I mean I guess it’s what the complex system is trying to accomplish. Wolves are amazing at hunting. Bees form pretty complex colonies and produce honey. The best we got is let’s build weapons of mass destruction to deter others from using it on us. We might have advanced in technology, but our nature seems rather primitive if you think about it.
You greatly oversimplify us. Think of all the different kinds of groups people form, and all of the kinds of things that they can work together to accomplish. Bees are social insects, a pretty good example, but insects and limited in their abilities. Wolves form simple packs.
But they’re effective in what they are trying to accomplish. Still the original idea is why are we making an effort in anything like group cooperation? For material goods? Seems like a futile attempt at building something for nothing.
It seems like we’re getting away from the point. Mine is that as social animals, we have an incentive to get along with each other, which makes morality valuable in its own right. Say we have a group which forms to cooperate in hunting animals, processing and cooking the meat, and other needed tasks for survival. Person “A” however decides that he doesn’t really care about anything but mass murdering other people in the group and then dying, like a rabid chimpanzee. How do you think that group, him, and the other individuals in it are going to do as a result? Are they going to be better off, and more likely to succeed in their endeavors, or worse off? Are that person’s genes more likely to be passed on, or less likely?
I hear hoofbeats… probably the Four Unicorns of the Apocalypse. 
Some years ago they said humans are the only species known to engage in torture and murder for pleasure. (Cats “playing” with their food before eating it are simply acting on the hunting instinct.) Has that been revised?
As for Andrew’s objection, yes, of course there are situations in which an individual decides the expectation of pleasure exceeds the expectation of pain (including emotional pain, also including the emotional pain resulting from an intellectual calculation that the action would have negative consequences in any number of ways) and therefore goes ahead with the destructive action.
That’s why the challenge for all of us is to avoid letting those situations occur, to the extent that we can. A code of conduct is supposed to do that, whatever the alleged basis of the code is (biology, theology, etc.). A greater understanding of how people get into those situations probably helps.
Sure, but really why do we even care? Life is fleeting away, seems like a waste of time even talking about it.
Then why are we talking about it? 
I agree with what you are saying, yes we are social animals. Yes we also have an incentive working together, we produce more. It’s basic economics.
But outside of belonging and able to be part of society, increasing production that causes positive consequences like improving living conditions, quality of life, technology, wealth, etc. Are these two things enough for me to believe morality that is just a social construct enough for me to follow it. I may very well live off a society that does that, and I selfishly say run a ponzi scheme and shuffle money over seas hidden and live off that for years.
I guess what i’m trying to say, your answer isn’t a sufficient enough reason for me without some sort of objective morality.
I agree we should avoid them, i’m not debating that. I’m just wondering why? Why do you and I seem to agree that mass murder is wrong?
Because i’m questioning if there is some sort of objective morality or it’s just as social construct of getting along. If it’s just for getting along, it bothers me. I can see for most it’s enough, but for me…it leaves very little personal incentive to always following social morality that is just something we agree on. There are obviously many instances in my day where being immoral would benefit me with very little consequences. and is the fear of consequences the reason to be moral. Or is it moral if i’m only doing it to benefit being moral.
It’s like the gender identity question. We’re born with instincts, and we build codes of conduct on top of those.
If you were raised by wolves, you would have a different code of conduct. If you somehow survived without the direct help of any animals, instead growing up eating fruit and fungus, you would have a different code of conduct.
Your instincts would still be there, your capacity for philosophy would still be there, and you might have religious visions. (You would also have the influence of whatever you experienced in the womb, so in a sense the “social” element can’t be 100% removed.)
Would any of those sources of inspiration for the development of a code of conduct be “right”? That’s not really something that can be proven or disproven objectively. We can, however, look at what makes a society worth living in (including what makes it likely to survive) and what doesn’t, and based on that we can say this kind of conduct is good, and that kind is bad.
If you’re worried about the afterlife, try this:
If your soul goes on trial in the afterlife because your conduct was immoral in the eyes of whatever authority has jurisdiction, I tried to live rationally and compassionately may or may not be a valid defense. But I figured there was no point to anything, so I just f***ed around carelessly sounds like the kind of defense that wouldn’t go down so well.
As for the “afterlife” in the biological sense (your direct descendants and your relatives – and ultimately that includes all life on earth and possibly the universe), just try to live in a way that, as far as you can tell, is the best way to live to avoid making the planet (and universe) worse. Simple, eh? 
But that’s very subjective. I’m not saying social conduct isn’t real. It is, obviously. But that to me is not morality. I have no problem following social conducts when it benefits me. But sometimes it really doesn’t and it seems just as easy to not follow it. I mean for me does it not mean that ISIS is ok? They seem to believe they are moral and just, and it’s something they want in their society. Who’s to say bringing the caliphate back and the islamic empire under shiria law wouldnt benefit us? They seem to think so.
I’m not. I don’t know if there is one. Actually I would probably prefer not in some ways. Not really my concern about morality.
Basically, I need a definition of what is good to even base any arguments with morals. Kant has some interesting ideas, I’m not fully sold on that.
There are three possible settings for one’s moral compass: God, the common good, or self. The common good provides a serviceable setting but it’s ultimately insufficient because it provides too dim a beacon to illuminate many of life’s moral ambiguities and deeper questions. Only a relationship with God can provide that level of illumination.
That’s how you see things now. Without knowing what your standards are for concepts like immoral, benefit, and very little consequences, it’s hard to know what kind of situations you actually face.
For example you might think I should steal this money because I’m untouchable so I’ll get away with it, but then you’re contributing to corruption, lawlessness, resentment, etc. And people keep voting with their feet, showing that societies where that kind of thing is expected are (generally) not where people want their children to grow up.
So there are consequences here on earth, whether or not a heavenly authority also cares, but you need to think long term (“long game”) to avoid falling into the trap of out of sight, out of mind.
To give another example, four men on a boat debate who should eat whom. They choose the weakest one, expecting him to die soon anyway. Then they’re suddenly rescued, tried and convicted. 
The law says it was murder because they weren’t actually certain that they weren’t going to be rescued, and they were supposed to wait for the weakling to die of natural causes before eating him.
In that case (true story), the law may or may not be “right”. But at the very least, it has a point. If we use a code of conduct that says as soon as you’re uncertain of your survival you have the right to eat the weakest person in sight, that’s likely (so the argument goes) to make things worse.
(The notion of as soon as I’m afraid for my life I can kill people with impunity is also at the core of those police shootings that people get so upset about, though that’s another topic.)
It is, in the sense that everyone has different preferences. It’s less subjective in the sense that people in general tend to agree on certain measures of quality of life, and historians might also agree that certain factors make it easier for a society to endure times of hardship.
On average, a human being wants life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, including all the conditions that make those things easier to maintain/achieve. A quality of life index will therefore take into consideration factors like education, health care, pollution, crime rate, freedom of expression, infrastructure, and so on. And these factors will directly or indirectly be related to a society’s ability to recover from a disaster, defeat an enemy in war, go to the moon, make great works of art about the meaning of life, and so on.
As I said, people keep voting with their feet: from poorer, more dangerous countries (where “life is cheap”) to richer, safer countries. When you see a minority moving in the opposite direction and even trying to create a new country (or recreate an old one), that means the country they’re supposed to be satisfied with isn’t satisfying them, for one reason or another.
I don’t think nature embodies some sort of collective consciousness. Human species was just born with a instinct morality. I said it given by nature as a metaphor.
Morality is not set for benefits of individuals but for societies or species. There are many instances being immoral is beneficial to individuals as you mentioned. But it may be harmful for the whole society.
For us it is. Other animals don’t work together in this way. Morality is an imperative for us under this structure.
But outside of belonging and able to be part of society, increasing production that causes positive consequences like improving living conditions, quality of life, technology, wealth, etc.
Yeah, in other words, other than surviving as the type of animals we are born as.
Are these two things enough for me to believe morality that is just a social construct enough for me to follow it. I may very well live off a society that does that, and I selfishly say run a ponzi scheme and shuffle money over seas hidden and live off that for years.
Whether you choose to follow morality is irrelevant to whether it exists or not. No one is trying to say it’s some kind of binding force. People choose to be selfish all the time. This may or may not enhance their own success–how do you think a group will handle a garden variety thief that’s caught? What happened to Ponzi in the end?—but it’s generally going to be a detriment to a group, which is an important structure for us as social animals. Experiments have shown that even chimps have a basic sense of fairness. How much more developed are our senses in this area? Don’t we have particular feelings about selfish individuals who are leaching off of other members of a group, even a group of 2, and ways of dealing with them?
I guess what i’m trying to say, your answer isn’t a sufficient enough reason for me without some sort of objective morality.
I guess you should keep believing in the objective morality then 
People do all kinds of things, but you don’t think that cooperation is one of them? Do people cooperate more, or torture and murder each other more? Those hoofbeats sound like an army, what do you think it takes to get that going?
Sure, people co-operate. But–
As a social species, we place a higher value on group cooperation than other species. You might say it’s been a key to our undeniable success. Getting along with each other is in our blood.
If we are the only species that kills for pleasure, how does that reflect on our co-operation? If we are the only species that’s ever come close to wiping itself out (not to mention the species we’ve already wiped out and then regretted), what does that say about our success?
Essentially nothing. The cooperation stands on its own. Whether we eventually wipe ourselves out as a result of our success will never change the fact that we have risen to be one of the most dominant animal species in the history of life on this planet.
The successes say everything, the failures nothing. 
I don’t quite agree.
But we’re not making some kind of overall assessment of success or failure here. The point is, do people ever cooperate? We don’t always have to do so, or the cooperation be successful in the long term, for the answer to be yes. How much? A lot, I’d say. Would moral sensibility be a benefit in such a framework?
I think other species kill for pleasure and not for food and survival. I think dolphins and whales kill to just fuck with other species sometimes or for no reason other than fun that we can understand. I mean my dog brought me squirrels and birds he killed as gifts before. Idk if that counts though.
The problem i see is, wouldn’t our moral sensibility be completely determined by just the social structure we are placed in. There has been many times a large society of people got together and did what I would consider immoral and even evil. They cooperated to the success of that particular group. They even cooperated to stay alive but yet we now have laws since Nazi germany from the Geneva convention that saying cooperation toward war crimes is still a war crime and it’s not an excuse for say a accountant at a concentration camp to say he was just doing his job.
The problem with this moral sensibility idea is it’s entirely determined by society and our nature.
- I’m not entirely sure our nature is “good”. Maybe it’s not bad not either but I could not say we are innately “good” with any definition of good that I can think of.
- Some societies have cooperated for what they believe is the ultimate good.
If I was a child in Nazi germany. My parents and family were all nazis and fed me Nazi ideas from birth. My friends all also all Nazis, my school was teaching me that the world will be better if we make a pure Race and Jews and gays and gipsys are the problem. They even had “scientific” reasons and philosophical ideas they taught me and it there no other competing ideas. I get sent to hitlers youth camp and even the fuerer himself came and pat me on the back and said Im doing the right thing and it’s good. It will make the world better place. I later become a gas chamber operator at a concentration camp. Am I evil? Because my survival did kinda depend on cooperation. I cooperated with the society I’m in. I though it was for the good and had pure intentions that this was right and it will make the world better. Later even following and cooperation i get punished for crimes against humanity and recieves consequences. What went wrong? Should I have known innately what im doing is wrong? Or is it just moral sensibility and it happens that other people decided I’m wrong? Who’s actually immoral?
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if you think you’d freely choose to be gassed along with your entire family then youd have a case. otherwise… it looks like a morally indefensible position.
however you do have a point because we are all complicit in varying degrees for the suffering of others, its just wether we choose to recognise it or not. to recognise the existence and feelings of the other.