Learning v. Reiteration/Reinforcement

Response to Emily - Full post here - http://hobbitsworld42.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-we-learn-morality.html


I think an important distinction should be made between learning and reiterating. Which is to say that movies, games, and stories are not necessarily there to teach us any morals, but rather to reiterate moral ideas that society finds agreeable. I think the same principle which you mentioned in the example of killing applies to other moral problems. If left to our own devices we would realize that we don't want people to steal things from us, or if we are invested in a relationship that we intend to be between only two people, we wouldn't want the other to go to someone else. We don't (generally) want people to lie to us (though in some instances, most people could find lying agreeable). We learn all of these things almost independent from media.


So, I think that we are not necessarily taught our morals. I think we have an evolutionary set of morals which we come around to knowing anyway. Society uses the mediums of parents, media, school, and so on, to reiterate or fortify the agreeable, according to contemporary society, morals . We see this when we look at books and consider what parents taught their children in the days of The Bible compared to now. You won't see 'stone people for picking up sticks on the Sabbath' or 'stone disobedient child' in many recently written moral guidance books. If you do, you'll be told it's a metaphor or that it's irrelevant to our society.