What Defines Morality?

[Greatest I am]

HI Rose

Tried and failed to pick up your quote.

Just wanted to agree and show you this.

http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/17/the_real_differ/

Regards
DL

[Richard Amiel McGough]

Morality is grounded in human empathy. If we didn't love or care about others, we would have no sense of morality. It's that simple.

Morality is not based on any rules. It is based on love. That's it.

I do not agree.

A baby can bond but it cannot reason love.

It can follow it's instinct though and to us it might look like love but it is just the baby recognizing through instincts the rules of prisoners revenge. That it is more profitable to survival to cooperate and not compete. The only two things that you and I do constantly when interacting with others.

I think this is proof.

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories...rality-100511/

Regards
DL

Hi DL,

Welcome to our forum!



I agree that the there is a biological basis to morality, but that doesn't explain everything about it. Empathy is seen in other species and primates are known to have a sense of "fairness." But the full concept of "morality" is a product of our big brains and ability to reason and abstract. I have no reason to think it is entirely based in biology and nothing else. The babies discussed in the link you posted shows only the rudimentary circuitry that lies at the foundation of our morality. As an adult, love and fairness are the key to our moral intuitions. I still have no reason to think that morality is based on a set of rules.

All the best,

Richard

[Richard Amiel McGough]

HI Rose

Tried and failed to pick up your quote.

Just wanted to agree and show you this.

http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/17/the_real_differ/

Regards
DL

Thanks for the link, TED talks rock!

There is a bug in the forum software that occasionally causes the edit box to be blank even when you clicked "Reply With Quote." An easy work-around is to copy/paste the text you want to quote. Place it between the "quote" tags that look like this:

[QUOTE] put quote here [/QUOTE].

[Greatest I am]

Hi DL,

Welcome to our forum!



I agree that the there is a biological basis to morality, but that doesn't explain everything about it. Empathy is seen in other species and primates are known to have a sense of "fairness." But the full concept of "morality" is a product of our big brains and ability to reason and abstract. I have no reason to think it is entirely based in biology and nothing else. The babies discussed in the link you posted shows only the rudimentary circuitry that lies at the foundation of our morality. As an adult, love and fairness are the key to our moral intuitions. I still have no reason to think that morality is based on a set of rules.

All the best,

Richard

I agree that initially it is not based on rules. It is based on our survival instincts and those go to cooperation as that baby shows. It is the same with other animals. Rules for man only come into play as a learned response. You are thinking backwards. You say that love and fairness are the key to our moral intuitions.

That baby clip proves that it is our survival instincts that push to cooperation and that intuition is what grows to our sense of fairness and then love.

Watch what happens when the first cooperation (love) is rejected by the other chimp in this clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mv8rfJmCPk

Thanks for the welcome BTW.

Regards
DL

[Richard Amiel McGough]

I agree that initially it is not based on rules. It is based on our survival instincts and those go to cooperation as that baby shows. It is the same with other animals. Rules for man only come into play as a learned response. You are thinking backwards. You say that love and fairness are the key to our moral intuitions.

That baby clip proves that it is our survival instincts that push to cooperation and that intuition is what grows to our sense of fairness and then love.

Watch what happens when the first cooperation (love) is rejected by the other chimp in this clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mv8rfJmCPk

Thanks for the welcome BTW.

Regards
DL

That's an awesome video! Here it is embedded for folks to watch with one less click:



The video shows that primates are pretty smart and can understand cooperation to a significant degree. But the narrator's assertion that the chimps were distinguishing between guilt and innocence when the human moved the food is not at all clear. He may be reading morality into the scene where it does not exist. It seems more likely that the chimp saw the human as a super "alpha chimp" and so deferred to his actions. If the alpha chimp gave the other chimp his food, he can't complain because that might incur wrath from the alpha chimp.This is a more primal instinct seen even in wolves with much smaller brains. So when interpreting experiments like this, we need to be careful not to anthropomorphize the chimps.

My assertion that our moral intuitions are based in empathy does not contradict the fact that our empathy is based in our biology. So I'm not sure that we are in any disagreement here.

Your contributions are very interesting! I hope you keep them coming.

Richard

PS: I've upgraded your account to "Full Membership" so you can start your own threads, post pics and videos, and all that good stuff. New members are automatically put on probation just long enough for me to be sure they are not spammers.

[David M]

HI Rose

Tried and failed to pick up your quote.

Just wanted to agree and show you this.

http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/17/the_real_differ/

Regards
DL

Hello DL
thanks for supplying the link to this video. I shall make a general comment of two from what came from the video.

Jonathan Haidt said that our minds were designed by evolution. Surely that is a misnomer because evolution cannot design. Evolution has no plan.

He says that our evolved minds are blinded to the truth. All I will say is that the acceptance of Evolution is to blind our minds to the truth. Should evolution have blinded my mind to this truth?

Jonathan Haidt uses the example of the Dalai Lama as an example, probably because he is the best living example. The truth is that Jesus the Son of God is the greatest example of someone who has lived. Jesus had the greatest moral authority and in the eyes of God was sinless. I doubt the Dalai Lama can claim that. Jonathan Haidt said the Dalai Lama's his enormous moral authority came from his moral humility. Once again, there is no greater example than the humility of Jesus which manifested itself in all aspects of Jesus' life.

As far as "being outside the box", God is already there. This is why God has shown us the way. It is the way that men and women are struggling by going their own way. If we step out of the moral box built up by men and women, we find God. In finding God, we come to know the moral code that He has given us, it is the moral code that evolution would make us blind to or if we accept that we start off with a blank mind at birth, the moral code is not something men or women will find out easily for themselves. The fact that men and women will do as they want or agree to do as a team is not in accordance with what God wants. The inventions or men and women have made the problem of finding the truth that much more difficult.

At the moment, this forum shows the contributers are in different teams.

All the best,

David

[Richard Amiel McGough]

Hello DL
thanks for supplying the link to this video. I shall make a general comment of two from what came from the video.

Jonathan Haidt said that our minds were designed by evolution. Surely that is a misnomer because evolution cannot design. Evolution has no plan.

He says that our evolved minds are blinded to the truth. All I will say is that the acceptance of Evolution is to blind our minds to the truth. Should evolution have blinded my mind to this truth?

Jonathan Haidt uses the example of the Dalai Lama as an example, probably because he is the best living example. The truth is that Jesus the Son of God is the greatest example of someone who has lived. Jesus had the greatest moral authority and in the eyes of God was sinless. I doubt the Dalai Lama can claim that. Jonathan Haidt said the Dalai Lama's his enormous moral authority came from his moral humility. Once again, there is no greater example than the humility of Jesus which manifested itself in all aspects of Jesus' life.

As far as "being outside the box", God is already there. This is why God has shown us the way. It is the way that men and women are struggling by going their own way. If we step out of the moral box built up by men and women, we find God. In finding God, we come to know the moral code that He has given us, it is the moral code that evolution would make us blind to or if we accept that we start off with a blank mind at birth, the moral code is not something men or women will find out easily for themselves. The fact that men and women will do as they want or agree to do as a team is not in accordance with what God wants. The inventions or men and women have made the problem of finding the truth that much more difficult.

At the moment, this forum shows the contributers are in different teams.

All the best,

David

Good morning David,

Your comments miss the meat of the video. What do you think about the five moral foundations Haidt listed?

1. Harm/Care
2. Fairness/Reciprocity
3. In-Group Loyalty
4. Authority/Respect
5. Purity/Sanctity

What do you think of his research that showed how liberals and conservatives rank the importance of those five categories? Did you see yourself in the research results? I know I did.

Your comments remind me of how I felt when I was a Christian. I was always bothered by the way evolution was integrated with practically every scientific discipline. It made it impossible for me to read most scientific works without a sense that the author was biased against God and the Bible. It felt like they were all part of a "grand conspiracy" designed to deny the truth of God. But now I see things differently. The fact that almost every scientific discipline naturally coheres with the theory of evolution is the greatest evidence of its validity. It's like there is a "great cloud of witnesses" from all the independent scientific disciplines that confirm it. It's like the dozens of independent ways we can confirm the age of the earth and the universe (starlight, expansion rate, radioactive isotopes, tectonic plates, fossils,etc., etc., etc.). The agreement of all these different witnesses gives great weight to their united testimony. If evolution really were fiction, then it simply could not be integrated with the entire body of human knowledge in the way that it is. This is why E. O. Wilson began his book Conscilence: They Unity of Knowledge with a discussion of how the theory of evolution revolutionized his understanding of the natural world in his youth. He then went on throughout his book showing how all scientific knowledge forms a unity, and at the heart of that unity is evolution.

Your comment that "Jonathan Haidt said that our minds were designed by evolution" missed the scare quotes that Haidt put around the word "design" to indicate that he was not using that word in the literal way that you interpreted it. You are correct that it would be a "misnomer" if Haidt had not put it in quotes.

You are correct that "evolution has no plan." But that does not mean that evolution does not produce effects that look designed. Are you denying that natural selection can produce changes in organisms? What limits those changes? What about the DNA evidence that supports the idea of common descent? What part of evolution are you denying?

I find it very curious that you say "If we step out of the moral box built up by men and women, we find God." How do you discern between the "moral box built up by men and women" vs. the "moral code that He has given us"? The world is filled with religions that claim to have the "moral code from God." How is a person supposed to find the One True Religion^TM buried in the confused mass of human traditions?

Great chatting,

Richard

[Rose]

Hello DL
thanks for supplying the link to this video. I shall make a general comment of two from what came from the video.

Jonathan Haidt said that our minds were designed by evolution. Surely that is a misnomer because evolution cannot design. Evolution has no plan.

He says that our evolved minds are blinded to the truth. All I will say is that the acceptance of Evolution is to blind our minds to the truth. Should evolution have blinded my mind to this truth?

Jonathan Haidt uses the example of the Dalai Lama as an example, probably because he is the best living example. The truth is that Jesus the Son of God is the greatest example of someone who has lived. Jesus had the greatest moral authority and in the eyes of God was sinless. I doubt the Dalai Lama can claim that. Jonathan Haidt said the Dalai Lama's his enormous moral authority came from his moral humility. Once again, there is no greater example than the humility of Jesus which manifested itself in all aspects of Jesus' life.

As far as "being outside the box", God is already there. This is why God has shown us the way. It is the way that men and women are struggling by going their own way. If we step out of the moral box built up by men and women, we find God. In finding God, we come to know the moral code that He has given us, it is the moral code that evolution would make us blind to or if we accept that we start off with a blank mind at birth, the moral code is not something men or women will find out easily for themselves. The fact that men and women will do as they want or agree to do as a team is not in accordance with what God wants. The inventions or men and women have made the problem of finding the truth that much more difficult.

At the moment, this forum shows the contributers are in different teams.

All the best,

David

Hi David,

The one huge flaw I see in your statement of Jesus being "the greatest example of a human and the greatest moral authority" is the fact that nowhere in all his teachings does he ever condemn all the moral atrocities contained in the Old Testament that were ordered by his father, Yahweh. How could greatness, or morality be attributed to anyone who condones by silence the murder of babies and the rape of women? Keeping that in mind the Dali Lama is a far greater example of a human life than Jesus.

All the best,
Rose

[duxrow]

Hey Rose,
You don't think that serpent in the garden had anything to do with those atrocities? Remembering how God told Satan about Job being in his (satan's) domain, seems to me there's been a mixup between the works of God and the works of Satan.

[jce]

Hi Cheow,

10. Thou can divorce and remarry Absolutely! All people should be able to divorce and remarry whomever they wish, this also has nothing to do with morality


All the best,
Rose

Perhaps this one is contingent upon whether or not a contract has been signed, unless of course it is not immoral to break a written agreement. A societal majority could however, agree to modify the intent of written agreements thus rendering them "invalid" should one of the parties agree to terminate the agreement, for whatever reason. In this way a society could continue to advance or degenerate based on the ever evolving description and mutual understanding of morality. How's that for a perfectly democratic, existential, adaptive solution?

John