• hypericin
    1.5k
    Morality does not arise from the dictates of religion: secularization did not lead to the feared collapse and anarchy. It is not the contingent product of culture. It certainly does not originate from reason. Rather, morality is driven by instinct.

    Consider any cooperative species. Individuals, driven to maximize their own reproductive chances, will always want to game the system, and behave in an uncooperative manner, benefitting themselves at the expense of the group. What is nature's remedy? The moral instinct.

    How does the moral instinct work in humans? In two primary ways.

    The first causes us to become automatically angry at someone who has behaved uncooperatively towards us, who has benefitted at our expense, in other words, who has committed an injustice against us. What is every child's first moral utterance? "It's not fair!" This is instinctual morality in it's purest form. No parent is going around teaching their kids to say this.

    This is well and good, but not enough. The outcome on the group scale would be fights between immoral individuals and their victim, the subjugation of the weak by the strong, and the breakdown of the cooperative group.

    So, there is an additional mechanism: we instinctively feel anger when someone behaves unjustly towards another group member. While this anger may not be felt as keenly as when the injustice is towards us, collectively this is a powerful force indeed, and works to impose significant costs on immoral individuals. When they behave immorally, they face the wrath not only of the victim but of the group. When we talk about morality in the abstract, we are speaking of concepts derived from this instinct to adjudicate injustice between others. Legal systems are externalized formalizations of this instinct, albeit filtered through (and perhaps perverted by) cultural mores and norms. The concept of justice itself has not changed much over the years, as it is instinctual. What has changed is the concept of group belonging, of whom justice does and doesn't apply to, which has expanded as the world has become ever more globalized.

    What is *not* included in the moral instinct is any impulse to be just, to be cooperative, ourselves. This is must be learned. Anyone who believes this is an instinct should reflect on their own long and arduous moral training, and the training you might have in turn visited upon your children. This training is internalized as guilt, and by our need for an egoic self-concept as a good person.

    As this is trained, not inborn, it is inherently fungible. We can certainly talk a good moral game. But then the doors are locked, the cameras are off, no one knows you are there, and lo and behold, the cash box is unlocked. Suddenly, everything changes, and the key question more often than not becomes, "will I get caught?". Conceptually, we may not like this about ourselves, and we might loudly protest our own moral purity. But all this is exactly as nature intended. The individual learns to be moral, to benefit from participation in the cooperative group, but may flexibly behave immorally as far as the situation presents an advantage.

    While there is no instinct to be moral ourselves, there is an additional, separate, inbuilt, and more primitive mechanism: empathy. Empathy works through mirror neurons: if someone inflicts pain on someone else, they are punished with the echo of that pain in themselves. This serves to prevent group members from directly harming one another. But as anyone knows who has dealt with a bully in school, this trait is variably expressed, reflecting variability in genetic moral strategies. The safest strategy is to be highly empathetic, while the riskiest is to possess little to no empathy at all: such people end up dead, imprisoned, marginalized, or as CEOs and political leaders.

    All together, our instinctive outrage at injustice against ourselves and other group members, along with empathy, along with the moral training any human must learn to thrive in the group, serve to maintain the smooth functioning of a cooperative group against the inevitable "bad actors". What is evil? Evil is no more and no less than to behave uncooperatively, to act for your personal gain with indifference to the costs and harms you are imposing on others. Good is the opposite, it is to behave in an especially cooperative manner, to benefit others of the group, at your own expense. These concepts are direct reflections of the moral instinct.
  • T Clark
    13k
    You are expressing opinions as if they are fact without providing any evidence. I am skeptical that things actually work the way you say they do. It certainly is not consistent with the kinds of positive social behavior I observe in myself and others.
  • Tom Storm
    8.3k
    It would strengthen your ideas if you could provide some evidence or citations for your claims. I tend to agree that morality works through intersubjective mechanisms, socialization and power. Definitions of good and evil, like definitions of truth, don't engage me very much. We all have a sense what these things mean and values differ across individuals, communities and cultures. Humans are a social species and cooperation seems hard wired into human behaviour and is perhaps foundational to our morality.
  • Tzeentch
    3.3k
    I think intuition and/or instinct can provide some starting points for morality, but I find the idea that it can provide a basis for morality unconvincing. Plainly following instinct frequently leads to actions that are irreconcilable with any moral code or system.

    Instinct may provide us with the basic goal of man - all individuals are instinctually driven towards being happy and content. (Plato's "All men desire the Good")

    It is then reason, rationality and wisdom that guide our actions to be in accordance with that goal. I believe that is what morality is.

    We tend to see morality as altruistic. I disagree with this. I believe morality is inherently 'selfish', but by acting in ways that are in one's true self-interest, one inevitably becomes a positive force to all around them. Selfishness and selflessness become the same.
  • Nils Loc
    1.3k
    You could view a moral code as just a kind of rationalization of social relations that emerge in nature.

    Take for example chickens. They can't rationalize their behavior but if they did they might uphold the pecking order (generally). Hens never(?) outrank a rooster. But if rationalization came into play, hens and roosters might be justifying the system with regard to their self-interests. Is the risk to give reasons for why the prevailing system is bad, tolerable? If you're getting pecked to death you might have nothing to lose, assuming you've persuaded others to your cause.
  • praxis
    6.2k
    There are studies with infints that give creatence to the notion of moral intuition. I will not bother to look them up for you though. Google it.

    Moral frameworks are built on these moral intuitions, or so say they who subscribe to moral foundations theory. Your tribe might say "potato" whereas my tribe says "potahto".
  • T Clark
    13k
    There are studies with infints that give creatence to the notion of moral intuition.praxis

    Here's a link to Karen Wynn's publications page:

    https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ZBkyZBIAAAAJ&hl=en

    Here's a link to a 60 Minutes piece on her work with moral judgement in very young children:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRvVFW85IcU
  • Seeker
    214
    Here's a link to a 60 Minutes piece on her work with moral judgement in very young children:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRvVFW85IcU
    T Clark

    Incredible stuff, thanks for sharing.

    Here's the transcript from CBS News

    So basically we are all little bigots from the moment we leave the whomb right up till the moment our upbringing steers us otherwise.
  • T Clark
    13k
    So basically we are all little bigots from the moment we leave the whomb right up till the moment our upbringing steers us otherwise.Seeker

    I don't think "bigot" is the right word, but certainly babies are fairly rigidly judgmental. What was most interesting to me is that they have a clear sense of the agency and intentions of others. Even at such a young age they recognize the personhood of others, even when those others are stuffed animals.
  • NOS4A2
    8.3k


    Wouldn’t it follow that if being just is learned behavior, being unjust is also learned?
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    Well, as far as I can tell, there's got to be a moral instinct akin to survival instinct; what else can explain a pride of lions or a pack of wolves? Wouldn't it be easier for a lion or a wolf to kill one of its own than go through all the trouble of hunting wildebeest and deer? Going by their behavior they don't really look like they're thinking about anything beyond the 4F's let alone ponder about morality. The long and short of it, some aspects of morality are hardwired.
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