Could evolution have left one race with lower even unique ethical standards?
I think one can not single out one race with low ethical standards. I assume you are a white European and maybe you fear you might be in the lowest of the lowest category. I want to reassure you. It is true that Europeans have shown low ethics in the past: colonial exploitation, oppression and genocide, slave trade, slave labor on plantations, Inquisition against religious dissidents, extreme exploitation of the working class, extreme pollution of industrial areas, concentration camps (for South-African Boers by the British/ for Jews by the Nazis/for dissidents by the Soviets/for the others by various former Yugoslavs), dictatorships, world wars and war crimes, etc,etc. But that doesn’t mean that a white European is bound to behave ethically inferior because of his genes. History shows that other races and groups have done horrible things in the past as well. So the gene pool for ethical genes – if there are any- will be quite similar. So you do not need to fear you are in the group wh
I don’t believe so. Ethics appears to be a social decision. And changes over time as societies grow. It appears to tend towards equality and fairness, certainly in western societies. We have gone from burning witches and slavery towards racial and gender equality. We no longer stone people for homosexuality or adultery, but we used to. The reason it is unlikely to be anything to do with evolution is that we are all mongrels, the gene pool is mixed. Remember we all came from a population of approximately 2000 individuals a few thousand years ago (yes, that’s how close humans came to extinction). Also, if you take a child from an are where the ethics are questionable and bring it up in a different environment the child’s ethics tend to be that of the society they grew up in. The same happens in reverse, take a child from a ‘good’ family and bring them up in a questionable region and they tend to have questionable ethics. Your view of a higher and lower set of ethics is also up for questi
As humans have increasingly learned to control their enviorment, most of the natural pressures of evolution have disappeared, to be replaced by the pressures of human created enviorment, society, and sexual selection. Suppose a society let only docile and dumb and submissive females allowed to breed,and be protected, then those traits would become concentrated on the x chromosome. Or suppose there were bottlenecks in population where massacres took place, or wars and the “victors” breed with the available females left.You could even suppose the case where a certain population, were all derived from people who had killed other people, and there were nobody with the “genetic” background of non murderer because those were the ones that perished and did not breed. I don’t think it is far fetched at all, that populations with different human evolutionary pressures and different sexual selection pressures would diverge, and then incorporate that (consciouslunconsciouslysly?) into their ethic
