I'm writing another article for my blog and I was wondering about morals and moral behavior so I thought I would purpose this question to the minds at the Cave. Where do our morals come from. I have my ideas but I want to hear everyone elses. If you feel they come from God then how are we made aware of them. If you feel that God doesn't provide our moral standards to us then how does man work that them out? What criteria did man use to detemine that murder was wrong and why is do some morals seem universal to all humans? I am very interested in everyone's input.
I believe that morality is rooted in the human ability to empathize. Empathy, like language, is an innate faculty in humans which has evolved over many hundreds of thousands of years out of a survival need for it and because human societies benefited greatly from it. Empathy, merged with reason, produced abstract concepts such as ethics, morality, and justice. And humans used those concepts to create rules and laws.
What evolutionary benefits are their to morality and empathy? Why would nature perfer moral behavior and empathy over, let's say, merciless behavior? And why does man seem to be the only product of evolution to benefit from the behaviors? If these are evolved traits and they are beneficial to survival wouldn't they be more common in nature?
Man is not the only product of evolution that has "morals". Most apes exhibit morals. They care for the sick and injured of their groups. They know when they do wrong, they exhibit sadness and remorse. Dogs are like that. Elephants are like that. Almost all animals that live in social groups have that.
A fossil found of Homo Sapien Neanderthalensis (Neanderthals) showed that this particular subject had suffered severe trauma. Several broken ribs, a severely fractured skull, and some other injuries that escape me. These wounds did not kill him though. He was treated back to health, and died years later. This happend tens of thousands of years ago. When mankind lived in groups of 5 to 10, and no more then several hundred thousand of our species populated this planet.
Since human beings are not exactly the best physically equipped predator, compaired to the others at the time of our evolution, we had to learn differant traits to fight our way up the ladder. Social communal behavior is one of those traits. It's an established fact that humans survive better as a group then alone. Groups can't hold together if everyone is cut throat, stab you in the back to get ahead. Communities cannot grow and thrive that way. Empathy, morals, etc, must develop. The need to survive, thrive, and reproduce has caused us to grow to depend on our fellow man. To treat them with kindness, love, and compassion.
You could say our need to fight and kill is rooted in the same evolutionary process. Look at the rest of the animals on this planet. Nearly all of them exhibit forms of hostilities to "strangers" of their species. The need to survive and thrive forces them to fight for territory, rights to mate, etc... This stuff is hard wired into our system. It's in our DNA to fight and protect what is ours. But since our brain has grown and evolved to such astounding levels, we take it further as well.
"Morals" are easily explained through the evolutionary system. They are probably our biggest means of survival, and the largest reason we are as advanced a society today as we are.