*Sock Puppet Timmy - “Mommy, where do morals come from?”
Sock Puppet Mommy - “Well, sweetie, morals come from the church, the priests and all those nice people have told us what is moral because God told them so.”
Sock Puppet Timmy - “So does that mean that all of my atheist and agnostic as well as all my non-christian are bad people because they have no priest to tell them what morals are?”
Sock Puppet Mommy - “Well…yes and no honey. They might be wrong because they do not believe in God, but they can have morals too.”
Sock Puppet Timmy - “But…if morals come from priests who listen to God and tell us what He says, how can they have morals? They don’t listen to priests.”*
So, if not from a higher power, where do we get our morals? Are there other animals out there that can be altruistic, or is it just us humans? Are there animals out there that believe they go to hell because they killed a fellow animal?
I think our morals come from our thoughts drifting to the possbility of a higher power, one that might look down upon us and frown at our actions. Why we chose such things as murder, rape, thievery, and other such things as being immoral elude me.
What other possibilities for the conception of morals exists?
They must have been created by someone dumb. For you see, evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.
No, honestly, just think about it, if you killed someone everytime you got a litte mad-on how long would humans have lasted? It’s just much more productive to be cool.
I’m not entirely clear on what you’re asking - probably because I’m now approaching 48 hours sans sleep - but I think it’s something like “If morals don’t come from a perception of a higher, possibly judgemental power, where do they come from?”
I think the answer is: empathy. Basically, putting yourself in another’s shoes, more or less feeling what he’s feeling. Once you can do that, and especially once it becomes an automatic response, it becomes unpleasant to hurt another person.
You can see this at work in little kids; their parents help them develop morals by working on their empathy. (“Johnny, how do you think Sara felt when you bit her?”) You can also see the other side of the coin, with sociopaths, who lack not only empathy but the perception that other people are real people - they also lack morals, and I think it’s because they lack the necessary internal structures to learn them. (IANAPsychiatrist, though.)
I think man is probably the only animal with a concept of hell, but there are examples of what appears to be altruistic behavior in animals besides man. Meerkats live in burrows. When they are looking for food, one of them (usually the one that has eaten the most) acts as a sentry. His or her job is to cry out a warning when a predator is sighted and continue the cry until all of the other meerkats are safe in their burrows. This puts the sentry in greater danger than if (s)he just dove for the nearest burrow. But the benefit to the community out weigh the increased risk for the individual. Now, is MeerFluffy thinking “I must save my family.”? I somehow doubt it, but we have no way of knowing what she might be thinking.
We are social animals. Social animals develop rules regarding what sort of behavior is tolerated by the group and what sort of behavior is not tolerated. Killing one’s own kind is usually not tolerated, but even in human society, there are situations where killing one’s own kind is tolerated. The government can kill. Killing someone in self-defense is tolerated. I think our idea of a higher power come from our contemplation of where the morals come from.
Altruism exists because behaviour for nepotism is costly to specify. Try searching google for Axelrod and (particularly) Hamilton or inclusive fitness.
Morals have changed greatly over time and still vary greatly from place to place.
All moral philosophy can do is follow this algorithm:
1/ What do you believe are the most important things in life?
2/ How do you act? How do others who believe what you believe act?
3/ Are these consonant with your beliefs?
4/ If yes, Great! If no, then modify your behaviour or your important beliefs to get consonance if you wish to be moral.
Past societies have seen the following as allowable, nay moral behaviour:
Killing of the first born child.
Father of the family having the right of life and death over entire family.
Obedience to the state is all.
Killing any child with a disability is required.
Sacrifice of other humans to the gods.
Unlimited War.
Extermination of the Jews.
Extermination of all non-believers.
Unlimited private property/ No private property.
Although we may not see these as moral acts, they were seen as moral in their time and place, and people believed that their acts were consonant with their beliefs.
Many acts in our current society may be of questionable morality:
Allowing mass-starvation when it is possible to feed the world.
Threats to use nuclear weapons.
Refusal to limit greenhouse gases.
Denying AIDS drugs to poor countries.
Use of the death penalty
Abortion
and so on.
In different places and at different times, these may be seen as as heinous as the other acts above, yet we do not see a society wide movement to stop these things because society’s apparent basic beliefs do not conflict with these acts.
As an athiest, I think morals have no higher power behind them (nor does anything else). I think they are what you make of them.
Which is not to say that they are easily made up or changed, or that they are not important.
It is in our nature to behave according to some standards, no doubt due to our social evolution. To say that there is no real right or wrong, to say that no supreme being watches and cares about what we do, to say that emotions are just evolved feelings to aim us in a productive direction, is not to say that being kind and thoughtful or avoiding meanness isn’t the most important thing one can do.
Doing something good gives me a more valued feeling than anything else I experience.
Read Stephen Pinker’s book How the Mind Works. In one of the chapters towards the end it has a great explanation of morality from an evolutionary perspective.
Basically he posits that morality evolved because we need to work in partnerships - you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. He compares that on a very simple level to birds who, for instance, need to have their head preened by another bird. Therefore the birds need to have an instinct to preen each other for that to work.
In order to defend against selfish mutants who will accept preening but not preen in return, the birds need to have some memory of who has preened them in the past and who has refused to preen them - and then only preen those who have - thus evolving the sense of “fairness.” (Laugh all you want, but I have a parrot and I can tell you she has a strong sense of fairness. If I’ve ignored her for a day, for instnce, she will be aloof, aggressive and generally unpleasant until I give her some attention).
Anyway, Pinker goes on, other aspects of morality evolve as elaborations of this need to work together. For instance, you need to have a sense of who is trustworthy or likely to help you in the future, and you base that on friendliness, displays of affection, or - if they’ve harmed you - on displays of regret, sorrow etc.
That doesn’t explain a strict absolute code of “right” and “wrong.” But I think it’s a nice framework for why we might have an instinct for fairness, altruism and empathy - that doesn’t involve priests.