Why be good?

[rexbeccarox]

What does participating in gossip have to do with what I asked you?

If your only example of someone on this site being honest is them admitting to murder, is it your contention that I'm being dishonest when I say I have no desire to murder anyone?

Are you sure you are not feeling a murderous rage build up inside you right now?

Gawds help us if it gets to a boiling point. 

[henryp]

The faulty assumption here, is that other humans being harmed is bad.

But that's not an assumption, it's a direct consequence of the fact that morality requires minds to apprehend it, and minds of sufficient complexity to do so, in all our experience, require human meat bodies to exist. If you want a system of morality you need thinking agents capable of considering it, and so therefore their survival is paramount to maintaining that system.

Also though, what else would you consider morality? Absent references to moral actors and what directly impacts them, what would you consider moral? And in what way is morality meaningful at all, if it either does not deal with moral actors, or deals with them in such a way that things they can only ever interpret as bad are somehow good?

What we'd do in your line of thinking, which I think starts out right, is determine what we need to do to assure we don't feel pain (if we care about that).  If the best way is to form a global team human with a bunch of rules that say 'no hurting' eachother, then so be it.  But that's fairly impractical, inneffective, and certainly not the only path.

As we've seen through out history, a popular solution is to amass a bunch of power to protect yourselves from others being able to hurt you.  Another is to form small groups that takes care of themselves.  

So what we're talking about here with your reality based system isn't really related to morality.  It's just self-preservation.  Because from the actual framework, being a brutal dictator is just as legit a solution as being a hippy in a commune or being a psychopath mass murderer who doesn't view his own death as a particular problem.

I'm sorry, what? Being a brutal dictator doesn't involve causing people pain? Who is the dictator being brutal to, then? And if it's just, like, rocks and stuff, then where is the disparity that shows my moral system ends up with people being hurt?

1) I may have missed some of the context that says we HAVE to have morality.  I was just perusing some of the later posts. 

I'm looking at things from your only absolute'ish statement, that my experiencing pain is undesirable to myself, and I want to avoid it.  From that starting point, we're not developing 'morality,' as much as looking for a solution to the problem.  

I think the logical way forward would be looking at a solution as a practicality rather than establishing a fictional morality.  With my goal of preventing my own pain, one way to go about that is a system where we all prevent eachothers pain.  Ironically, by threatening pain upon those who cause others pain.  But that's not really morality, that's the rule of law.  The difference being that you are motivated by avoiding punishment rather than caring whether others experience pain.  

So, I guess personally, I think the idea of morality is nonsensical.  
----

2) I was proceeding under the idea of the goal being avoiding pain for myself.  Again, you haven't really said why we have to care about others.  You say it's because that's the only way to establish morality, but there's nothing saying morality has to exist.  

[Cato]

So, I guess personally, I think the idea of morality is nonsensical.  

Perhaps this will help:

Morality
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/

[Simon Moon]

What I am asking is: what is the BASIS for objective moral behavior? Where does it come from?

If some feel that they have already answered, my apologies; however, I re-phrased my OP based on a quick scan of a few responses.

I will try to get through all of the posts as quickly as time permits. Sorry for the delay.

The objective basis for moral behavior is reality.

Morality is all about the well being of other humans (or sentient beings). Moral behavior increases the well being of other humans, and minimizes the harm to other humans.

I'm sure we can all agree on the following points:

1. We all live in the same reality, subject to the same physical laws.
2. We all have very similar physical bodies.
3. Because of this, we can extrapolate that what is harmful to my well being, is almost assuredly harmful to the vast majority of other humans' well being.

For example: life is preferable to death, health is preferable to disease, freedom is preferable to slavery, comfort is preferable to discomfort, etc.

From there, all it takes is a modicum of empathy and rationality to understand that harming others well being is not advisable, since there is always someone in society with more power than you that has the ability to harm yours. 

[Huggy Bear]

What does participating in gossip have to do with what I asked you?

Because a gossip is ranked above a murderer.

If your only example of someone on this site being honest is them admitting to murder, is it your contention that I'm being dishonest when I say I have no desire to murder anyone?

If you did it would be premeditated. I would say the majority of murders aren't premeditated....

[robvalue]

This probably doesn't alter things much, but I thought I'd point out that no God doesn't necessarily mean no hell. There could be still a hell, of any kind, with any arbitrary entry requirements.

All after-lives are unfalsifiable, until such time as we have any actual information about them. But to take any of them seriously is irrational, because we have the same amount of evidence for each of the infinite number of possibilities: none.

[AFTT47]

I think the logical way forward would be looking at a solution as a practicality rather than establishing a fictional morality.  With my goal of preventing my own pain, one way to go about that is a system where we all prevent eachothers pain.  Ironically, by threatening pain upon those who cause others pain.  But that's not really morality, that's the rule of law.  The difference being that you are motivated by avoiding punishment rather than caring whether others experience pain.  

So, I guess personally, I think the idea of morality is nonsensical.  

I can't speak for anyone else but I am MUCH more guided by what I consider moral than by law.

[henryp]

So why are we good? The simplest answer, I think, is evolution. Those who have been good at cooperating and at caring for society as well as themselves have fared better, so it has been promoted by natural selection.

This.

We evolved to be a social species and certain behaviors/values promote our success as a social species.  So part of our evolving social behaviors involved developing a meta-cognitive faculty we call moral judgement.  We intuitively value good behavior, and are repulsed by impulses to engage in bad behavior.  It's a subconsciously driven system of influencing what our consciousness wants so as to promote behavior that benefits a social animal.  In short, evolution built us to desire the good.  (This basic desire is also shaped and reinforced by childhood training, along with an inbuilt desire to belong.)

Are we good?  Looking back on history, outside a few pockets, the notion of people being good seems like a stretch.  And that's despite generation after generation and institution upon institution preaching morality to the people over millions? of years.  

It's one of the great riddles of humanity.  How do you get people not to treat each other like shit.   The question posed, how to answer the question "why be good?"  And they're still working on it, as far as I can tell looking around the globe.

[robvalue]

AFFT:Me too!

The law is only meant to put boundaries on the more extreme amounts of harm that can be caused, and to represent some sort of consensus about what is "really bad". But I find some things that are legal to be far more immoral than some things that are illegal. I would imagine most people's moral character is much stricter than just what the law imposes on them.

Wallym: the fact that we can live in relative peace, in some parts of the world at least, I think shows we are generally "good". If we weren't mostly evolved to be discouraged from harming others, society would not work like it does. To be honest, I am amazed sometimes at how well society does work. However, humans can be quite easily led, and being shown that not hitting people means you don't get hit is enough for people to accept it's a good idea.

@all: Secular morality is superior because it can adapt and evolve. It can learn from the mistakes of the past and strive for a better society. Stubborn religious dogmatic morality learns nothing. In reality it does change, grudgingly, but by having to find ridiculous ways to re-interpret the rules that it already has. God seems to not care at all when people just reverse his rules. Weird huh?

And of course, religious "morality" often gets conflated with "sin", which is in fact nothing at all to do with morality, it's about caring more about the feelings of a deity than what the effects of your actions are here on Earth.

[henryp]

Simon Moon

What I am asking is: what is the BASIS for objective moral behavior? Where does it come from?

If some feel that they have already answered, my apologies; however, I re-phrased my OP based on a quick scan of a few responses.

I will try to get through all of the posts as quickly as time permits. Sorry for the delay.

The objective basis for moral behavior is reality.

Morality is all about the well being of other humans (or sentient beings). Moral behavior increases the well being of other humans, and minimizes the harm to other humans.

I'm sure we can all agree on the following points:

1. We all live in the same reality, subject to the same physical laws.
2. We all have very similar physical bodies.
3. Because of this, we can extrapolate that what is harmful to my well being, is almost assuredly harmful to the vast majority of other humans' well being.

We just don't care.  We don't care about the well being of the vast majority of other humans.  That's just reality, and it's been made evident time after time after time after time.  Even now, we like our dogs more than most other human beings.  We like our TV's more than most other human beings.  We like taking a nap more than we like most other human beings.


We have no real preference to the life or death of some kid in china.  It just doesn't matter to us.  And why should it?  Because they have opposable thumbs too?  

For example: life is preferable to death, health is preferable to disease, freedom is preferable to slavery, comfort is preferable to discomfort, etc.

From there, all it takes is a modicum of empathy and rationality to understand that harming others well being is not advisable, since there is always someone in society with more power than you that has the ability to harm yours. 

As I said earlier, you've switched from right and wrong, to an issue of practicality.  Now the question is am I willing to risk X to get Y.  That's an entirely different idea than morality.