http://www.fgm.org/MalevFemCirc.html
In short, it seems to me that there’s a difference in degree, not necessarily in kind. But that degree is one hell of a degree.
Cheerful Sunday night conversation!
Quix
I’ve given this question more than a bit of thought. I am not religious, and so I don’t believe we have a “spiritual nature.” And yet, I have morals. So where do morals come from, if not from religion/spirituality?
In my view, the answer can be summed up with one word: Empathy.
I think we humans evolved as social beings. As such, we are adapted to live in groups, and to be attuned to the needs of the other members of our “tribe.” As part of this, I believe humans are born with a natural sense of empathy. This empathy is honed and reinforced by our socialization in childhood. Our parents teach us the lesson. (Don’t all parents use the line, “How would you feel if someone did that to you?”)
As a result we think about and take into account how our actions affect others. There is actually a selfish (though subconscious) motive: to maintain good standing in the group, and thus to retain the protection of the group. That would have been critical to survival in pre-civilized times.
If you think about it, all moral codes have some basis in empathy. The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is nothing but a restatement of the concept.
To put it another way:
“Good” = Strongly Empathetic
“Evil” = Lacking Empathy
IMO, the fact that our parents have to tell us that something is wrong, better serves the argument that morals are a cultural thing.
How about “cares for others in out of a desire for reciprocation”? If I couldn’t care less about your woes, but help you anyway in the hope that you will help me when I need help, is that good, bad, or neutral?
Spoke and MandaJo, I think you’re both on the right track.
Moral concepts do arise from social enforcement of actions that benefit the group as a whole. I thought about what you said, Spoke and I agree, empathy is the key good, but is “subconsciously selfish,” truly a necessary condition? I agree that acting in the best actions of the group, and enforcing these actions will have the side effect of advancing oneself, but it isn’t “selfish,” it’s “groupish.” But I disagree that the Moral is necessarily Groupish, though is necessarily empathetic.
Need it have another specific person to be empathetic with? Or can empathy exist in the abstract, lacking a tangible owner, and lacking any possible payback or recognition?
Suppose I am helping someone I don’t know, nor will I ever. Whose emotions am I considering when I donate food to help the hungry in Africa? In what way am I subconsciously selfish when I send anonymous checks a charity? What about when people strive to “not be a burden on their family” by walking off into the desert?
What possible payback is there in those cases?
I would say, they all represent empathy, and sacrifice, but not latent selfishness. The Moral is the consideration of what effect our actions have on others, and strive to do what we would want done if the situation was reversed. I think that is true Moral, that we are all equal and should treat each other accordingly.
Robert. It is natural, Groupish behavior. It can range from bad to good, depending on what motivates the others in your hypothetical, but is usually good.
That said, the worst form of sociopath is he who can fake empathy, but is nowhere to be found when the chips are down.
There was a study of conditional cowardice in Lions recently, where some would join in a group fight if assured of victory, but not when the numbers were equal. Something to consider.
I agree on the idea of morals being a sort of group mechanism.
(Which might easily be translated as ‘culturaly defined’)
However, I don’t agree with empathy being an essential ingredient. In Roman society, flogging a disobedient slave would certainly not have been seen as morally bad.
It is a large ingredient in our morals, shaped by christianity. But not even there does it apply to all morals.
How about morals applying to ‘loose’ sexual behaviour?
Where does empathy come in when we condemn someone for having sex with someone very much younger then him/her?
You might find some interest in this essay.
http://www.americanhumanist.org/humanism/morality.html
I’d need a little more elaboration on your idea of our “spiritual nature” before I could express an opinion on that. IMO&E, “spirituality” is a tremendously poorly and inconsistently defined and ambiguous word.
Perhaps it is a learned behavior and not an innate one. Difficult to know without a controlled experiment (the conduct of which would pose its own “moral” problems).
The Roman circuses also present an argument against empathy being innate, I suppose.
On the other hand, surely the Romans had empathy within their own tribe.(?) Would a Roman who beat and abused his fellow citizens not be frowned upon? Would Romans feel no sympathy for his victims?
AceOSpades, I think the tendency to show empathy is subconsciously self-serving. Perhaps I should not even call it a “motive” since that word almost implies a conscious intent.
Let me recast the proposition: one possessed of empathy has a quality which will serve him well in a group dynamic. Individual acts based on that empathy may or may not have a self-serving purpose, but the tendency to empathy is ultimately an advantageous adaptation for functioning within a group.
Oh, and Latro, sexual practices vary so widely from one society to another that I tend to view community standards on sexual matters as being more a question of mores than of morals.
Your recast proposition is agreeable; I do agree that most group advancement has an element of self-advancement, since you’re usually advancing your own group. However, “subconsciously self-advancing,” is an argument I’ve seen to deny capital M Morality, and is incorrect, or just as incorrect as calling selfish acts “subconsciously self-damaging.”
Better that we say that one of the motives driving self-sacrifice for group advancement is long-term self-advancement. Not all of us are capable of taking such a long-term view of life. The short-term view is invariably selfish, and I think the good, and to much extent Morality, means helping the most people, not discluding yourself, over the long run.
I agree that my moral state is such that, if everyone followed, everyone would benefit, and thus I would benefit. However, if I saw insufficient benefits, long-term, I wouldn’t change my philosophy. Indeed, as in the prisoners’ dilemma, many, many iterations have to occur before optimal group advancement is achieved.
Similarly, I am content to advocate the goal of the Golden Rule, even if I fail to see the benefits in my lifetime, as long as more people follow it in the future after my passing. You might say I’m empathetic for the generations yet to come. I agree, but I’d fight you tooth and nail, without denying your generalization, if you said I was “subconsciously selfish.”
You need to separate out some concepts here. First, we have the psychological motives of human beings, which we can either pretty uselessly characterize as “selfish” (acting as the self wills) on a very deep and basic level, or, much more usefully, characterize as acting in accordance with some conceptual values or interests which may or may not have anything to do with “the self.” For instance, when I argue for certain gay rights, it should be noted that I am not gay, nor am I in any sense thinking about my own interests or even my own existence at all. What I am thinking about is a concept, and certain situations in the world that hurt people.
Now, you can of course complain that this is ultimately selfish, since I am acting as if I just want to world to be a way that is pyshcologicaly pleasing to me. But this moves us back down into that silly level where we can make up a “self-ish” motivation for anything other than purely irrational and unintended actions.
Next, we have the morality, which, I assert, is not a thing or process in human beings, but rather an concept that developed over human history. Morality (or, rather, “a morality”) is one of those more conceptual values: it involves thinking in a way divorced from ones individual self, and focused much more generally.
Fast and loose: first argue that there must be moral absolutes because cultures agree on basic ideas. When it’s pointed out that cultures DON’T always agree… argue that this is because those cultures aren’t justified: they’re ignoring the absolutes!
Did that line of arguement confuse anyone else? It should have, because it tried to use too totally incompatible lines of justification at once.
It’s pretty obvious that cultures are going to have general correlation with certain basic norms: because without them cultures wouldn’t last very long (sort of a natural selection of cultural norms). I’m not sure what that proves.
But, indeed, it’s not clear what is meant by the “are” in “There are moral absolutes!” Moral absolutes are at best still subjectively apprhended: if there were no subjects around to think something was wrong, how could there be an immorality?
Agreed. It’s similar to a “No True Scotsman” argument. I wish JThunder’d pop back in here and alleviate my confusion.
**
I’m not so sure it’s obvious to me, unless you’re really giving yourself some wiggle-room with the phrase “general correlation.” Could you elaborate, in your characteristically insightful way? [Disclaimer – that’s not sarcasm. You’re a fantastic poster, IMO.]
Quix
Hang on.
Maybe we have a language barrier here but, as I understand it, the terms morals and mores are synonyms.
What you are doing is splitting them up .Placing those things that don’t fit your view in one box and leaving those you like in the other so that it nicely conforms to your theory.
Apos, you, in effect, do the same thing.
You are trying to give a seperate identity to our modern set of morals. You degenerate past moral codes to stepping stones toward some higher form of ‘morality’.
I don’t agree with this linear reasoning. You paint a process with a set end-result. As if this end-result was, somehow, meant to be and superior to anything previous.
I don’t regard this as valid argumentation. I can understand that you like our modern values better than others. That in itself doesn’t make them superior.
No need to come up with a spiritual answer when there is a perfectly logical evolutionary one. Take a human population, half of which cooperates, half of which doesn’t. Who will prevail? Man creates myth and laws to solidfy what already exists.
I agree.
I believe that there is an evolutionary advantage to the trait of empathy. And I believe that we have dressed up this naturally-occurring, evolutionarily-advantageous empathy as “morality.”
Perhaps my choice of words was confusing. I was using “more” as a synonym for “custom.” (I trust you would agree that “customs” and “morals” are not the same thing. Mores (or customs, if you will) are externally-imposed societal norms. Morals come from within.
The fact that societies vary so widely in their sexual practices seems to me to show that they are not a matter of internal morals, but of externally-imposed (and socially reinforced) societal custom.
Morals, I would argue, derive from natural, hard-wired empathy. Internally acquired, not externally imposed (though society may reinforce, and even build its laws around this empathetic impulse).
Name a law or moral that is universal across human societies. Ten bucks says that law will be based on empathy. Why? Because empathy is a naturally-occurring human trait, evolved to allow humans to thrive as social creatures.
No, no, you’re doing it again.
Moral and mores pertain to ‘appropriate behaviour’.
Condemning or allowing certain sexual habits certainly falls within this category.
Doing what again?
Spoke said that empathy-based rules are universal, and, per KidCharlamane, cooperation strategies, in genetic parlance, outcompetes individual strategies.
Therefore, the universality of the Golden Rule shows its necessity for self-sustaining cooperative societies, and the non-universality of sexual mores show their arbitrary nature.