This paper has been concerned with innate human emotional capacities that we have inherited from our simian ancestors. However, there are other emotions possible for human beings that are the result of unique tetrahedral events. This is to say that it is possible for humans to invent and experience emotional states that are not possible for chimpanzees. Among these emotions are things like humor. It seems to me that humor originates when the LogFac comes to recognize a circumstance of extreme irony. When this traffic arrives in the EmoFac an emotional response is attached, and that response is what we experience as humor. The concept of romantic love falls into this category. It originates as a value judgment in the LogFac and when it arrives in the EmoFac an emotional response is attached. I would also argue that concepts like self-esteem, hopefulness and despair belong in this category. While all these emotions are important and significant aspects of human behavior, they have been beyond the scope of this paper.
This exposition has involved sundry hypotheses about how the human mental apparatus operates. It has involved models, tables of relationships and descriptions of interactions. These things are the stuff of a data model. I suspect that it may be possible to model at least the basic instincts with a computer program. Given the inherently serendipitous nature of free will, it is probably not possible to predict the exact behavior of individual human beings. But I suspect that it may be possible to set up a computer program that would react in a way that would be very hard to distinguish from the emotional reactions of a human being. It may be possible to model the aggregate emotional responses of large populations in a way that would closely match real world events. It may even be possible to predict mass emotional reactions with fairly small margins of error.
It seems very clear to me that the instinct of Fosterity is one of the most extremely powerful drives affecting human behavior. Demonstrably, it can in some circumstances be even stronger than Survivity itself. The alarm that Ayn Rand sounded when she spoke of altruism and the evils deriving from it was exactly on target. Fosterity was fundamental to the establishment of the very worst and most murderous states to exist in the 20th century. These states were universally socialist in character and were created for the nominal purpose of imposing compulsory altruism by any necessary means.
Still the fact remains that from before Miocene time right up to the present, Fosterity has been a requirement imposed on all mammals by the forces of natural selection (i.e. the physical laws of this universe). Without it mammals in general and human beings in particular would be extinct. There is no way to escape the premise that Fosterity, in at least some circumstances, is part and parcel of what it means to live as "man-qua-man." I see no alternative but for an objective system of values to make room for it.
Robert Tinney has advanced the premise that "unconditional love", "compassion", "mercy", and "altruism" belong in a subset of the objective value system that he calls "family values." From my own point of view this is a proposal to continue Fosterity in the original context in which natural selection mandated it (i.e. in the parent-child context). If an objective system of values cannot make room for Fosterity in this context, then it can make no room for it anywhere. I see no alternative but to accept the pursuit of Fosterity in the context of the parent-child relationship as being morally acceptable behavior by rational human beings applying "the life of man-qua-man" as a standard of value.
Beyond this, Ayn Rand's argument that friendship deriving from objective values necessarily includes a willingness to assist a friend in distress makes sense. Whether this involves an application of Fosterity or a wholly new emotion based upon value judgments originating in the LogFac, is not clear. Either way this behavior should be sanctioned by an objective system of values.
Beyond even this, almost no one likes to see other people in distress. So long as there is no coercion of third parties, I see no moral obstacle to charitable giving for the purpose of relieving one's own distress-by-proxy.
Finally, I cannot conceive of persons in the health and teaching professions who would not be expected to practice professional Fosterity as a business requirement.
I have made occasional references to objective morality and objective values in this paper. I do not mean to imply that any given thing is a value to be pursued regardless of circumstances. I recognize that values are not absolutes and are necessarily circumstantial in nature. This is to say that as circumstances change, the values one pursues may need to be changed and, that any given thing may or may not be an appropriate value, depending upon circumstances. By objective morality I mean values that have been derived from an objective standard of value applied to a specific set of circumstances.
If any one thing can be described as the point of most intense friction between objectivism and other philosophies, it is the subject of ethics. Opponents of objectivism seem to universally assert that any attempt to derive an objective system of values is intrinsically irrational and doomed to failure. I leave the rebuttal of this premise to the philosophers, however there is a psychological component of this controversy that is relevant to this paper.
The ape within each of us has the ability to select goals based solely upon the priorities of his emotional faculty. Apes have operated this way for millions of years, and our resident ape wants to keep on doing things this way. In the movie Star Wars, Obiwan Kenobi admonishes Luke Skywalker to "Let go, Luke" and "Trust your feelings." This is the resident ape voicing his fondest desire to an audience of apes who are only too happy to be enjoined to do what comes naturally.
Lets face it, values exist. They are coming from somewhere. That somewhere has to be some aspect or component of the human mental apparatus. Clearly it is possible to define an objective standard of value and to attempt to apply it to circumstances. I submit that if this is not done, a default set of goals will be imposed by the resident ape and his emotional faculty. I submit that the resistance to objective morality is coming from the resident ape who does not want to give up control and/or see his agenda supplanted.
No doubt many readers of this paper are going to interpret it as a full scale denunciation of human emotions as being evil and destructive. That is not and has not been my intent. Emotions are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically evil. It's how we manage them and, how we react to them, that is good or evil.
As a practical matter, it is not possible to consistently practice emotional repression on a continuous basis. Or if you will, Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame is not a practical role model for human beings. The brain is after all a physical organ with physical limitations. Just as one cannot run at full speed continuously, one cannot manage one's emotions continuously. Any time one is at rest, the ape inside with his emotional agenda is in control.
Briefly, I advocate that in matters of life and death, we think critically about what we are doing, why we are doing it, and that we manage such matters in a constructive way that furthers the "life of man-qua-man." In other matters, let the ape within have any damn thing he wants. Paradoxically, although man's rational faculty is what makes life possible, emotional gratification is what makes life worth living.
It is possible to observe and recognize sundry kinds of repeating human behavior. Sexual behavior, for example, is ubiquitous across thousands of years of human history and across all kinds of geographic boundaries. We know that the human genetic heritage is the fundamental cause of sexual behavior. This leads to the general proposition that any kind of repeating human behavior may be the result of a common genetic heritage, and that an objective respect for the full context of reality requires us to investigate that possibility.
War is a form of repeating human behavior that transcends time and geographic boundaries. It is patently absurd to treat this phenomenon as random or serendipitous behavior given that the human genome is a common denominator in all wars. The same argument applies to totalitarianism, genocide, racism, human exploitation, etc. History repeats itself because the human genome repeats itself.
If social science is to yield workable solutions for these problems, that progress must be founded upon an objectively accurate understanding of the basic building block of social organizations: the individual human being. This paper has been an attempt to take a step in that direction.