Moral Origins

Where do we get our morals from? What or who decides what even is moral behavior? This is an interesting question with different answers for different people. Here's mine.

So what is moral behavior? Where do we get our morals from? Christians and other believers will have us believe that morals are absolute, and that there's one universal standard for moral behavior. For Christians it's the God of the Bible. They believe that without faith, without belief in God and the Bible there's no way to know, ultimately, what moral behavior is. It's not that they claim that all atheists are immoral or amoral, that they all behave like criminals and barbarians, just that there's no way for them to know, for sure, what's good and what's evil. I reject that world-view, I even think it's lazy at best and can be dangerous at worse.

For one, the notion that belief in God and the Bible can lead to moral behavior, says nothing about the validity of theism, it says nothing about the actual existence of a god. To explain this, let's look at belief in Santa Claus. There's no doubt that belief in Santa Claus can lead to good, or at the very least to desired behavior in children. The belief that there's an invisible man watching your every move, with the power to decide if you've been a "good kid" this past year, and to decide if you get a present or have his assistant kidnap you, is powerful indeed and can influence the behavior of children. But this says nothing about the actual existence of Santa Claus, and we all know that he doesn't exist.

But even if we grant that the mere belief in a Grand Adjudicator of Moral Behavior can influence our behavior for the good, we have to acknowledge that it can influence our behavior in very negative ways as well. 1 Peter 2:18 says: "Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh." There's God telling slave to submit to their masters, however harsh those masters are. Is that behavior we want? Is that moral behavior for those slaves or those masters? Is it even moral to allow for the existence of masters and slaves? We all can name many examples of immoral behavior being justified by the Bible and other Holy Books, I'm sure, but what it comes down to is that it's too easy, it's lazy to deem behavior good or bad just because some higher power says so, regardless if that higher power exists or not.

In the real world, in our world, the statistics simply prove that societies become less socially dysfunctional when God and Bible play a smaller role. In countries, regions and cities where more people identify as atheists, there's less crime and better health:

Murder rates, like most violent crime rates, are lower in more secular nations and more secular states in the U.S. such as Vermont and Oregon compared to more religious states like Louisiana and Alabama. The safest cities in the world are nearly all in nonreligious countries and the eight that are in the U.S. are in the least religious regions.

Nearly every measure of health or well-being finds that less religious countries score better. That includes supportive family and youth systems, honest government, non-discrimination, protection of political and civil liberties, peace, and prosperity with a high quality of life.
_{source: Secular AZ}

This is not at all surprising if we look at the true origin of moral behavior; it's a product of our social and biological evolution. Humans are social creatures who live in communities; we've always lived and operated in groups, and as a result we've simply had to learn how to get along. That's it, no more explanation needed. We are all social creatures, no exceptions. How far would we have come if we, as a species, would have evolved with the notion that murder, rape and dishonesty are acceptable behavior? It's not a coincidence that the "Golden Rule" is universal across all religions, societies and law-books around the world. Our sense of morality is based in reciprocity, in the fact that we know it's best to treat others the way we want to be treated by others.

Note that capitalism and the hyper-individualist nature of it is a refutation of this natural state of the human condition. It's based on the opposite of the Golden Rule and asks: how differently can I treat others than I myself want to be treated, and get away with it? How can I, in order to profit, get away with having the other get the short end of the stick? The whole notion that a "free and voluntary trade" under capitalism is a win-win situation is a scam, and was invented to make it seem to align with the universally accepted Golden Rule. Capitalism has winners and losers, every trade has a winner and a loser, it's the very foundation of the system, and the Invisible Hand is as real as Santa Clause.

Although Adam Smith theorized that a system in which every individual acts selfishly could render a situation where every individual's needs are served, he understood that we're not just selfish:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it.
_{source: Adam Smith Institute}

That's from his book "Theory of Moral Sentiments" and describes the principles in human nature he thought would constitute the "invisible hand"; it's not a mechanism, but human moral behavior that would ensure everyone's needs would be served. Where Smith was wrong, is the fact that the most selfish, the most unscrupulous sociopaths will float to the top of a system that's based on that one trait called egoism. And those people do not adhere to the Golden Rule. He didn't reckon with the fact that these people would become the ones writing the rules for society, that their egoism would trickle down to the general population.

We're not intrinsically selfish, it's not how we've evolved. We live together. We thrive together and we lose together; that's the reality of human society. There are no exceptions. Even if you think you are the exception because you're antisocial, never leave your room and order in your food, you still live in a community. Every time you switch on the lights, you depend on the people working at the electricity company. Every time you have food delivered, you depend on the delivery person, the restaurant, the people who built the roads and so on, ad infinitum. We all depend on each other, as it should be.

Or not? Watch the below linked video which gives proof, through the study of 3 and 6 month old babies, that we do have an innate sense of morals. But the same study also shows that we have an innate urge to create in-groups and out-groups, which is a reminder of how important "nurture" is and how important the shape of our society is in shaping the nurture part in our social behavior. That should say something about the current society that's founded on selfisness.

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