Jan Ardena:
Let's say that for some reason more females were born in region, than males. Let's say for every male that was born, a thousand females were born at the same time.
From an evolutionary standpoint, most of those females were not going to be able to have off-spring, so that they could pass on their genes.
Which would mean those excess females would not be selected.
Do you think it would be okay for some of the few remaining males to rape and/or murder a very small amount of these females?
Could that ever become a good thing?
There are lots of problems with this scenario, both conceptual and logical.
Firstly, logically, if females greatly outnumbered males, there would be no need for males to rape or murder anybody in order to propagate their genes to the next generation. All things being equal (which they never really are, of course, but let's run with the simplistic premise and see where it leads), the women would all be fighting each other to compete for the opportunity to have the men's babies, thus passing on their own genes. If anything, it would be the
females wanting to rape the
males and murder the competing females. The males would presumably have no shortage of sexual partners.
Interestingly, something a little like this is playing out right now in China, though not in such a violent way. The one-child policy led to an oversupply of male children and a deficit of female children, so that now China has many single men with little prospect of marriage or children. As for the women, they are much sought after, and can now afford to be very picky about the men they marry. The result is that men with fewer resources (economic, educational, social, etc.) are finding it difficult or impossible to find a life partner for marriage and/or children. I don't know what the rape statistics are like in China - if there are any reliable statistics - but they could make an interesting study.
Secondly, when you write "would it be okay ... to rape and/or murder...", what do you mean? Would it be okay from an evolutionary perspective, evolution being morally blind? Or would it be okay from the perspective of a moral human being making a decision?
The answer the question from an evolutionary perspective is often more complex than it appears on the surface. Although rape might be an "okay" way to spread ones genes, in a morally neutral sense, there tend to be social repercussions to going around raping people. Those tend to have flow-on impacts on one's reproductive success, too. For example, if you are in jail for rape, there's usually not much chance for you to spread your genes to the next generation.
Being evolutionarily "fit" in the Darwinian sense means having good "fitness" in all the circumstances you find yourself: environmental, personal, and social. Being a rapist doesn't usually endear somebody to his fellow human beings, and that has inevitable impacts on his evolutionary fitness. So, even from a morally neutral Darwinist perspective, the rape strategy is often not an evolutionarily productive one, for many reasons.
There is doubtless an interplay between other evolutionary pressures and the social environment in which codes of behaviour and "morality" develop, in both human beings and other animals. So, what is considered morally evil often has correlates with what is evolutionarily a bad strategy for survival and reproduction. The idea that this is
always the case is, however, false.
To equate what is "good" from an evolutionary perspective with what is morally "good" is a fallacy known as Social Darwinism. It is a fallacy because human beings are not automatons driven solely by genetic imperatives. Rather, human beings are thinking and feeling creatures who can make decisions based on complex information and ideas, not all of which are compatible with blind evolution. The genes may be selfish, but that doesn't mean that human beings have to be. We are not
just our genes.
Don't worry, I don't think you ever would, but I ask because you seem to think that moral decency comes from humans, or that morals are subjective as opposed to objective.
Where else could morality come from, other than from human beings? Who else talks about or writes down moral codes and discusses what it means to be a good person?
Perhaps you think that God dictates morality. If you think that, you immediately hit two major obstacles. One is the problem of whether God's morality is arbitrary. If it isn't, then where does God's morality come from? The other is the problem of evil. If God is so good, why does he allow such evil in the world?
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I should note that all of the above discussion is off-topic for this thread, except insofar as it addresses issues of human psychology. It is because of that connection that I am posting it here.
Needless to say, the topics of evolutionary morality and of the sources of morality in general, are huge, interesting topics in themselves, but they would be more appropriately discussed in the Philosophy or Morality and Justice subforums.