Why do we need "morality"?

[danston]

Isn't it simply governments that create this concept?

[Greg H.]

My ethics professor once described morality as necessary because there are more people in the world than just myself. I don't think goverments neccessarily create morality (though they do seem to like to legislate it), as much as they attempt to enforce the social mores already in place in the society they govern. As those social norms change, the laws tend to change (in some fashion) - to wit, the fight over Gay Marriage that's going on in the United States now. Goverments react to changes in morality, but it's the society that creates the idea of what's acceptable and what's not.

 

When governments try to artificially impose morality (or at least in the US), it tends to bite them on the ass, if the majority of the people don't agree with the change. Look up the history of Prohibition as an example.

[danston]

So people need protection. OK, from whom or what?

[John Cuthber]

So people need protection. OK, from whom or what?

From other people.

 

As far as I can tell, it's more realistic to say that morality creates government, rather than the other way round.

[StringJunky]

Morality is what allows more people to settle in closer proximity to each other than it's absence would otherwise allow ... they are the rules of engagement and behaviour that allows social harmony. More explicitly, it is selected for evolutionarily because it increases the propagative potential of those species that practice it by allowing more individuals to occupy a given space, and hence, the incidence of mating and nurturing/survival of the resulting progeny is improved.

Edited November 25, 2013 by StringJunky

[too-open-minded]

I wouldn't say governments create morality. Morality or whatever you want to label it, stems from our Morales, ethics, what we think is right and wrong. This is all relative to our perspective, different cultures can have different Morales. As with different governments. However morality between different governments still has more in common than different. Morality is something that has arisen among our awareness of others. Morality is something that we have evolved. Notice most Morales commonly shared are about killing and really dark things that have been norms in the homo sapiens evolutionary past. You can't say that governments enforce morality, you can say that governments condone opposing of physical infringement between one another.

[hoola]

yes, we are a product of our animal heritage, and morals are the quasi-instinctual obeyance to social herarchies, such as alpha male/alpha female, tribal affiliations and hunting techniques which require organization of a definite rule-set to increase chances of success....even bacterial colonies have a primitive structure of the outside layer of cells, protecting the insides of the cellular mass....an early proto-altruistic stage, adopted and modified for use, then eventually identified as a "moral concept" when sentient life became capable of affixing labels it's our own behavior....the onus against gay marriage is a result of most of human history being of a condition of humanity hanging on to a precarious existence, which required all people to reproduce as much as possible as the chances of a newborn reaching sexual maturity long enough to reproduce were not good enough to "waste" sexual energy or attention on relations that do not end in pregnancy....now that we have 7 billion plus people on the planet, the danger to the enviornment and humanity itself is actually increased by pregnancy-generating relationships....we, and the entire world would be wise to adopt gay marriage as an acknowledgement that such relationships increase our survival chances, and those of other species on the planet, let alone the atmosphere itself. ....edd

Edited November 29, 2013 by hoola