Origins of Moralistic Behavior: Naturalistic or Not?

[Whiskey1428]

To start I would like to say I have my own reservations about all of this. Anyway, for the sake of gaining better understanding, I will submit to other's views for this particular argument.

Stealing a car from your neighbor with 100% assurance of you not getting caught would only be beneficial, but only beneficial to you and not the group (group-selection theory). Merely saying that the existence or moral behavior automatically excludes any naturalistic explanation is bunk due to "survival of the fittest" meaning, the most fit to adapt to environmental changes. You are left with the origins of such. The only logical predecessor of morals would be instincts. So I am inclined to inquire what are the origins of instincts? For if we can accurately postulate the origins of such we can formulate a sound hypothesis.

Josh

[Night]

Very interesting subject.

Instincts are later developments resulting from the evolution of the nervous system. Insects are known as instinctive creatures. They do not logically ponder their behavior, it is all based on instincts hard wired into their nervous systems. The nervous system originally evolved to give a creature faster motor control and reflexes.

To understand the development of morality, we must have a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system. Most simple creatures possess only a peripheral nervous system, basically similar to a simple computer. A physical action, such as a human hand touching a hot stove, will send signals through nerves from the hand to the spinal cord and to ancient regions of the brain. This pain/heat signal provokes an immediate response, which is to move the hand from the source of pain. All of this goes on without conscious thought.

Instincts are much faster than we would act without instincts. If you had to think about your hand being on a hot stove and you had to consciously decide to move your hand, you'd get burnt a lot more than simply having an instinctive reaction.

The central nervous system evolved to give a creature actual processing power. A central nervous system allows an organism to process vision, hearing, smell, and allows it to combine all of these senses into an accurate depiction of it's surroundings. This gave organisms the ability to hunt better, or escape hunters as well.

As the central nervous system grew more and more complex during this biological "arms race", as predators and their prey evolved to survive better, consciousness developed. We don't know where exactly consciousness first evolved, it really depends on your definition of consciousness.

As you correctly said, morality developed from the evolutionary pressure known as group-selection. Many animals have to live together in a social group. Predators find this socialization beneficial because they can combine their efforts together and bring down prey more effectively. For example, one lion is not very dangerous to a large herd of African buffalo. But a "pride" of lions is dangerous to any herd animal on the savannah. And forager animals, like gazelle and buffalo, also evolved socialization as a defense mechanism. One buffalo living by itself is in a lot of danger of being killed. But a giant herd of buffalo is much safer.

These groups of animals have their own special moral codes. They have strict hierarchies, especially social predator animals. Even social wasps, ants, and bees have social orders, which is just a simplified form of morality.

Humans evolved from earlier primates that we're very social animals. Primates are generally "weak" compared to their African predators. They evolved social behavior to provide defense, and other benefits of social life. Morality evolved as a social "code" of sorts. If these social animals killed each other often, they couldn't live well together. So social animals evolved morality, instinctive "feelings" that murder is wrong, the way mating should be performed, who eats first, who leads the group, etc. These ancient "social orders" are just the morality of other animals. We call our own social orders morality.

Let's look at murder. Murder is not always wrong in some species. Male animals in many species will kill infants that aren't theirs. By killing other infants, they make females more receptive to their sexual advances, because if the female doesn't have kids she is more likely to mate. The male also eliminates the genes of competing males so it can spread its own.

But as a general rule, most animals will normally not kill other animals in their social group. This is due to group selection. If one animal kills another, the "killer" might benefit, but the rest of the group will suffer because of the loss of a group member. So group pressure will tend to favor members of the group that contribute to the group, and will eliminate those that don't contribute.

In fact, "group" is actually a very accurate word for human social behavior. For most of human history, we lived in relatively small tribes of 20-100 people, the "group". Humans evolved to identify as a group. If a person sees another person who isn't in their "group", studies show they will be a lot more suspicious of this person, and much less likely to assist this person in anything.

"Group identity" is the biggest force in human social orders. That is why people view people in their own religion as someone in their group, and will be more friendly to this person. People always think in terms of groups, and these modern "groups" are things like nationality, family, ethnicity, religion, location, etc.

This was a very simplistic explanation but I hope it gives you something to think about!