When it comes to morals, ethics, right and wrong, there are some standard points we all pretty much agree on - sort of, mostly, usually. So killing other people is always wrong - except when we call it war and then we really go at that killing thing pretty much full time. Stealing is wrong - except when we call it good business practice, or war (again). Deception, lying, cheating are wrong - same exceptions as above for business and war. Maybe business is just another form of war? Perhaps a topic for another blog.
Religions, societies, governing institutions aren't so helpful because even though they promote these ethics and morals, they also are good for justifying the exceptions as well.
But we are all human. And even though we differ in many ways, we also share this common humanity. There are those who appeal to that shared humanity as the basis for a universal morality, one that would be the same for everyone. If that is the case, where do we start? Where would this come from? How would it be formed?
As we noted in the earlier posts, our ability to conceive and construct ethics is an evolutionary part of the process by which we have become and are still becoming human.
We are different from other animals not because we have unique capabilities or attributes, but because we humans have a tendency to take the characteristics we share with our animal ancestors and distant relatives and push them exponentially further. In other words, we got all obsessive compulsive and just took every evolutionary characteristic and ran with it right past the goal posts.
So communication in some form or another, - whether chemical, audio, gestural, or visual - is common to all living things. Communication that can fall into the loose category of "language" is common to many animals and birds. All the other animals except us just "talk" about mating, food sources, dangers of various sorts - the basics of the survival of the fittest routine.
We started talking and couldn't stop. We talk about the weather, our ailments, everyone we know, everyone we don't know, money, sports, celebrities, politics. You can't shut us up. And the more we talk the more complex things we develop to talk about. We classified everything on earth and then started classifying our language, our thought processes and conceptual schemes, even classifying our classifications.
Of course one of the things we talked about and classified was "things I don't like you doing to me, with me, around me" and naturally also the opposite categories of "things I like you doing." But there are lots of things that for one person fall into the category of "things I like to do" while for the other person those things are "things I really don't like you doing"! Thus pillaging, rampaging, looting, marauding and enslaving are great for the ones doing them but not so popular with those being pillaged, enslaved and rampaged.
So for all our communicating extensively, communication by itself doesn't get us to any unified, mutually agreeable basis for a shared morality. But it is a major component for a shared morality based on natural processes.
For the next ingredient, see the next post.
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