natural morality 5: working with what comes naturally

Empathy is the key trait which provides the most reliable basis for human morality. But empathy isn't a rule you can make, it's not a law you can pass or a social ethic you can institute. It's a capacity we need to learn from childhood. We have to establish it at the root of our motivational formation and firmly fix it at the top of our values. If we don't learn it and teach it, it won't happen.

But, as we noted, teaching and learning is something we do, in every way we can conceive of, as an indelible aspect of our humanity. When empathy is deliberately and consciously engaged, practiced and enhanced, it works seamlessly with the other three human characteristics we talked about. Each of these qualities contributes its own components to a very profound and meaningful sense of morality that is based not on external requirements but on the naturally occurring evolved tendencies we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.

The components we have discussed so far, form a constellation of characteristics which, when consciously recognized and deliberately fostered and applied in tandem, generate a moral basis for our shared human life.

First, we are a species which not only communicates but has expanded rudimentary practical communication into multiple complex languages. We use our languages to articulate and explore not only the vast information available from the external environment, but continually expanding inner universes of ideas, concepts, abstractions, thoughts. The more we think and talk about something, the more important it becomes for us, the more interesting and valuable.

Simply by thinking and talking about the role of empathy in governing our shared life experience, moves it up the scale of value. By focusing our tools of inner and outer language skills, we elaborate our understanding and our conceptions of the role of empathy to increasing degrees.

The same is true for the fluidity and malleability of our categories of the group associations which form our social environments. As humans we have engaged in repeated re-conceptions of the groups with which we personally identify. We’ve expanded from identifying only with the troupe, pack or family group, to identifying with a collection of families in clans and villages. Then we expanded our self-perceptions to identity with language and cultural groups, which could include many hundreds of villages, towns and clan associations. We also constructed cities and trade and business associations that incoporated diverse languages, cultures, and societies.

But why stop there! We put lots more units together and made countries and nations. Then businesses found that being international was a really good idea. Scientific enterprises found that cross-cultural collaboration was good for their work, as did universities. Sharing ideas, skills, and expertise really moved everyone ahead at a much more rapid rate.

In the seventeenth century a lot of people began to see that, in fact, we are all connected by our common humanity. We're all, in reality, just one big group to which we all belong. We have always been accustomed to experiencing empathy for "my people." Now we're finally beginning to see that all people are "my people." When we make this conceptual transition, then empathy begins to naturally flow to anyone we meet, anyone we know or interact with.

And the final piece which works most closely with empathy to create a universal morality, are the mirror neurons we share with other pre-human species. It is the mirror neurons that enable us to recognize both intellectually and emotionally, the experiences of others. Empathy makes that recognition matter to us.

So what about creating a larger social ethic based on a natural morality based on empathy, enhanced by mirror neurons, articulated by all our language skills and applied to the whole human community.....


see the next post

natural morality 2: I, you, we, they

In addition to the capacity for language, we also share with some other animals the aptitude for complex cognitive faculties of self-observation and analysis of the environment. All living creatures are conscious of their environment. But some have developed beyond merely experiencing the environment to being aware of it, consciously observing it. The evolution of consciousness has generated in some animals an awareness of themselves as "self" and of the rest of life that they see as "not-self". They are also capable of not just observing this distinction between "me" and "not-me" but of setting up many different categories of "not-me".

Thus, they recognize, "my troop" and "not my troop"; "good food place" and "bad sleeping place". And they also can make the further distinctions like "my troop but might beat me up so better be careful" and "good place to sleep but belongs to that one who might beat me up." The individuals and the group develop a mental map of the world as it pertains to them. And through communication skills continue to develop the map to more complex levels and pass it on to the young.

Humans have taken the rudimentary sense of self found in other animals and have elaborated that into a perception of a multi-dimensional personality. The "I" that we perceive comprises various complex interwoven mental and emotional states. We observe and identify with numerous interconnected physical and psychological "selves." The "me" when I am working is quite different from the "me" when I'm playing with my dogs or kids.

And we have taken the basic recognition of "me" and "mine", "you" and "yours", "them" and "theirs" and generated an unending stream of categories for the objects, creatures, environments, events, conditions, circumstances that we encounter in our shared life. But because we have also been talking incessantly with ourselves, with others and with the universe in general, we've also amplified these ideas enormously. We've conceptualized and abstracted them.

For much of our human history we've still preserved the strong sense of family, clan, homeland, territory, that are direct hold-overs from our pre-human heritage. But also present in some of our non-human relatives is the capacity to modify the clan-territory predisposition in favor of making alliances outside of the clan. We've taken that tendency also to a greater extent forming towns and cities, conducting commerce and trade.

We expanded our conceptions of "my people" to include those of different clans, different regions, even different linguistic groups. And we benefitted enormously. It allowed us to extend our facility to survive and thrive in all the vastly different parts of the earth. We redefined in our minds what "my people" means and then continued to reconfigure that concept into innumerable permutations and variations, depending on the circumstances and advantages new alliances might offer.

Thus we can work with people we don't identify with and identify with people we've barely met. The categories of who we experience as "self" and the people with whom we connect as "my people" are fluid, malleable, fungible. I may lose my feeling of connection to my family, school, city and replace them with a different set of people with whom I feel more immediately connected.

Throughout this process the ideas of morality, the unspoken standards for how we treat others, have continued to evolve as well. But each person, society, culture, religion still tends to distinguish between "my people" and "not my people." And that distinction carries with it the inherent justification, rationalization to not give the same moral treatment to those who are "not my people."

In other words, although these capacities and tendencies also contribute to a universal natural morality, by themselves they fall short of generating a universal moral sense. They can still be used to set us against one another.


Well, is there anything else lying around that might prove useful in getting us out of here?

questions of morality 4: creating our morality

We have outlined ways in which the evolutionary process has benefited social groups which developed more complex communication and cognitive skills, like humans.

Although a number of species developed higher level communication skills--with some probably definable as language or at least proto-language--humans took to it intensively and developed it exponentially. You might say we are completely addicted to language. When with others we know, and even often with those we do not know, we will talk nearly continuously.

Not only that, but at some early stage we also began to talk to ourselves in our minds. We carry on a continual mental rehearsal of things we might say, should have said, would like to say.

And humans very quickly acquired a huge appetite for gossip, talking with each other about each other. We talked to ourselves in our thoughts and came up with an unending stream of opinions on everything we thought about. We turned language into alphabets and began writing down our talk to preserve it and disseminate it beyond the limits of our immediate community.

As we saw in previous posts, socially organized populations of many species developed unspoken and undefined social agreements about what types of actions the group will and will not tolerate. However, in humans these proto-moral unarticulated agreements were subjected to the scrutiny of community discussion – extensive, incessant community discussions.

As communities, societies, populations, we experienced the consequences of actions from both sides: as, for instance, joy on the side of the ones stealing and anger, frustration, and hurt on the side of the ones being stolen from. And we talked about it, and thought about it, and gossiped about it.

As communities we came to clearly defined and expressed ideas about what we considered "good" and "bad" actions. Often we embedded these communal standards in our religions; we always included them in our socio-political structures.

But over thousands of years we have evolved our sense of morality far beyond that. At this point in our ongoing transformation of our sense of our own humanity, we now have many long-standing values attached to many different thoughts, attitudes, motivations. In other words morality is not just about actions. We see actions emerging from mental ideas and emotions and have labeled these as "good" and "bad" as well because of the actions to which they lead.

In point of fact, we know what is right and wrong because we have been thinking about it and talking about it for thousands upon thousands of years. It is part of our social evolutionary process of becoming human.

Yes, there are disagreements between different communities about what particular items go on our respective “good” and “bad” lists. And as the innumerable varieties of communities mix and mingle on a new global scale, a lot of disputes, arguments, and even anger are bound to result. But it also is expanding that conversation about what we want our humanity to become. We’re going to sort it out like we always have by talking, thinking, arguing, adjusting, expanding, abstracting – and probably beating the hell out of each other on occasion.


So is there any real universal basis for morality, or is it all just dependent on what culture, society, religion you find yourself in? See the next blog