Why should people act morally?

[Green Gaia]

According to your religion, faith or philosophy, why should people conduct themselves in a moral way, and what, if any, consequences will people suffer if they do not act morally? And where do these morals come from? Are they subjective or concrete?

 

[Lightkeeper]

There was a story of a boy who was raised by wolves in the wilderness. When he grew older he explored and found other human beings. He was surprised to find out that they had the same laws and morals for living that he had come to himself. I think morals come from within us. I don't believe we will be punished by any higher power for not living morally. Any punishment would come from society or our own consciences.

 

[Scott1]

He was surprised to find out that they had the same laws and morals for living that he had come to himself. I think morals come from within us.

I agree that morals come from within us........ from our conscience.

Where does conscience come from? How could the boy raised by wolves have similar moral values to "society"..... genetic morality?

The Catholic Church teaches that :
1778 Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed. In all he says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and right. It is by the judgment of his conscience that man perceives and recognizes the prescriptions of the divine law:


Conscience is a law of the mind; yet [Christians] would not grant that it is nothing more; I mean that it was not a dictate, nor conveyed the notion of responsibility, of duty, of a threat and a promise. . . . [Conscience] is a messenger of him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by his representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.

According to your religion, faith or philosophy, why should people conduct themselves in a moral way, and what, if any, consequences will people suffer if they do not act morally?

With my faith, there is a fairly complex (suprised? ) explaination of what consitutes a moral or imoral act.... so I will spare everyone that definition.

In a nutshell, if a person does not act morally, that is a sin. Sin is an offense against God. Again, there is a fairly long explaination of what sin is (mortal or venial) and what the consequences of sin are in relation to the severity of the act (and other factors)..... that I won't go into (I can hear people cheering.... stop it! )

And where do these morals come from? Are they subjective or concrete?

These morals come from our conscience, which comes from God (see above). They are not subjective:
1756 It is therefore an error to judge the morality of human acts by considering only the intention that inspires them or the circumstances (environment, social pressure, duress or emergency, etc.) which supply their context. There are acts which, in and of themselves, independently of circumstances and intentions, are always gravely illicit by reason of their object; such as blasphemy and perjury, murder and adultery. One may not do evil so that good may result from it.

For a complete study on morality: http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s1c1a4.htm#1750

Peace,
Scott

 

[Ceridwen018]

I think it's necessary to act morally in order to interact successfully in society. Many of our moral laws seemed geared towards that, such as no killing or stealing, etc.

 

[Lightkeeper]

Some of the moral laws are for the protection of our lives and health.

 

[Scott1]

Some of the moral laws are for the protection of our lives and health.

What if someone kills because they think it was a morally correct thing to say, kill a jew or an athiest?

I think it's necessary to act morally in order to interact successfully in society. Many of our moral laws seemed geared towards that, such as no killing or stealing, etc.

A murdering, stealing, drug lord may "interact successfully" by some standards.......... he/she would be rich, respected, feared, etc...... by who's definition is a cultural interaction successfull?



Scott

 

[Ceridwen018]

Lol, touchee, Scott.

I would define 'successful interaction' as interaction which leaves everyone happy and content (except for the person who is perhaps ticked at having to abstain from naughty and detrimental behaviors). Yes, the drug lord is very successful personally, but his individual success causes pain to many around him (at least thats what movies have led me to believe...I suppose there could be a nice drug lord...), and because of that, his actions are a-moral.

 

[Scott1]

Ceridwen,

I would define 'successful interaction' as interaction which leaves everyone happy and content (except for the person who is perhaps ticked at having to abstain from naughty and detrimental behaviors).

Hmmm... happy and content, eh?

In my fictional country, The United States of PinkUnicorn, the ruling class regularly shoots and kills people for no particular reason. Your loved one is next in line to be shot. After reading you last post, the ruler gets a touch of morality and decides that your loved one will not be shot, but only stabbed in the eye with a hot stick.....

Are'nt you HAPPY your loved one won't be killed? Would you be CONTENT if there was a rule that only one family member could be affected and the rest of your family is now safe?

Would the hot stick in the eye then be a moral action?

Yes, the drug lord is very successful personally, but his individual success causes pain to many around him .......and because of that, his actions are a-moral.

What about all the people that the drug lord made feel happy and content?



Scott

 

[painted wolf]

apparetly telling others that they are doing things wrong makes us feel better. According to reserch it activates the same areas of the brain as other forms of pleasure.

check out: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3601134.stm

wa:do

 

[Hope]

I believe that the fact there is such a thing as morality, and that it does seem to come from within us, is one of the best arguments for the existence of a God.

My quote from C.S. Lewis refers to this. He was an atheist who became a Christian--and one of the main things that convinced him there was a God was this whole thing we call 'morality.' It's something built into us, not something we invented. It's God's 'signature', so to speak. A signature that points to this 'straight line' outside of ourselves.

 

[Fra.Morelia]

The idea that there is a common morality has strong and weak points, and like most things intellectual is likely a half truth. Societies generally do not condone murder, rape, stealing, etc...
This is for the good of the society. So, it seems there is some truth to this.
Now, there are extreme deviations between societies for acceptable behavior:killing of 'useless' female children, female castration, ethnic 'cleansing', murder being repayable in camels. We have the death penalty, many nations consider it barbaric.
People do as they are taught. Someone who grows up around drug deals and murder is LIKELY to become involved in similar situations.
Most people DO have an inherant understanding that some behavior is wrong; killing, etc...
But some people never quite sem to pick up on it. And so we attempt to weed them out. Maybe some sort of self enforcing evolution.
Do we have society because of morals, or do we have morals because of society? Chicken or egg style quandry.
To me it is more indicative of an interesting social evolution than presence of the divine.

 

[Mr Spinkles]

Fra. Morelia pretty much summed up my opinio...so, look up there! ^

C.S. Lewis might as well tell me that because lots of species of ants behave in a similar fashion, there must be an ant god with divine ant morality transcendental to this world. Organisms behave because of what they are, not because that is how they 'should' behave.

 

[Scott1]

Fra.Morelia,

Thank you for your post and your opinion.

Societies generally do not condone murder, rape, stealing, etc...

Truth by popular vote?

The fact that a society does or does not condemn an action should not make something moral or a-moral.

People do as they are taught. Someone who grows up around drug deals and murder is LIKELY to become involved in similar situations.

I don't get your point.... maybe morality should be replaced by a different word to show the distinction between a "opinion" of a current culture and an absolute.

To me it would be like calling the sky "blue" (yes, I know the truth but play along) today because we feel like it........ then as society changes opinion we re-define the color blue and call it "red".

The sky would still be blue........... the fact that our current opinion changes that, should not influence truth.

Not the best example, but I hope that you get my meaning.

Peace,
Scott

 

[Hope]

' "Isn't what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?" I think there is a misunderstanding here. The people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. But, of course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked? .....Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others.....Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other.....You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.....The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said "New York" each means merely "The town I am imagining in my own head", how could one of us have truer ideas than the other?.....You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built. ' ~C.S. Lewis, from "Mere Christianity"

Sorry to quote C.S. Lewis, but he says things so much better than I ever could! Basically he elaborates on what Scott said, which was very good.

 

[Mr Spinkles]

But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked?

Yes, actually, the multiplication table is a human convention. There are no multiplication tables scattered throughout the universe...we created multiplication tables as a tool or model for understanding reality. The map is not the territory, so to speak.

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other

I agree with this much. The problem with C.S. Lewis' reasoning is that he extends this one step further and assumes that there exists a "universal standard" that is "true". The fact of the matter is, I can measure a set of moral ideas by my own standard, and that standard can be very different from someone else's standard.

New York can be measured and defined. We can all go to New York, confirm that we all are seeing the same skyscrapers, and agree that we will call this place New York.

But by what yardstick do we measure how much more "true" to the "universal standard" my morals are from someone else's? We can't "go there" and all see the exact same thing....if one society says killing is okay sometimes, and another society says killing is never okay, how do we measure who is correct if not by our own standards?

All we can do is compare moralities in relation to our personal/societal (and sometimes totally unique) standards of morality, which is why all morality is relative to your personal/societal standard. Why, even in the Bible morality changes with culture...is it immoral to massacre women and children, or not?

 

[Hirohito18200]

I have to agree with the cynical members of the crowd here. I do not think that there is any moral code to which people come to naturally. Take the wolf boy for example. Even though he has not had any human interaction, the wolves, who raised him, do not just randomly kill and steal from each other for pleasure or gain. Thus, the boy is going to be instilled with the morals of the wolf society. I think that at our source, we are a blank slate, silly putty, what have you. That is why we have such conflicting morals in different societies. To the argument of our concious being sent directly from God, I post this argument. The nazis who sealed off the gas chambers at auchwitz must have been born with a concious from God. God would most likely not condone the slaughter of his chosen people, and their conciounes would have spoken against their actions. How could the brainwashing of Hitler overcome God? Is God able to be choked and silenced? In short, i know im rambling its late, i believe people act moraly because they are told they should and they obey, because we're obedient beings. We are manipulable *sp by nature, as Hitler youth demonstrated.

 

[Scott1]

To the argument of our concious being sent directly from God, I post this argument. The nazis who sealed off the gas chambers at auchwitz must have been born with a concious from God. God would most likely not condone the slaughter of his chosen people, and their conciounes would have spoken against their actions

Free will.

Conscience is there as a grace from God........ not a robotic implant.

Peace,
Scott

 

[Hirohito18200]

Thanks SOGFPP, i need to stop posting stupid stuff at 3:00 AM...., yes you are right, and i dug up some verses that agree with you, good call.

 

[LittleNipper]

I have to agree with the cynical members of the crowd here. I do not think that there is any moral code to which people come to naturally. Take the wolf boy for example. Even though he has not had any human interaction, the wolves, who raised him, do not just randomly kill and steal from each other for pleasure or gain. Thus, the boy is going to be instilled with the morals of the wolf society. I think that at our source, we are a blank slate, silly putty, what have you. That is why we have such conflicting morals in different societies. To the argument of our concious being sent directly from God, I post this argument. The nazis who sealed off the gas chambers at auchwitz must have been born with a concious from God. God would most likely not condone the slaughter of his chosen people, and their conciounes would have spoken against their actions. How could the brainwashing of Hitler overcome God? Is God able to be choked and silenced? In short, i know im rambling its late, i believe people act moraly because they are told they should and they obey, because we're obedient beings. We are manipulable *sp by nature, as Hitler youth demonstrated.

People sometimes blame Hitler and say he killed Jews because he was a Christian. I know it is alot deeper than that. Hitler had a live-in girlfriend. Was that "Christian"? It is a fact that there were some cases where some Jews escaped Nazi Europe. In most cases, those which did left everything behind. They fled with only the clothes on their backs. Those that tried to cling to "their" businesses, "their" possessions, "their" communities usually ended up in an Interment Camp (where everything was stripped from them anyway).

Do I think what Hitler did was good? NO! Did Hitler raise Germany from the ashes of the Great World War-----Yes, but he did it by goose stepping all over everyone that got in his way.

God did bring much good out of Nazi Germany though. Because of Hitler many Jews got out of Europe and Israel was re-established. God fulfilled ancient prophesy even though satan did his best to disperse, absorb then finally try to
exterminate the Jew. There are more Messianic Jews than ever before. Jews as a group are far more appreciated since the II World War as opposed to before the war. I also note that as a direct result of the horrors of social evolutionary thought that there was a resurgance (for a time) of religious furvor throughout the United States and much of Europe during the 1950's.
Missionary work became very widespread.

 

[Hope]

Yes, actually, the multiplication table is a human convention. There are no multiplication tables scattered throughout the universe...we created multiplication tables as a tool or model for understanding reality. The map is not the territory, so to speak.

I agree with this much. The problem with C.S. Lewis' reasoning is that he extends this one step further and assumes that there exists a "universal standard" that is "true". The fact of the matter is, I can measure a set of moral ideas by my own standard, and that standard can be very different from someone else's standard.

New York can be measured and defined. We can all go to New York, confirm that we all are seeing the same skyscrapers, and agree that we will call this place New York.

But by what yardstick do we measure how much more "true" to the "universal standard" my morals are from someone else's? We can't "go there" and all see the exact same thing....if one society says killing is okay sometimes, and another society says killing is never okay, how do we measure who is correct if not by our own standards?

All we can do is compare moralities in relation to our personal/societal (and sometimes totally unique) standards of morality, which is why all morality is relative to your personal/societal standard. Why, even in the Bible morality changes with culture...is it immoral to massacre women and children, or not?

You have some valid points, Mr. Spinkles. However, I think what Lewis was getting at is what I will call 'extremely basic morality'. Let's make things a little simpler. Why do we even use the word 'good' or the word 'evil', in the first place? Through all humanity, whether you are a native in a jungle in the Amazon, or a highly civilized person living in a flat in the center of London, there is something that we all have in common--it is an inescapable idea in our heads that some things are wrong to do, and some things are right. And while, yes, the more you look at the specifics of these 'right things' and these 'wrong things', they do indeed differ from culture to culture, time period to time period, and person to person. We all agree on this.

What does not change is this very basic standard--there is right, and there is wrong. Why? Why do we think of things as being good or bad at all? This is why Lewis says we are not talking about mere human convention here. There is obviously some very real standard in our world--like a straight line, along which people throughout history have either gone off to the left or to the right, in varying degrees. As he says, how do we call a line crooked at all, unless we have an idea of what a straight one looks like? If this 'straight line' did not exist, and was merely something I imagined, then I would have no right to tell you that killing somebody was EITHER good OR bad. This was Lewis's point about New York--if New York was not a real place, just something I conjured up on my own, for whatever reason, then saying to you, "New York is a big city", would have no meaning to you, and if I kept insisting to you that it was a big city, then you would probably look at me as if I were a lunatic. However, because we both know New York is a real place, if I said to you, "New York is a big city", you could agree or disagree with me, for simply the words "New York" have meaning to you. Does any of this make sense? I hope I explained myself ok! So with all due respect to your opinions, I must still say that I believe that this 'moral law' or 'straight line' is a reality outside of ourselves, not created by ourselves.