Where does ethics come from?

A synthesis of 2 and 3. Some ethical rules derive from pre-civilisation evolution, the rest became necessary once we formed civilisations but were based on the former.

Interesting note on Dawkins using the programmer analogy. He makes that statement yet suggests that genes had no programmer.

From the point of the programmer, the set of rules are set forth from a sentient mind. Yet he would reject that analogy for genes, suggesting the rules sprang forth from evo. But how do rules arise from thoughtlessness?

Your #1 scenario is a bit of a conflation. An independent universe of ethics? Is that universe with or without a G? If without, then how may the ethics arise and become transmitted to human reception? I see no possible way for this to occur, unless of course, the ethics themselves are the G.

I find the question interesting, yet I’m not prepared to take any of the available options. I personally prefer Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

I’d add my vote to @ragingloli for a mix of 2 and 3. The desire to have and nurture children surely came from evolution. But much of our ideas of right and wrong vis-a-vis getting along with other people and doing business, commerce, trade, etc, has to derive from cultural evolution and thought on the part of each of us.

@ragingloli My next question then would be whether or not the evolutionary process is effecting our ethics in the present. I guess we have no way of really knowing the answer here…

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies I also reject #1. I’m going to have to look up Kant’s Imperative…. :P

I think it’s entirely possible that all 3 have integrated in one way or another.

@lilikoi
Possibly. Assuming that our current life style and artificial environments become constant for the next millennia, it might rewire our behaviour on genome level. For example I could imagine the following developments:
– diminished drive to protect your offspring, caused by the improved protection by the community itself and the greater survivability rate of children, due to advancements in medicine and food supply
– diminished selfishness and in return a greater sense of community (which would have the positive effect of making Socialism/Communism a viable global system in the far future)
– diminished aggressiveness, due to societal pressure against it
– diminished xenophobia, due to lessened danger from unknown sources

These sort of things.

I think that ethics and morals are a byproduct of human intelligence. When humans evolved and gained the ability to have complex thoughts we learned how to cooperate with one another.

People needed certain resources depending on their environment and held certain things with higher value than others. This brings forth religion and the rules of the religion aka morality and ethics.
example: A society or religion that is habituated on a mountain and doesn’t see cattle that often might value cows very highly and preach vegetarianism.

Parents teach their children these rules of their society and they pass it on to their children and so on.

It seems to me that the point of view of Dawkins is not included in Ehrlich’s options – that ethics provides an evolutionary advantage. There has been a bit of exploration in this area lately. An interesting result t followed from a competition of strategies for repeated responses to the prisoner’s dilemma problem.

My belief is that we are born with something roughly equivalent to a belief in the Golden Rule, but beyond that I think we are evolving culturally (and possibly physically), ever so slowly, to be more humane. Slavery has disappeared from most places, the long term homicide rate is declining, we are moving toward greater racial and ethnic tolerance and we have laws against animal cruelty.

I warmly recommend the following books on the subject.
Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morals
Derek Parfit – Reasons and Persons

I would agree mostly with option two. There is no question that morals are a good trait to hold, since there could be no other conceivable reason for continuing to be moral. If they are good for us, there is every chance that evolution discovered ethics to encourage individuals to work together, which would act as an advantage over other species. Some ethical guidelines have been intentionally designed since then, but our innate sense of morals and the difficulty with which we determine exactly what is moral is almost certainly evolutionary in origin.

Convictions! Learn them from the truth!

@ericnueman Convictions? David Koresh had some pretty strong convictions, and he was far from ethical.

True, but I always look on the bright side!

@ericnueman That is all well and good, but surely you need to take the less desirable aspects of society into account when you are deciding what is and isn’t ethical. After all, the “bright side” is a relative term that is based on ethical theory, isn’t it?

i have manfully slogged my way through some of Western philosophy’s big hitters and their tormented ethical investigations and have to conclude that there is something seriously amiss, a real crisis of morality, why else is their such a plethora of voluminous and convoluted ethical theorems, competing, entangling and strangling each other in their quest for the light? But at this moment i’ll settle for Hume when he states, roughly, that reason is the slave of the passions. i think a sense of injustice is generally an instinctive gut feeling, but which governs what, remains open to conjecture. But reason alone is unfulfilling and a deeply unsatisfactory moral guide.

@mammal, I tend to agree with you, but there are those who would say that reason would lead people to agree to cooperate with one another on the grounds that the alternative is chaos, which would act against the interests of everyone.

@LostInParadise ”...on the grounds that the alternative is chaos…”

The common materialist of modernity would claim that chaos will eventually lead to order. Don’t mean to derail this discussion to one of origins, but the concepts are the same nonetheless.

I am one to promote the notion that reason (thoughtfulness), is the only proven mechanism to harness chaos.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies , That sounds interesting, but I am not quite sure what you mean. What does it mean to harness chaos?

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies I think that it would be a stretch say that “materialist of modernity would claim that chaos will eventually lead to order.” While evolution theory does cover something like that happening, that is only because life arose as a replicator and was continually shaped by the pressures of natural selection. It certainly does not apply to weather systems, or cloud formations, or anything outside replicating life. But as you note, that’s a discussion for a different thread.

@LostInParadise When a bridge is built, chaos is harnessed. When a antibody is created, chaos is harnessed. When a musical note is struck, chaos is harnessed. Mankind harnesses chaos by placing reasoned thoughtful codified information upon the available materials this universe gives us to work with. Without codified information, the universe is complete orderless noise. It is entropic. With codified information applied, thoughts are born into life, and expressed into physicality.

@ETpro Expecting the order of life to arise from the stormy orderless soup of the cosmos is no different than expecting order to arise from a cloud formation or a solar flare. The principles are identical because chaos is fractal in all of nature, not just parts of it.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies “Expecting the order of life to arise from the stormy orderless soup of the cosmos is no different than expecting order to arise from a cloud formation or a solar flare. ” That is simply not true. All you need for order to rise from the primordial soup is for a chance mating of the amino acids we know from laboratory testing exist in such a chemical broth to come together in a chance pairing that generates the very simplest possible replicating single-cell organism. The replicating cell in itself if order from chaos. Once it exists and begins replicating and expanding its habitat, looking for food, natural selection inerrantly begins to improve branches of the life form, giving ever increasing order.

I know it is one hell of a lucky roll of the die, but you can actually roll the die lots of times in 4.54 billion years. One of those rolls, the right set of numbers came up.

Theory, unproven, and against all mathematical odds to the extent that it is commonly referred to as miraculous. It should not be promoted as factual. And I don’t believe in miracles.

Ultimately, if this has actually happened as you say, then the materialist must acknowledge that the blind, deaf and dumb universe has actually spoken. How can this be accepted as truth? How will the materialist defend a speaking cloud of particles? A code was written. How does a mute cosmos write a code?

The materialist is forced to acknowledge the very miraculous mysticism they would otherwise reject.

We’ve hashed that debate around enough now for me to realize that there is no point in our discussing it. Would it be improbable that DNA would arise by chance. I said so. Is it miraculous or unprovable? Not at all, but the alternative of a divine intelligence generating the code of life is both miraculous and unprovable. Perhaps we should agree to disagree on that.

Let’s try it from another angle, just for fun. How many ways can we beat a dead horse?

OK, and this is very crucial to this question, because either ethics came from the mind of man, or a God being, or the blind deaf and dumb cosmos.

I’ll play along and assume that the mute cosmos somehow spoke a code into existence. Yes, let’s pretend that soup somehow accidentally sent and received a message. Well, ultimately, that means the soup message has continued to evolve until it became a concept that we call ethics. Since the mind of man would thus be reducible to mere particles (from the soup), then really there is no such thing as a mind. It’s just soup talking, and that soup has somehow tricked itself into an argument with itself, half of it believing there is a God, and a mind/soul though/spirit independent of itself, and the other half insisting there is no such thing, and in fact, only talking soup.

In the spirit of parsimony, this seems a bit inefficient. But who am I to judge talking soup, when my entire being is nothing more than talking soup that enjoys arguing with itself?

Ha! Cute. But we really are off topic. Another day and another thread and I’ll debate it some more with you. You do know I love discussing it, right?

Right. But we could both use a break. Me at least. Just launched 13 web sites for a client and got the pinched nerve thing going on. It’s painful just looking at a screen right now.

Ugh. Me, it’s the right arm and hand after days on end of mousing.

Exactly. Can’t even hold the dog leash with my right hand. I keep a track ball on the left side and use it for everything possible. It’s helped to even things out, but the pain comes within a couple of hours using the wacom pen/tablet for retouching. I freaking hate it.

Ethics, in my belief are a byproduct of the Ten Commandments. You have to have a standard to hang ethics on or they are just a set of rules made of men and not likely to match, also have no weight.

Are you saying that if the Ten Commandments did not say “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not kill”, these activities would be perfectly fine with you?

^ Are you saying that if the Ten Commandments did not say “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not kill”, these activities would be perfectly fine with you?
How would I know it was not OK? If I were on a road where the city who built it wanted people to travel at 25 mph but they never posted a sign stating that, how would I know to travel at that speed? If I felt more comfortable traveling at 55 mph why would I not do it if I did not know to the contrary? By reason it would not be anything that I would see as overall wrong because there would be no real standard.

So you are saying you have no inborn sense of right and wrong. You must find it odd that all the countries of the world have laws against stealing and killing, even Buddhist and Hindu ones. You no doubt think that slavery is okay since it is not condemned in the Bible. With all due respect, I find it very difficult to understand your point of view.

^ So you are saying you have no inborn sense of right and wrong.
The proof is in the pudding, if what you are attempting to allude to, and missing badly, that a child knows good from the womb that is innately there. I guess when a child lies and do actions to avoid punishment the parents taught the child to lie to them, or allowed someone else to teach their child to lie to them, in some cases, I guess to make cute YouTube videos, unless you have some theory to debunk that. Why are these kids lying to escape punishment if they had no innate concept to lie but to be good and truthful?

A child’s brain continues to develop for 23 years. Young toddlers are too immature to have any ethical sense. I know right from wrong without having to read it in the Bible. The golden rule is something that sane humans follow automatically. Should I do x person y? How would I feel if someone did x to me?