joe_meadmaker wrote on Oct 4
th, 2019 at 11:31am:
I see morality as coming from two things. And in full disclosure, these aren’t ideas I came up with, but ideas that I’ve heard and agree with.
The first thing is that as humans evolved as a social species, certain traits developed. Things like a sense of fairness, empathy, compassion, etc. These traits have also evolved in other social species and have been tested in chimps, monkeys, dogs, and likely other animals. This is a really entertaining video if you haven’t seen it,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg.
Now those traits are needed, but by themselves we don’t have morality unless we’re all striving for the same goal. My favorite description of that goal is “well-being”. And as part of well-being we can have a number of things included, such as life is preferable to death, health is preferable to sickness, pleasure is preferable to pain, etc.
So for example, as an individual it’s obvious to me that I don’t like pain. And because I’m part of a social group and have compassion for the others around me (at least most of the time
), I don’t want to cause them pain either. If I step outside of either of the criteria, such as not showing fairness, or impeding someone's ability to be happy and healthy, I would generally be considered to be acting immorally.
Looking at it from the point of view of secularism one could see how morality might have evolved as a genetic trait that has benefits. Humans are by their nature social creatures. Large societies cannot exist indefinitely without a shared sense of morality.
A larger more cohesive society has more of a chance of overtaking smaller or more disorganized society meaning their genetic traits will be passed on to a greater extent.
This is just the secular side of the argument. I am Christian so that colors my world view as well.
But to me it seems anything that offers a benefit is more likely than not something which will be passed down genetically, meaning, generally speaking, even if a particular action being good or bad may be something that changes, the
idea that there are actually things which are morally acceptable and not might be genetically encoded.