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fubarobfusco comments on Thwarting a Catholic conversion? - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: Jay_Schweikert 18 June 2012 04:26PM

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Comment author: fubarobfusco 26 June 2012 03:37:24AM -1 points [-]

Well, there's the anthropological concept of the psychic unity of humankind — we may have different values, but our ways of thinking (including our values) are not wholly alien from one another, but have a lot in common.

And there are also things we can say about human values that descend from cultural evolution: we would not expect, for instance, that any culture would exist that did not value its own replication into the next generation. So we would expect that people would want to teach their ideas to their children (or converts), merely because societies that don't do that would tend to die out and we wouldn't get to observe them.