
Are humans too aggressive to justify having a Nobel Peace Prize? - vixen99
https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/10/07/are-humans-too-aggressive-to-justify-having-a-nobel-peace-prize/
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beloch
"...if humans do have a big capacity for peace shouldn’t we expect to find
more accomplished people on this list?"

Go look at the list of Nobel Peace prize winners:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laureates)

Some of the winners probably didn't deserve the prize and are now
disappointing to see on this list (e.g. Obama or Arafat).

Some of the winners are symbols of inspiration rather than people who have
accomplished much themselves (e.g. Malala Yousafzai).

However, there are a lot of highly accomplished people on this list who have
made a huge impact on the world. Many of them just aren't as famous as some of
the disappointments.

Alfred Nobel was a merchant of death. The fact that people striving for peace
now feel honored by a Nobel Prize is deeply ironic, but perhaps this also
shows that, even among those of us with the most blood on our hands, there
exists the yearning for a more peaceful future.

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timbuckley
It's exactly because there is so much violence that we need to reward actors
who work to reduce it.

~~~
abritinthebay
Seriously. If anything that is the stated purpose of the creator of it after
contributing to so much violence with dynamite.

For Harvard this is _intensely_ stupid.

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megaman22
People always bring up dynamite with Nobel, like dynamite was a significant
war-fighting weapon, rather than something that spurred tbe construction of
the infrasructure that made modern civilization possible.

It's Bofors, and it's place among the Victorian era heavy arms cartel with
Krupp and Armstrong-Vickers that he was ashamed of.

~~~
abritinthebay
The reason people bring it up is Nobel’s own writing on the subject.

I think he’d know.

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WillReplyfFood
Yes, and we have a whole clown show along with the bloody circus.

Always the same prophets at the sideline, wrinkling there noses in disgust-
but also condeming those who pacify the situation with a constant surplus as
greedy and disgusting human beeings. We have parasites that condemn killing
mammoths, but know exactly how to cut it up and redistribute it. We have a
whole caste of social controll freaks, who know exactly what is good and bad,
unless they predict something completely wrong, like a society of violent
gamers, and they can walk away from that defeat and not be ridiculed for
eternity.

Not only are we not peacefull. But we are also unable to really understandf
what facilitates peace, what actors are actually propelling the process of
peacefullness-decay and how to sedate these actors.

Nuclear weapons are the only thing, keeping the sociopathic chieftains of
olden times from sending us all to mass slaugther to avoid dealing with
society internal pressure. How somebody can be so dumb to argue for removal of
this society-implant, basically the pacemaker of 60 years of peace- is beyond
me.

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moo360
There was an awful lot of war in your "60 years of peace".

~~~
cm2187
Only between nations where one or both didn't have nuclear deterrence.

~~~
wavefunction
Or internally. Or at the behest of nuclear powers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts#10.2C000_or_more_deaths_in_current_or_past_year)

And I guess those are just 'direct' deaths so it doesn't count all the deaths
of refugees or plague or starvation that arose from the conflicts.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>And I guess those are just 'direct' deaths so it doesn't count all the deaths
of refugees or plague or starvation that arose from the conflicts.

And is there and reason to believe the killed anecdotally to killed in action
ratio is different than it was pre-1945?

Starving refugees were a thing before nuclear weapons too.

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maxander
Peace and war aren't intrinsically balanced; it's stupidly easy to make
headlines as a bloodthirsty murderer, but it's hard to stand out as a builder
or negotiator. There are millions of brilliant people who have devoted their
lives to peace, who are shining examples of virtue and altruism and everything
else, but their stories aren't seen as being as _dramatic_ as Stephen
Paddock's. And thus, instead of thinking about the multitudes of wonderful
people around us every day, we dwell on some asshole who decided to shoot an
assault rifle out his window. Paddock becomes a nationally recognized symbol
while the best of humanity labors in obscurity.

Most of the crudeness of humanity can be attributed to this fascination with
terrible things and people, I think. The Nobel Peace Prize can best be seen as
a way of turning phenomenon around- of putting the spotlight on _good_ people
for once. There is no shortage of excellent candidates. That less-than-
sterling examples sometimes win the Peace prize is perhaps a sign that the
prize itself is being misused- awarding the prize to Obama was widely seen as
an inducement towards, rather than recognition of, good- not it's intended
purpose! The rest, the good-but-not-earth-shaking examples, are so just
because the work of peace just intrinsically isn't earth-shaking; it's slow,
subtle, and ubiquitous.

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AHASIC
This is why I think that all Nobel Peace Prizes should be awarded only to
those already deceased. It removes their ability to mess it up like some of
the people from the list now.

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vorotato
Relative to what? Are we even considering the environment these humans were
raised in?

You know it's no wonder no aliens have come to visit us, we're such a huge
bummer we get caught in a knot for even congratulating ourselves for putting
forth a good faith effort to improve.

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fit2rule
Is it perhaps not more that all human institutions which keep secrets are
emminently corruptible, and that is what has happened here?

The spirit is certainly worthy, the Peace Prize. But perhaps we should have
"Peace Makers" supplant "War Makers" in the scheme of things - and recognize
more of this strata, first.

Its one thing to have a prize, but the cultures which participate in these
sorts of things, have to also be honest and understand their own hubris ..

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Tomminn
Are humans to scientifically illiterate to justify having a Nobel Prizes for
science?

...

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return0
The implication being that we should have a Nobel War Prize? (after all alfred
nobel himself made bombs)

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warent
There's two reasons why this argument doesn't make any sense.

1\. "Too aggressive" relative to what? There's probably never going to be an
absolutely perfect, peaceful human being, simply due to our evolutionary
roots. To suggest that this means we should abandon the peace prize is absurd.
There's never going to be some perfect embodiment of peace, but that's not
what the peace prize is for.

2\. [http://www.icanw.org/pledge/](http://www.icanw.org/pledge/) If this list
is "bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping" then please, scrape more of the "bottom of
the barrel". Would we rather reward someone for managing 100+ nations to sign
a treaty like this, or reward someone who posts indignant and borderline self-
righteous rants in an internet blog? Again this is a throwback to the above
point of relativity.

Bonus point: The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Mother Teresa aren't good
indicators that this prize has a purpose?

Edit: Added Desmond Tutu above because I'm a big fan

~~~
Osmium
> "Too aggressive" relative to what?

Other humans (Homo not Sapiens). Sadly, we'll probably never know for sure,
because it looks like we were responsible for wiping most of them out 10,000s
years ago.

> Mother Teresa

Usually isn't a good example to bring up ... Mother Teresa has had her fair
share of controversy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/25...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/25/why-
to-many-critics-mother-teresa-is-still-no-saint/)

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_wor...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html)

[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/12/19/mother-
teresa/](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/12/19/mother-teresa/)

~~~
warent
Mother Teresa may have been a poor example, I admittedly don't know that much
about her. Thank you for the insight. Though I don't think my post has no
merit and warrants downvotes

~~~
Osmium
Didn't downvote you for the record. If a comment's worth responding to, it
doesn't make much sense to me to downvote it (:

