User talk:JFG

Provocation of aggression is not a fact of nature; a lion or bear does not respect this so-called structure of morality. Instead, provocation of aggression is a legal frame work by some human societies to regulate human interactions. In war between two great powers there exists thousands of individual violations of aggression on both sides. There were thousands of raids upon Christian and Muslim villages prior to the Crusades of Europeans. Therefore, making provocation of war imagined legitimate by rulers on both sides. When rulers abstract the individual legal frame work to a collective level the many individuals under his power often feel justified in joining a war against the members of the rival power. The right to defend yourself and/or your nation/religion/ideology under aggression is a useful legal innovation that probably advantaged societies that adopted it; it is not a fact of nature. An example of the provocation of aggression argument is made today by rulers of liberal democracies for covid 19. They state if you’re not vaccinated you exist in a state of aggression toward the vaccinated population. This claim is highly dubious but for arguments sake let’s say this is true. If you dogmatically follow the principle of non-aggression, you should be vaccinated. All the claims of the vaccine causing infertility, myocarditis, and countless other severe condition could be false; but there is also a high probability these conditions are all too real. So, if you take the vaccine, you are internally consistent with non-aggression but at the cost of your health and future genetic success. The point I’m making is your moral code could make you an evolutionary dead end. Given that we understand provocation of aggression is a legal framework not one set in nature, should one disregard provocation of aggression as a reason to retaliate and simply aggress whenever he thinks it would advantage himself? Let us again look to nature: a lion attacks when he feels it would advantage him, but lions have very limited understanding the rules of the humans around him. A lion that attacks a human in the plains of remote Africa would face limited chances of retaliation for his attack; but a lion in a zoo in Chicago would certainly be killed for doing such an action. Therefore, lions have a low level a genetic fitness for their demonstrable actions in most of the environments of the world today. Lions are quite cognitively rigid in their actions, humans through morality and law are becoming cognitively ridged. Successfully defending against the existential threat Islam posed to Europeans was not achieved based on arguments of self defense on a collective level to the individual. It was achieved by modifying Christianity into a Christo-pagan religious syncretism. It is best exemplified in the work of the 9th century Heliand epic: the Heliand tells the gospel story in the style of pagan epic; Jesus is a war chief and his disciples are his generals. The Chivalric code combined the Germanic warrior ethos with some Christian values for example; to fear God and maintain His Church, to serve the liege lord in valor and faith, to protect the weak and defenseless, to give assistance to widows and orphans, to live by honor and for glory, to fight for the welfare of all, to obey those placed in authority, to guard the honor of fellow knights, to eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit, to keep faith, at all times to speak the truth, to persevere to the end in any enterprise begun, to respect the honor of women, never to refuse a challenge from an equal, never to turn the back upon a foe. We see elements of Christian and Germanic paganism running throughout the code of the knights. Therefore, the justification of war was a non-factor; instead, the mere existence of the knights under the Christo-paganism religious belief was enough for the survival of the Europeans.