Evaluating, judging, discriminating, measuring…all refer to consciousness.
Only life wills, has intent…objectives.
Will, i.e., choice, is what differentiates the living from the non-living.
Denying will in oneself, is an indirect way of denying self - a death wish. A desire to return to the non-living.
Since life has intent, objectives, it judges, values, in relation to its objectives.
The primary objective of life is the prorogation of life - its own.
Humans can place an objective above this primal, primary, objective, adjustring his evaluations accordingly…and he can completely deny all objectives, making this his primary objective.
Free-will refers to a will’s options, their accessibility, and their quantity.
More options = more freedom.
Power is a determining factor.
power overcomes resistances, ergo multiplying a will’s options.
Moral behaviors, or acts of compassion, tolerance, cooperation, reciprocity, love, benevolence, are not exclusive to one species.
What is exclusive to homo sapiens - or the known life forms - is the encoding of actions…converting actions into words/symbols, arranged into categories.
Moral rules.
Once man converts actions into words/symbols he can adjust them - make amendments.
Ethics is the term I use to distinguish moral rules that evolved, via natural selection,. and manmade amendments, making more complex systems possible.
An example of an ethical amendment are the ethical rules enforcing monogamy upon a polygamous species.
An necessary imposition on individual sexual optinos, because without it modern societies would be impossible.
No god required.
What decides which evaluation, judgements succeed and which noes fail?
Natural order.
Natural order remains independent from all human subjective judgments, perspectives.
It is what we refer to as objective reality…or Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself.’
Moral ACTIONS, emerge out of necessity. They offer an advantage to life forms that have adopted a cooperative survival and reproductive strategy.
This is why many moral rules are true across all human cultures and all social species.
This is why we witness moral acts in otter species, such as elephants, canines, dolphins, whales apes…etc.
Where things become confusing is when men, guided by their differing ideals, objectives, make ethical amendments to these moral behaviors.
Genes to Memes.
All Value-Judgements are relative to objectives…whether they are idealized or not; whether they are realizable or not.
Ergo, good/evil needs a god to be enforced, because there is no good/evil without an ideal, which in this case, i.e., Abrahamic, is god.
God is a representation of an ideal man…giving meaning to good/evil, wihtin Abrahamic traditions/superposition.
Nothing has intrinsic value, because nothing has an objective…only life has objectives, ergo only life bestows value upon phenomena, relative to its objectives.
Without morals social cooperative species could not have evolved.
Morals are restrictions imposed upon individual choices, by a collective, that become innate.
The collective’s well-being takes precedents over the individuals, because an social individuals becoems dependent no the collective.
A way of dealing with random mutations destroying social cohesion.
Without ethical amendments, adding to these innate moral restrictions, complex human societies would be impossible.
Imposing additional restriction on sexual behaviors, primarily, is essential in integrating as many individuals into a system, converting them into investors, rather than disruptors.
Ethics require a god to discipline the average man.
This is when shame and guilt were weaponized.
Free-will does not contradict determinism…it claims that a living organism’s will participates, intentionally, in what is being determined.
Free does not mean liberated from causality…we don’t need to be gods to be have a degree of freedom.
Every willful act, every conscious or unconscious choice, participates in the determination of the future.
Power determines to what degree it participates.
I would argue necessity is the mother of morality and ethics, concerning the efficiency of social organization it could not exist without a framework of morals or ethics.
In the absence of universal values the necessity of evolution pushed human beings to invent morals and ethics. That necessity being perfectly natural from a standpoint of evolving biological social pressures.
It’s difficult to care for and raise 1 livestock.
It’s more difficult to care for and raise 100 livestock.
It’s way more difficult to care for and raise 100,000,000 livestock.
As human populations increased, so did the sophistication, power, and means of societal control. That’s why it feels hopeless, to almost everybody, regarding a “rise to power”. Hell, even going from one class (poor to middle, middle to rich, rich to wealthy) to the next is enough to make average people give up. Thus hopeless people turn to the fringe, where the charlatans and snake-charmers, scammers and gypsies, are waiting greedily.
Why are morals considered to be of divine origin?
Because for social species, such as homo sapiens, these behavioral restrictions on individual optinos, are necessary. A matter of life or death.
Cooperative survival strategies make it possible for individuals to specialize…and by specializing become more codependent, so the collective, the group, becomes an extension of themselves.
