[marcinreal]

I had a similar thought. It seems like an attack on morality, implying that there is no true morality or God-given conscience, only fear of consequences.

> After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.

Hard to judge from the wiki page, there are so little details, but this sounds fake and staged. I think there were less stunts back then so people were more trusting. At any rate, I get strong vibes of some kind of agenda here, and you're right that it's probably not a godly one.

[terryf]

The bounds of morality are a social construct. So, if you stage something that is purposefully meant to create an environment that seems to be outside of society, you will get behaviour that is not bound by regular social norms and morality. It is possible that saying this was the artist's goal, but who knows.

But yes, there is no true morality. How can there be? In nature, there is only survival. A lion is happy to find some prey thas has had a stroke of bad luck and gotten stuck or hurt so it can't easily fight back.

And the previous paragraph is not meant to say that the lion is evil. No, the lion simply is.

[tetris11]

Nature is not a model of morality though. It's a pretty linear system that offers very few choices that don't lead to death. We constructed a society where there are many more choices other than death, and in doing so defined a moral system.

[hnbad]

> We constructed a society

That's just nature. Unless you'd argue that bonobos have "defined a moral system" because they have "constructed a society" that is built on mutual cooperation, all humans have done is find increasingly abstract ways to cause harm to one another in order to work around the natural tendency towards cooperation.

What makes human morality special is not how we support each other but how we hurt each other. And this is a fairly recent achievement even in our own species' historical timescale.

[navane]

I'm assuming you don't have any free will and it's the combination of your genes and experiences that made you get to this position.

[hnbad]

Is there a point to your statement? The existence or non-existence of free will has no discernable effect on reality (see the "philosophical zombies" thought experiment).

[kmoser]

Of course it was staged: it was performance art! It's not like she found herself wandering through the gallery and suddenly decided to subject herself to the whim of strangers. The event was planned ahead of time.

Or do you mean the reactions of the audience sound fake/staged? In either case, what gives you that idea?