Yazata
Active Member
It's an interesting and difficult question.
Me too. I suspect that's the case for most people. They just kind of intuit that some things are right and other things are wrong. Of course, not everyone's intuitions coincide on particulars. So moral disagreements are difficult to adjudicate when they are based largely on people's feelings.
Yes, I agree with that too.
I hypothesize that human beings have a hard-wired set of social instincts that make it easier to get along in small groups. Compassion, solidarity, reciprocity... our ability to "mind read" others and intuit their emotional states. There's obvious evolutionary advantage to living in groups, so social animals very early evolved emotional/behavioral predispositions to facilitate that. We see much the same in other social mammals, so it's probably much older than the appearance of human beings. (I share much of it with my dog.) Some of the dinosaurs appear to have lived in groups, so they probably had some kind of innate proto-ethics too.
The big innovation with humans was probably the appearance of the language instincts and all the cognition associated with that. And I think that more detailed ethical ideas are kind of socially constructed by means of those cognitive processes in some large part by the various societies and cultures in which people live.
I doubt very much whether evolution of social instincts can explain the details of our ethics. Evolution can explain feelings of group loyalty and solidarity. That probably worked well in small paleolithic bands linked by blood ties. But what happened when people started gathering in early cities of thousands of people where people encountered total strangers every time they left their home? The old family-based loyalties started to break down.
So we see various things filling the void. We see larger groups of people trying to think of themselves as extended family by imagining mythical ancestors. Today's Jews imagine themselves tied together by blood ancestry back to Abraham. We see ancient Mesopotamian cities whose disseparate inhabitants all felt themselves tied together into one by loyalty to their city's patron god whose symbolic home on Earth was the city's great temple.
Today it's more often loyalty to abstractions. Political ideologies, nations in the modern sense, religions, ethical theories, whatever it happens to be. Those are the places where our ethical intuitions come from.
Our rationalizations (which are rarely all that rational) channel our basic feelings of loyalty to our group by defining what kind of group we feel that loyalty to. The Muslim Ummah? One's race? Liberation struggles of whoever (us) against whoever (them)? One's "gender" identity? One's nation?
I suspect that those kind of identifications are inherent in what it means to be human. Idealists can try to eliminate them so as to make everything "global" and everyone exactly the same, an idea that always threatens to become totalitarian when one asks whose values everyone will end up sharing. But I suspect that people will damnably continue to divide up into identity groups regardless.
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