Morality is the basis for social cohesion, which is necessary for the survival of the individual. Try to survive without the help of any other person, including parents, teachers, employees, …
But also, morality does fuck all to help you survive. Morality is absolutely useless for an individual, much to the contrary.
Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
novibe@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
That has nothing to do with morality. You don’t help people because it’s right. We help each other because we literally evolved to be social animals. Our biology in many ways depends on others. We feel individually sad and bad if we are isolated. And we feel good when we help others and see that people around us are doing well.
Morality has not been present throughout our evolutionary or even social history. Moralism only became an essential part of society after the Christianity and other religions like it took over.
Things being “wrong” or “right” doesn’t help us really, materially. In fact, it’s mostly been used to control people and keep them in-line. After all, who decides what’s “moral”?
Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
I consider morality to be a societal representation of our social nature.
novibe@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
morality noun principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour. “the matter boiled down to simple morality: innocent prisoners ought to be freed”
There isn’t much of a distinction between ethics and morality. Ethics is mostly spoken of as a philosophical question, and morality as an ideological one. Ethics is usually associated with the ancient Greeks, and morality to Christianity.
What I mean is that if we allow external entities and “authorities” to dictate to us what is right or wrong (an ideology, the Pope, a philosopher we like etc.), we aren’t living materially and objectively, but ideologically. We are being controlled by externalities.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I think the point is that Morality can very simply be an evolved human trait due to the massive second and third order effects that derive from it or the lack of it.
Let me put things this way: psychopathy is a condition people are born with, were they are unable to empathise with others so amongst other things they don’t feel the hurt of others and are thus capable of inflicting great hurt to others, lie and do all sorts of socially-reprehensible things without feeling a shred of guilt. In practice they will do what’s best for themselves with no consideration for others except for the purelly rational “can they punish me if I do this” (in simplifying all this a bit since psychopathy is actually a range rather than simply an Yes/No thing).
Anyways, around 3% of people are born high in the psychopathy spectrum. Now, if psychopathy is “doing what’s best for yourself with no consideration for others, no guilt, no conscience to be weighted on”, which one would expect is the best possible survival and reproductive strategy there is, why hasn’t that trait not dominated and human evolution led to 100% of people being born psychopaths?
My theory is that societies with too many psychopaths collapse, removing the psychopaths from the genetic pool.
How would that be. Well, they’re pure takers - why tire oneself by making if you can get away more easilly with taking - and they’re not good at cooperation (mainly because when others spot their character, they don’t trust them and don’t want to cooperate with them), so any society with too many psychopaths is less productive, has less resources available (too many takers too few makers), it stops evolving, can’t properly organise a collective defense system and eventually gets overwhelmed by some other society without such problems.
This last bit is just my theory for why, but certainly the part that only 3% of people are born like that is a pretty good indication that for some reason an amoral behaviour in humans is not a winning evolutionary strategy even though some might think at first sight that it would be.
novibe@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Psychopaths can just as well have morality systems… they will just look very different from yours.
Morality is ideological definition of right or wrong. To you, scamming someone might be wrong. To a psychopath, getting money from a sucker who’s less smart/strong/awesome than you is right.
Might makes right is a moral system… it might be “imoral” to you, but it’s a moral system nonetheless.
someguy3@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You heard it here lemmy, this guy things morality is “absolutely useless”.
novibe@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Yup! Doing things because some moral authority decided it was “right” is dumb as fuck and I’ll die on that hill.
What a lack of material analysis does to a mfer and all etc. etc.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 9 months ago
So if you could get away with it, would you kill your granny?!
Or is there something inside of you which make you feel uncomfortable about just the idea, even though in purelly logical terms the old lady is probably just a useless consumer of resources well past her breeding age?
If there is that something inside of you (i.e. you’re neither a psychopath nor a sociopath) that too is Moral.
I agree with your point about externally defined and imposed “Moral” (which is really Morality or Moralizing), it’s just that most people also have their own internal Right-Wrong Compass (I suspect derived from one’s empathy) and that too is Moral and it’s not under external control.
novibe@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
What you suppose is your “internal” morality compass is an “internalised” one.
I wouldn’t kill my grandma because I love her, not because it’s “wrong”. I won’t kill anyone, I guess, because I don’t like seeing living beings suffer. Not because it’s “wrong”.
Morality is always an internalised “system”. It can’t be “natural”, it’s always ideological.
But that doesn’t mean that being materialistic in analysis of our existence as humans would make you do “evil” things. If you try to analyse us as a species scientifically, we realise that we literally evolved to cooperate and be nice to each other. Our chemistry makes that necessary. We hate being alone and seeing those around us suffer, because those things produce “feel bad” chemicals. We love helping each other because that produces “feel good” chemicals. On average of course (as you mention psychopaths do exist).
In fact, a purely material analysis of us would show that greed, individualism, destroying the planet, killing all animals on it, making large portions of our species to suffer in poverty etc. are counterproductive. Those things all make us individually feel worse and have worse lives. We would have the best lives if everyone around us had access to all amazing developments of the past centuries freely, if the animals and ecosystems of the world were protected, if the people around us cared about us and lived with us, not despite us. And none of that is moral, or based on morality. Just science and materialism.