Where do morals come from?

[Mr Skeptic]

Thanks iNow. That definitely points to a strong correlation between religion and various negative social aspects.

[pioneer]

Many people look for God or some form of religion during the difficult times, not during prosperity and periods of ego-centric self control. The junkie who will find "Jesus" does so at "rock bottom" and not at the top of his game. The data can also be interpreted as social secular policies causing more people to feel closer to rock bottom, thereby causing more perceived need for religion comfort in their life. We may have cause and affect backwards.

 

If you go to a poor African country, it is corrupt leaders hoarding wealth with corruption and guns. The poor have no opportunity and can find some hope in religion. Once they feel empowered, they may not feel the same hole in their soul and may gravitate toward semi-religion that accommodates some whims or to atheism, where anything goes, until the next down cycle. The fact that religion is on the rise shows more people are not at inner contentment but are looking for something to help fill in the void that is created. So you have discontent people going into religion with the original secular cause creating the correlated affect.

 

Ask yourself this question, would the break up of the family make children more content or less content, on the average? This was not done by religion but may result in more young people heading into religion instead of therapy or prescription drugs. The anger was already there, with religion not able to take it all away. The result is the original cause is glossed over and the final affect is correlated.

Edited November 23, 2008 by pioneer

[iNow]

Oh, I love you, Pioneer. Nonsequitur and faulty premises galore. Those conclusions you form based on faulty premises are themselves false, you do realize, right? If any of your conclusions are accurate it tends to be by accident.

 

It was also really great when you equivocated lack of theism (atheism) with "anything goes." You're almost cartoonish in your responses sometimes, and I thank you for the great big ear-to-ear smile it brings to my face.

 

 

The poor have no opportunity and can find some hope in religion. Once they feel empowered, they may not feel the same hole in their soul and may gravitate toward semi-religion that accommodates some whims or to atheism, where anything goes, until the next down cycle.

 

 

By the way, the posts you're making continue to conflict with the empirical data being shared. Who cares about reality, right?

[iNow]

Not sure where you stand in regards to God's great plan and morals? You should try the Moral Master 2.0! In just 10 short questions, you can see how moral you truly are.

 

 

 

h/t

[bob000555]

According to Freud morals are the result of a bazaar chain of events starting with sexual attraction to the opposite sex parent and ending in acquiring the mannerisms and value(morals) of the same sex parent.

 

Also according to Freud we are born with only the Id the primeval pleasure seeking part of our personality. As we learn to cope with realty we devolve the Ego, the realty centered part of the personality structure , which seeks to gratify the Id’s wants in a realistic way. Then around four or five we develop the Superego, the part of personality focused on the ideal, according to Freud this is the personality structure responsible for feelings of shame and pride, it is the source of our conscience and morality. (the development of the superego is influenced by the afore mentioned bazaar chain of events.)

 

According to Kohlberg morality develops from a consequence based system in which we seek to avoid punishment, develops into to a stage of social norms in which we do what society tells us is right and then to a post-conventional stage in which we decide from our own internal values what is right and wrong. Not everyone develops into the post-covenantal stage and simply believes that thing society deems wrong are wrong, that all laws should be blindly fallowed.

[iNow]

Not 100% on topic, but very closely related.

 

 

 

http://nanosoc.wisc.edu/Scheufele%20-%20UW%20press%20release.pdf

When it comes to the world of the very, very small — nanotechnology — Americans have a big problem: Nano and its capacity to alter the fundamentals of nature, it seems, are failing the moral litmus test of religion.

 

In a report published today (Dec. 7) in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, survey results from the United States and Europe reveal a sharp contrast in the perception that nanotechnology is morally acceptable. Those views, according to the report, correlate directly with aggregate levels of religious views in each country surveyed.

 

In the United States and a few European countries where religion plays a larger role in everyday life, notably Italy, Austria and Ireland, nanotechnology and its potential to alter living organisms or even inspire synthetic life is perceived as less morally acceptable. In more secular European societies, such as those in France and Germany, individuals are much less likely to view nanotechnology through the prism of religion and find it ethically suspect.

 

"The level of 'religiosity' in a particular country is one of the strongest predictors of whether or not people see nanotechnology as morally acceptable," says Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of life sciences communication and the lead author of the new study. "Religion was the strongest influence over everything."

 

The study compared answers to identical questions posed by the 2006 Eurobarometer public opinion survey and a 2007 poll by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center conducted under the auspices of the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Nanotechnology and Society at Arizona State University. The survey was led by Scheufele and Elizabeth Corley, an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University.

 

The survey findings, says Scheufele, are important not only because they reveal the paradox of citizens of one of the world's elite technological societies taking a dim view of the implications of a particular technology, but also because they begin to expose broader negative public attitudes toward science when people filter their views through religion.

 

"What we captured is nanospecific, but it is also representative of a larger attitude toward science and technology," Scheufele says. "It raises a big question: What's really going on in our public discourse where science and religion often clash?"

 

For the United States, the findings are particularly surprising, Scheufele notes, as the country is without question a highly technological society and many of the discoveries that underpin nanotechnology emanated from American universities and companies. The technology is also becoming more pervasive, with more than 1,000 products ranging from more efficient solar panels and scratch-resistant automobile paint to souped-up golf clubs already on the market.

 

"It's estimated that nanotechnology will be a $3.1 trillion global industry by 2015," Scheufele says. "Nanotechnology is one of those areas that is starting to touch nearly every part of our lives."

 

To be sure that religion was such a dominant influence on perceptions of nanotechnology, the group controlled for such things as science literacy, educational performance, and levels of research productivity and funding directed to science and technology by different countries.

 

"We really tried to control for country-specific factors," Scheufele explains. "But we found that religion is still one of the strongest predictors of whether or not nanotechnology is morally acceptable and whether or not it is perceived to be useful for society."

 

The findings from the 2007 U.S. survey, adds Scheufele, also suggest that in the United States the public's knowledge of nanotechnology has been static since a similar 2004 survey. Scheufele points to a paucity of news media interest and the notion that people who already hold strong views on the technology are not necessarily seeking factual information about it.

 

"There is absolutely no change in what people know about nanotechnology between 2004 and 2007. This is partly due to the fact that mainstream media are only now beginning to pay closer attention to the issue. There has been a lot of elite discussion in Washington, D.C., but not a lot of public discussion. And nanotechnology has not had that catalytic moment, that key event that draws public attention to the issue."

 

 

 

Here's a link to the actual study:

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nnano.2008.361.html

[swansont]

Fear the unknown. The unknown is eeeeviiiiiil. Been there, done that (for nanotech)

 

I'm not sure where the distrust in the unknown becomes "this is immoral," though.

 

"There is absolutely no change in what people know about nanotechnology between 2004 and 2007. This is partly due to the fact that mainstream media are only now beginning to pay closer attention to the issue. There has been a lot of elite discussion in Washington, D.C., but not a lot of public discussion. And nanotechnology has not had that catalytic moment, that key event that draws public attention to the issue."

 

Translation: Nobody cares until there is a crisis. We haven't been able to blame any miserable event on nanotech. Yet.

 

Implicit argument: the MSM is a useful tool for educating the public about science & technology issues. Bwahahaha! How useful is CNN at this, now that they've announced that they're dismantling their S&T reporting unit?

[iNow]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5733638.ece

 

Some researchers believe we could owe our consciences to climate change and, in particular, to a period of intense global warming between 50,000 and 800,000 years ago. The proto-humans living in the forests had to adapt to living on hostile open plains, where they would have been easy prey for formidable predators such as big cats.

 

This would have forced them to devise rules for hunting in groups and sharing food.

 

Christopher Boehm, director of the Jane Goodall Research Center, part of the University of Southern California's anthropology department, believes such humans devised codes to stop bigger, stronger males hogging all the food.

 

"To ensure fair meat distribution, hunting bands had to gang up physically against alpha males," he said. This theory has been borne out by studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes.

 

In research released at the AAAS he argued that under such a system those who broke the rules would have been killed, their "amoral" genes lost to posterity. By contrast, those who abided by the rules would have had many more children.

 

 

Via PZ:

 

Collins has argued that one piece of evidence for god is the human moral sense, which he claims could not have evolved. I guess we're going to have to call monkeys our brothers and sisters then, since researchers have found that monkeys have a sense of morality. (Let me guess; he'll just push the magic moment of ensoulment back another 30 million years.) Furthermore, they have explanations for how altruism could have evolved.

[Baby Astronaut]

I'm not sure where the distrust in the unknown becomes "this is immoral,"

(read: not "God approved")

[visceral]

Morals are just what society deems to be acceptable as if you don't conform with them then society won't accept you and humans are inherently social animals who work in groups to succeed.

 

For example when trying to catch larger prey or out smart it, it is far easier for a group to do it and there for these traits to work together will be selected for due to greater survival rate.

 

Humans also do have instincts, however many are taught out of use due to them being little use, such as babies not eating sour food this is due to it usually being poisonous in the wild, however we are taught that things like lemons aren't so we ignore it.

 

Agree with this. We need certain rules to cohere as a group.

 

Sometimes these rules are appropriate ('don't disrespect people'), sometimes they are illogical, serve no purpose, and/or create divisions where divisions are not necessary ('don't wear a certain colour, or use a certain slang word').

[dichotomy]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090226141108.htm

 

An article that shows a possible link between how morals are formed and our ancient inherited physical responses to taste, poison and disease.

[iNow]

A good article this week by David Brooks, published in the NYTimes:

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07Brooks.html?_r=1

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

 

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

 

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

 

The question then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there’s an increasing appreciation that evolution isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

 

The first nice thing about this evolutionary approach to morality is that it emphasizes the social nature of moral intuition. People are not discrete units coolly formulating moral arguments. They link themselves together into communities and networks of mutual influence.

 

The second nice thing is that it entails a warmer view of human nature. Evolution is always about competition, but for humans, as Darwin speculated, competition among groups has turned us into pretty cooperative, empathetic and altruistic creatures — at least within our families, groups and sometimes nations.

 

The third nice thing is that it explains the haphazard way most of us lead our lives without destroying dignity and choice. Moral intuitions have primacy, Haidt argues, but they are not dictators. There are times, often the most important moments in our lives, when in fact we do use reason to override moral intuitions, and often those reasons — along with new intuitions — come from our friends. <

more at the link

>

[Logica]

Does psychology have an explanation of how we came to have morals? I heard that humans don't have insticts, is that true? If so the morals can't come from instinct and if so, i.e. nature plays no role then all that seems be left is nurture. Thoughts?

 

Pete

 

Morals were the logical outcome of the human dualistic mind. The non-human has an instinctively unified amoral existence while in the human instinct has seemingly split/mutated into two separate conditions of Intellect and Emotion giving rise to behavior both necessary (like non-humans) and unnecessary.(very human). The conflict that this dualism has brought about has driven our thinking into dualistic conceptual modes of good/bad, right/wrong, moral/immoral etc.

 

These dualistic concepts are arbitrary for most part thus determined by Nurture. But the need to behave, at this stage of our evolution, in a dualistic framework, is what is driving our evolution because the conflict caused by dualism drives cognitive development more than anything else.

[iNow]

Posts like that remind me strongly why I prefer science over philosophy.

[Kyrisch]

Posts like that remind me strongly why I prefer science over philosophy.

 

Philosophy reminds me of being so open-minded your brains fall out.

[Logica]

Posts like that remind me strongly why I prefer science over philosophy.

 

Your comment is ambiguous - which post are you referring to? And if mine did it positively or negatively reinforce your preferance for science.

[iNow]

http://pactiss.org:8080/ct/critica/religions-parasitic-morality

Religion's parasitic morality

[iNow]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/30/religion.torture/

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

 

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

 

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

[Sisyphus]

Posts like that remind me strongly why I prefer science over philosophy.

 

Philosophy reminds me of being so open-minded your brains fall out.

 

Please don't confuse "philosophy" with "anything claiming to be philosophy." I don't judge science by the pseudoscientific rants about how wrong Einstein is.

[vosh]

We feel pain and pleasure. Right and wrong is based on that.

 

An instinct is a complex unlearned behavior. Spiders building a web is instinctive. It's unlearned and it's complex. It would be like an infant one day making a model of a sky scraper with Popsicle sticks. Not even all animals have instincts. Lions learn how to hunt from their mother.

 

The people who put together the dictionary have an unfortunate, and in my view, dumb, practice of modifying a word based on how most people have been using it, no matter how incorrectly. For any little thing that wasn't strictly conscious, people say, "oh, it was instinctive". No. No, it was not instinctive. Instinctive is building a web, not answering the phone just as your true love was calling. But the people who put together the dictionary these days have no problem with adding, "a feelin' ya kinda have" to the list.

 

I know that babies reflexively hold their breath under water. I don't know about "swimming". Has an infant ever done the breast stroke?

[Sayonara]

We feel pain and pleasure. Right and wrong is based on that.

Errr... not so much. If this were the case you would not see behaviours such as self-sacrifice or altruism emerging, and you would expect much more expression of hedonistic and self-serving behaviour.

 

It would be like an infant one day making a model of a sky scraper with Popsicle sticks.

Bad example because there would not be any selection pressure for an infant to do that, whereas the selection pressures favouring organisms which lay down sticky silk in particular patterns in particular habitats are very easy to see. But I get what you mean.

 

Not even all animals have instincts. Lions learn how to hunt from their mother.

Slight error in reasoning. Lions learning how to hunt from their mother does not mean that lions have no instincts; it merely means that the hunting behaviour in particular is not inherited.

 

The people who put together the dictionary have an unfortunate, and in my view, dumb, practice of modifying a word based on how most people have been using it, no matter how incorrectly.

I agree, and in my experience this extremely annoying practice is more evident in some dictionaries than others. It's referred to generally as defining by "common usage", and dictionaries such as Merriam Webster are really bad for it. The Oxford English dictionary is widely considered to be quite authoritative if you are ever struggling to find a good one.

 

I know that babies reflexively hold their breath under water. I don't know about "swimming". Has an infant ever done the breast stroke?

You would not expect them to do the breast stroke as this is a highly specific and non-intuitive means of optimising aquatic locomotion which has to be learned through teaching and then improved with training. But babies do a kind of doggy paddle, although I cannot say if any research has been done to figure out if this is "instinctive movement in water" as opposed to the usual baby-like 'just trying to flap about a bit and coincidental moving around'.

I'd tentatively suggest that babies flap their limbs about because they have instinctive routines which associate limb movement with both locomotion and manipulation, and the lack of success which we see when the baby is flapping about and gurgling is simply due to the developmental shortcomings of their limb structure and co-ordination systems at that age.

[Glider]

An instinct is a complex unlearned behavior. Spiders building a web is instinctive. It's unlearned and it's complex. It would be like an infant one day making a model of a sky scraper with Popsicle sticks. Not even all animals have instincts. Lions learn how to hunt from their mother.

Stalking, chasing and pouncing behaviours are instinctive (have you never played with a kitten?). The cub learns how to put them together for best effect (i.e. refine them so they end in a kill) from their mother. If you watch lion cubs, they will instinctively stalk, chase and pounce on each other in play as soon as they leave the den. It is instinctive practice.

 

 

I know that babies reflexively hold their breath under water. I don't know about "swimming". Has an infant ever done the breast stroke?

Babies immersed in water will never perform a non-intuitive stroke like butterfly or crawl. These have to be learned. However, like almost all other animals, when submerged, they will instinctively orient themselves and move to the surface using a kicking stroke that is entirely instinctive. See

for example.

[vosh]

Errr... not so much. If this were the case you would not see behaviours such as self-sacrifice or altruism emerging, and you would expect much more expression of hedonistic and self-serving behaviour.

 

Hello. Ack, I cannot get the hang of replying to replies...

 

Well, we would use our intelligence to know what will be best in the long run - it's still based on what hurts and what doesn't.

 

Bad example because there would not be any selection pressure for an infant to do that, whereas the selection pressures favouring organisms which lay down sticky silk in particular patterns in particular habitats are very easy to see. But I get what you mean.

 

Slight error in reasoning. Lions learning how to hunt from their mother does not mean that lions have no instincts; it merely means that the hunting behaviour in particular is not inherited.

 

Agreed. I should have said that folks may think that the ability to hunt is a complex unlearned behavior, so I was saying that it isnt. Do lions do anything that is complex unlearned behavior? See, I think of instincts as bees constructing a hive, doing a dance to communicate where the flowers are, or birds building a nest, or spiders making a web... very particular, intricate sets of skills, like a human building a shed, not just nerves and muscles reacting to a stimulus... Instincts seem to be needed more so the lower on the food chain you go, and less so the larger the brain. I've never heard of the "chase, kill" trigger in dogs and cats, for example, referred to anything other than a reflex action. Just thinkin' aloud, here.

 

You would not expect them to do the breast stroke as this is a highly specific and non-intuitive means of optimising aquatic locomotion which has to be learned through teaching and then improved with training. But babies do a kind of doggy paddle, although I cannot say if any research has been done to figure out if this is "instinctive movement in water" as opposed to the usual baby-like 'just trying to flap about a bit and coincidental moving around'.

I'd tentatively suggest that babies flap their limbs about because they have instinctive routines which associate limb movement with both locomotion and manipulation, and the lack of success which we see when the baby is flapping about and gurgling is simply due to the developmental shortcomings of their limb structure and co-ordination systems at that age.

 

I would expect them to do the breast stroke if they inherited that instinct. Is holding the breath under water a complex unlearned behavior? I dunno... Hope this post comes out readable.

[iNow]

Animals Can Tell Right From Wrong

 

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/5373379/Animals-can-tell-right-from-wrong.html

Scientists studying animal behaviour believe they have growing evidence that species ranging from mice to primates are governed by moral codes of conduct in the same way as humans.

 

Until recently, humans were thought to be the only species to experience complex emotions and have a sense of morality.

 

But Prof Marc Bekoff, an ecologist at University of Colorado, Boulder, believes that morals are "hard-wired" into the brains of all mammals and provide the "social glue" that allow often aggressive and competitive animals to live together in groups.

 

He has compiled evidence from around the world that shows how different species of animals appear to have an innate sense of fairness, display empathy and help other animals that are in distress. <

more at the link

>

[Severian]

Anyone who claims to make scientific statements about morality is being unscientific. Since moral decisions require, by definition, a choice between "moral" and "immoral" actions, morality presupposes the existence of free will. However, free-will is not testable, so a non-scientific concept.

 

To put it another way, you have no scientific methodology of determining whether or not the decision or view point of an individual has a moral basis, or is just a consequence of genetically favoured behaviour or self interest.

 

And anyway, this thread has devolved into yet another religion bash, so is against the rules.