God & Objective Morals

[Ryantology]

For reasons I have posted about rather extensively elsewhere, I do not believe moral systems based on evolutionary psychology satisfy the requirements a moral system should have. Primarily because certain behaviors generally accepted as immoral, like rape, may in fact assist the survival of genetic material for some low-status individuals. Using pain and pleasure as an index of morality, like Utilitarianism, involves a highly arbitrary assessment of what degree of pleasure offsets what degree of pain (or loss) and to what degree these are spread among individuals.

This is the flaw in trying to base a moral code on a single standard. The only way to have a real, working moral system which is of benefit to everyone is for a social contract to evolve. That's by no means a perfect method, but it is the best (really, the only) one suited to pretentious primates like us, because civilization offers manifold benefits to people, and it is not possible to operate a civilization without understanding and restraint from the people living in it. Attempting to establish any person's personal idea of morality as objective and applying to everyone is a flawed approach which never works in the long run.

However arbitrary the specific ratio of pleasure vs. pain as a moral determinant, almost all humans experience pain and pleasure and react to both in fairly similar ways (seek pleasure, avoid pain). Humans also, usually, possess a capacity for empathy, which is essentially the understanding that whatever you can do to someone else, someone else can do to you, and that people are likely to treat you the way you treat them. All human morality is based on this reality, and the two biggest flaws we have are the evolutionary artifact of might making right, and our difficulty rationally determining what is actually helpful and what is actually harmful, very frequently confusing them because of personal tastes (sorry, Christians, gay marriage is not nearly as harmful as the insistence that two consenting adults of the same sex who are in love cannot enjoy the same rights and privileges).