According to Kohlberg, morality has its root in our ability to accommodate the varying positions of others around us, or at least to tolerate them. We call this empathy. In his more advanced stages of moral development, he asserts that reason and prediction play greater roles in shaping our behaviours. Oddly, morality tends to want to beget a regression to the mean, or conformity, to values, standards, and acts permissible in a culture. People in a culture tend to desire to behave in a narrow range of permissible behaviours. It helps with belonging and acceptance, which those researching interest-based models of social interaction would say is an important element in well-being.

Lack of foresight, impulsivity, and ego-centric reasoning, which Larry Kohlberg would say is the purview of those stuck in the bottom two levels of moral reasoning, they comprising his First Stage.

As is the case with most behaviours, moral reasoning is learned and adopted for its perceived values. For those with arrested development, or brain damage of a defined/undefined type, moral reasoning has little meaning. It might be still interest-based though, and adopted because the alternatives in many contexts are not going to serve the person well. Very intelligent, but otherwise amoral, people can still function well in society because it's the easiest path for them. It's not to say they won't be more opportunistic than others whose conscience plays a larger role in shaping their overt acts.

It's interesting that almost every person will, if comfortable, admit to fantasizing about immoral acts they wouldn't dream of carrying out if others were ever to find out or to observe them. We have to ask ourselves why such behavior is at odds with otherwise lawful and ethical people, and what drives them to value these contrarian acts for sexual or non-sexual reasons.

I don't know that 'the beasts' are capable of moral reasoning...I would think not...but they have instinctual tendencies to act in ways that seem altruistic. I think of dogs defending a toddler from danger, or apparently empathetic toward a crying person, as is commonly seen.

Morality was designed with the needs of the group in mind. Morality was not designed with the needs of the individual in mind. The reason for this approach was the team affect. A team, when optimized, can become more than the sum of its parts.

If you had all the parts needed to make a fancy sports car, but as a pile of parts, it has no practical value beyond recyclable resources. This is analogous to a bunch of individuals all going their own way. But when assembled properly, into the working sports car, all these parts take on a new layer of value. This was the goal of morality.

The mistake often made, based on ego-centric philosophy, was to assume morality was about outdated laws for individuals. Nobody thought in terms of the team affect and how these rules still apply. Many people lament how traditional morality does not allow them to have their way. They are not team players, who have the team in mind. They are the hot dogs who wants to play when they want to and how they want to. Morality is like the coach, who puts them in, in certain situations for certain shots. The individual may lament his limited play, as unfair and want the rules changed.

If you look at the 10 Commandments, each one, if done by all members of the group, would remove all types of triggers that could upset the integration of the group. The first commandment of one god gets rid of a variety of problems connected to religious bickering and warring among the group. This may not optimize all individuals, who like to speculate. All the thieves were upset since stealing was not allowed. However, if they all bite the bullet, and the team wins the championship, then everyone rises to new heights. Then the sacrifice now makes sense.

Darwin had the survival of the individual and survival of the species. Morality was connected to survival of the species. Morality took survival of the species, one step further, in terms of making use of the team affect; evolutionary.

The individual can also think in terms of survival of the individual or survival of the species. For example, say the baby animal is being attacked. The mother may decide to risk her own life and fight the predator. She sees the baby as the future of the species. If she was egocentric and thinking only for her personal survival, she may run. But now the future is uncertain for the team. The animal mother makes a moral judgement, in nature; help the team, even to her own detriment.

"Intrinsic morality" seems to be limited to some very general things like empathy. We seem to be wired to feel (approximately) what other people are feeling. (We are not entirely unique among animals.) Most of our morality is extrinsic, and generally is compatible with whatever intrinsic tendencies toward kindness and cooperation we have.

Over the longer run of our biological evolution (say, last 300,000 years to pick an arbitrary number) we elaborated the capacity to productively live amongst others of our own kind in hunter-gatherer bands. Our primate relatives developed along similar lines.

We have employed language and culture for a long time to transmit across generations that which can not be passed along in genes, but our genes enable us to use culture and language.

Morality -- rules for living together -- have become more elaborate over time (since... what, 10,000 years ago?). The family teaches basic morality, the group teaches more, and the individual internalizes the lessons which last a lifetime.

It's interesting that almost every person will, if comfortable, admit to fantasizing about immoral acts they wouldn't dream of carrying out if others were ever to find out or to observe them. We have to ask ourselves why such behavior is at odds with otherwise lawful and ethical people, and what drives them to value these contrarian acts for sexual or non-sexual reasons. — gloaming

Remarkably, there are a lot of things individuals won't do, even if no one is watching. Internalized moral remote control works pretty well.

Still, people not only fantasize about performing acts they think are wrong, many of us periodically carry these fantasies out. I'm not thinking of mass murder here -- more like petty theft, sexual peccadilloes, minor acts of vandalism, and the like.

Why do we perform these wrongful acts? Maybe it's a pressure release. Lots of us have been imbued with pretty rigorous moral systems that box us in pretty tightly. But we have urges to stake out individual autonomy, and sometimes that seems to mean violating the rules. It might be as petty as deliberately throwing the aluminum can in the garbage rather than the recycling bin, or maybe skimming off a bit of cash or stealing a little company property (at least some nice office supplies). Or, if we are more confident, things that slide into gross misdemeanors for which we are pretty sure we won't be caught (and generally we are not). Office furniture and computers have been known to disappear. Strange! How did that happen?

We might not condemn wrongful acts that other people commit. A few years back I had to admire the panache of the thief who used a backhoe to scoop a cash machine out of an exterior wall and haul it away for dissection. Immoral? Of course. I'd never do that. But still... the frontiers of free enterprise!

My view of immorality is very straight forward and easy to understand. Everything that is immoral, i.e., all immorality involves harm in some fashion or form. That doesn't mean that it's always easy to see the harm, because some harmful affects can be very subtle, which is why we often disagree about what's immoral. I don't often use the word all when describing referring to things, but in this case I do; and while it's true that all immorality involves harm, not all harm is immoral. In fact, sometimes doing harm is the right thing to do, especially if you're faced with two choices, in which both will cause harm. In such a case, one should choose the action which causes the least amount of harm.

My view also includes the idea that what's immoral is objective, i.e., we simply look to see the harm done. If no harm, then no immorality. Again, though, it can be very difficult in some cases to see the harm, but in most cases it's clear. For example, in most cases of lying we can objectively see that there is harm done to marriages, businesses, friendships, and to our own character.

How are you measuring harm?

Maybe in court you may need to quantify the harm to properly meet out justice, but in our everyday lives I don't see the need to measure the harm, whatever that means. In most cases we can see the difference in the amount of harm done, i.e., I can see that cutting someone's arm off without good reason causes more harm than lying to your parents about where you were at 1 am. So generally I don't see the need to measure the harm, unless there is some context where that needs to be done. Moreover, I'm not sure that measure is the right word.

But morality is prescriptive is it not, otherwise it's just relativism? So it's not enough to say you can see that cutting someone's arm off without good reason causes more harm than lying to your parents about where you were at 1 am, because you're going to be telling someone else what they ought or ought not do. What matters then is whether they can see the relative harm. The example you give is quite extreme, but even at that extreme there are people (or have been) who consider minor infringements (stealing for example) to be more morally "harmful" than cutting of a hand (the 'justified' punishment).

Bring this down to more everyday moral issues and what constitutes harm (and how much) becomes the central question. At what level of certainty in a drug's safety is it acceptable to test on humans? Here, the different sides of the argument will be over whether the 'harm' to the individual of side effects is worth more or less than the 'harm' to society of slowing down the development of the drug.

You write:

“Morality was designed with the needs of the group in mind. Morality was not designed with the needs of the individual in mind. The reason for this approach was the team affect. A team, when optimized, can become more than the sum of its parts.”

Designed by who or what? If your answer is evolution, then how do you make the case evolution had a “reason?”. Doesn’t something need need the ability to reason to have one? If your answer is humans designed morality to achieve an end, I ask, is morality a choice we had? My view is that morality was blindly thrust upon us by evolution like a hot potato; the nature of our existence regularly imposes decisions upon us to act or not act in some way; there is no avoiding that our actions or inactions affect ourselves and others in significant ways. Throughout history we have managed to incrementally rationalize why we act the way we do, and have experimented with implementing various moral theories. Is this what you mean by designed?

In my view the best moral theory incorporates both the wide and narrow moral senses. The wide sense providing the advantages of the team effect you mention, and the narrow sense acknowledging that securing your own oxygen mask first is important. The question of what is right and wrong when the wide and narrow moral senses conflict, is one of the tough questions in moral theory.

The point of giving the examples is simply to show that there is an objective component to harm, it's not just relative. In terms of justice one needs to show objectively that the harm done while administering justice is not out of proportion with the immoral act. Besides my only point is to show that all immoral acts involve harm, that's how we know it's immoral. How justice is administered is a matter of law, and that's a separate issue, but not completely separate.

My point above about facing a choice of harms is to show that in certain cases, like the drug case, where we are faced with two harms, we have to choose the lesser of the harms. Do I want to die, or do I want to take the drug with potential side effects. Generally with drugs one decides that the harm done by taking the drug is much less than the harm done by not taking the drug. The principle of harm is that one wants to always choose the lesser harm based on what is known at the time. In limited cases one might die by taking the drug, but the overall good is that the drug causes less harm to society, at least in theory.

Again, it always gets down to the harm done, and it's not always an easy decision, but generally it is.

“My view of immorality is very straight forward and easy to understand. Everything that is immoral, i.e., all immorality involves harm in some fashion or form.”

I like your overall argument. Under your theory, is someone that speeds down a residential neighborhood 60 mph in a 20 mph zone, without hitting anything, causing harm?

Read Parfit, hence cometh Kantian reasoning. It's the act, not the outcome. It's the orientation, the lack of good will, that makes an act unethical.

The point of giving the examples is simply to show that there is an objective component to harm, it's not just relative. — Sam26

Yes, that's the question I'm asking, how does one objectively measure the amount of harm done? Is having an arm cut off more or less harmful than a lifetime of severe depression? Is finding out your wife has been cheating on you more or less harmful than losing the use of your left hand? One of the most significant criticisms of consequentialism is this very difficulty in judging the least harmful choice.

Again, it always gets down to the harm done, and it's not always an easy decision, but generally it is. — Sam26

It is virtually never an easy desicion, that's why ethics is such a complex subject.

"Read Parfit, hence cometh Kantian reasoning. It's the act, not the outcome. It's the orientation, the lack of good will, that makes an act unethical."


By orintetation, do you mean strength of reason supporting the act? If so, I agree. In the case of speeding through a residential neighborhood without incident, I'm not sure how it makes a difference whether or not one has goodwill. Questions of motive are psychological in nature and don't change the danger of the act?

One with good will would not exceed the limit through a speed zone. One without good will wouldn't care of the outcome or the fact that their behaviour is immoral, unethical, illegal, or merely charitably ant-social standing on its own. If acting in good will, her intent would be not only to obey the law for the law's sake, but to embrace and to uphold it for the reasoning and spirit behind its enactment, beneficence. That is the good will. Good will is acting out of duty. It is not a duty to speed through speed zones, it is an expression of motivation.


I fully agree, the nature of the act isn't changed solely by the motive, but the motive is an expression of one's orientation to others which is the Good Will. Anti-social behaviours have all kinds of motives, none of which are expressions of Good Will as Kant describes it.

The bridge between biology and culture is evolutionary psychology. So: simply due to the nature of the human animal and the nature of its lived context, some habit patterns are conducive to social co-operation and social flourishing, some aren't. Habit patterns that are helpful for social co-ordination and flourishing will tend to spread genetically through a population and then gradually get codified in religion and custom, which makes them open to conscious reflection, and the system of such habit-patterns becomes what we call "morality."

So there is an element of subjectivity and an element of objectivity in morality: whether a habit pattern is conducive to social co-ordination and flourishing or not is an objective fact; but the fact that most people in a given society or culture will tend to choose the habit patterns that are conducive to social co-ordination and flourishing (the fact that most people act morally) is partly an intersubjective confluence of individual preferences that evolved initially randomly and genetically to become a habit of the majority, and partly a result of the reinforcement of those habit patterns by the majority on the minority (those who genetically aren't so predisposed to those rules as the majority).

Fundamentally, the choice of the "human flourishing" perspective is "subjective" in the sense that it's arbitrary from a cosmic point of view (there's no cosmic reason to take the human side over the side of anything else, that's just how we grew, that's how we feel about it). But once that perspective is taken, all the conditionals ("if ... then you ought to") are objective and fall out of human nature and the nature of the world (though of course the implications may be difficult to figure out, given limited knowledge, fallibility, and just the sheer complexity of the problem).

Then on top of that, there's philosophical and legal reflection, which refines the codification of morality, hearkening back to the objective basis of it (i.e. philosophical and legal reflection investigate which social rules, or clusters of social rules, are conducive to flourishing, and which aren't, and which are non-contradictory with others and can form a system, and which aren't). In a way it's just the acceleration and refinement of a process that started blindly, via natural selection.

Also, an added wrinkle is that when I say "conducive to social co-ordination or social flourishing", that's a placeholder for a whole basket of slightly different ultimate goals (which may be implicit in any given habit pattern as it is generalized) that are usually closely related, but may have some outliers. (e.g. the morality of some cultures is more focused on the individual and their happiness, the morality others is more focused on the group and its flourishing, but that's just one - albeit an important - dimension).