The content of secular morality

If this whole story about the origins and nature of morality is roughly true, then our moral rules fundamentally are an attempt to codify the instinctive attitudes and behaviors that most of us perceive either as good in themselves or as promoting what is good.

But if so, what does the genesis of our morality say about its content? Less, perhaps, than we might like – but quite a bit, nonetheless.

Basic Rules

If we never thought we had any divine revelation, and if we did not already grow up with a wide variety of moral and behavioral rules inculcated into us by our parents and by society, and we had to invent the rules based mainly on our own instincts and experiences, there are probably quite a few general rules most of us would come up with on our own. Here are some pretty obvious examples:

Things to try to do:

· Love our family members

· Respect and honor those who do good things for us and for others

· Stand up for others close to us when they are in trouble

· Tell the truth, most of the time

· Treat others in our community kindly and, where possible, even generously

· Contribute our share to the general well-being

· Send chocolate to your favorite writer – lots of chocolate

Things to try not to do:

· Don’t kill or injure other people

· Don’t mess with other people’s stuff

· Don’t go out of your way to incite jealousy, resentment, anger, fear, or doubt

· Don’t betray a trust

· Don’t be careless in ways that might adversely affect others

· Don’t be needlessly offensive

You don’t need God to tell you these things, you don’t need the Ten Commandments to outline them (among other reasons, because they don’t anyway). You already know these rules, and others like them, and you could hardly drop them if you wanted to. You can ignore or overrule them at times, but you can’t take them out of your heart.

It is hard to say, though, that rules like these are truly “instinctive.” In humans, just about anything that is instinctive is also affected by our experiences and by our intellectualizations. Perhaps the real genesis of much of our moral thinking comes from the realization, at some age, that when we either crave or object to a certain kind of treatment ourselves, other people mostly feel the same way, and that we are all better off if we each treat others the way we like to be treated.

It is probably not necessary to pull the rules apart according to their various multiple sources. The point is that our moral sense, however it works and wherever precisely it comes from, brings most of us to an agreement on points such as those listed above.

Rules of this sort, by the way, do fit into our whole evolutionary theory. They bind the human community together, which makes it more effective in surviving and increasing in a pretty hostile world. Without instincts/rules of this sort, we would each end up alone, and extremely vulnerable.

So all the pieces inter-lock: we have a moral sense, and we mostly all agree on some basic rules, because of the kind of creatures we have evolved into, and because of the sophistication of our brains. We can think this way, and we benefit from thinking this way – so we do. And it is “good” that we do.

This is “why” we are moral, and “why” we should be moral. We don’t need God’s law or divine revelation.

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