Quote:1. What is morality? Do good and evil exist?
A. Morality is 'right' behavior, 'right' being defined as the mores of a particular society. This is why not all cultures share the same morality. By way of example, a Roman family of the Republic and early Empire who exposes a deformed child would be judged moral. This is not the case in New Zealand of the current day.
B. Yes, good and evil exist, but only in terms relative to each other. A commonly used example is theft. Stealing food from a hungry child would pretty generally be considered an evil act, why stealing a loaf from a bakery to feed a hungry child would not.
Quote:2. Presuming that we are highly evolved biological machines whose main motivation is to survive and adapt, why, in societies in general, is there such a collective fixation with love? By this I mean the romantic love expressed in movies, pop music etc. In many movies there seems to be one story, that is, there is a hero, things go bad, the hero finds love, the hero fights for love, the bad is defeated, the hero wins the love. Why is this story so deeply ingrained in our collective subconsciousness?
Primarily because romantic love is a survival adaptation for human beings. Given the relatively long gestations and maturation periods that human beings have to deal with, emotional attachment is fairly important for the survival of offspring.
Quote:3. Why does justice matter to each of us? If someone harms us or someone we love, we want them to pay the consequences. But why should there be consequences for our actions? That would imply judgement and an judge. What if the person that harmed us was merely executing their right to survival of the fittest?
You're misusing the term 'survival of the fittest', but I'll get back to that. Justice is important because human beings are society animals. If there were not consequences for harming other people, we would not survive. Thus, judgement and judges are necessary components of human society. And 'survival of the fittest' is better expressed as 'possessing traits best suited to a survival in a particular environment'. If I went about killing everyone I met, eventually I'm going to run across someone better at killing than I am. This is hardly a trait beneficial to my personal survival, and certainly inimical to the survival of the society of which I'm a part.
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax
