RE: Is morality objective or subjective?
April 26, 2017 at 10:20 am
(This post was last modified: April 26, 2017 at 10:21 am by Nanny.)
Thinking some more about this.
Environmental pressures could have played a key role in human morality. The advent of agriculture (cultivation of cereal grains, domestication of wild plants and animals) coincides with the Younger Dryas. Global temperatures plummeted. Humans learned that cooperation provides survival advantages in this changed environment. Villages, towns, and cities developed, creating different environmental pressures that further reinforced cooperation as a survival strategy.
But though I'd really like to think that my own moral stance has a pure evolutionary background, culture plays a very large role in what's considered right and wrong. History is full of examples of cultural morality that we now find repulsive- from King David to Kim Jong Un and hundreds of others in between. Whole nations get caught up in what seem to us as perverse moral codes. Slaughtering those we deem different is a very human behavior. It's one I find morally repugnant. Yet for those pulling triggers or issuing orders they feel just.
I write this from the privileged position of an adult American of Northern European descent with surplus resources and no unmet physical needs. Some slob herding goats in the Hindu Kush may see things very differently.
Environmental pressures could have played a key role in human morality. The advent of agriculture (cultivation of cereal grains, domestication of wild plants and animals) coincides with the Younger Dryas. Global temperatures plummeted. Humans learned that cooperation provides survival advantages in this changed environment. Villages, towns, and cities developed, creating different environmental pressures that further reinforced cooperation as a survival strategy.
But though I'd really like to think that my own moral stance has a pure evolutionary background, culture plays a very large role in what's considered right and wrong. History is full of examples of cultural morality that we now find repulsive- from King David to Kim Jong Un and hundreds of others in between. Whole nations get caught up in what seem to us as perverse moral codes. Slaughtering those we deem different is a very human behavior. It's one I find morally repugnant. Yet for those pulling triggers or issuing orders they feel just.
I write this from the privileged position of an adult American of Northern European descent with surplus resources and no unmet physical needs. Some slob herding goats in the Hindu Kush may see things very differently.
