All too often, we hear the argument "Well, how else do you explain morality, therefore God" arguments from theists. We can talk later about the fact that this is an argument from ignorance fallacy or that no religion can produce morals, but for now let's deal with the other staggeringly dumb aspect of this argument: the belief that only magic can explain morality and that no other explanation can possibly exist.
This is stupid because philosophers from around the world have been providing a large number of explanations for morality, and none of them require magic to explain. Even if we ignore the argument from ignorance fallacy and ignore the fact that no authority-based moral system can actually produce morals, the argument still falls apart. I get that theists have difficulty keeping up with the rapid changes of modern life, but they should at least be able to keep up with what philosophers from around the world said thousands of years ago. Surely that's not too current for them.
Anyway, what follows is just how I personally conceive of morality as a way of demonstrating how ludicrous the "morality is impossible to explain without magic" argument is, but of course if you are interested in this topic, you really should read what the philosophers have said.
Solitary versus Social Survival Strategies
We can divide animal species into two categories: solitary species and social species. Each represents a different survival strategy. One is not necessarily better than the other, but each has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Alright, I admit that I think socialization is a better survival strategy, but I'm probably biased because I am from a social species. I'm getting ahead of myself.
Solitary species have the advantage that they only have to work for their own survival and well-being. They don't have to waste any time or effort working for the well-being of others, but the downside is that no one is working to help them when they are sick or injured or old.
The survival strategy of social species is different. I do things that benefit the well-being and survival chances of others, but which do not benefit myself. If enough individuals in my social group do the same, then the survival chances and well-being of the group increases dramatically even if the contributions of each individual is relatively minor.
The specific details of the socialization survival strategy vary greatly from species to species based on circumstances, but I'm sure we can agree that all social species follow the basic outline spelled out above.
Standards of Behavior
Each species needs individuals performing actions that benefit the group, but not themselves, but there needs to be some standardization of this behavior, or else the survival strategy doesn't work very well. The specific things a given social species needs to do may vary wildly depending on the circumstances of that particular species. Lots of things that ants and bees do seem horrifying to us. The things that ants and bees do is beneficial to the survival of their colonies, but would not be for us.
Both bees and humans produce offspring that require a lot of time and effort to raise, but fertile female bees have an army of infertile females to do all the child-rearing for them. Fertile human females don't have an army of infertile females to raise their young, and so we rely on long-term pair-bonding to provide help to a mother with young. The circumstances of each species is different, and thus the standard behaviors that are conducive to improving survival chances are going to be different from species to species. Having standards of behavior help to improve the effectiveness of the socialization survival strategy.
Since humans are the only social species able to communicate ideologies to each other, every other social species must get most of their standards of behavior from their instincts. More intelligent mammals are able to teach a few things to their young, but without language, there is probably a limit to how much can be reliably passed on through mere behavior rather than through genes.
Regardless of whether you believe life was created by evolution or by magical, spell-casting fairies, the socialization survival strategy simply would not work for all social species but humans if most of their behavior standards didn't come through their genes. Standards of behavior need to be largely enforced/created biologically, or else the socialization survival strategy simply does not work.
Instinct Versus Intent
One thing that always bugged me about what philosophers have to say about morality is that the philosophers seem to think that morality is largely the product of sentient thought and deliberate, carefully-considered choices.
I don't know about you, but I rarely stop and carefully think through decisions (moral or otherwise) before I make them. From observing the other humans around me and from reading history, it seems obvious that most humans don't carefully think through moral decisions before making them.
Further, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that every social species other than humans come with a set of instincts whose function is to improve the socialization survival strategy, but that humans would be lacking in these instincts. Nearly every other primate species is a social species, and it does not seem reasonable that humans would have become magically stripped of those socialization instincts the moment we gained sentience (not the least of which being that there probably wasn't a single moment in which we became sentient; it was probably a gradual change). If every other social mammal species has such instincts, it seems reasonable that we would also have such instincts to at least some extent.
We have an elaborate chemical reward and punishment system built into our brains that make us feel good when we help others (especially those closest to us) and bad when we hurt others (especially those closest to us). These same chemicals exist in the brains of other mammals, so presumably those chemicals are also part of the same mechanism for physiology-based influences on behavior.
I suspect that when we make moral decisions quickly, we are falling back on a combination of past habits and the aforementioned instincts. If you rely heavily on instincts, you can trust that your decisions probably won't result in the extermination of your species. Your instincts must be thus because if they weren't, your ancestors would never have survived to produce you.
So if you want to just "listen to your gut," there's a pretty good chance you won't cause the annihilation of your own species. Your decisions will probably be good enough to not exterminate your own kind. However, if you read your history and/or pay attention to the news, you should observe that good enough to not cause the extermination of your own species can still leave a lot of room for unnecessary suffering of other humans. This is why I think it's important to take the time and think things through rather than just coasting along on instinct.
Individual versus Group
Solitary species have a set of instincts meant to encourage them to take care of themselves with minimal consideration of the survival of other individuals from the same species.
Social species seem to retain those instincts and add instincts for encouraging behaviors that benefit the group. Whether you think species were created by evolution or magic, it still makes sense for social species to have both sets of instincts that try to balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the group.
After all, the more individuals take care of themselves, the less others in the group have to spend time and energy taking care of them. Finding a balance between selfish instincts and selfless instincts would benefit the survival chances of the group.
Sure enough, a variety of other mammal species have been found to have a sense of fairness, including Capuchin monkeys, chimpanzees, dogs, and wolves. A sense of fairness does seem to be a useful mechanism for regulating balance between selfish instincts and selfless instincts, and so it should not surprise us to find a sense of fairness in other mammalian social species.
It should, however, surprise some of those previously-mentioned philosophers who seem to think that things like fairness are a uniquely human trait and the product of conscious thought. I think this lends credibility to the claim that our morals are merely part of a survival strategy and something that for the most part arises from our instincts rather than rational, carefully-considered thought.
I think that morality and ethics are our attempts to rationalize moral decisions we already make rather than the source of our moral decisions.
Us versus Them
Morality is just a property of decisions. Decisions which are beneficial to the well-being or survival of the group get labeled as good moral decisions, while those that are harmful to the group get labeled as bad moral decisions.
Moral decisions always have an "us" component of some kind. If humans were solitary species, then our notion of ethics and morality would be utterly alien to what most of us consider moral. It is the effects our decisions have on others that bring the moral dimension to a given choice.
What is interesting is that the concept of "us" that underpins our moral decisions has changed throughout history. For early humans, there were only clans which were basically extended families. Your moral choices only took into account the other members of your clan.
Then clans combined into tribes and the "us" component of our moral choices were based on what was good for the tribe, not just our immediate family or clan. Tribes eventually became city-states, which eventually led to the nation-state.
For ancient humans, harming other humans outside your clan was morally acceptable because your moral choices were only concerned with the well-being of your clan. Now we have nations forming close-knit alliances and trading zones to such a degree that the nation-state is no longer inclusive enough for moral decisions that make sense. The rise of xenophobia and white supremacy (or other forms of extreme nationalism such as the Hindu extremists) is troubling precisely because these movements represent groups that are trying to backpedal on the normal progression through history. They are trying to dial back the "us" component of our moral decisions to tribes or clans within a nation-state and abandon any sense of "us" tied to the nation-state.
The arc of history includes a slow but steady expansion of the notion of what the word "us" means. I think a lot of changes in morality through the centuries can be traced to this expanding notion of "us" and shrinking notion of "them."
Cats and Dogs
Morality is just a label we apply to decisions. We don't need magic to explain the existence of good and evil. With lots of humans making lots of decisions, we expect some of those decisions to be beneficial, harmful, or neither.
As for what prompted all of this thinking about instincts and social species versus solitary species, it was honestly cats and dogs. Like many, I couldn't shake the feeling that dogs seem to have a sense of right and wrong, while cats seem utterly amoral to me. I think the reason I and other humans have this reaction is because dogs are domesticated from a social species, while cats are domesticated from a solitary species.
Comments