Morality without god

I finally have a bit of time. OK, so we get a good feeling when we have done the right thing. Well, why is that? Why should we feel good for doing the right thing? IMHO it is because we had a sense of morality in the first place. The good feeling is a by product of having morality. How many people feel resentful when they are placed in a position of having to do the right thing, maybe because people are watching and they don’t want to lose face? The good feeling isn’t in all people. Some people have a higher degree of morality than others obviously. The feelings are the result of morality not the cause of it. I don’t disagree with that. In my view morality is about having a heart that actually wants to move away from that model. I know that I sit in my nice comfortable home in the full knowledge that there are people who don’t have a home at all. I just came home from a nice dinner with my wife in a Thai restaurant knowing that a huge percentage of the world is starving. I live peacefully and safely whereas many live in constant fear for their life. All this is true but other than the nice easy safe thing of sending money to the third world as well as being a rep for an African home for young women I do nothing. I am far closer to being as moral a person as a mass murderer than I am to what I really should be.On the other hand though we do have the ability to overcome to a small degree our instinct for selfishness and we are on occasion capable of even completely selfless behaviour. Again, morality isn't what you do. What you do is the result of your morality. I believe our basic instinct is to consider the self first and in order to do the selfless thing, (to act in someone else’s best interest at personal cost), we have to rise above that basic instinct. That is beautifully written, and is consistent I think with both of our points of view.

You say that God could have created a world where indifference is worse than evil. IMHO that is exactly what we have. As I’ve said to Dogmafood morality is about mind and heart. What we do or say flows from our heart’s moral condition. To a degree I think that absolute lack of morality could be defined as total indifference to the suffering of others. (We might however go further and consider those that find pleasure is the suffering of others, and we don’t have to look far for the examples of that.)At its most basic life is about survival and I agree that in many cases co-operation enhances our chance for our survival but that isn’t what morality is. Using your terms I would say that morality is having a heartset, (if there is such a word), that moves from indifference to others,( or for that matter all of creation), to having a heartset that is primarily concerned for others. If we couldn’t be indifferent then we wouldn’t have the choice to be concerned. It would simply be the way things are and we wouldn’t even know what it means to be concerned for others. When we go in the water we get wet. If we go in the air we get....? It’s just how things are.

I don’t deny that we can get a good feeling when we do the right thing but my question is why do we get that good feeling. Also I would add that there is always a tinge of regret because we could have done something for ourselves with our time and money. I think that there are a number of ways to define morality and one might be that we move from seeking self pleasure to seeking pleasure for others. ...just as morality as evolving from a non-intelligent non-moral first cause is also unfalsifiable. We all just come to our own subjective conclusions. That might be a great thing to do. Maybe it would absolutely make his day. (Mind you I think I’ll stick with Uganda.)

How about the traditional throwing yourself on a grenade to save your buddies? There are countless other examples. Certainly, because it is a moral choice. We constantly make moral choices in our lives — some big and some small. I contend that there is a fundamental part of our character that balances off the selfish and unselfish sides of who we are. It seems to me, from personal experience, that my first instinct is selfish but then there is another seemingly intangible voice that makes it a choice between following that first instinct or choosing to act unselfishly. I think that in life though, the more we make the unselfish choice the closer we come to having the unselfish choice be instinctive. From a Christian POV I think that it is all about establishing a trajectory based on wanting to do the unselfish thing as opposed to allowing our selfish nature to become entrenched.

The fact still remains that the individual sacrificed his life and his ability to reproduce for the life of others. I have heard the argument that it is about co-operation and maintaining the tribe or even the gene pool but you are extending it to the whole human race. If you take your argument to its logical conclusion you would say that individuals at war would not try and kill the enemy. IMHO I have falsified it. Profit isn’t much good to you when you’re dead. I would agree that God did create us as selfish creatures, but with the potential to reject selfishness in favour of selflessness. If we don’t have the ability to be selfish then there would be no such thing as selflessness. We would be no different than the computers we work with. Again, IMHO the fact that we aren’t like our computers is to me a strong indication that we are the product of an intelligent and moral first cause which would infer that the first cause (God) is necessary for morality to exist. That does not mean that belief or faith in God is necessary for morality.

Certainly some have a greater disposition to be able to deal with killing another human than others. Let's be honest. Many soldiers that go to war wind up enjoying it. I recently watched a video of US Serviceman in the mainland US fire a missile from a drone in Afghanistan killing the occupants in a car. Afterwards it was hi-fives all around. Personally I found it chilling and I have to wonder what we think we are doing to the mind set of our young people.We do have a knowledge that kindness is a good thing but I contend that when there is a selfish interest involved that selfishness usually wins. It does in my own case.

I just don’t buy it. I understand the argument is that it is about the society and the gene pool so that every act of altruism is fundamentally based on selfishness. To go back to the proverbial guy throwing himself on a hand grenade to save others, he not only dies himself but also any descendants that he might have. He has very effectively not only removed himself from the gene pool and the society but it also means that he is now unable to pass on his genes to the society and the gene pool.

I don’t think that I would understand indifference that way. I would say that indifference to the plight of others is exactly what Hitler and Pol Pot were guilty of. In their lust for power they were completely indifferent to the harm they did to others. Indifference to others leads to our basic selfish desires running rampant. Indifference and evil go hand in hand. I believe that there is existence in other dimensions that we with our 5 senses are unable to perceive but are in some way interconnected. I know we’ve gone through this before but our own thoughts are non-material and yet real. It is my belief that somehow out of this greater reality we have been infused with an understanding of good and evil.I also believe that our sense of morality is infectious and as a result it does evolve over time. As a result I think that we have today cultures that are more aware of others and the environment, and that these traits have evolved. However the question as always goes back to whether this could have evolved from a non-moral, non-intelligent first cause. It is my contention that an intelligent moral first cause is more probable.

Not 100 % but essentially yes. I think that it is easier to demonstrate that humans are capable of acts that are not only of zero benefit to the actor but is detrimental to the actor, than it is to prove that all acts have at their root a self serving motivation. In the case of someone who sacrifices their life to save the lives of others, who they may not even know, means that he has not only lost his/her own life but is now unable to pass on his/her genes.Edited by GDR, : puntuation

Good post and I agree with all of it except for one sentence. I don’t exactly agree that we do what we want to do. It’s a narrow point but I think that the guy who throws himself on a grenade does it because he believes that is the right thing to do, although every fibre of his being desperately wants to be somewhere else. Presumably you would say that he is doing what he wants to do because he wants to do the right thing, but my point would be that in order for him to do the right thing he has to overcome what he really wants which is to survive. Most of us want to do the right thing, but at what cost? Where do we draw the line? I think for most it is drawn prior to the point where we sacrifice our lives.

It makes sense although I’m not convinced that there is an altruistic gene. I think it is more likely something like one of Dawkin’s memes. I think that cultural, and particularly parental pressures, spread the altruistic meme so that it has evolved and over the centuries become stronger. I also believe that there is at its root an intelligent and moral first cause. My own personal subjective belief is that that divine first cause continues to be subtly involved through our hearts and minds in the spreading of that altruistic meme.What you are saying though does not negate the point that sacrificing his/her life and future genes is a selfless act.

I’m not sure that it’s germane to the topic of this thread but I believe that we have to overcome what it is we want to do in order to do what we believe we should do. I think that there is a huge difference between doing what we want to do and doing what we should do.The idea of selflessness developing from a non-moral, non-intelligent first cause is IMHO not plausible. A life is a life and so why should I give up my life and genes in favour of the life and genes of a complete stranger? From a strictly naturalistic POV, we could assume that if I’m prepared to give up my life for a stranger then I think it would be clear that I have inherited selfless genes. The person that I’m going to die for might very well have completely selfish genes so in fact my sacrifice would actually help to move society away from selflessness.

It might be an explanation for how it works but it isn't an explanation for where it came from. Just because it gives an explanation for how societies benefit from selflessness tells us nothing about the first cause for selfless behaviour or altruism.

I just thought I'd drop in my 2 cents in the middle of your discussion.
I actually agree with you Tangle. Who would have thought it. I think that the point of morality isn't about what we do or don't do as individuals or societies, and that it is a variable. I would say is that our "codes of practice" that our societies adopt are a result of our collective morality. By extension our individual "code of practice" is a result is a result of our individual morality.Our morality is essentially our base motivation that drives us. The basis of all of our lives either individually or collectively is somewhere on the line between total selfishness to total selflessness. I don't imagine that either of those extremes are ever reached but we obviously we all fall somewhere in between. Our morality isn't our practice. It is about our hearts that provide the motivation for our practices.Therefore I think that if God exists, then it is God's wish that our aspirations would be, no matter how imperfectly we achieve it, that we would actually be totally selfless.If there is no god then I would think that the ideal would be that our aspirations would, no matter how imperfectly we achieve it, be that we would live lives that would be in the best interests of our society.The question then is how can we tell the difference between the two and it would seem to me that we can't. Therefore in the end, the question about "morality without god" can't really be determined.I would add though That as our most basic instinct is the instinct for survival, it would seem that there is something beyond our nature that can give us cause to overcome that fundamental instinct for survival, but that is JMHO.