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wherein personal decisions feel good and true.
“Nor is science the enemy.
For more than a thousand generations they have increased the survival and reproductive success of those who conformed to tribal faiths.
Indoctrinability
instinct.
by consensus under the guidance of the innate rules of m...
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Ethical and religious beliefs are created from the bottom up, from people to their culture.
gross insufficiency of knowledge needed to judge the full consequences of our moral decisions, especially for the long term, say a decade or more. We have learned a great deal about ourselves and the world in which we live, but need a great deal more to be fully wise. There is a temptation at
People need more than reason. They need the poetry of affirmation, they crave an authority greater than themselves at rites of passage and other moments of high seriousness. A majority desperately wish for the immortality the rituals seem to underwrite.
surrender the precious self and
A Treatise of Human Nature
The Descent of Man
Immanuel Kant, judged by history the greatest of secular philosophers, addressed moral reasoning very much as a theologian. Human beings, he argued, are independent moral agents with a wholly free will capable of obeying or breaking
minds are subject to a categorical imperative,
of what our actions ought to be.
Nature, Kant said, is a system of cause and effect,
moral choice is a matter of free will, for which there is no cause and effect. In making moral choices, in
Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong. It does not accord, we know now, with the evidence of how the brain works.
Moral reasoning in his view cannot dip into psychology and the social sciences in order to locate ethical principles, because they yield only a causal picture and fail to illuminate the basis of moral justification.
road. He offered the very plausible premise that justice be defined as fairness,
Ethicists don’t need that kind of information. You really can’t pass from is to ought.
a genetic predisposition and suppose that because it is part of human nature, it is somehow transformed into an ethical precept.
be physical products of the brain and culture.
Adultery not only causes feelings of guilt, it is generally disapproved of by society, so these are other reasons to avoid
There is a supreme principle,
and its officials may do.” Rawls would point us toward egalitarianism
The individual is seen as predisposed biologically to make certain choices.
a belief in the command of God or the natural order of the universe.
The naturalistic fallacy
Most agree that ethical codes have arisen by evolution through the interplay of biology and culture.
sciences, subject to judgment according to their consequences.
dynamic relation between cooperation and defection.
empathy to the distress of others and certain processes of attachment between infants and their caregivers.
Such a process repeated through thousands of generations inevitably gave birth to the moral sentiments.
xenophobia.
The complementary instincts of morality and tribalism are easily manipulated.
labor was finely divided as a growing minority of the populace specialized as craftsmen, traders, and soldiers.
hierarchical.
always to the advantage of the ruling classes.
About this time the idea of law-giving gods originated. Their commands lent the ethical codes overpowering authority, once again—no surprise—to the favor of the rulers.
who have evidently never given thought to the evolutionary origin and material functioning of the human brain.
the innate epigenetic rules of moral reasoning will probably not prove to be aggregated into simple instincts such as bonding, cooperativeness, or altruism. Instead, the rules most probably will turn out to be an ensemble of many algorithms whose interlocking activities guide the mind across a landscape of nuanced moods and choices. Such a prestructured mental world may at first seem too complicated
instinctual algorithms,
Paleolithic egalitarian and tribalistic instincts are still firmly installed.
As part of the genetic foundation of human nature, they cannot be replaced.
they are not yet in the genes.
produce cause-and-effect predictions and sound judgments based on them.
From a convergence of these several approaches, the true origin and meaning of ethical behavior may come into focus.
Religions are analogous to superorganisms.
They express a primary rule of human existence, that whatever is necessary to sustain life is also ultimately biological.
