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Quote by: SoylentGreen  I think it more the other way around. Our need for morality lessens as we better understand what influences us.
Morality is more like religion. A way of controlling others. The more primitive the society the greater the influence morality has, the more stricter the rules. But as society develops it's technology and understanding then morality becomes more fluid less a rule and more a guide line. |
I don't think so. 'Morality' can be used to refer to the conglomerate of values held by each person. No one can escape having values – not you, not me, or anyone else. Values may change, they may be contradictory or inconsistent, but you can't exist in this world and at the same time value nothing. Living itself implicates you value existing. Enough not to just lay motionless and starve to death anyway. Strict rule-following, as you describe it, is an incidental feature of morality, not the defining aspect, and strictness and rules can go away with some kind of morality still being present. Some kind of morality must always be present in every human.
If morality and values are continuous concepts, then morality can never go away – its not in humanity's character to value nothing.
To elaborate more on my old point: from a sociological perspective, cultures operate like systems which unify people under a single table of values. Humans being impressionable creatures, the values of the culture (or rather each individual's interpretations of those values) are generally accepted throughout without much fuss. People receive benefits from accepting this cultural morality – the security which comes from being part of an orderly group satisfies desires for self-preservation and pleasure quite nicely – so they never think to challenge the authenticity of their culture's values. Such people exist in a 'subjective' state – they receive values from their culture, but they don't challenge them (why question something which works for you?). In much the same way, most people don't question their vehicles or their medicines (they don't feel a compulsion to become engineers and doctors in order to understand how these things work – they don't feel a compulsion to become priests to understand how their religion's morality works).
In contrast, the people (moralists) who make knowing values – their origins, nature, and applications – are like engineers and doctors in that they understand how an object functions and know what they need to do to make it serve human interests. The engineer understands machinery, the doctor the human body, and the moralist understands whatever it is about humans which makes them value things and why. The better the engineer understands his craft, the better suited he is to produce a machine which will be a great benefit to the interested parties. The same goes for the doctor and the moralist.
The moralist, in so far as he is not a pseudo-moralist, is of course a moral objectivist -- he looks at values from a feigned third-person perspective -- he thinks about morality objectively, the same way the physicist thinks about the universe, the psychologist the mind, the engineer his machines, and the doctor the human body.