Quote:
Originally Posted by Teuthida
It's been forever since I took biology (actually going back to college in a few months to continue the bio degree I abandoned a decade ago in favor of art) so looking forward to having a proper debate on evolutionary once I'm refreshed.
Worrying about trivial things such as if there is good or evil in the world is for people who have time to do so. (I personally don't believe in good and evil. They're just man-made labels.) Once civilizations begun to arise, and you had a bit of downtime, of course the human mind would wonder about these things. Would be as simple as four cave men sitting around a fire after a successful day hunting and chatting about why things are the way they are. Wondering about the way things are gives rise to new ideas, and new ideas gives rise to better techniques of solving the pressing problems.
As for morality. It is ingrained. You want your genes to pass on. That is the ultimate goal. And if not you, then genes similar to yours, so you would also care about your family such as cousins. And so on. Not sure at which point humans began to care for those distinctly related from themselves. Altruism can be beneficial though.
So I would say it's more altruism, rather than morality, since many different species exhibit that. Rather than give you hazy memories of biology class I'd refer you read up on this. It's quite interesting. It's basically do unto others. Do something for someone else and expect to get treated in kind. If someone holds out, then the whole thing can collapse. Take vampire bats. If a bat returns home after a night of bloodsucking but didn't get enough blood, another will feed the bat a share of the blood it collected. So if sometime in the future it happens to the giving bat, it can expect to receive blood on one of its bad nights. |
I realized that I promised a response to this and never did so.
First off, a question: Do you agree that there is an objective morality? For instance, that there are certain actions or behaviors that are always right or wrong, regardless of the circumstances?
It seems from your statements above that you equate altruism with morality. I would disagree with this belief. While animals may be capable of forgoing a personal gain for the benefit of the group, they show no sign of having a concept of "right" vs. "wrong" like humans do. For instance, when you hear a story on the news of a mother who drowned her children, you would rightly comment that that action was "wrong" despite it having no direct perceivable effect on you. Animals do not judge actions as "right" or "wrong" because they do not have a system of morality.
Furthermore, while science may be capable of describing a mechanism by which a certain action is beneficial to humans, science is not capable of describing why human beings have an
obligation to choose the correct action.
Because of this, I argue that objective morality does not have a natural explanation.