Why be good?

[henryp]

Wallym: the fact that we can live in relative peace, in some parts of the world at least, I think shows we are generally "good". If we weren't mostly evolved to be discouraged from harming others, society would not work like it does. To be honest, I am amazed sometimes at how well society does work. However, humans can be quite easily led, and being shown that not hitting people means you don't get hit is enough for people to accept it's a good idea.

The threat of retribution keeps most people in line.  Toss in a heaping of brainwashing to be good, and people in the comfortable middle will mostly behave.  We'll still illegally stream television, and do a lot of other little douchey things as we go along.  But we're fairly manageable as we want the things we have enough that we will respond to the threat of having them taken away.

Same principle for religion.  The perk being that the thing you are threatening to take away doesn't exist, so you can pretend everyone has it.  Unlike money, which only people with money have.

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How do you get people not to treat each other like shit.   The question posed, how to answer the question "why be good?"  And they're still working on it, as far as I can tell looking around the globe.

I'd be willing to bet that morality is an emergent property of in-group/out-group dynamics, arising as it did because it help cement in-group cohesion so that a given group could compete successfully for resources. I don't know that to be the fact, but that would be my guess.

Again, so it's not really morality.  It's practical behavior we've misidentified.  The problem being when the practical behavior is no longer practical for someone, they no longer have a reason to participate in the behavior.