Breaking the rules is fun. The thrill in taking such risks is exhilerating and if you get good at it — if you can repeatedly break the rules and get away with it — you feel powerful. Unless you're suggesting a transhuman approach, there's no way to get around that. You can eliminate any incentives for crime, and eliminate all sources of childhood strife, and still have people who commit crime because it's a great hobby.
It certainly is. Personally, I've grown beyond purely breaking rules for the sake of it, without concern for the repercussions. I still break the rules, all the time, but only when I think the rules are wrong and no true harm will come from my breaking them. It's gotten much less fun in my old age, just seems rather boring and rational.
Sexual desire was fixed at a cultural level until it wasn't. The narrative that people only steal because they're poor and desperate is just that, a narrative. Anyone can feel excitement at taking another's property. Your perfect society free of crime is begging for a "disruption."
> Anyone can feel excitement at taking another's property.
My upbringing has had this "golden rule of ethics" (don't do to others what you don't want done upon yourself) ingrained in me pretty well, so I would never feel excitement about this.
(Hypothesis: This ridiculous objectivism has had people forget how much cooperation is ingrained into humans by nature.)
That said, I am aware that such thoughts exist in my subconsciousness, because the subc is always exploring all possible paths, but I have never experienced that as an even remotely acceptable (in terms of my own moral) path of action.
> don't do to others what you don't want done upon yourself
This only works for people who sufficiently appreciate their own possessions. Others might develop a very relaxed "stuff comes, stuff goes, who cares it's just materialistic crap anyways" attitude and and that equips them to have surprisingly little remorse in regards to theft. This is probably exemplified best in the extremely high rate of theft affecting near-zero-value bikes in many Dutch cities. That kind of thief might even rationalize by inverting guilt, "if he feels bad about the loss it's his own fault that he is not as cool about shitty old piles of rust as I am"
Have you ever watched a heist film? If so, you can't claim not to understand how it could be exciting to break into someone's property, risk imprisonment or death, and take their stuff. Go watch one some time, the writers make sure to paint the victims as bad men and the thieves as anti-heroes so that you can enjoy the fantasy without guilt.
You've missed my point for the opportunity to moralize and posture. Consider this: You know cheating is wrong, you probably consider yourself to be someone that would never do it, yet you can still acknowledge that it would most likely be enjoyable for at least a very short while, right? That's all I'm saying, not (lmao) some kind of faux-objectivist philosophy on the right to take other people's property or whatever it is you seem to be imagining.
> ... instead of trying to change it at its roots?
Because eugenics went out of fashion a long time ago. The "roots" is free will, so you can't really change that without horrific consequences. Using birth control (voluntary and involuntary) to bias the population was a popular idea in the 1920s. China's latest gamifaction of "social credit" is another biasing attempt. I'm not aware of any "roots" solution that doesn't require total surveillance or head measurements...
Now I have to apologize for playing both sides of this conversation, but we've been working on this tribalism for a few hundred years, maybe if you were a better student of human history than I am you could make a case for a few thousand.
We have a way to go, but we have made at least some progress. Maybe in another few hundred years humans won't be so 'Us and Them'. Maybe materialism will be the next thing we work on. Who knows, maybe by the time we reach the next galaxy we'll have it sorted out.
It's human nature to crave sex, maybe not with every single person you meet, but certainly with more than a single partner in your entire life, right? For thousands of years, Christianity attempted to "work on this" aspect of human nature and make non-monogamous sexuality taboo. It was fairly successful at it. Yet (depending on your perspective) it only took somewhere between a few years and a few decades post-sexual revolution for it all to come crashing down spectacularly.
If the most powerful institution in the western world couldn't "fix" this aspect of human nature over millennia, it is sheer arrogance to think we can do better today.
Feminists have selected against male aggressive behavior in our education systems for decades. They have "successfully" ruined the lives of countless western boys and laid the foundation for immigrants from non-castrated cultures to take their stead with redoubled aggression. Turns out that it's much easier to beat boys into submission than it is to subvert female attraction to dominance.
Human nature is the least productive concept ever. It is only ever brought up to defend the status quo and declare it as inevitable. It is a mystical concept impervious to examination. Whether it's "God" or "human nature" it's just a term for an abstract master that keeps us all in bondage.
>Human nature is the least productive concept ever. It is only ever brought up to defend the status quo and declare it as inevitable. It is a mystical concept impervious to examination.
Actually it's the exact opposite: very pragmatic and empirically verified.
It's exactly what people, in statistical quantities, tend to do over what they tend not to do.
Plus, most of it is shared with our animal siblings.
Except if you think that an Elephant or a Cat doesn't have certain natural characteristics (insticts, behaviors, traits) based on their species.
Do you see a specific claim backed up with empirical research in the above usage of human nature? I don't. Do people ever? Any time someone brings up human nature they could omit the term and just talk about the research itself. They don't. Human nature is a rhetorical shortcut. You can't assail human nature, you can't examine it like scientific evidence. It is intellectual laziness to make any argument from human nature.
>Do you see a specific claim backed up with empirical research in the above usage of human nature? I don't.
That's because it's a casual online conversation. I don't stuff my responses with citations when I'm not writing a paper.
>Do people ever?
Yes. There are tons of research on human psychology, cognition, physiology, evolutionary traits, instincts and other aspects of what colloquially is called "human nature".
Do you think animals have a "nature"? If so, why are humans any different? Sure, we can reflect on our behavior and try and change it, but it's undeniable there are innate drivers that can be hard to overcome.
I take issue with the way "human nature" is used, not the idea that we have a nature. It is almost always unproductive. Even so, most who make an argument from human nature always convince me that they know nothing about other human beings within a sentence or two.
Yea, I wish we could all live in Anarchy without rules or police or armies etc. But there is always an asshole who want more, or think he deserves more. I mean, we reward these people today with jobs on WallStreet etc, but these people would still exist in an anarchy, and would do their best to "solve" the world to their liking.
Since the discussion is about criminality, and it was suggested that this arises due to some religious notions rather than eg (a) people being defective or (b) social-economic disadvantage, it thought that out to be challenged. From an evolutionary perspective you could say that there must be an advantage in such behavior to the individual, even if the society suffers.
Also, thanks for the unjustified rudeness, you've made a great contribution today.
Idealistically and for the fun of philosophically considering the matter, by creating a world composed of societies in which the inhabitants are free from want.
Do you mean chemical lobotomies or a post scarcity economy? Because there are some wants that are impossible to fulfill, for example: there are a bunch of murderers in Syria motivated by the desire to fly a winged horse to a sky mansion where 72 infinity virgins await. I don't see that happening, even post scarcity.
Why are we still assuming that as a given, instead of trying to change it at its roots?