Morality without god

While it's true that in the end we can only ever do what we want to do (as chosen from a selection of possible actions, anyway), that does not necessarily mean that "selfish" desires have a greater power to move one than the internal desire to act in accordance within one's moral code.I suppose you can take it that compliance with one's internal moral code becomes the reward, but it feels a bit stretched.

It's a stretch because it expands the instances in which an act is considered "selfish" to the point that all acts are selfish. There can no longer be any distinction between a selfish and a non-selfish act, and the term becomes meaningless.We can only ever do what we want to do among the choices available to us...but if we are to retain the concepts of "selfishness" and "selflessness," we need to continue to draw a distinction between those whose goal systems disregard others and those whose goal systems encompass empathy for others.Serving your own goal system is always self-rewarding, but not all goal systems are the same.

That depends largely on the species in question, and the person.PETA members seem to feel quite a lot of moral outrage regarding the killing or mistreatment of just about all animal life above that of the cockroach.Most Americans would experience moral outrage over the unnecessary killing or and form of abuse of a cat or dog.Some people care more about their pets than they do human beings, if those human beings live far enough away or can otherwise be conveniently ignored.Only a few people (religious extremists of the pacifist variety) actually morally care about the killing of microbes, but they exist as well.But as usual, reality doesn't actually factor in to your ramblings.

That depends. Most people don't feel a lot of remorse over the chicken that died for their dinner. Fewer people feel remorse over killing a fish to eat. Even more people feel no remorse over killing a rat with a trap. Virtually nobody feels remorse for killing a cockroach.There are people who regularly feed mice or even live rabbits to their pet snakes with not a shred of remorse.Society as a whole doesn't judge any of those things to be particularly heinous. Sometimes a bit excessive, and there is a minority of people who thinks all of the above are wicked and evil...but let's not kid ourselves here.Human moral concern over non-human species is a mixed and often completely subjective bag. We care more about generalities and less about specifics; we care more about "cute" and less about "tasty." And we don't care almost at all about "disease-ridden" or "creepy-crawly." It's primarily driven by culture...which of course is yet again a demonstration that morality is not centered on some "objective standard," but is in fact flexible and is defined by societies in a form of mutable collective consensus that changes over time and varies across geopolitical regions.

But his combat group survives. Individuals possessing a willingness for self-sacrifice do not have a reproduction advantage. Groups containing individuals with such traits do.And the heritable trait need not necessarily be genetic at all; social structures evolve as well, and are similarly influenced by natural selection. Societies that consider murder to be immoral will be more likely to survive than societies that consider murder to be just fine, for example. The social traits are passed down through social instruction rather than genes, but the end result is similar.It's not that every action is "selfish;" it's that we all have an internal sense of priorities and responses to various stimuli. Much of this is unconscious (we make many of our decisions without ponderously thinking about them). If John wants his buddies to survive more than he wants himself to survive, he's obeying his own internal priorities and doing what he wants to do (being "selfish" in the way some are using the term), and his action in throwing himself on a grenade is simultaneously "selfless."We only ever do what we want to do. Our actions are always dictated by our personal set of priorities; since we are ultimately the only ones who decide on our own actions, this is the only way it could ever be. But that doesn't mean that what we want is always about improving the self at the cost of others; often, we want others to be happy and healthy even at the expense of our own happiness or health.

What he really wants is for his friends to survive. He places their survival above his own.You're confusing our ideal wishes with what we want to do given unfortunate circumstances. Our ability to choose a course of action is always limited by our extant circumstances, and sometimes our choices are all unwanted.But if the hero did not want to save the lives of his comrades more than he wanted to save his own life...he wouldn't throw himself on the grenade. Certainly he'd rather be somewhere else where he didn't have to make a choice like that...but his options are limited by the fact that he is where he is, and there's a live grenade and his friends nearby.We can only ever do what we want to do, in the end. Every single choice you make is a matter of choosing the most preferable outcome according to your internal priority system. Sometimes the most favorable outcome is not what benefits you the most, and that's what we call "selflessness," but you can only ever make a choice like that if you want that outcome more than you want the alternatives.

Nothing would. And why would we want it to?The naturalistic perspective on morality, social evolution, and the like are simply explanations for how it all works and where it came from. Even the underpinning decision theory behind how we make choices, moral or otherwise, doesn't for an instant remove the heroism of self-sacrifice for a worthy cause.It's rather how like one can understand what causes a rainbow to appear, and that the knowledge of refracting light on water droplets does not in any way diminish the beauty of the rainbow.Personally, I appreciate things more when I understand how everything works.

How it works is where it came from. Just like, when an astrophysicist tells you how solar systems form, he is also telling you why Earth is rocky and Jupiter is a gas giant and why planets exist at all.A "first cause" in a biological context can be as simple as a fluke mutation...as with the formation of all other biological structures.You're arguing entirely from a perspective of personal incredulity here, GDR. "I don;t buy it" is your whole argument...and it's a logical fallacy. What you prefer to believe has nothing to do with what is provably so.The evidence for the evolution of altruism and morality is frankly overwhelming. It's demonstrated in a wide variety of social animals, not only humans. They may not have such clean-cut examples as soldiers and live grenades......but consider the lowly worker bee. She is infertile; nothing she can do will preserve her genes...except by preserving her hive, and thereby her mother, the queen, who continues to reproduce. She has a stinger...one which, when used, ensures her death. Bees have literally no other option than self-sacrifice when defending the hive - every successful attack results in the death of the bee. Every single sting is like a soldier leaping onto a grenade to preserve others.The evolutionary explanation for how and why this is so is beautifully elegant. The bee sacrifices herself because doing so ensures the survival of her hive. By ensuring the survival of her hive, she ensures that her altruistic traits will be preserved in future generations. Bees that do not sacrifice themselves in the defense of their hives will be killed by predators, and the "selfish" bees will die out.Altruism, self-sacrifice, and morality are all social constructs. Versions of each exist within groups of social animals...because those traits will increase the likelihood that societies that include them will survive and reproduce, even if the individuals die.

So is a portion of human altruism. This is how evolution works - features are built upon. Humans have more complex social interaction than bees, and so have concerns like "self-image." So do some other animals.But the observation here is the same - a worker bee sacrificing its own life for the survival of the hive is not substantially different from a human soldier throwing himself on a grenade. The same principles of group over individual survival are consistent, and the selective pressure favoring altruistic behavior is the same. Humans can override instinct, but our behaviors are far more heritable than you might think. The human brain is a constant feedback loop...and from birth, we have an instinctual desire to be accepted by our family group and to please them. You'll notice that babies react to the emotions of their parents - they smile when happiness is expressed, they get upset when others are upset. While we build upon this instinct with additional social constructs, a very significant part is built in. Empathy is biological - you don't decide to feel empathy, it's just a normal function of a working human brain.Human morality is an extremely convoluted subject, but at its root we tend to try to rationalize our base instincts and add additional complexity to them.For further evidence, take a look at the tribalistic behavior of humans - not unlike any set of social animals you can name. When we identify an "other," a tribe that is not our tribe (your favorites, FEY, appear to be "liberals" vs "conservatives" and "Christians" vs "Atheists," but we all have this base instinct), we tend to dehumanize them and react negatively to them regardless of what they're actually saying. Have you ever heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Look it up - you'll see a bit more about how human altruism works, or rather how it stops completely when confronted with a different tribe, even one completely made up for an experiment. Which themselves build on instinct. There are lots of similarities within a given culture, where "nurture" would be an effective explanation for this, but the desire of newborns to be pleasing to others, the feedback loop in the brain that helps them learn social skills like talking, is universal across all cultures and happens before "morality" is a concept. Indeed - and a great deal of that comes from human social structures and, like language, have biological backgrounds but learned complexity.Your basic argument is that, since the bee does not "choose," since the bee is not sentient and its behavior is fully instinct driven, its behavior cannot be an example of altruism.But the evolutionary model predicts that we should find primitive, instinctual precursors to what we would identify as "morality" and "altruism."The basic claim of evolution is that no feature is ever completely new, that all features of all organisms are slightly modified versions of pre-existing features from an ancestor, inherited with small cumulative changes over multiple generations guided by natural selection.The self-sacrifice of the worker bee is exactly that - it's an example of another branch of the evolution of altruism. The bee is sacrificing itself for the survival of the group, which is exactly the very definition of altruistic behavior. The bee is not aware of its choice...but so what? The mechanism is identical, and it demonstrates elegantly the way that altruistic behavior (including instinct and purely social constructs) will tend to be selected for.It's one of many possible examples that can be used to prove that altruism and moral actions are not exclusive to human beings.If you'd like, I can go on with some examples of apes and monkeys that have more complex social behavior...including self-image, social posturing, and other humanlike behaviors relevant to morality.

It's really not an assumption. It's a well-observed fact. We build on it, but it's already there. Empathy is not learned behavior, it's built in to your brain. Human beings separated from social interaction suffer severe psychological issues - because our instinct drives us to be social, to seek feedback from others of our own group, to be accepted, etc. The specifics are learned, but the general drive is instinctual.That's why it's universal across cultures, and why it starts at birth before any behavior can be learned. You're drawing a distinction without a difference. The selective pressure is identical regardless of whether there is a conscious choice - the altruistic behavior, sacrificing the self for the survival of the group, unarguably improves the chances of survival for the group, and therefor improves the chances that group-related genes (and social constructs) will be preserved. The soldier preserves his squad, who preserve his ideals (and in the ancestral environment when combatants would have been members of the same reproductive group, his genes as well; just substitute the grenade for another form of self-sacrifice for the betterment of the group). The bee preserves its hive, which preserves the queen and therefore the worker's genes.The observation is the same - self-sacrifice to preserve the group. The selective pressure is the same - the survival of the group allows the altruistic behaviors to survive. The honor of a human able to make that choice rationally rather than it being a pure mindless instinct is worthy of note but irrelevant to the argument. ...those sentences are mutually exclusive. The queen bee's genes are the genes of the workers, after all - she is their mother. The human species would not have survived to be the dominant life form on the planet were it not for altruism within the tribe, and arguably the continued success of our species in the recent past and on into the future depends on our ability to expand our "tribes" to be more and more encompassing. We help each other, we sacrifice some personal benefit for the greater benefit of the group, and so we all have a greater chance for survival. And the human brain, the seat of all psychiatric function, is inherited.The human brain has little variation between individuals, FEY. The learned information differs, but the basic structure is essentially identical. There is a reason that a smile is universally recognized across the species as an indication of happiness. There is a reason that we all have the same cognitive biases, a reason we all have the amazing ability to identify patterns (better than computers, still!), etc.There is a reason we would all suffer psychiatric damage (or at least immense emotional anguish) if put into solitary confinement for a year.

Do human beings contain any instinctual behaviors at all? Or is every act and thought the result of various forms of conditioning?

Indeed.But what about those behaviors and thought patterns that we do not generally address with training, experience, etc?Take cognitive biases for example; confirmation bias in particular. This is a basic tendency of thought universal to all human beings. It's not something you decide to do, and in fact it's a built-in factor in how decisions of all types are made in the first place.If species-wide behaviors and patterns of thought like that exist, is it impossible that a similar pattern of thought can bias decision making towards preservation of the group over preservation of the self?And since we still perceive our decisions as our own deliberate choices even when we are significantly affected by inherited cognitive bias, how would we be able to tell the difference between "intentional" and "instinctual?"

But not entirely.That's the issue. We don't completely program our own brains. I wish we did - a lot of our brain structure is specialized for the ancestral environment, and is not particularly useful in an age where it's more important to be able to process abstract concepts like mathematics than an overcautious identification of a predator.You're right - there is no single answer. I think the evidence is fairly clear that both heritable biology and cultural influences determine our capacity for selflessness...somewhat in the same way that our brains are biologically structured in such a way as to process language and pattern recognition very well, while specific languages are learned from the cultural environment.

So a simple "Thou Shalt Not Own Slaves" as the 11th Commandment was just too much for your god?Giving rules for the "humane treatment" of slaves is the same as condoning slavery.And of course the "humane treatment" was anthing but humane - the rules explicitly allow for beating a slave to death so long as the slave doesn't die too quickly.

It's not snark, Faith - it's a legitimate and honest objection to your arguments. If your deity had wanted to disapprove of slavery, he could have at any time. The 10 Commandments would have been ideal. But instead, he chose not to, and gave specific rules for the handling of slavery including how much a man should be paid if his neighbor's ox gores his slave.That's approval, Faith. There is quite literally no other way to take it.The Christian opposition to slavery stems from the much more morally commendable "love thy neighbor as thyself" commandment...which just goes to show one of the many contradictions in the Bible (since loving my neighbor and owning him are mutually exclusive). Your god doesn;t seem to do that anywhere else - he seems to be all wrathful when it comes to disobedience to his laws.A good deity would have banned slavery. And rape. And a whole host of other terrible crimes not covered in Biblical law. Of course:

quote:

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Exodus 21:20-21

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King James Version (KJV)

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20 And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.

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21 Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.

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If the slave lives for a day or two after the beating with a rod, then the owner is not to be held accountable. And the "Christian world," if we're identifying "worlds" by their religious majorities. But that's irrelevant to any of this argument - you just wanted to take a potshot at Muslims. Feel free to make a new thread if you want to go off on the travesties of Islam.ABE:Please do take note of the definition of the word "condone" as CS has helpfully provided. Your deity meets the definition of condoning slavery - it's simply incontrovertible, unless you have a different Bible, or you're using your own version of English.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.