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Comment by gbog | Hacker News Reader

There is this angle that says that natural laws are good, better than "artificial" laws. It seems trendy nowadays and is emphasised in the article.

But another angle, that seem to describe more closely the long term evolution and progress of human societies, is that laws and ethics have been slowly built by human societies against the law of nature. The direst way to express this is that in a natural environment, the weak and the disabled are left aside and die quickly, which we humans have decided to try hard to avoid.

So maybe a softer, more informal, "stateless" society like this Xeer could be valuable. But if it was, it would be because it would better protect us from the law of nature.

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>in a natural environment, the weak and the disabled are left aside and die quickly

This simply isn't true[1]. Humans evolved feelings like compassion because such cooperation and caring was beneficial to our survival. These emotions exist outside of any deliberate human decision making or social planning. Even monkeys have evolved forms of altruistic behaviour[2]. 'Ethics' in the sense of empathy and compassionate behaviour is hence just as much a part of the 'law of nature' as the more violent behaviours associated with it.

1.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2864937/

2. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/04/6-amazing-way...

> Humans evolved feelings like compassion because such cooperation and caring was beneficial to our survival.

That's a plausible hypothesis, but considering that it cannot be proven or disproven, it is an ultimately uninteresting one. gbog was talking about social evolution, which is a topic of social sciences. On second thought, perhaps reclassifying evolutionary psychology as a social science would be in order.

Gbog spoke of the 'state of nature' as something characterised by a lack of altruistic behaviour towards weaker members of the species. Assuming altruistic behaviour can be quantified, that's a claim that could be verified or disproved empirically.

> Even monkeys have evolved forms of altruistic behaviour

I'm sorry, but I can't agree with this kind of point. Ok, maybe by looking very closely, one could find traces of altruistic behaviors in monkey societies, but this cannot count as an argument against the amorality of Nature. Because it would mean to take the exception for the normality. Any unskewed view on natural behavior in animals is just saying the plain obvious: animals do not care at all if they inflict pain to other animals or kill them, except for their offspring. This is the norm, the natural way. You can count the exceptions, it will not change the norm.

On the opposite, in human societies, it happens that some people do not care (do not feel anything) when they inflict pain on other beings, but this is the exception, not the norm. And this has been built very slowly against nature, by the process of civilization (in the good old "natural" times, most human did not care if people of other race or slaves were suffering).

So let's not forget that. Nature is beautiful, but it feels nothing, we feel for her.

Empathy has a biological basis [1]. The span of human civilization has been far too short so far for any significant evolutionary changes to have taken place, so these biological elements must have existed before humans 'civilized'. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: a species in which the members help each other more has certain advantages to its survival compared to one completely lacking in cooperation.

The time when slavery and contact between races existed is generally not considered the 'state of nature'. In pre-civilised (pre-agricultural) society, populations were so small and transportation technology so limited that it would have been quite rare for people of different races to come in contact.

[1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#Neurological_basis

You're mistaken. "Natural law" refers to intuitive ideas of right and wrong, which is the kind of law Hobbes appeals to in the state of nature. In other words, everyone the world agrees that Bob is in the wrong when he punches Alice and steals her shoes; it does not depend on a local legal system. In contrast, patents protections are arguably counter intuitive, and the feeling that they are just derives from a specific legal system and from the benefits they have for society.

Natural law is an orthogonal concept to the laws of nature (i.e. physics) and to the empirical consequences of stateless societies (e.g. property is often stolen from the weak).

Are you sure that the article and connex ideas (e.g. Rousseau) really have no flavor of "modern humans and their artificial life are evil, while the good old savages and their natural life were much better"? I would connect this trend to some parts of ecology, and I think it is wise to never forget that Mother Nature is "amoral". "She" do not care a bit if hundred of thousands of being suffer and die. We do, and we humans have built ourselves mostly against and despite of nature.

Another example: you can't really have tigers and humans living too close of each other. A part of the work of civilization process has been to kill tigers so to let human offspring live. As much as we may like tigers (so beautiful, and endangered!), we still should prefer humans, right?

The flavor of the article is besides the point. You're using an established term to refer to something completely different, so any discussion you try to have with someone else will be confused, regardless of the merits.

Ok, maybe I blurred a bit between the Natural Law and the Law of Nature. If so, thanks for pointing this out. I am not native speaker.

Then maybe my point still holds: wishing for a life closer to nature, going back to "good old times", removed from all the "artificial institutions" (such as the Law and the State), as emphasised in the article, is not that much of a good idea, if we consider that, in ancient times, life was in average much harder on the weaks and the disabled (and the women, and the enemies, and the different ones).

There are plenty of exceptions. Maybe one can find a time window in some places where e.g. homosexuals were better accepted than right now. But still, these exceptions will not change the big picture, wich was much darker before.

Aside from the law of nature, I remarked the use of precedents as a co-basis for juridical mediation. Although this is something used all over the world outside Somalia (on a secondary role and usually only in an informal manner), its interesting to know it to work somewhere in real-life as a primary law principle.

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