Has Beagles ever sinned ftpotd?

What is this ur committee on sin somewhere in the mist of time deciding the rules of morality?  Sounds like the social contract, wasn't that a favorite of Locke, and isn't Locke a big figure in deism and in libertarian theory?  But anyway he knew the social contract never actually happened, in the sense that people got together and made an agreement, it was just a figure of speech, so to speak. 

Likewise you surely don't believe that some committee long ago hammered out some kind of list and passed it around, and bingo there we got our morality and we have been living it, or variations of it, ever since.

Of course the concept of right and wrong is inborn, how could you think otherwise?  We are a social animal, it is in our genes.  I have had precious little experience with newborns, but there have been those experiments where they display bad behavior to babies and they don't like it.  Just from being around pre k's I can tell that these kids have an instinctive feel for right and wrong.  It's like language.  If people are isolated from their societies they develop their own languages.  We are born to talk and we are born to distinguish between right and wrong.

Not that we don't also talk about morality, not that we don't analyze it and come up with different formulations, but there is a simple kernel, something like do onto others that all the big religions contains, that simple altruism which highly socialized species such as ours requires for survival.  And stuff can be twisted around, and people do that, and self interest is always there, and there is that great enemy of progress, rationalization, where you already know what you want to believe and you just make arguments that lead to that conclusion and pretend that you have thought it through.

But you know what?  We have reason, which is a result of language which comes in our genes, and we can figure things out.  People can make up all these rules and lists and whatnot, but we don't have to accept them at face value, we have reason and we can put them into the crucible and decide whether we accept them as true or not.  People do this all the time.  It's why we don't believe in witches and demons anymore.

You seem to think that the only reason that people think anything is because they heard it somewhere, and I say no, no, no.  You seem to think that whenever public opinion changes it is the result of Them Who Rule Everything pulling some strings, and I say crazy man crazy. 

I didn't accuse you of being without sin, I thought you clearly implied it by questioning why anybody would ever do anything that they thought was wrong, and if you couldn't understand that it rather followed that you had not, and you certainly didn't confess to any, and even in last night's post, you admit that you might have done wrong, but only because you didn't realize that it was wrong at the time, so therefore it would not be sin ftpotd.

Why would anybody commit sin ftpotd?  Back in my wayward days when I used to shoplift books I did it so that I could take them home and not have to pay for them.  I did it for personal gain.  That's generally why people commit sin ftpotd.

Okay then I am taking The Lost City down from the shelf and putting it somewhere where it will be in my way, so that I will reread that part of the book over the weekend, ah, here it is, Part 2, Chapter 5, page 111.  And maybe in tonight's post Beagles will answer the question of whether he has ever committed sin ftpotd.