Morality and Ethics are Natural

Nov 12, 2005,    Dov, in biologicalEvolution forum.                                                                       Nov 5, 2005,      Dov in IHS forum.

(A) From IHS forum, The Image Thing, Nov 03 2005. Lhumanist writes:

"I am going to die, so is everyone else in this world, and on top of that, the universe itself will eventually die and there will be no evidence whatsoever that I even existed let alone whether I was a good or bad person. In the end my fate will be no different than Hitler's.  Whatever impact I make on the world will die as well, which makes me wonder why I should continue to help others rather than be a selfish, self-centered person. I am not saying that I want to be selfish, or immoral, all I am saying is what incentive is there to be a moral decent person."

(B) Morality-ethics are human artifacts, extensions and elaborations of the most basic characteristic of life, cooperation.

All aspects of organisms' inter-cooperation are at the base of life's evolution and are an expression of evolution's progress towards survival, at ever higher complexity. This scheme started with the occurrence of life, with individual genes evolving and elaborating cooperative genomes commune associations.

Life has always been and is a fractal affair, a repetition of phenomena on ever more complex scale. It cannot be otherwise; this is the nature of the universe. And surviving-proliferating life has always been a cooperative affair since cooperation is a most successful mode for overall survival/proliferation.

(C) Thus all organisms have an innate natural drive and instinctive mode of cooperative action in within-group activities and relationships. This holds for the most complex poly-celled creatures and all the way down to the mono-cell organisms, and it comprises a variety of modes of cooperation including self-sacrifice for the good of the community.

(D) Having evolved the capability of intelligent communication plus technology of memory/recording we humans have been extending all the life-aspects inherited from our predecessors with human-cultural-artifactual elaborations. The extensions include all forms of all the arts and all fields of all our behaviour including morals/ethics.

(E) For those who need more than the natural and rational innate tendency for adhering to and upholding of the consensual moral/ethics I suggest reflections about the infinite matters of the universe and of life; this might be an awe-inspiring incentive, emotionally uplifting at least as much as some of our cultural artifacts like music or painting or praying etc.,

Dov