On Aug 26, 2004, at 6:43 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
In a message dated 8/25/2004 9:31:32 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
That's not evolved; the only reason one would have guilt after rape would be if one believed it to be a bad thing. Guilt is a socially-created phenomenon.
Ah but here you are wrong. Guilt serves a very useful purpose in social
animals that use recipricol altruism. It is an internal and largely unconscious
talleying up of whether one's actions are likley to be viewed as reasonable by
other members of the society.
But that underscores my point of view. Assuming social rules change, and they do, guilt definitions change as well. Not wanting to be outcast from the group is surely older than primates (think small huddling rodentlike creatures); the idea of guilt over an action that is *socially proscribed* is really an extension of the desire not to be outcast. But the action itself is determined by society to be acceptable or not, so the presence of guilt (and the degree to which it's felt, and the ways in which it is to be ameliorated or addressed) are also social phenomena.
Guilt is an internal sense of whether one is behaving correctly and therefore it is a inhibitor of selfish behavior.
No; it's an inhibitor of behavior that one's peers would find objectionable.
-- WthmO
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