MORALITY: Why do we bother?

12/31/12

The whole issue stood Darwin on on his head. His theory, one of the most successful in science suggested that altruism should not exist. We should not be giving charity, boy/girl scouts should not be helping old ladies across the street, soldiers should not throw themselves on hand grenades to save their buddies . . . you get the idea. Evolution says we should be trying to spread our genes, yet we persist in the notion of marriage for life, surely a limitation on spreading our spawn. While evolution has succeeded in helping us understand much of biology it has failed to justify altruism.

Some economic theorizers postulate the “rational” man notion, persons always function in terms of their best interests and the devil with the rest. The epitome of such thinking is Ayn Rand's vision of government. In her system, the landscape would be littered with human detritus, society's failures. In spite of not understanding why evolution should make us so, we do not accept such draconian solutions to societal problems.

Religion, once the source of all knowledge (if it is not in the holy writings it isn't true) has gradually been forced to scale back; science has erased many of its ideas. This should be no surprise. After all, religious books reflect what seemed believable to nomads and tribes people but it is antiquated to speak of floods and celestial spheres, the earth's age of 6,000 years, souls, etc. Such wisdom has faded with our better understanding of how things work. But, religionists have one card with which they trump all others: Morality is impossible without god. Without a belief in god we would all be murderers, thieves, rapists, liars, etc. That we are generally not so becomes evidence for the existence of god. We don't act immorally because our faith forbids it. If you don't mind going in circles that might satisfy you.

It seems pompous to declare the beginning of a new age, but if current science is correct the tendency to morality is genetic. If you ever wondered why you don't take candy from babies, it is now likely that your genes won't let you. Ayn Rand and the others of that ilk, to the contrary not withstanding are wrong. Most of us are pre-disposed to feel bad when we act badly. What, after all, is guilt except the awareness of doing wrong. Fairness is apparently built in and we don't like it when we see others violating that rule.

Assuming that morality is built into our brains, what does that mean for religion? Obviously, they will lose their raison d'etre; they no longer can speak the Truth about reality unless catching up with science (The Vatican finally accepted the reality of evolution though postulated that god had set it all in motion. Also, after hundreds of years they admitted that Gallileo was right.). Truth becomes truth. And now, morality is no longer in their bailiwick, they cannot argue that it depends on belief in god and that belief in god depends on morality. Of course, they can argue that god set it all up, that he or she or it adjusted our genes to nudge us in the direction of goodness. Well, so much for free will, another religious fantasy.

Some might conclude that if it is all genes, we no longer have to think about our behavior, that our brains will automatically decide on the morality of a deed,. Sorry. Keep in mind that we need to learn out society's culture, IE its moral values. That we want to be moral may be a given, but we have to learn how. Cultures around the world vary in such details. There was, for instance, a group on some Pacific island that extolled the virtues of murder. Enough said. The thrust is there but the content varies.

And so, is it possible to conceive of a universal morality, I mean one in which all societies agree so that murder is murder everywhere and rape and thievery and meanness are looked upon with the same distress around the world. Why not; our genes will cooperate. Religions have declared themselves to provide universal values and often does so by torture and killing unbelievers and apostates. No thanks!

Western civilization has begun to eschew religion. Perhaps if only out of sheer exhaustion we'll be left with some general sense of how humanity might get along.

People have struggled to figure out the causality

Of what is generally understood as morality

Some tried religion

But that led to division

It's all in our genes, that seems the reality.