Morality is like a religion

[strawdawg]

Hello there

I'm sorry to hear about your depression. I too am severely depressed. At my worst I have been so numb as to barely feel any emotions except the depression, so I have some idea where you are coming from.

I'm not sure what you mean by morality not existing. We need to be careful exactly what we mean by terms. Of course morality is an abstract concept, and like all abstract concepts, doesn't literally exist. But I don't think that is what you mean.

We can either look at an individual and their personal thoughts about morality, or we can look at humans as a whole. I think when trying to understand the "source" of morality, it's better to focus on humans as a whole. Each individual will find their own rationalisations for their morality, but ultimately they are getting it from a combination of genetics and environment.

As a species, we can observe that people do care about each other. We value the lives of each other. That is morality, at its simplest. So in this way, morality does exist. Why do we care about each other? As you probably know better than me, we evolved as a cooperate species through natural selection. People who cared about others fared better.

So as a species, we have morality. If we look at each individual, they are going to have their own specific different behaviours. This is to be expected.

So then going to the individual level and saying "it makes no sense to have morality because..." is just untrue. We do have morality, in general. The reasons we have it may not be the ones we tell others, or ourselves. Ultimately, we have it because of evolution. Nature and nurture, with nurture echoing nature to a large degree. We raise children by our own values on the whole.

As we're able to think at such a high abstract level, we can start to analyse our own morality, and to question it at a fundamental level. Some people won't have any, such as sociopaths. Some people will have a very twisted or just unusual version compared to the rest of us. This is all to be expected. But there's nothing magic going on, and I'm not at all sure what you mean by it's a religion or it doesn't exist. If morality didn't exist, we wouldn't care about each other. But we do. You may just be using a very different definition which is causing problems here.

No, our lives are not inherently "good" or "bad" because that makes no sense. These are value judgements, and are subjective. We can each say someone else is living a good or bad life, but it depends on our own individual morality to make that judgement. There is no ultimate objective standard. There is also no reason to expect one.

I have seem you say you were depressed before Rob. The truth is and I am one of them, I don't have time to be depressed, too busy. You need to get busy and stay busy, see if that will help.