[dreadgeek]

So since morality has come up a couple of times now, I thought I would try to stimulate some conversation about how human beings are moral.

It's a shibboleth that without God or, more generically, some 'spiritual' belief there is no reason to be moral. I have, on numerous occasions, had people express that if not for their belief in God they would probably run amok stealing and making mayhem. These folks say more about themselves and their own view of morality than they do about human nature.

I believe that human beings are *naturally* moral and that our moral sense is not imposed from the top down but grows from the bottom up. What follows is a plausible evolutionary account of morality. I would love to say that I was clever enough to come up with these ideas myself but I'm not so clever. This is based off work of others but the expression of those ideas are mine.

Human beings are social primates. If we look at the other social primates, we see some common themes all of which look like a proto-moral sense. For example, reciprocal grooming is a common feature of gorillas, chimps and bonobos. It is a way of bonding, smoothing over insults, and serves as a form of social cohesion. Given our close proximity to those other great apes it is safe to presume that before we lost our body hair it's likely that the other hominid species that proceeded us also groomed for much the same reasons. Now, this does create a dilemma. If I can get away with it, what I would like is for you to groom me but me not have to groom you in return. The time I take grooming you is time I can't be, for instance, foraging. You, however, have a vested interest in not being exploited by me. Nature's solution was to give social animals a means for telling one another apart and a faculty for detecting cheats. Just that and you have the beginnings of anger--one of our moral emotions.

Think about the moral senses we have. We feel pride when we do something good, we feel even *better* when others acknowledge the good thing we've done. We all feel that. We feel shame or guilt when we do something hurtful. We feel worse when others acknowledge that. We strive to make amends. The person we wronged feels anger or indignation at our behavior and then, hopefully, forgives us. No one has to teach a young child to be angry at being treated unfairly. What is considered worthy of praise or of blame is culturally conditioned but the *capacity* to learn what your particular society thinks is praiseworthy or blameworthy is built-in. No human culture does not have rules of behavior and consequences for breaking those rules and rewards for exemplifying the qualities that society feels should be promoted.

All societies have pretty the same kinds of problems, people have non-identical interests. In such a world cheating or using violence is tempting. But that kind of behavior will quickly tear a society apart. So nature has equipped us with rules that work well enough most of the time. We are moral not because of religion but despite religion. Religion doesn't provide us with morals, our morals are reinforced by religion but even if we didn't have religions we would still have morals. Keep in mind that our moral system evolved in an environment where we lived in very small (~150 people) groups and might have contact with twice that number. We now live in gigantic conglomerations called cities but even with that, we are still a rather moral species. Is everyone always moral? No, we shouldn't expect that to be the case. Cheating is *always* an option but just as a group of all cheaters can't get anything done, a group of entirely honest people will be easily exploited by a cheater. In devising models for how our morality could evolve, biologists have borrowed liberally from game theory. Within that framework cheating all the time is unstable, being a sucker all the time is unstable but tit-for-tat is stable. In other words, I cooperate with those who cooperate with me but I don't cooperate with those who don't cooperate with me. Is it perfect? No, but it is *stable*.

We may have brains that evolved to be open to religion memes but that does not mean that we need those memes in order to be religious. As I said earlier, we're moral first and then we use religion as a post hoc justification for our morality. We don't have religion first and then morality later.

Cheers
Aj