Morality is, for the most part, social leverage which seeks to control or confine behavior and thinking. Without the presence of others, say you had the planet all to yourself, where would morality or ethics manifest itself in your life?

I read the question more as "why should I conform to external expectations in regard to my interactions with others", which begs the question: what is it that you wish to achieve in your social interactions? How does one wish to be percieved? Morality and ethics are learned parameters, not entirely unlike the concept of indebtedness or "owing" something to somebody. What you owe to your neighbors, family, colleagues, friends and strangers as far as your behavior and attitude is surely determined by not only your desire to be perceived a certain way, but perhaps equally as much as how you wish to conduct your business and assert your will with as few obstacles as possible.

Even if ethics is more or less there because of society (more or less what you are saying, I think) it’s still about what you should and should not do, is it not?

to be truly happy is to be at peace

being at peace there is no stress, anger or anxiety

to be at peace we must not affect anyone in a negative way

thats where the living without guilt comes in

to be truly happy we must be truly moral

"why should i be moral"

if we are truly moral we will all learn inner peace

Fair enough

“why should I be moral?” — Georgios Bakalis

Why should you be rational? (or communicative? healthy? adaptable? sustainable?) Reason, history and experience strongly correlate not being "moral" (or rational, etc) with a significant likelihood that you will be more miserable (frustrated, dissatisfied, abject) throughout your life with others (especially strangers) and not less miserable. As a metacognitive eusocial species, it follows that every human group survival toolkit (i.e. culture) includes morals (rationality, etc) of one kind / degree or another.

Morality is, for the most part, social leverage which seeks to control or confine behavior and thinking. Without the presence of others, say you had the planet all to yourself, where would morality or ethics manifest itself in your life? — Seditious

Morality is social leverage on one part, and an unavoidable behaviour response on the other. The two parts are so distant, that I separated them, as described in my paper. The paper can be found here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10744/ethics-explained-to-smooth-out-all-wrinkles-in-current-debates-neo-darwinist-approach

If you have any comments to make on the points of that paper, please respond to it in that thread. Thanks.

As to why we should be moral: our trigger motivation is the expectancy of guilt. The formation of morality is evolution-driven. This is also shown in my paper, which is quite lengthy.

No mistake. Ethical propositions state what one ought do.

@Seditious still has to address the issue of what to do, with or without social coercion, and so doesn't really address your point.

@cal is just confused.

@180 Proof verges on the naturalistic fallacy - which is unusual. @god must be atheist explicitly commits the naturalistic fallacy.

"Verges" =| commits. And, even so, my conclusion is not invalid or false.

Morality often just the logic used to justify naturally occurring emotional and psychological reactions to events. I think it correlates with ones emotions and psychology far more than most people want to admit. Even things like being afraid of violence and thus condemning it, thus, morality is in of itself the result of your motivations and that's why it doesn't make much sense for most people to ask "why should I be moral". Being moral means pretty much doing what you already wanted to do anyway.

If there's anything for me that answers "why should I be moral" then it's the concept of doing what is in my best interests and the best interests of others. I could bully and harass people, I could steal and cheat but I know that society will be better for everyone, including me if people don't do that. I want to be the change I want to see in the world and that's my motivation. However, I'm not sure if I didn't have that, whether I'd be out bullying and stealing, I don't think so, still think I'm mostly just doing what I want.

Yep.

If there's anything for me that answers "why should I be moral" then it's the concept of doing what is in my best interests and the best interests of others. — Judaka

Doing what is in your best interest is not the same as doing what is right.

Serving yourself is not being moral. Doing what is in the best interest of others is where morality begins.

god must be atheist explicitly commits the naturalistic fallacy — Banno

If you read my paper you'd maybe make a different derisive remark.

This remark here by you actually was not derisive. I sense you truly stated your honest opinion, which I appreciate.

However, I stand by my naturalistic -- well, fallacy, if you wish. I, of course, think it's not a fallacy, and I carry the naturalistic approach farther in the paper than most have. I may be mistaken, of course, as I don't read. Please read the paper and comment on it if you feel like it. If you care, please leave the comment on that thread. Thanks.

They're not mutually exclusive, a good deed doesn't have to involve self-sacrifice, acting appropriately doesn't require noble motivations. Morality begins with a set of guidelines or rules for how we should behave. Those guidelines do have to involve me doing anything at all, I can consider adultery immoral even if I'm single. "Best" interests? Doesn't even have to involve anyone's interests. Sometimes two people doing something that's nobody else's business like homosexuality can be considered immoral.

Perhaps you're just saying this is your preference but even then... well I don't want to get into any potential virtue signalling you're going to try on me, if you think it's about doing what's in the "best interests" of others then okay, lol.

Doing what is in the best interest of others is where morality begins — Banno

Try defining "moral" with meaning something other than doing good for others or for the self. I will show you that there is no difference between doing moral and doing good, and therefore "moral" could be extracted from the discourse of philosophy and of social sciences, if it were not for the guilt and the pleasure generated by not doing or doing, respectively, that, which one feels one should.

It's all in the fucking paper, if you pardon my language.

well I don't want to get into any potential virtue signalling — Judaka

Why not saving your drowning child is a wholly different immoral action from viewing adultery as an immoral action is perfectly described in my utterly unread paper. You don't believe me, I know. Try reading it.

Morality begins with a set of guidelines or rules for how we should behave. — Judaka

There are two different set of guidelines by their inherent nature, and everyone in history has ignored that to date. Please read the paper if you wish to know how I view that.

Try reading it. — god must be atheist

17 days and not a whit of interest. Perhaps morality is not your thing.

I don't know why you are so insistent on having people read your paper, I listened to it for a bit and well first of all, if someone tried to read your thread rather than listen to it, I think they'd give up pretty quickly, need some formatting. You start out by describing what a moral act is, talking about how certain acts are indistinguishable from each other but no one in their right mind defines a moral act as something that makes you happy. How can helping people and working yourself to death for your corporate master be indistinguishable? I was already pretty much done by this point, your premises are far from reasonable.

You offer all your points in rhetorical questions and you write as though you were thinking out loud. These points could have been so much more succinct, you write so much while saying so little. Even after I was halfway through and I still had no idea where you were going with your argument. You gave me so much to disagree with before we even got to your main point that I had lost interest. It's not surprising to me that your paper is ignored, to even rebut it would be a tremendous task because of how many questionable claims you have in it.

Try rewriting it with statements rather than rhetorical questions, reformat it - give headings or something. Drop the raping children examples and rewrite your points so they're more succinct.

so surely asking “why should I be moral” has its answer embedded in the question itself. — Georgios Bakalis

It does. Just rearrange the words a bit: "I should be moral." Maybe you will be, maybe you will not be, but surely you should be. Never mind "why". Just be as moral as you can manage.

Now all you have to figure out is what being moral means.

If you read my paper you'd maybe make a different derisive remark. — god must be atheist

I flicked through it.

I think you are right. I would. Several.

Ethics/morality is more or less the study of what you should do. So, when saying “why should I be moral?”, surely that is no different to saying: Why should I do what I should do. — Georgios Bakalis

It is inevitable that one follows some moral code. The question is, which one, and how to make that choice.
"Why should I do what I should do?" asks about the justification for the choice of one moral code over others.

The question is actually asking:
"Why should I behave in line with moral code A, as opposed to moral code B?"

Practically, this translates into questions such as:
"Why should I not steal, instead of stealing?"
"Why should I always speak truthfully, instead of speaking the truth only sometimes and lie at other times?"
"Why should I follow the Christian moral code, instead of the Muslim or Viking one?"

why should I be moral? — Georgios Bakalis

Kant seems to be. the go to person here. Suppose the answer to the above question is, "there are no good reasons why one should be moral." Would this answer license you to be immoral? The question itself seems to have the seed for such a course of action; why else would you ask it? I mean the query suggests that the only reason why someone would choose to be moral is if there's sufficient warrant. Absent justification for morality, it's implied, one can opt for an immoral existence.

If one is immoral, however, there is no reason why others should not be as well. Are you prepared to face the consequences, likely painful and even life-threatening? Immorality fails the categorical imperative of Kant that itself can be rephrased as a question, "can immorality be made into an universal law that everyone has to follow everyday and everywhere?" I fear the answer would be an emphatic "no!"

Thus, in some sense, you should be moral because you want others to be moral and if you make an exception of yourself, others will too and there's nothing you can do about it but then that would mean, inter alia, the collapse of civilization itself and that would be the least of your problems.

Interestingly or so I think, what of the inverse question, why should I be immoral? I'm no expert but the world seems to have a personality that makes it prudent/necessary to deviate from the straight and narrow and the legal system (judiciary/police) is almost like a refrigerator - there to keep people from going bad, not to make people good. In short, there are "good" reasons to be bad, in fact not being bad, paradoxicaly, can be as "bad" as not being good.

Also, the whole enterprise of seeking reasons to be good seems misguided in a sense. Look at altruism. Whatever it is, the aim of altruism seems to relegate/eliminate an aim i.e. altruism is about being good, period. Sure, there are reasons baked into goodness itself - the definition of good contains within it the reasons why one has to be good. That, unfortunately or not, can't be helped. However, altruism is about ignoring/eliminating reasons for being good as pertains to the altruist faerself. This can be read as an attempt, successful or not you be the judge, to reject/oppose the instinct/desire justification for morality. The altruist is good not because, the goal is, there's a reason (in its current state, benefiting the altruist) for being so; the altruist is good because good to faer is self-justifying i.e. good because good but we all know self-justification is an logical illusion - it isn't despite the word "justification" a justification).

Ethics/morality is more or less the study of what you should do. So, when saying “why should I be moral?”, surely that is no different to saying: Why should I do what I should do. — Georgios Bakalis

Morality is a lot of things and is approached from many difference angles. Generally a more helpful formulation for me would be: morality is the intuition that one ought to do that which is right and ought not do that which is wrong. Then comes the interesting bit - the choices you will make.

17 days and not a whit of interest. Perhaps morality is not your thing. — praxis

Either that or morality is not other people's thing.

Try rewriting it with statements rather than rhetorical questions, reformat it - give headings or something. Drop the raping children examples and rewrite your points so they're more succinct. — Judaka

I think I'll take your advice. Thanks, this was the first time someone actually gave some useful advice, and AFTER reading it or attempting to read it.

If you read my paper you'd maybe make a different derisive remark.
— god must be atheist

I flicked through it.

I think you are right. I would. Several. — Banno

Hey! I think I won that argument. (By predicting the results precisely.)

:100: :up:

Ethics/morality is more or less the study of what you should do. So, when saying “why should I be moral?”, surely that is no different to saying: Why should I do what I should do.
That seems to not make sense (maybe?), so surely asking “why should I be moral” has its answer embedded in the question itself.
I feel like there is a mistake in her somewhere, please tell me. — Georgios Bakalis

Ethics isn’t the study of what you should do its more specific that that. It would be the study of what you do according to an ethical standard. It isnt the study of what you should do to train your dog for example, right? It’s specific to a ethical standard, of which there are many different kinds.
So rephrased “why should I be moral?” is actually more like “why should I do what I should do according to so and so ethical standard”, which illustrates the two different contexts of the word “should”. It is an awkward sentence but none the less it isn’t fallacious. I think you fell into a semantic trap .

It's all in the fucking paper, if you pardon my language — god must be atheist

it isn't actually. The "paper" as you call it isn't overly clear. It is also based on an assumed premise and once that premise is removed, the paper falls apart. I was hoping for more. Hopefully not your best work.

If you want to take things a step further, try answering why you need a reason to be moral. Honestly, I think determining whether or not one must have a reason needs to be established first before this question can even be approached.