Do you think morality is something humans discovered as they evolved, or something they created?

Morality seems to be a choice that has evolved than inherit. Look at all of the examples of ‘survival of the fittest’. Creatures are known to kill their own kind in order to survive. Crows will seek out other birds’ nests, knock the existing eggs out and lay their own in order to have another bird raise it as their own. It seems that only humans come up with moral rules that are not agreed upon by the general population.

Protomorality is found in all social animals as an evolutionary byproduct of being social. If you are going to live in a group, it helps your survival and your offspring’s survival if you don’t wantonly kill your fellow groupmates, if you share with them so they share with you later, if you assist in defending the territory so its resources are available to you, etc. So, in that sense, we “discovered” morality when we became self-aware enough to ponder it.

I think morality probably came about slowly as we evolved into social beings. Morality does tend to lead to more societal cohesion and constructive behavior.
Also, it seems as if animals might have a very basic precursor to morality; meaning that they treat members of their own species very differently than members of other species. (Spend some time looking at ants.)

@Pied_Pfeffer

As I pointed out in my response, many animals have protomoral “rules.”

Remember- being the “fittest” means having the most surviving offspring. If group living is part of that survival strategy, then the species will evolve “rules” to make group living work. Look at wolves, for example, and their elaborate hierarchical behaviors evolved to resolve conflicts without injury, their propensity to feed all the pups in the pack, their tendency to bring food to injured pack members, etc. All evolved behaviors, but all behaviors that enhance group living.

I think morality is a uniquely human trait….In my opinion, in order to be truly moral, the actor has to understand and consider the potential consequences of his or her actions. Morality, therefore, goes beyond considering the mutual benefit of not doing particular harm (taking present harm into consideration before committing an act), but also considering the harm that we might or will cause (taking future harm into consideration).

In addition to potential acts, we take potential victims into consideration – people outside our in-group. Therefore, we commit resources to help those who we very well will never meet, and would likely not commit their resources to us if we needed help. We often even praise those who would assist an enemy or someone who would do them harm if the assistance is offered because morality dictated it be done, and not because there was any perceivable present or future benefit for the assistance.

Although other beings do care for each other, I think morality is something that requires frontal-lobe style thought to abstract the effects of ones acts as they extend both forward in time and outward past perceivable environment.

@crisw yes, I completely agree, but the only tricky part is; how does altruism suddenly appear if it’s never in a creature’s advantage to act except for itself. What I mean is, if you were to imagine the “first” altruistic creature, wouldn’t it die pretty quickly?

I think cooperation developed first. Two can get more accomplished if they are not wasting resources and energy protecting what they have from each other.
Imagine I have a pile of food and you have an equal pile. What we have is not enough to last us for the year. We both need to collect more but if we are in an “every-one-for-themselves” society we both can’t afford to hunt for more because the other person will take the pile.
Now imagine we cooperate I won’t mess with your stuff if you don’t mess with mine. We are both free to hunt without worry.
Let’s take it further. I’ll protect yours if you protect mine. Now we’re forming teams.
And the rest is history – protohistory.

Completely constructed and it was done so because it benefited society, in some ways.

I think the tendency is inherent in us (because of the benefits for survival as people have pointed out) and was refined through socialization and cultural adaptations.

@satyagraha

“if you were to imagine the “first” altruistic creature, wouldn’t it die pretty quickly?”

There are a few ways to answer this.

Sometimes, dying is actually the best way to propagate your genes. In ground squirrels, for example, young squirrels take turns watching for predators. Sometimes, one gets eaten. That squirrel obviously loses the personal reproductive race, but enhances the reproductive capacities of his relatives.

And altruism can help you survive, even if you help non-relatives. We see this in vampire bats. where the bats will give food to non-relatives. All bats participate, and all benefit.

So we see altruism repeatedly evolving- but it always benefits the giver in some evolutionarily-desirable fashion.

@crisw

Well, then in the case of the squirrel wouldn’t the “altruistic” gene be removed from the population? Since whenever a squirrel pops up that’s more altruistic it would be much more likely to die, even if it did help out it’s community.

Also, in the case of vampire bats, doesn’t that only work because they all do it? All genetic traits come about at some point because one creature happens to be born with a mutation which is successful. But wouldn’t the first vampire bat born with altruism be much more likely to die, since it was giving it’s food away? I guess the key point that it hinges on, is that it seems like the only time that being moral isn’t a disadvantage is when the beings around you are also moral.

Again, I completely agree with your ideas, I’m just trying to find some answers to questions that have irked me for a long time.

@satyagraha – all the squirrels are behaving in the same way – so they all would have the gene, so if one of them dies it doesn’t matter in terms of heredity. If we go back to a first cause you can easily imagine a family of squirrels doing this behavior, which might make it likely that more of them live and reproduce and spread the trait to others. (this is something you kind of answer when you talk about the bats).

You seem to be assuming that there’s an altruistic gene that would be expressed in a single entity and then would be dependent on that entity surviving. That’s not necessarily the case, and considering the complex interaction between genes that would be necessary to pattern a behavior that can be inherited, it’s most likely that the expression would be fairly robust once it started.

Have you read The Selfish Gene? If not, it might help a little bit with how this conceptually could be possible. It discusses a gene-centered theory of evolution as opposed to an organism-based one.

@satyagraha

“Well, then in the case of the squirrel wouldn’t the “altruistic” gene be removed from the population? Since whenever a squirrel pops up that’s more altruistic it would be much more likely to die, even if it did help out it’s community.”

No. That’s the whole point. In evolutionary biology, the individual is simply a repository for genes. You share 50% of your genes, on average, with a sibling. If your chances for reproduction are low, but you can benefit your kin by doing something risky, then you benefit your genes, even if you dies in the process. That is enough for such behaviors to evolve.

“Also, in the case of vampire bats, doesn’t that only work because they all do it?”

In a sense. Here’s a great explanation of it in, of all things, a rap song.

As far as how such behavior evolved- here’s a good paper on it.

I think the question first of all presents a false choice… creation is often an act of discovery (as many scientists and artists would say).

Also, we should define morality, because it’s a very loaded term. I understand the word to mean, simply, a code for behavior. “X behavior is permitted under X circumstances.” When society enforces morality, it’s called “law.”

So, with this definition, obviously there are evolutionary pressures. Morality is wrapped up into the survival-value—not to mention economic value and technological productivity—of society. So societies with morals that foster these qualities are more likely to survive and spread than those that do not. This is why, for example, revenge-murder tends to be common in small tribal societies that are dying out, while it’s widely forbidden in state-level societies.

Here’s my view on this. My theory is that morality comes from human interactions. We see what works and what doesn’t, in terms of our goals. We find that we are better able to survive if we treat each other as we want to be treated then if we steal and try to “get over” on others. It is something that I think game theorists believe would come up in any society. I believe it, anyway.

Now what is God’s role in this? Think of morality as something that is learned. As with much learning, you have to do some persuading in order to get people to buy into the moral system. Sometimes we don’t have time or the will to let our children learn this stuff on their own. Sometimes we can’t wait for people to figure it out (if they didn’t figure it out as children).

In a patriarchal society (and most are), it is standard to have a leader who tells people the rules and they better follow them, or else. It seems efficient. No one has to think. You just have to do what the leader says and everyone is ok.

Some religions use God this way. God is the leader of leaders, and if you don’t do what He says, you’ll lose all rights to be in this society. Of course, God says what his priests say He says. This was especially true in times when priests were the only ones who were educated and who could read. Knowledge is power, and the religious folks were the only ones with a lot of knowledge.

So, to keep folks in line, they created a mythology around the idea of a Deity. These stories were used to illustrate the power of God, and they bought the legitimacy the priests needed to tell people to do what they said.

God, then, has a civilizing function. He is a tool in the process of pacifying society. He doesn’t always work, of course. Then you have to figure out how to get people who break the rules to feel like they can come back into society without being killed. And thus you get a separation of church and state. God loves the sinner, and the state kills the sinner, to put it crudely.

This isn’t the case with only the Christian God, either. All religions provide ways of passing knowledge on. Gods are pedagogical tools, as are ritual and music and dogma. It’s all in aid of teaching people something they would figure out anyway, if they thought about it very much. But by using a God to pass on information, you don’t have to convince anyone that something makes sense, you can get them to accept it because the Deity said it was so.

It’s efficient and it worked in past times, but now education is much more universal. People think for themselves much more. A didactic deity is no longer appropriate. Yet so many religions try to keep that deity in place. Others are more willing to change with the times, and their deities take on different roles, since they are no longer needed to convince people of what is right and true.

There is, of course, a whole lot more I could say about just about every aspect of this, but I will leave it here. God helps in the process of teaching people about what works to hold society together. This worked well in a time when hardly anyone was educated. Now that most people are educated, it isn’t working well, and that is one of the reasons why so many people have become atheists.

What originally got me thinking morality may be a force of nature is this deep, innate feeling about doing what feels right, and limiting harm. We could have a huge debate about that, but I’m just talking about intuitions with which likely all of us are familiar. Those impulse feelings one can’t always rationalize. Due to the development of various religions throughout human culture, I wondered if the mystical nature of religion was a product of our evolved brains trying to rationalize why we feel morality. Almost like we were tapping into this force, but clumsily expressing it. But I really like what @wundayatta described as how religion has had a stabilizing effect on cultures throughout history.

As I’ve pondered and read what others wrote, I think I’m now more of the opinion that morality is a complex tool a species uses to ensure mutual survival more than a force of nature in the universe that we are able to innately detect as our brains have evolved. Just as a society with greater economic freedom thrives more than an oppressed one, morality may help individuals feel “safe” so they can innovate and be productive without fear of someone murdering him/her.

I was particularly interested by the “altruistic” gene that was mentioned by @crisw and @satyagraha . Obviously morality has a large cultural component, but to what extent is morality a genetic component? @iamthemob mentioned the necessity of a frontal lobe to facilitate such thoughts, and obviously the development of that area of the brain is a result of genetics.

I like contemplating this idea, the genetics of morality, because morality actually does truly feel ingrained in us. The idea of harming a child really does gall me to the core, and I don’t actually think it is just because it is what I was taught as something bad. I’ve been able to selectively reject/accept many ideas culture taught me throughout life, but seeing torture is really appalling.

So do you think there may be a set of “moral” genes that evolved, as they would assist us in forming successful cultures?

I really like this thread, and every single post has been intelligent. Thanks.

It’s likely that incresed intellectual capacity based solely on increases in brain size have almost reached their limit. Gestation and childbirth are already made more difficult by the sheer size of the baby’s head. Adding another 25% in circumference would most likely kill the mother of such a child.

@CaptainHarley Yes, but I would imagine the female body would have to adapt to birthing the increased cranium, as I’m guessing it already has.

Each human may or may not have their own sense of morality, which may or may not be more or less similar to others’. Different cultures tend to reverberate ideas about it amongst themselves and with other cultures they communicate with.

To believe there is an absolute morality, is to believe that one’s culture is universally right. Hint: I don’t think there is any culture that believes any other culture is universally right, unless it limits its scope to its own adherents. ;-)

Morality is certainly discovered, not created.
Morality occurs when certain things in nature become true. One of them is the presence of a living thing. Antother is that the living thing is mortal. Another is that the living thing holds its ideas in abstract form and is prone to error. Another is that the living thing has volition and thus must choose its actions, and since it is mortal the actions actually matter and have a consequence regarding the life or death of the living thing.
In the presence of these facts, such a thing needs a code to guide its choices.
Morality is the code of behaviour and choice for survival. It has nothing to do with other people.
Morality exists for a single person on a desert island. It is connected to the metaphysical.
How we treat each other is established by convention and/or law. That is totally man made.

resisting…urge..to derail…thread…:-)

@CaptainHarley brings up a good point about the brain size – plus, I think we’re already jacking up the CAFO meat production for those gray little energy-suckers, I don’t think that the consequences for the environment would be too pretty if our brains got any bigger.

In terms of “moral” genes, I don’t think so. At least not a direct set of moral genes. I do think that we are innately inclined to “take care of our own.” Add onto that the fact that our brain size and design allows us to include by memory more in our group as our “own,” we have a more expansive idea of what our own entails – so that it ends up becoming more abstract than concrete.

Also, considering that we do have to develop outside of the womb because of our brain size, and because human mothers don’t have the extremely strong attachment to her children that we see in other close relatives, human infants need to learn quickly whether the person their with intends care or harm. Therefore, we become very good face readers, and are able to tell what someones intentions are (much better than other creatures, that is). Therefore, we build up a concept of trust because we can trust each other as we can read each other. And if something goes wrong, we can remember each other.

Because we have the ability to read and interpret each other’s faces in that manner, we can read each other’s emotions. Then, we develop empathy.

Then, we get language…which we seem to be built for as well (relax, not making a design argument). So we can communicate information to each other about each other.

So I think that the only programmed behavior is the close-knit family and close in-group that seems to be present in other species – the fact that morality develops from that is because we have developed in the course of evolution tools which have allowed us to read each other, tell each other, remember each other, put ourselves in each other’s shoes, and imagine each other. Since we can base what might happen on what we learn through that tools, we’re geared to build and hold together larger and larger communities – which in essence mandates that we make that concept of in-group care more abstract…to morality.

I’m going with created.

Nihilism for the win.

@iamthemob Maybe it isn’t so cut and dried, to imply morality is cultural/environmental. Consider the vast amount of human behavior that is affected by hormones, which is purely gene expression. Malfunctions can cause terrible depression, which may appear to have a moral or spiritual manifestation (just a loose example). Would it be so far-fetched to imagine there is, maybe overly simplistically, a set of hormones that influence morality? Or development of areas of the brain that grew along with these hormones?

I know I’m reaching, and have no data, resources, nor experimental design to test this idea.

Well, I more meant to imply that the communication that was allowed, as well as the social reading, by our genetic development ended up with the outgrowth of morality. The fact that we evolved into social animals with sufficient hindsight and foresight to be able to sustain and spread our groups is only beneficial from a selection perspective if the basic caring and protection functions discussed above extended to the more extended group. So the interaction of these features, a function of the evolutionary development of our genes, is only really successful if we also have a more complex sense of caring.

So yes – I think that there might very well be hormonal effects, etc., that might be triggered biologically and inheritable that developed in the end in those that actually had the ability to increase the scope of their caring behavior, and therefore would be genes that would be likely to succeed.

@cockswain What a fascinating question, and an equally interesting discussion it has provoked.

@crisw Adding to your note on protomorality being present in all social species, recent research on wild chimps has shown that not only do they trade favors, and have an expectation of payback for a favor done, but they seem to have at least a rudimentary counting system that comes into play in such trades. If one chimp brings x number of tasty pieces of fruit to an injured friend, then when the tables are turned, the donor will expect a return of nearly equal proportion.

Given that increasingly mental computation of morality we see with increasing brain size and structure, as evidenced by the complex moral behavior chimpanzees exhibit, it seems certain to me that moral behaviors were part of the earliest hominid’s routine, and as we evolved to the point of full self awareness, we began to ponder why we felt compelled to behave in these ways. Chimps seem to be in the early phase of considering those issues right now. They have a measure of self awareness. They are one of the few animals that recognize photographs of themselves and of their friends. There is a certain level of self awareness implicit in that ability.

Of course, elephants are highly social animals with truly massive brains. They have very complex social behaviors, but we have much left to learn about their social routines and their ability to communicate with one another. The fact that elephants and blue whales have brains many times the size of a human brain but are not able to compete intellectually with humans tells us that there is more than just brain size involved in intelligence. How the brain is wired, and particularly the self-teaching feedback functions of its neural networks, give our brains a good part of their remarkable qualities. Also, it appears that humans evolved a language that the brain uses for logical thought, and that this language exists outside of and underlying all learned languages. It can be called mentalese. Having this mentalese makes learning spoken languages particularly easy for us.

Social contracts developed as societies developed. “Don’t hurt me, and I won’t hurt you.”

Does morality go beyond a quid pro quo of mutual aid or mutual non-aggression? People will come to someone’s aid without expectation of compensation and they may avoid taking advantage of someone even when they think they can get away with it. I wonder what role is played by empathy. Is it necessary for true morality? If I help someone because I feel that person’s pain, that is a whole different motivation than helping because I expect something in return.

Morality is real and discovered.
Morality is more fundamental than how you treat others. Morality exists even if you are stranded on a deserted island. In such a case, you would have to have a basis for deciding what to do in order to survive. And if you did not follow some sort of code, you would die.

“Rights” is the moral code when two or more people begin to co exist. There is no such thing as rights on the deserted island. They kick in when one more survivor arrives. Rights do not involve the actions of others. They merely involve others not interfering.

Conventions, customs and contracts determine how we treat each other.