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From: tron@fluke.UUCP
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,soc.women,talk.abortion
Subject: Re: Treating others as equals.
Message-ID: <1619@vax1.fluke.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-Oct-86 12:05:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: vax1.1619
Posted: Tue Oct  7 12:05:17 1986
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Reply-To: tron@vax1.UUCP (Peter Barbee)
Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA
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Scott writes;
>>There is the internal reason that quite often it
>>simply *feels good* to be polite/nice/helpful to others.  If you don't want
>>to feel good, and don't care to interact with society, there is nothing at
>>all _wrong_ with being an obnoxious idiot; just don't act like one and
>>expect people to care to associate with you.
>
Paul writes;
>...restraints, it seems fairly likely to me that negative social consequences
>of wrong actions would lack the necessary intensity and frequency to prove
>practical as a deterrent.  In other words, if one has the power to avoid
>the consequences you state or considers them to be trivial in comparison to
>the rewards she seeks for her anti-social behavior, your "pragmatic reasons"
>for calling such behavior wrong lose all their weight.
>
>Our society does not operate on pure pragmatism where morality is concerned.
>We "hedge our bets" with laws that raise the stakes for wrong behavior.

Paul, you seem to be ignoring the idea of positive reinforcement.  I thought
it was well accepted that positive reinforcement works decidedly better than
negative reinforcement.

It is possible that our society (or any) is too much into "get what you can"
to accept positive reinforcement as a means of insuring proper behaviour, but
this is a pragmatic consequence.

Peter B