I said in an earlier post (The Source of Morality, Part 1) that I don’t think morality comes from religion. Or more specifically, it’s possible to be a highly moral person without religion. So if I’m saying that religion isn’t necessary to be moral, then what is the source of a moral code? Where DOES it come from? Maybe thinking of religion as the source is the wrong way to go about it, since religion (or substitute “faith” if you’d prefer) is simply every person’s attempt to put into practice what they think god wants them to do. They get their ideas of what that means either through listening to their spiritual leaders, or from their own interpretation of the book they accept as god’s word (the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, etc.). But if that’s true and that’s where everyone gets their morality concepts from, you’d think there would be as many different views on morality as there are interpretations of the appropriate holy book. There’s hundreds of religions in Christianity alone, and probably thousands by the time you add up the smaller offshoots, so wouldn’t that lead to hundreds or thousands of different moral codes? But that’s not what we see. Oh sure, there’s lots of minor variations in moral codes, but in general I think you could distill almost all views of morality down to a few simple statements. The Golden Rule kind of sums it up nicely I think: do unto others as you’d like to have them do unto you. Treat others the way you’d like to be treated. Sounds more like a kind of a social contract than anything, it seems to me.
So how would this social contract (if that’s what morality turns out to be) arise? Well, a community arises out of a tribe. Tribes/communities provide their members safety from predators, access to members of the opposite sex, and less chance of starvation because of greater food-gathering capacity. Anthropologists will tell you that virtually every culture in the world has a set of agreements or rules; furthermore there’s a similarity to these rules across most cultures. A strong case has been made that these agreements (stated but more often unstated) give the group the cohesion that keeps them together, which subsequently gives protection to individual members. Safety leads to greater probability of children surviving to adulthood and passing their genes on to future generations. So an argument could be made that a sense of community (one way of defining morality, perhaps) could provide an advantage to getting your genes into the next generation.
There’s some problems with this theory though; I’ll be discussing other thoughts in future postings. At the very least though, I don’t think there’s much starch to the theory that morality must come from a religion or holy book.
