The basis of morality

What is the basis of morality?

Morality in my view is a hypocrisy shaped by culture and fashioned by the times and by convenience. Cannibalism is moral in some societies, and is considered barbaric in some others. Knowledge is revered in many soceities and happiness is valued over knowledge on some others. Morality is based on these things and whats queer is the nature of the human animal which fashions different rules to group and carry forward humanity by imposing rules which it would seem as per Oliver Goldsmith’s words to be “Doctrines fashioned to the varying hour”.

Morality doesnt seem sensible to the rational mind and indeed is an impediment to a rational discussion. But people who control more than they know are difficult to mould without some basic morality infused into them. Was this the reason morality was considered a virtue? Simply because you would be conducive? Was the emphasis on social congeniality rather than on correctness?

Welcome whitelotus, its nice to see a fellow new member posting already! :slight_smile:

I agree with your views about Social Darwinism almost entirely, but I still have a few questions and issues here. First things first, could you please explain what ESS is? I have no guesses on this one…

You have perhaps stated here that a symbiotic relationship like the example you gave, or between egret and cattle for instance, are situations in nature where individuals interact with each other to obtain the best compromise and solution to the problem at hand. For long in several societies which have been indigenous and which have invaribaly met (I here refer to human societies) there have been instances of cocksure and contradictory (and necessarily vague) customs (sounds like Russell!) coexisting in harmony and providing a unique perspective on things.

Ethics and morality in my mind are rather different. It might just be a matter of language but it is indeed language that decides a lot of things, so I believe that it falls into the scope of this discussion. Ethics could be defined as well laid out rules and regulations as per any social system - it could be a social system or a religious system, but morality to me seems more like a set of unwritten rules which are rather gained form intuition and which are added to and subtracted from with the passage of time and people and their intuitive thoughts and modifications and contributions. This is perhaps the reason why you have so many forums and organizations for religious ethics and things like that but perhaps not for morality.

To eschew ethics from it, and focus on morality and in specific the example of the shark with the toothbrush fish, I’d say that societies have invariably been at sea when conflicting forces due to long- and short-term goals in societies meet face to face in their purview. So what happens is that the limited abilities of the people that form these societies have to selectively chose from the options they have and that leads to several dichotomies of choices which results in some best compromise patterns, going by the Social Darwinism theory you have suggested.

So under what conditions of morality does quasi-stability exist in a certain group of people. This I guess depends on the moral legacies that they inherit, or rather the input to the solver and the direction in which they are heading, which could also be considered their social stand on several key issues, which could give us the direction the society and from these eventually we will be able to estimate the future course of the society. However, the distant future from a moral perspective will remian a fog and perhaps a bundle of contradictions owing to the several made in the interim.

Is this the method of working out social darwinism you suggested or is there more?

just a quick note: an ESS is an ‘Evolutionary Stable Strategy’. it is as it says, a strategy that proves to be stable enough as a pattern of behaviour to be passed on through the genes and reproduction.

The basis of morality?

What is in my not your interest; in other words, self-preservation.

whitelotus wrote:

Hello Whitelotus,

Ethics is the formal study of moral judgments and standards. A moral judgement requires that a moral agent should have a choice in the matter. Bacteria replicate. Spiders replicate. Could a bacterium choose not to infect a child? Could a spider choose to become a vegetarian? Would a hungry lion refuse to kill and eat a newborn Thompson’s Gazelle? A moral judgement is a conscious determination of how the world ought to be. Even Charles Darwin expressed revulsion for the wanton cruelty he saw in the natural world. He famously wrote:

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae (a kind of wasp) with the express intention of their feeding within the living body of caterpillars.”

Darwin is saying that how the world is, is at great odds with his notion of how the world ought to be. He understands why the wasp acts as it does - that the living flesh of a paralyzed caterpillar is nutritious to wasp larvae - and yet he’s disgusted at the thought of it. Again, moral standards are not observations of how the world goes, they are judgements about how the world should go.

That’s a bit like insisting that classical Newtonianism had answered all of our questions in physics. Of course, it didn’t. Likewise, how would social Dawinism explain the action of a soldier who falls on a hand grenade in order to save his comrades? How would social Darwinism explain the father who died trying to save his neighbor’s children from their burning house; leaving his own children fatherless? Or consider the young woman, who during the siege of Sarajevo risked dying by a sniper’s bullet in order to fetch water for an elderly man. What is the evolutionary benefit to a young person who has died attempting to preserve the life of an old stranger? Until such behavior can be explained by your theory, then your theory will remain, at best, woefully incomplete.

Theologists routinely make similarly sweeping and close-ended statements; scientists and philosophers rarely, if ever, say such things. Some of the best-known sociobiologists (E.O. Wilson, Matt Ridley, Richard Dawkins, etc.) have repeatedly stressed a position exactly opposite to the one Whitelotus has presented. The evolutionary process helped to bring about a human mind fully capable of thwarting its sociobiological proclivities. In his new book, A Devil’s Chaplain, Dawkins repeatedly drives this point home in typical Dawkinian prose:

“Stand tall, Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gives us all existence; the gift of revulsion against its implications; the gift of foresight - something utterly foreign to the blundering short-term ways of natural selection - and the gifts of internalizing the very cosmos.”

Und Whitelotus; Aber, wir sind das Licht und das Leben!

Tschuess,
Michael

It’s all about survival.

ship.edu/~cgboeree/sociobiology.html
peace.saumag.edu/faculty/Kardas/ … ology.html
biology.unm.edu/biology/pwatson/ … pjw_cv.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociobiology
animals.about.com/cs/sociobiology/

Very true, its also all opinion so there is no basis.

Hi Polemarchus!

“A moral judgement is a conscious determination of how the world ought to be.”

No! You are speaking of a moralising judgement! There is a significant difference between moral judgement and judgemental moralist! You are misrepresenting morality!

“Again, moral standards are not observations of how the world goes, they are judgements about how the world should go.”

This is simply not true! Where on earth do you get this from?

If you think that something, like the, “Ten Commandments,” say, is an illustration of the veracity of your statement then I’m afraid your understanding of moral law and the law of god is somewhat inadequate!

The, “Ten Commandments,” itself is not at fault; rather, it is the interpretation given, nay, imposed upon the laity by moralising religion-mongers that is the cause of all the problem.

Moral law is eternal law, imperishable truth, laid down by the divine logos in the beginning. Moral standards are laws for living, and living well. They weren’t suddenly written in some arbitrary book of law! The ancients observed morality as clearly and closely as Darwin observed the remarkable similarities amongst the various mammals indicating a common source.

The physical laws of gravitation or Newton’s laws of thermodynamics do not show how the world ought to be understood but how it actually is. Likewise the laws of morality theoretically demonstrate an understanding of how the world is in practise, not how it should go! They tell you what happens to those who follow morality at haphazard. But no morals tell you or order you to conform to their code. Only moralisers do that!

Courage!

P.

Hello all,

I agree with Polemarchus in that ethics is a formal case for moral judgements and standards. It was an interesting post and I could not miss the inherent non-humanness of some of the examples you gave, or rather comparisons with us humans, and that is an example-ridden manner of explanation.

Indeed, morality is a set of unwritten rules, and unwritten rules in human perceptive society invariably seem to transgress the boundaries of correctness or any well defined regimes and fall in the dimly illuminated regime of irrationalities such as pleasure and sometimes convenience which, like a shallow lotus pond, draws amphibians in on a cool afternoon and the clarity of the pond water is then utterly spoilt by the rising silt which then leaves the directions which were so clear before jumping in, now murky.

Atleast a couple of posts here have dealt with morality having to do with survival and these posts are either the decisive result of a lot of intuitive and imaginative thought which happens to consider Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, in which he writes “What I am not, that for me is God and Virtue”, juxtaposed with the considered range of the survival games played at various levels by people and animals alike, thereby arriving at the then intensely apparent basis of morality, or theyre mere instinctual feelings on the subject. Either way, they were good food for thought.

Also, in this light it is interesting to note Polemarchus’ observations wherein he has given tactful examples of both the so-called ‘Intelligent’ or rather sufficiently excessively conscious, viz. Man, and less conscious animals, with the latter being observed in many more acts of immorality than the former. Empathy, love and such irrational feelings perhaps transfer sufficient inertia to the human animal so as to have social darwinism not entail these metaphysical things here, and as a rule, social darwinism is sure to not underscore the future trends in irrational and certainly the moral aspects of future culture, which is as murky as an individual’s ability or decision. This is both in line with Nietzsche’s endorsement of ‘good’ being alluded to capacity and ‘bad’ to the converse, and I heve dealt with this thought in the next paragraph.

In regard to the ethics and morality, I will give you an example to settle the differences - the example is tradition, which is also considered moral in older societies. This is an example which I discussed witha few friends, but here goes -

If we have a bunch of 8 monkeys in a room with a stash of bananas hung from the cieling with a stool for the reach, except with a cold water spray for every monkey when any one from the that climbs the stool to get the bananas, we’ll have a coping behavious amongst the monkeys which prevents them from encouraging other monkeys to get the bananas. When the monkeys are replaced with new ones over a period of time one by one, however, information is passed to these monkeys as and when they enter the group about the forbidden fruit and this is now etched in their minds to such an extent that it continues as a tradition that wherever else the monkeys go they will arrange for a stash of bananas and a stool and will fear to climb the stool as long as there are influences from the older monkeys. Of course, some monkey will come along to realize that the bananas are reachable in another room without the cold shower spray and thats perhaps revolution, like Lenin and the Czar Empire, or the Fourth Estate in France, or the Indian War of Independence. So societies and morals work on similar principles - you never know who gets the banana first.

With regard to choices and the power of the individual to influence populations rather than have some evolutionary strategy evolve sentient beings, I suggest you read a little about India, its cultures and how its cultures represent different facets of correctness and sometimes iron-strong laws of state. From Gandhara (presently known as Kandahar, Afghanistan) architecture used on Buddha statues which were worshipped in hardly ephemeral, nearly all-Hindu/Buddhist kingdoms with Muslim Rulers, to the present day, where exist security with 1024 bit encoding side by side with 2000 year old rituals and customs, India flaunts as much as there is and thats a lot of possibilities, if anything.

What this shows is not only a good examples of recessive strategies being adopted in several instances for conquering dominant causes with morals in place, albeit non-subjugatory as instanced here, in most cases, but also pertinent points such as how small ruling classes with no heed to the evolutionary (societal, in this case) make up of the other social customs; they can point to a considerably tameful equillibrium even in the face of hard-hitting diversity. Is that explained by evolutionary sociology? Is this the question of how the world is, in all its diversity, and how it ought to be, in unity? Why not?

As for Polemarchus’ finishing lines which I will now elucidate upon, with my understanding of the same now: Social Darwinism is not a conscious and yet unavoidable matter like the second law of thermodynamics, or so I feel from what I know about the second law. From Man being able to adapt to his environment, the game has changed somewhat to mutating species of populations adapting/modifying the environment (rather than themselves) to their cause, owing to the dexterity which we so associate with human evolution and modern humans. To apply this to the matter of pertinence, it would be apparent that systems with modifyable morals, use more than the inherent conflict of several competing individuals and strategies, and in fact rely on randomness and irrationality to spawn ever-diverse and survivable strategies. Just follow the Indian election campaign this summer, with its several contenders making their fat claims, and seemingly addressing, in fact, some of the issues at hand. Some of these will turn out to become more successful than others, and just as managing irrational things requires an understanding of the irrational and its tendencies, morality in society will seem a veritable gift to the irrationally mutating matter that is a societal moral, drawing as it is on several recessive strategies rather than pseudo-positivist and Nietzsche-esque ‘good’ strategies.

As for the finishing line of the post, the signoff, it was excellent appropriation, Polemarchus. And pray tell, whats that last line in German? Could you please translate?

Hello all,

To come to the other posts then, (after I wrote the previous one offline) :

There is perhaps no prescribed behaviour for an individual, and if neglected, the individual’s decisiveness in one direction or another will, in a kind of butterfly effect, balloon into an incomprehensible result for even the well laid out condition that you say the moral is.

I agree that it works for all lions in captivity or in the jungles. It perhaps doesnt apply to such specific cases as ‘evolutionary’ arguments, since evolution (barring mutation, which isnt the case with our lion) is not over one generation as yourself or I would have stated. Then there is the question of this lion amongst other lions and the question of his personal improvement into ca capable hunter. (Man, the lion’s getting it! :slight_smile:) So you are self contradictory there, perhaps.

However, in a non-darwinan analysis where each case is considered rather than the average and applicable state of species and situations, the cage-lion’s actions could be predictable.

Its is simple as you say but not so unprofound. Evolution explains the bulk of it without heed t the individual, and the age of the individual has not passed, and technology, which you claimed evolutio brought is enabling the individual with more power, which means that evolutions will make lesser sense on larger scales and mutations of capabilities will be more appropriate.

All strategies need not be ESSs as I have already doubtless guessed. So what of the lone soldier who wants to save his comrades? Hey, he’s a hero to the rest; he is just an aberration perhaps, in the myriad of influences that circumstance has brought to evolution to face. But what if he holds the key to something important, perchance?

This is another instance of the same heedlessness to the individuals in the herd. The individual matters more than you believe at the face of this theory, since individuals make up the group, and pedagogy is only that much effective. Even the German Wehrmacht in WW2 didnt make it past Russia, due to several reasons, and some ones directly related to these.

Which is the exact opposite of Polemarchus’ example of the young saving the old - thats an irrational (although dangerous) behaviour and you can’t not pay heed to it. Which is a no-gain situation, but is that not moral? If so in what society is it not?

And I do understand that one must be rational, and that I advocate even for the metaphysical, for what is the metaphysical today could be explained tomorrow with a know-how born out of a mutation or perhaps an evolutionary process, and perhaps a metaphysical thing or two we know nowadays, be it in relation to Newtonian physics, or to Darwinism could be explained rationally.

The Golden Rule is an ESS. If i don’t want to be killed, i shouldn’t kill others.

(new member – first response)

So sad a doctrine some Darwinists have! I don’t think you’re even giving him the best reading. Why, when thinking about men, do you go about comtemplating carnivorous wasps? Man is a gregarious species. Isn’t it possible that this is a strength, and deferring to others of the species is good for the continuation of the species as a whole?

But I also disagree with the original poster on morality being hipocracy. It’s my thought that morality is grounded in our natures and the natures of things – to use them as befits their nature, and ourselves as befits our true needs. The needs of men around the world are pretty much the same, but we sometimes supply the need in different ways – hence local laws and customs.

Make any sense?

Vale bene.

Sure.

Actually, you just entirely missed the point. There is quite an extensive body of research into this matter, and it is generaly lumped together under the label “Sociobiology”. It’s not about mere opinions. It’s about people testing theories, gathering data, and working with the scientific method. So yes, there is a basis.

All these new-fangled theories you all speak of, with their strange labels, do in fact amount to nothing more than neo-onto-theology.

One cannot ever hope to understand the basis of morality so long as one begins by clouding the issues in mystification!

Once again, please remember that the scientific method is being used.

So, the scientific method is infallible?

So, we have a new god and a new morality?

It is called, ‘the scientific method.’

All bow down and worship your new lord and master!

That includes you, phrygianslave!

“Gods” have nothing to do with it.

And an appeal to ridicule does nothing to support any side in this discussion.

nizkor.org/features/fallacie … icule.html

I have posted this information before, but perhaps people don’t read everything, so here it is again…

First, something by a chap I vaguely know:

Science attempts to tell us the facts. Emotions and such did not appear in a puff of smoke out of some tooth-fairy’s nether-regions. They exist because of certain causes. There is a field of science investigating those causes. The absolutely, incomprehensibly stupid rejoinder “Science is a new god! Science is fallible! Let’s ignore science and discuss this scientific field without science, coz that way my opinion may have some spooky merit!” is ridiculous. The science is not mystical hoodoo. It is based on facts and many tested observations. However, you are of course free to ignore it all and come up with some other ideas.

Adam

“Science attempts to tell us the facts.”

‘The’ facts? Whose facts? What facts? Science’s facts of course!

Science attempts to tell us scientific facts.

Let us be correct about this eh?

Science doesn’t actually know anything itself. All it does is describe observed phenomena. It doesn’t give any answers to absolute or general questions. It doesn’t explain but simply proffers theories. The feeble-minded may well understand theory to be some sort of infallible truth, (especially when they are told that science says it is so,) but we are not all taken in.

Proper science engages with relative and particular questions about the material world. Morals and morality is properly not part of its remit. Science may well think it has some right to trespass in morality’s domain; it may well claim squatter’s rights; that does not mean we should necessarily get in the bailiffs to throw it out for it may well have something of interest to offer. But it does not mean that it can invade another’s domain and throw out the existing inhabitants with impunity.

“Emotions and such did not appear in a puff of smoke out of some tooth-fairy’s nether-regions.”

Literally or metaphorically?

“They exist because of certain causes. There is a field of science investigating those causes.”

I’m supposed to be impressed, or what? You speak of science as though it were god. What about the science of house building, or the science of fishing?

“The absolutely, incomprehensibly stupid rejoinder "Science is a new god! Science is fallible!”

‘absolutely, incomprehensibly stupid rejoinder’ [???]

“ Let’s ignore science and discuss this scientific field without science, coz that way my opinion may have some spooky merit!" is ridiculous.”

You’re correct, that is ridiculous!

“The science is not mystical hoodoo.”

There is much in science that is mere idle distraction.

Science does not have the answers. Morality, emotions, mental processes, behaviour, and the suchlike, are beyond mere science’s capabilities. Where does art enter in?

Human beings are not machines. Science cynically attacks the so-called ‘ghost in the machine,’ but its understanding of the term, ‘ghost,’ is materialistic. Like all sceptics scientists want to reduce the mystery of existence to the terminal boredom of production-line engineering.

Where’s the morality in science itself? What about nuclear; chemical; and biological weapons? What about engineered crops? What about cloning?

Science is not for little people, it is for big business. Look at the massive profits made by pharmaceutical companies!

“It is based on facts and many tested observations.”

And all financed by big multi-nationals!

“However, you are of course free to ignore it all and come up with some other ideas.”

There is a basic law in morals that one test impressions before giving assent or dissent.
You expect me, simply on the basis of your word, to give my assent to impressions that have not been thoroughly proven to my satisfaction?

You go ahead and give your assent by I am withholding mine.