/lit/ - Literature

Humans are a amoral animal, we act as though there is such a thing as morality. It is not about defining morality in any real sense, it is about why the majority of humans generally act as though they believe that certain things are "moral" ("right"), and certain things are "immoral" ("wrong").

In the book "The Moral Animal" Wright ends the chapter "Evolutionary Ethics" with these sentences: "We are potentially moral animals - which is more than any other animal can say - but we aren't naturally moral animals. To be moral animals, we must realize how thoroughly we aren't." Though he wants us to be, and has a feeling that we should be, he unequivocally admits (as we will see that he must) that we aren't moral at all.

The author intends to show that our "moral impulses" are the result of an evolutionary process which has left its mark (to one degree or another) on each of us. For instance, the general, human prohibition against indiscriminate murder is present in virtually all cultures not because it is morally true, but because it has proven to be good evolutionary strategy. Monogamy is another moral ideal in virtually all cultures for the same reason.

In essence, we feel the way we feel because organisms which felt that way made it through the sieve of natural selection more often than those which did not. We feel these feelings because the genes which form us command it. We possess what Wright calls "the knobs of human nature", one for guilt, one for lust (and so on), and each individual has the knobs tuned slightly differently due to random chance and the environment in which we mature.