Morality

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by henry quirk

What is the source of morality?

From people (I'm going to avoid the neurological explanation). I'll explain in the following fashion.

100 people with their own unique moral code come together to form a community. After dealing with each other, the 100 individuals had to update their own moral code to survive, fit in, and keep a stable society. Eventually, the moral codes of the 100 individuals become more and more similar until you could make generalizations about the society's moral code (keep in mind that everyone's moral code was still unique, and everyone's differed in different ways, but they were close enough that they could agree on many key issues to guarantee the survival of the community).

Now children are born and they are influenced from the morals of the community and their parents. As the children grow older, they keep their childhood moral influences, to varying degrees, while updating their individual moral code for various reasons (free thinking, environmental influences, and the change of the generalized "society morals).

Morals come from people and represent our reaction to our environment. Our moral code is how we interact with our society and environment.

What makes one behavior 'right' or 'good' and another 'wrong' or 'evil'?'

There is no clear answer to this one. Usually someone is evil when they go against the moral code of an individual. That can include people that are going against the moral code for sadistic pleasure, people that are forced to break society's moral code for whatever reason, or people that have a different perspective of what is right or wrong.

[Sundae]

Chimpanzees sometimes indulge in "child" hunting.
And killing.
And eating.
They are omnivores after all.
It is only males that participate.

Male dolphins - sometimes called the most intelligent mammals - will gang rape.

[sexobon]

Rape, Kill, Pillage and Burn we're gonna Rape, Kill, Pillage and Burn EAT BABIES: Rape, Kill, Pillage and Burn we're gonna RAPE, KILL, PILLAGE and BURN!

Diet and exercise.

[JBKlyde]

i take that back.. there are four ways a man can think.. his head his heart his penis or his "stomach"..

[Rrrraven]

Originally Posted by henry quirk

Anyone else want to weigh in before I piss someone off (again)?

On a very basic level, morality is socially constructed. All societies have values; norms develop from those values. Values are shared beliefs about what a group considers worthwhile or desirable - those guide the creation of norms. Norms are the formal and informal rules regarding what kinds of behavior are acceptable and appropriate within a culture. Folkways, mores, and taboos develop from those norms.

Our ideas about what is "good" and what is "evil" are based on our experiences, what we have learned is acceptable in our own culture - whether that is the culture of our country or the culture of our family.

What is moral in one place might not be in another. Totally driven by societal factors.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by JBKlyde

i take that back.. there are four ways a man can think.. his head his heart his penis or his "stomach"..

re BOLD:

Technically, this is the poster child for NOT thinking; it is *acting*.

[infinite monkey]

Exactly...actually on all of them except 'head'.

The only part of anyone that's thinking is a person's brain. A man might be constantly thinking about his penis but it's not really going to solve any of his problems or do math or write a book...

disclaimer: if you're a man who doesn't constantly think about his penis I apologize to you and applaud you.

[GunMaster357]

Originally Posted by infinite monkey

disclaimer: if you're a man who doesn't constantly think about his penis I apologize to you and applaud you.

Thinking about sex around once a minute...

[GunMaster357]

Joke aside, morality depends heavily on context.

I have done things that are considered by a lot of people to be bad. Yet, at that time and in that context, it was only normal. I didn't say it was good, but something I had to do.

The main problem when trying to discuss those things with other people is that they will look at you now and not "then". They will judge without context for the most part.

For example : Canibalism is anathema for a lot of civilizations. Yet, it can be seen as acceptable as a means of survival. In some civilizations, it was a way to honor your dead and, by doing so, a moral thing.

[jimhelm]

Think that's a lot?(same link as in 357's post) It's nothing if neuropsychiatrist Dr. Louann Brizendine, author of "The Female Brain," is correct. She writes in her book that men think about sex every 52 seconds, while women tend to think of it just once a day. If men are thinking about sex more frequently than once a minute, how do they get any work done?

how the hell would SHE know?

I KNOW i don't think about sex every 52 seconds. that's ridiculous. I'm 41 now, and not as horny as I was at 18, but c'mon... even then I didn't think about sex that much.

You can't count subliminal thought as thinking.

I'd like to see what led her to that conclusion. She must be hot... I'd like to see her naked.

[DanaC]

*grits teeth*

That's just not true though. It's another of those mega myths.

There are a number of urban myths about sexuality that refuse to die. One such myth is that men think about sex every seven seconds, which would would be a whopping 8,000 times for each 16-hour day that a guy is awake. The other myth is that men think about sex way more often than women do. Fortunately, a researcher whose work you can trust--Terri Fisher from Ohio State University--recently published a study in the Journal of Sex Research that runs a stake through the heart of this sexual stereotyping.

The 18- to 25-year-old males in the Fisher study tended to think about sex once an hour, or less than nineteen times a day, although the frequency varied considerably. According to the authors, "young men appear to spend only a brief fraction of their day involved with sexually related cognitions." The women in Fisher's study tended to think about sex once every two hours, with a large variation in frequency as well. And regardless of gender, 18- to 25-year-olds think about food and sleep as often as they think about sex

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...sex-more-women

[infinite monkey]

Oh...it's just men around ME who think about sex all the time. You can't really blame them. (Kidding!)

I figured it was an Old Husband's Tale, but it's a good one to tease men about.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by jimhelm

how the hell would SHE know?

I KNOW i don't think about sex every 52 seconds. that's ridiculous. I'm 41 now, and not as horny as I was at 18, but c'mon... even then I didn't think about sex that much.

You can't count subliminal thought as thinking.

I'd like to see what led her to that conclusion. She must be hot... I'd like to see her naked.

She and her ilk are amongst my current bugbears.

Here's a nice little rebuttal to her pseudo science:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langu...es/003668.html

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langu...es/003419.html

and here
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langu...es/003530.html

There['s other stuff as well, but I have found some of the blogs on that site really interesting to read.

[DanaC]

From the first link:

On page 91 of The Female Brain, Dr. Louann Brizendine writes (emphasis added):


Males have double the brain space and processing power devoted to sex as females. Just as women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion while men have a small country road, men have O'Hare Airport as a hub of processing thoughts about sex whereas women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes. That probably explains why 85 percent of twenty- to thirty-year-old males think about sex every fifty-two seconds and women think about it once a day -- or up to three or four times on their most fertile days.

This striking different in rates of sexual thoughts is also one of the bullet points on the book's jacket blurb -- but there, female sex-thought frequency is downgraded from "once a day" to "once every couple of days":

•Thoughts about sex enter a woman's brain once every couple of days but enter a man's brain about once every minute

Whatever the exact numbers, it's an impressive-sounding difference -- scientific validation for a widespread opinion about what men and women are like. And this is interesting stuff, right at the center of social and personal life, so you're probably wondering about the details of the studies that produced these estimates.

The end-notes for the quoted segment from p. 91 yield the following references:

1. Bancroft, J. (2005). "The endocrinology of sexual arousal." J Endocrinol 186(3): 411-27
2. Laumann, E. O., A. Paik, et al. (1999). "Sexual dysfunction in the United States: Prevalence and predictors." JAMA 281(6): 537-44.
3. Laumann, E. O., Nicolosi, et al. (2005). "Sexual problems among women and men aged 40-80: Prevalence and correlates identified in the Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors." Int J Impot Res 17(1): 39-57.
4. Lunde, I., G.K. Larsen, et al. (1991). "Sexual desire, orgasm, and sexual fantasies: A study of 625 Danish women born in 1910, 1936 and 1958." J Sex Educ Ther, 17:62-70.

As per this series of blogs, the author now examines in depth both the claims and the evidence. beginning with reading the cited papers. I'll not post all of them, but here's what two of the sources have to say, and how they relate to the studies they've been cited in:

1. The abstract for Bancroft (2005) begins:


The relevance of testosterone, oestradiol and certain peptides (oxytocin (OT), ß-endorphin and prolactin (PRL)) to sexual arousal in humans is reviewed. In addition to behavioural studies, evidence of distribution of gonadal steroid receptors in the brain and the limited evidence from brain imaging are also considered.

These two sentences are a good summary of the paper as a whole, which says nothing whatever about how often women or men think about sex.

2. The abstract for Laumann (1999):


Context While recent pharmacological advances have generated increased public interest and demand for clinical services regarding erectile dysfunction, epidemiologic data on sexual dysfunction are relatively scant for both women and men.
Objective To assess the prevalence and risk of experiencing sexual dysfunction across various social groups and examine the determinants and health consequences of these disorders.
Design Analysis of data from the National Health and Social Life Survey, a probability sample study of sexual behavior in a demographically representative, 1992 cohort of US adults.
Participants A national probability sample of 1749 women and 1410 men aged 18 to 59 years at the time of the survey.
Main Outcome Measures Risk of experiencing sexual dysfunction as well as negative concomitant outcomes.
Results Sexual dysfunction is more prevalent for women (43%) than men (31%) and is associated with various demographic characteristics, including age and educational attainment. Women of different racial groups demonstrate different patterns of sexual dysfunction. Differences among men are not as marked but generally consistent with women. Experience of sexual dysfunction is more likely among women and men with poor physical and emotional health. Moreover, sexual dysfunction is highly associated with negative experiences in sexual relationships and overall well-being.
Conclusions The results indicate that sexual dysfunction is an important public health concern, and emotional problems likely contribute to the experience of these problems.


There is nothing at all in this paper about how often women or men think about sex.

Andersen and Cyranowski do, as it happens, report some other research that actually measured the frequency of sexual thoughts among women and men -- with results totally at variance with Brizendine's assertions:

Data comparing the frequency of internally generated thoughts (fantasies) and externally prompted thoughts (sexual urges) among young heterosexual men and women indicate that men report a greater frequency of urges than do women (4.5/day vs. 2.0/day), although the frequency of fantasies were similar (2.5/day; Jones & Barlow, 1990).

That reference is Jones, J. C., & Barlow, D. H. (1990). "Self-reported frequency of sexual urges, fantasies, and masturbatory fantasies in heterosexual males and females." Archives of Sexual Behavior, 19, 269-279. (According to its PsycInfo abstract, this study involved "49 male and 47 female heterosexual undergraduates" -- probably one introductory psychology course -- who "self-monitored the frequency of fantasies, urges, and masturbatory fantasies for 7 consecutive days". And "urges" are "externally provoked sexual throughts", while "fantasies" are "internally generated sexual thoughts".)

Hmm. Adding up this study's tally of undergraduate male sexual thoughts, we get 4.5 male urges + 2.5 male fantasies per day on average, for a total of 7 sexual thoughts, or one every (24*60*60/7 =) 12,342 seconds. Compare Dr. Brizendine's figures: "85 percent of twenty- to thirty-year-old males think about sex every fifty-two seconds". That's more than 237 times hornier -- even if the other 15 percent never thought about sex at all, the average frequency would still be at least two orders of magnitude greater than Jones & Barlow report. (And they sampled male undergraduate psychology students, who must surely be near their life maximum of sexual consciousness.)

How about the female numbers? Jones and Barlow's student diaries yielded 2 female urges + 2.5 female fantasies per day on average, for a total of 4.5 sexual thoughts per day. That's 450% greater than the "once a day" that Brizendine cites in the book's text, and 900% greater than the "once every couple of days" rate in the jacket blurb. Not that the average self-reports from the "47 female undergraduates" in Jones and Barlow's 1990 American sample should be taken to stand for the nature of all women in all times and places -- but this is still 47 more women than we've been able to connect with Brizendine's estimates, at least so far.

Note also that the Jones and Barlow numbers for women amount to one sexual thought every (24*60*60/4.5 =) 19,200 seconds. But you're not going to sell any books by writing that "Men think about sex every 12,300 seconds, while women only have a sexual thought every 19,200 seconds".

OK, so where did Dr. Brizendine get her numbers? Not from the references that she cites, that's for sure. If you can find the source, please tell me.

[Pico and ME]

Yay for thread drift!