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I’m curious to know what people think about where morality comes from (morality in the general sense, being a system of ideas regarding right and wrong.) Some people speak of “The Moral Law” or the intrinsic sense of morality that each person has and certain set of mostly universal “oughts” that each person ought to live by. Some people speak of “natural law.” Some think that it is up to each individual to decide what is moral. Sam Harris speaks about morality in terms of “the well being of conscious creatures.”
An evolutionary psychologist would give a naturalistic explanation of The Moral Law, perhaps like this: morality evolved to allow humans to live cooperatively in groups. Early humans who acted immorally (by stealing, lying, murdering, etc.) would have been thrown out of the group, which, on the African savannah, would mean death. Morality evolved to allow early humans (with their exceptional intellectual capacity compared to animals) to cooperate with each other for the good of the group, thus leading to greater survival and reproductive opportunities. People who had a sense of morality were more likely to survive and reproduce than people who were morally destitute, and so we got the genes of these more moral individuals.
I’ve realized that morality does not come from religion. Morality comes from within us. I don’t think that morality comes from scripture, including the Bible. For example, we all know that slavery is a moral abomination. Yet the Bible approves slavery; the bible even approves the sale of one’s own children into slavery. We know that slavery is wrong in spite of what the Bible says about slavery. The Old Testament contains many stories that are morally questionable at best. Suicide bombers are acting in harmony with their religion, and their acts are moral, even heroic, in context of their religious beliefs. But our innate sense or morality tells us that their acts are immoral.
In my faith journey, I’ve started to ask myself if certain actions that I was taught are wrong are actually wrong. Do I really believe that drinking tea is immoral when there is no good evidence to indicate that tea is less healthy than sugary soda? (By the way, learning Brigham Young’s economic motivation for banning tea and coffee goes a long way towards clarifying this.) Do I believe that action X with a girl I’m not married to is wrong? Do I believe that it’s wrong to buy gasoline on Sunday?
Acts like assault and extortion are wrong because they negatively affect the well-being of conscious creatures. But for a lot of things that I was taught are grievous sins, I just can’t find good reasons to believe that these things are wrong. I don’t see that they negatively affect the well-being of conscious creatures. At this point it seems to me that an act would be immoral if it negatively affects the well-being of conscious creatures, and the degree of badness of the immoral act would be proportional to the negative affect on well-being.
So I’d be interested to hear opinions about the source of morality and about how people decide what is moral and immoral.
I’ve recommended this one before – Jonathan Haidt’s the Righteous Mind. He explores the six moral foundations that apply to all of humanity. When we think something is immoral, it’s because it triggers one of these six: Care / Harm. The action or inaction harms other people, particularly those who are disadvantaged in some way. It’s our moral imperative to protect others from harm. Fairness / Cheating. People should be treated in proportion to their actions. This is about justice. Loyalty / Betrayal. This is linked to tribalism. We don’t want people to free-load or not contribute to the community. We want to protect our group, family, or nation. Authority / Subversion.This is about respecting legitimate sources of authority or in some cases preserving tradition and respecting elders. Purity / Degradation. Some things are considered repugnant, disgusting or demeaning to people (e.g. foods, or actions). Liberty / Oppression. This relates to one’s determination of how subjects are tyrannized. In one study, Haidt poses scenarios that are designed to create a moral issue, but morality ultimately can’t be defended by logic. When it comes to morality, our feelings rule. We can try to explain why we find something immoral, but it’s usually nearly impossible to change that view. Also, some people naturally gravitate toward different moral foundations. Haidt has observed that liberals like himself have a very strong reaction to Care / Harm and Liberty / Oppression and can be dismissive of the other foundations. Most conservatives rally around all of the moral foundations equally. There is an online test that lets you see which are strongest for you. I was surprised to find I had a high Purity rating. I am easily grossed out I guess.
http://www.yourmorals.org/explore.php This is a really good topic. Coming from my background in asian studies, my favorite work on this — life changing for me, is by Randall Peerenboom, Law and Morality in Ancient China. Peerenboom explores the emergence of order from natural law and whether it can be justifed in terms of the type of system being considered: whether religious, political, confucian, etc. I don’t have time right now to give you more of a response.
Very short version: I think morality as a general concept (determining what is “right” and “wrong”) is part and parcel of group interaction – even, in a very real way, among animals of widely varying degrees of intelligence. It is, at its most basic level, part of survival instinct. It is focused on what “is” – at the most basic level. It is focused on “how” interaction needs to occur in order to perpetuate the species and, although instinctual rather than conscious, really is “morality” at heart.
I think morality among humans, specifically, has the exact same foundation – but our ability to think outside ourselves allows us to move from the most practical, biological, survivial aspect of morality to a philosophical foundation that expands from a purely group-based paradigm to include a focus on the person even, sometimes, at the expense of the group. It is focused on what “should be” – and, frankly, that transition, although important to us, is what complicates morality exponentially and makes things get really messy at times.
Finally, I see the existence of agency (the ability to think about and choose one’s actions consciously, even when they conflict with the morality of one’s community) as the monkey wrench in the ease with which morality can be evaluated and determined, since it is the only thing that posits the need for competing moralities – one communal and one personal that can and do conflict.
Morality is an incredibly subjective thing, but most people want it to be objective – since objective morality is SO much easier to implement and “obey”. Frankly, the most extreme version of objective morality we have within Mormon theology is Lucifer’s plan – and I really like that it is presented in that manner. I wish more members understood what I mean when I say thta,but I love the fact that I can say that and be totally “within bounds” as a Mormon.
InquiringMind wrote:I’m curious to know what people think about where morality comes from (morality in the general sense, being a system of ideas regarding right and wrong.)…Some people speak of “The Moral Law” or
the intrinsic sense of morality that each person has and certain set of mostly universal “oughts” that each person ought to live by.Some people speak of “natural law.” Some think that it is up to each individual to decide what is moral. An evolutionary psychologist would give a naturalistic explanation of The Moral Law, perhaps like this: morality evolved to allow humans to live cooperatively in groups. Early humans who acted immorally (by stealing, lying, murdering, etc.) would have been thrown out of the group, which, on the African savannah, would mean death. Morality evolved to allow early humans (with their exceptional intellectual capacity compared to animals) to cooperate with each other for the good of the group, thus leading to greater survival and reproductive opportunities. People who had a sense of morality were more likely to survive and reproduce than people who were morally destitute, and so we got the genes of these more moral individuals…
I’ve realized that morality does not come from religion. Morality comes from within us.So I’d be interested to hear opinions about the source of morality and about how people decide what is moral and immoral. Personally I think this natural tendency to judge what is right or wrong can be explained fairly well by evolution and natural selection, with or without God, because the end results are often somewhat random, harsh, and unforgiving just like life itself. For one thing, there is a significant amount of hypocrisy that happens with moral judgments because it will generally seem much worse when someone else is doing something we consider immoral but it looks like it is fairly easy and typical for individuals to try to defend their own immoral behavior and rationalize that they were right to act the way they did or at least claim that it wasn’t that bad.
The way moral sentiments end up being channeled and applied is definitely highly relative to the situation as well as individual and cultural preferences rather than something clearly defined for everyone and easy to predict plus some people are sociopaths without much of a conscience to begin with. There are also moral dilemmas where different ideals and values directly conflict with each other so even killing can easily be justified by many people to this day depending on the situation (self defense, law enforcement, etc.).
To me it looks like some of these strong feelings about what is right or wrong definitely would have been better suited to another time and place when the survival and relative success of small groups really was more important than the welfare of any individual members of the group. However, now people can easily switch from one company or religious group to another and vote for specific political parties or candidates without their survival really depending on the success of the groups they belong to or identify with. In fact, strong feelings of indignation over some perceived injustice can easily do more harm than good in many cases nowadays because it can and often does lead to overreactions, terrorism, government instability, unnecessary wars, etc.
InquiringMind wrote:…In my faith journey,
I’ve started to ask myself if certain actions that I was taught are wrong are actually wrong. Do I really believe that drinking tea is immoral when there is no good evidence to indicate that tea is less healthy than sugary soda?(By the way, learning Brigham Young’s economic motivation for banning tea and coffee goes a long way towards clarifying this.) Do I believe that action X with a girl I’m not married to is wrong? Do I believe that it’s wrong to buy gasoline on Sunday? Acts like assault and extortion are wrong because they negatively affect the well-being of conscious creatures. But
for a lot of things that I was taught are grievous sins, I just can’t find good reasons to believe that these things are wrong. I don’t see that they negatively affect the well-being of conscious creatures.At this point it seems to me that an act would be immoral if it negatively affects the well-being of conscious creatures, and the degree of badness of the immoral act would be proportional to the negative affect on well-being. hawkgrrrl wrote:I’ve recommended this one before – Jonathan Haidt’s the Righteous Mind. He explores the six moral foundations that apply to all of humanity. When we think something is immoral, it’s because it triggers one of these six:
Care / Harm. The action or inaction harms other people, particularly those who are disadvantaged in some way. It’s our moral imperative to protect others from harm. Fairness / Cheating. People should be treated in proportion to their actions. This is about justice. Loyalty / Betrayal. This is linked to tribalism. We don’t want people to free-load or not contribute to the community. We want to protect our group, family, or nation. Authority / Subversion.This is about respecting legitimate sources of authority or in some cases preserving tradition and respecting elders. Purity / Degradation. Some things are considered repugnant, disgusting or demeaning to people (e.g. foods, or actions). Liberty / Oppression. This relates to one’s determination of how subjects are tyrannized.
These ideas are interesting to me because some of the things Church leaders continue to insist are very serious sins never really made that much sense to me because I always thought that if little or no harm was done by them then it is hard to understand why they should be such a big deal to God or anyone else. However, looking at this list of “moral foundations” it turns out that most of the Church requirements and expectations I have had major problems with so far (tithing, chastity, and the WoW) definitely fit into these moral categories as examples of perceived degradation and/or not showing the supposed proper amount of respect and loyalty to the Church, authority figures, and tradition.
It’s almost like the Church has developed an extreme and highly specialized version of morality which makes sense given the idea that prophets will never lead the Church astray and the way it has continually selected a limited sub-set of people mostly based on their willingness to accept these requirements while generally excluding those that don’t. There are also human tendencies like strict legalism and asceticism where some people are basically obsessed with rigid structure, routines, and extreme self-discipline. There is so much variety in the rules and traditions different groups come up with and continue to hold onto that it looks like many people basically crave some kind of structure more than the specific details of what the structure includes. However, if any strict rules are really that important to God then I would expect most reasonable people to understand why they are so important rather than having to rely too much on claims that they are important simply because some alleged prophets said so.
Basic moral concepts such as those emcompased byt the golden rule I think have an evolutionary explanation. It was in the best interest of our ancestors to foster a support network withing the tribe. YOu watch out for me and I will watch out for you. It was a matter of survival. Those that exhibited these traits passed on their genes. It became our nature to some degree to care for others. MOrality such as the law of chastity may have its roots more in the fact that some men want to control the behavior of other men for various reasons. Hence you get morality defined by individuals with an agenda. To get others to conform to a certain behavior, nothing like throwing God into the mix to get people to fall in line. Not to say this is a bad thing all the time since it may relate to the overall health of the tribe but I do believe certain morals arer vestages of the past that we hang on to becasue of tradition.
Devil’s Advocate has a good point. When you look at church standards from the perspective of which parts of the moral foundation they relate to, some are very relative and situational – only applying to those inside the organization. For example, coffee drinking doesn’t cause harm, isn’t cheating (unless you think the caffeine boost is unfair), is only a “betrayal” of your community if you are in a non-coffee-drinking community (ahem, Mormonism), has nothing to do with authority (unless you are drinking coffee to show up leaders), can only be seen as a purity issue if you have outlawed it (I guess it may give you coffee breath or stain your teeth), and has nothing to do with tyranny (unless you have a moral objection to the symbolic ubiquity of Starbucks or object on the grounds of free trade). Yet I’ve heard many people in the church (wrongly) decry relative morality. If morality’s not subjective to the communities in which we live, then it simply makes no sense. Morality related to not doing harm is the only one that has a fairly good universal component. The others really do vary by community, although all communities have taboos that relate to the different foundations. For example, eating with the left hand in many countries is impure. The left hand is used in the bathroom. It’s a revolting thought to them. But to those who don’t use the left hand in this way, it’s a surprise that anyone has this taboo.
Quote:some are very relative and situational – only applying to those inside the organization.
I never really understood why the Church doesn’t want members to drink coffee but doesn’t care if non-members drink coffee.
A short while ago I hypothesized that there were two kinds of morality that the Church taught: objective morality and subjective morality. In objective morality, certain acts are condemned by the Church and are always wrong. In subjective morality, it is up to the individual to decide what is right or wrong. In the Church, the word of wisdom and law of chastity are objective morality: drinking coffee and having premarital/extramarital sex are always wrong no matter what. But the Church teaches a subjective morality in business transactions: it is up to each individual businessman to decide what is moral. In matters of business, it does seem to be that the Church believes in moral relativism of the kind that it condemns in questions of sexual behavior or matters of the word of wisdom. I like to avoid complaining or ranting, but it bothers me that the Church is so firm about matters of the word of wisdom and law of chastity with youth and YSAs, but businessmen and lawyers are allowed to do just about whatever they want in their professions. The message to me as a YSA was this: “A Mormon businessman can sell porn, alcohol, gambling, and even prostitutes and have his business open on Sunday if he wants to with no responsibility for what his actions do to others, or he can lay off his workers for his own greed or fail to give them benefits or decent wages because that’s his prerogative, but don’t you even think about touching a girl’s boobs because that’s a grievous sin.”
I personally find this unlimited economic freedom with strict limitations on social freedoms to be troubling, which is part of why I am wanting to develop my own system of morality.
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