If someone doesn't believe in a God that gives Objective morals, where do they get their morals from? If life is this straightforward then no objective morality or even truth can be claimed. So why do people follow the law and treat random people nicely? I get the argument that those things have evolved and it's a primal urge because of the preservation of the species, but like what if it has no connection to the preservation of the species? What if someone does something just because? Like what's the point of being nice?
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2See The Origins of Human Morality and M. Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, Harvard University (2016)– Mauro ALLEGRANZACommented Dec 12, 2023 at 15:06
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1Hello, and welcome to the PhilosophySE. See the site Help section for info on how to craft citation-oriented questions and answers. For introductions to various philosophical topics, such as non-theistic ethics, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.– Kristian BerryCommented Dec 12, 2023 at 15:10
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Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.– Community BotCommented Dec 12, 2023 at 15:55
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One day in the late 1980s I am taking a course at Manhattan College. The course is Field and Wave Electromagnetics. The professor is Dr George Prans. Back in the day there is a television series, In Search Of ..., narrated by actor Leonard Nimoy (Mr Spock on Star Trek). Doctor Prans says, "The Dell Operator ... In Search of Sources and Sinks!" The sources and sinks of EM Waves are regions of space containing particles with net positive or negative electrical charge. The source of moral recognition is human nature in the context of intersubjective interactions. Non-human nature is not moral.– SystemTheoryCommented Dec 12, 2023 at 19:36
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1I vote for reopen because the present question (origin of moral) and the question referred to (claimed immorality of atheism) deal with rather different topics.– Jo WehlerCommented Dec 12, 2023 at 21:18
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2 Answers
Morals are merely ethical shortcuts. Ethical reasoning is still possible without morals, but always proceeds from foundational opinions ("How do I feel about the results of this action?") rather than moral shortcuts ("What does my book of rules say about this action?")
Morals are usually learned. Some morals are learned through experience ("I don't want that to happen again, so I'll write a rule to prevent it;") while others are transferred from person to person ("Your rule sounds good and I'll adopt it for myself.")
One way of understanding this is from pragmatic ethics, particularly with the pragmatic maxim included. Paraphrasing the maxim in terms of ethics:
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the [action] of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the [action].
Morality and ethics which are traditionally philosophical areas can be understood with a particular framework of epistemology, called naturalized epistemology (SEP). This is when philosophy borrows heavily from science to do it's job.
Moral behavior has strong biological antecedents in the mechanisms of eusocial behavior. The famous Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal has done decades of research and writing on how our closest Great Ape relatives have the beginnings of moral behavior that begin with the notion of biological altruism. From WP:
In biology, altruism refers to behaviour by an individual that increases the fitness of another individual while decreasing their own.4 Altruism in this sense is different from the philosophical concept of altruism, in which an action would only be called "altruistic" if it was done with the conscious intention of helping another. In the behavioural sense, there is no such requirement.
Essentially, in his book, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, de Waal argues that morality is the result of taking the emotional impulses that help animals form societies and applying reason and language. For an introduction into how science more than accounts for psychological altruism, watch the introductory video and TedTalk Frans de Waal: Moral behavior in animals (YT). The theme of the talk is that reciprocity and empathy make for strong social relationships that enable group behavior, and of course, functioning as a group has survival fitness.
Others like Edward O. Wilson (founder of sociobiology) and Michael Tomasello (who is an expert in shared intentionality) have similar bodies of work, though not so much devoted to understanding the behavior of Hominidae, a group of animals of which we are the most successful example. For a good start in the SEP see Morality and Evolutionary Biology and in the IEP see Evolutionary Ethics.