What is the source of morality?

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If you want a broader sample of answers, I would call it the rules intended to avoid harm to others, which you have internalized well enough to care.


I would say that is a large part of what produces those internalized rules. The exact form of the social pressures doesn't seem to matter as much as the content: as far as I know it is not important for the outcome whether morality is attributed to an external source (like God) or an internal source ("part of human nature") or left unspecified. Of the five most morally rigorous people I have met, three are atheists, and I don't know the religious opinions of the other two. The small sample of my personal experience is consistent with a scientific study finding no difference in how moral people with and without religious beliefs are.

There is a voluminous scientific literature on what makes people care for each other, more than enough for a lifetime's reading. I have barely dipped into it. My impression is that enough is known to get a broad idea of the origins of altruism and conscience, but lots of details remain to be worked out and there might still be major surprises in store.

Edit: I never thought of conscience as theological. Would you be willing to explain?

Gromit

Last edited by Gromit on 21 Oct 2007, 1:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The fact of the matter is that no-one can trust anyone else. Aspies should be more aware of this than anyone else.

If everyone could trust everyone else, then laws would be unnecessary.

How many people really do trust everybody else?

Dawkins covered this in an entire chapter of The God Delusion (a must-read for the religious and atheists alike by the way), and it's one of the few times I've read a book and actual had my opinion changed. But I defy anyone to rationally deny his argument.

Religious and holy texts are full of blood, gore, and all manner of things which we in this day would find morally reprehensible, yet at the time they were done either on behalf of, or supposedly at the direct request of whatever "god" they believed in. Taking Genesis for example, when you consider the story of Noah and the systematic destruction of all life except for his family, it strikes me that perhaps "Genocide" would be a more apt title.

Believing religion to be the source of one's morality is simply the remnants of the childhood religious brainwashing most of us will have had to endure. Dawkins points to the work of George Tamarin, who ran an experiment regarding the destruction of Jericho to over 1000 Israeli schoolchildren.

When asked if they thought Joshua acted rightly or not to destroy the city and all inside, 66% gave total approval, and in each case the justification was religious, for example "Joshua did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different religion and when Joshua killed them he wiped their religion from the face of the earth."

Then he ran a control group and replaced "Joshua" with "General Lin" and "Israel" with "Chinese Kingdom 3000 years ago" and only 7% gave approval to the destruction of the city.

I can recall at university studying an experiment on ethics, where we were asked about the hypothetical experiment of 6 people dying in a hospital, all needing one vital organ in order to survive. If there was a person in the hospital who was not sick, and with 6 healthy organs all of which could be transplanted to these patients, would it be morally right to do so? After all, surely the "greater good" would mean that saving 6 lives meant more than saving just the one.

But of course that's wrong - you'd have to be pretty psychotic to think that surgeons should take their scalpels outside the operating rooms and chase healthy people down the street in search of the greater good. We think this because it's naturally built into our species, and has evolved through natural selection just like the rest of us. Morality stems solely from our sense of empathy, and not from any fictional character in someone's favourite book, no matter how many people they try and brainwash with it from birth.

"You humans (most of you) subscribe to this policy of an eye for an eye, a life for a life, which is known throughout the universe for its stupidity. Even your Buddah and your Christ have quite a different vision but nobody's paid much attention to them, not even the Buddists or the Christians. You humans...sometimes it's hard to imagine how you've made it this far."

- Prot, from the movie K-PAX.