Obviously objective morality doesn't exist considering everyone has a different opinion on what they think is moral. However, considering most of us don't go around killing and raping people, I'd have to say there is a dominant thought process we all share that could be considered universal morality. Chimpanzees and other higher mammals also exhibit this morality, albeit on a smaller scale. So did we evolve our basic morals as some kind of preservation of our species? Or is it completely learned behavior; rules created by tyrants that become memes? Or perhaps both? Is there a part of our brain that we have found to contain morality?

The simplest answer is indeed evolution, in my opinion.

Some species works best in cooperation, and so natural selection favours those who are more inclined to care about the group and not just themselves. Fast forward huge numbers of generations, and the average gets moved towards generally empathetic animals.

Of course upbringing and environment affect us individually, but when animals are being raised by generally empathetic animals, that's what they'll get on the whole. And naturally there are exceptions all over the place, because a species is not a monolith but a huge variety.

I believe there have been big differences found in the brain between people with empathy and those without (such as socio/psychopaths).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0HMhP4t3as

PS: Yes, I agree, objective morality is a nonsensical concept in my opinion. You'll find some here that disagree though

Oh, come on. Not another thread about morals and their origins. Seems like everyone coming here is driven by this one question and feels obliged to treat us to yet another thread about it.

(November 10, 2015 at 8:28 am)abaris Wrote: Oh, come on. Not another thread about morals and their origins. Seems like everyone coming here is driven by this one question and feels obliged to treat us to yet another thread about it.

Yeah. I think I'll sit this one out, but I'll follow it on the off chance that someone might say something new and interesting. I won't hold my breath though.

(November 10, 2015 at 8:28 am)abaris Wrote: Oh, come on. Not another thread about morals and their origins. Seems like everyone coming here is driven by this one question and feels obliged to treat us to yet another thread about it.

As long as there are new members to this forum, there will be new morality threads. 'Tis as sure a thing as death and taxes

An evolved brain.

Neuroscience points to the fact that we are born with an instinct for morality due to our brain's structure and capability but what we find moral and immoral is learned. There is a pretty good chapter on this in "Touching a Nerve" by Patricia Churchland. The more we learn about the brain, the more we find that our brains are blank slates that are hardwired to react and grow based upon outside stimuli. The nurture side of the argument has gained more traction with our better understanding of the brain.

As subjective as they are, morals come about as a need for a group to get along with others. We're social creatures, and normally need companionship and help in our lives to remain mentally and sometimes physically healthy. So we have general rules like don't kill, don't steal, be nice, obey your elders, and so forth. Every culture has them. You pretty much have to do these things if you want to stay in the group, un less you wield some kind of power over the rest of the group.

This is the main reason why power corrupts. The less likely you are to get kicked out of the group, the more likely you are to get away with doing bad things. Because you're the biggest, or you have the money, or whatever. The people need to keep those in power in line, because it doesn't matter if you're the top dog in a country if everyone leaves, or nobody does what you want them to do.

This brings me to the point about rulers vs public servants. The group benefits most if the people are happy and well off. Thus those who run things should do what the people want, instead of the people serving the ruler as their master. This is why yahweh comes off as evil and possibly insane, and most people don't want to follow something like that. We see what happens in theocracies and dictatorships, and they tend to be worse than social democracies.

In short, morals are rules for living in a group. Unfortunately they don't always pertain to those outside the group people are in, but people are often only capable of caring so much for so many people.

Whoops, I made a mistake. It was magic by God.

Just really shitty magic. It was meant to be objective, but we all got different values. And he forgot some people entirely.

Language is tricky. "Morality" as a scientific phenomenon is (I would say) just the evolved trait of giving a piss about other members of your group. But on an individual level, how each animal goes about achieving that, and to what level it is set/learned in them, is a different matter. So using the word in both senses at once is confusing. I find it best to make it clear whether we're talking scientific explanations or individual analysis. Conflating the two is where most of the confusion comes from I think.

I'm fairly sure my dad is a psycopathic, and mum is pretty messed up too. My morality is really different from both of theirs, almost unrecognisably so. It seems like I have some innate values which developed in spite of my parenting rather than because of it. But it's all very complex I'm sure. Exactly how much is genetic and how much is learned I couldn't say.

Morals come about from the differential success of groups exhibiting those 'moral' behaviors.  The winners get to define moral behavior and they uniformly consider themselves as behaving correctly.  Clearly this had to be the case, it worked for them.

There are some unfortunate results of this:
One revolves around its short time horizon and bias towards individual success.
Homo Sap. has developed a useful brain appendage, our frontal lobes, whose function is to model our surroundings and make short term predictions as to probable future conditions.  It is good at predicting, say, the trajectory of a thrown rock and deciding which way to duck.  It is not so good at predicting more complex future events, say, the global effects of large scale burning of fossil fuels.  In groups and on extended time scales, we're simply more stupid.  Immediately after the oil shocks of the 1970s, we in the U.S. collectively believed ourselves acting optimally by ramping up coal production to burn it in electrical generation and in conversions to vehicular fuels.  If God exists, He has a nasty sense of humor.
I'm more inclined to believe that it isn't a divine joke. It's just that our (moral) communities cannot adequately predict future conditions.  This is  because our successes are always based on our insufficient ability to extrapolate from past events, the only ones available to us.

A second, related issue involves our inability to see morality from any perspective but our own.
This is a crippling blindness that limits investigation into alternative courses of action.
Slavery and oppression of women is currently considered 'bad' by many of us.
It was not always thus but we in the relatively liberal West cannot understand on a visceral level how that could be.  For us, it's just evil.
This causes conflict with those communities for whom the old ways, the ones that worked for our ancestors, are still true.

There are other selective pressures at less complex, individual, levels that lead to group success: sex is good, children are a good and should be protected.  But up at the level of 'morals,' the common factor is the short term prosperity of the societies which exhibit and define moral behavior, even if it eventually leads to biodiversity destruction, ecological collapse and the death of those moral communities.