Human morality is an instinct which we have evolved. We see similar moral behavior in other social animals, such as wolves and chimpanzees. There's nothing supernatural going on here. You have a deep, gut feeling of morality and immorality for the same reason that you feel an instinctive need to eat or breathe. None of these are indicative of some greater, powerful, creative force. Our moral instincts have been part of our species' survival. And beyond our basic moral instincts, which acts we consider moral and immoral are the result of social conditioning.
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But that is an account of moral phenomena. Assume I agree with it. It doesn't show morality to exist. It just provides an account of how it has come to pass that there appears to be something we call 'morality'.
One can provide a similar account of belief in god. No doubt a disposition to believe in a god (and perhaps to sense that there is a god) has conferred an evolutionary advantage on those who have had it (made them happier and thus more successful breeders). You wouldn't accept that such an account shows a god to exist, would you? That's because a god is not a sensation or a belief.
Well, the same is true for morality. A disposition to experience the world as a place that contains external instructions with which we have inescapable reason to comply has no doubt conferred an evolutionary advantage on those who have it. It does not follow that any such things exist. The advantage was conferred by the mere appearance of such things. So, the hallucination of morality conferred the advantage. No need for morality to actually exist. And indeed, my whole point is that it doesn't seem possible for it to actually exist in the absence of a god.
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But that is an account of moral phenomena. Assume I agree with it. It doesn't show morality to exist. It just provides an account of how it has come to pass that there appears to be something we call 'morality'.
One can provide a similar account of belief in god. No doubt a disposition to believe in a god (and perhaps to sense that there is a god) has conferred an evolutionary advantage on those who have had it (made them happier and thus more successful breeders). You wouldn't accept that such an account shows a god to exist, would you? That's because a god is not a sensation or a belief.
Well, the same is true for morality. A disposition to experience the world as a place that contains external instructions with which we have inescapable reason to comply has no doubt conferred an evolutionary advantage on those who have it. It does not follow that any such things exist. The advantage was conferred by the mere appearance of such things. So, the hallucination of morality conferred the advantage. No need for morality to actually exist. And indeed, my whole point is that it doesn't seem possible for it to actually exist in the absence of a god.
