As the title asks, 'Where does morality come from?' and subsequently, how does one justify one's own morality?

One's morality may come their society, but if that were true what would happen if two societies have two diametrically opposed moralities? How could anyone know which is right, and which is wrong?

One's morality may come from a personal code ethics acquired over a lifetime, but this two can come in conflict with another person who has come to an opposite conclusion. So the question arises again...

Who is right, and who is wrong?

There is no such thing as right or wrong. Moral ethics passed down stem from how a society was founded, and what is used in order to survive. These ethics have been passed down through generations, changed of course, yet normally remain constant. Eventually your parents were born and were more or less indoctrinated (yes, that's a strong word but it's true) into society. Of course they still have the freedom to choose what they want to do, but if they don't, then the consequences are not very beneficial. Such as bullying or exile from the group/society. The way we receive are own morals is from our parents and society, again we still have the freedom to chose, yet problems still arise if we say against norms.

In our history, the people who are normally deemed "right" are those that have either beaten opponents, usually by killing them, or convinced the majority to follow them through speeches, technology, or religion (Not pointing anyone out). Those that are deemed "wrong' are those that clash with cultural views and standpoints. This is normally the case with the majority and minority.

Ex. If the majority says.. idk... cannibalism is right and the minority says it is not. Then the ruling party dictates what it teaches its children and how it is viewed... Of course we believe cannibalism is wrong, yet that is because of how we are raised.

To sum things up rather quickly, "To the victor go the spoils, and the history books."

2006553
Trial and error. It's an invention to get people to live together in a way they generally agree is more pleasant and conducive to human flourishing than not doing so.

It has lots of "good tricks," however, that do objectively exist, such as not causing harm or not deeming your own wants inherently more important than anyone else's, which beings similar to us are going to converge on.

It's a bit like asking where eyes come from. There's no great bin of them in the sky, but they keep cropping up because they're useful and something that works that way is a good idea.

I say morality is something that can only be decided and placed in how a person views it, making whatever the person believes is a moral or not a moral completely up to him. This is not to say he can not be influenced or influence others of morality, so morality can change depending on the indevudal sand their beliefs.

2006686>>2006909>>2006919

These answers sadden me greatly.

By the answers given so far, if society murdered your entire family and it was deemed morally right you couldn't deem it "wrong", even though in all of your hearts if you saw your sister being sexually assaulted and killed right before your very eyes you would know the Truth of right and wrong.

Likewise, if one saw an orphaned child on the side of the street and someone decided to be "kind" and give that child to rest his or her head tonight, it's not "good" because what one sees as true, another can see as false.

2007263
Sure you could; otherwise we'd still live like cavemen. You just have to make a cogent argument that it's wrong, or emotionally appeal to people's moral sense in such a way that they're shamed into seeing your point of view. I think the view I laid out is pretty uplifting, actually.

You'd have to think about the reasons why a society would deem that kind of thing acceptable in the first place, and it always boils down to some kind of tribal loyalty, and they can do that sort of thing to people who are outside the tribe, whether it's a religious, ethnic, or national tribe, or any other kind. They attacked your family because you were part of the outgroup, and to them that seemed OK, so fighting that would involve expanding their circle of who they consider "us," and/or arguing that wanton destruction isn't something separate groups should do to each other since it's only accidental which one of them you find yourself in, which, as I mentioned before, is a good trick, because it prevents cycles of recrimination and revenge that waste people's time, resources, and lives. People who use that trick and cooperate will benefit more than people who don't and who keep fighting.

It's the same reason that wheels are round - It works better, and you could argue that that's an objective property of roundness, but it's not an ordained property, which seems to be what people instinctually mean by that.

2006553

Morality is a human invention. Any act can be justified by the fact of omission: the universe only objects to physical violations.

Morality is a society's attempts of regulating its way of life so individuals can function as an ordered and efficient group. Morality focuses on the group, not the individual, which is why morality has historically allowed atrocities, even though most naive attempts of codifying morality have explicitly forbidden killing.

Individual moralities are products of the vivid imaginations of individuals, whose perceptions are filtered by their societies.

Morality comes from a mix of empathy and reason. Empathy is the foundation, and reason builds on top of that, applying empathy to ever grander (or more minuscule) scales.
Think of it as a sort of applied golden rule.
Take your example of two societies, with different views of morality. What is actually moral is independent of what either society says, but they both believe themselves to be right. What people think is moral changes over time, what is or isn't actually moral doesn't.
Now, as for the counter that morality is what society says is wrong, the term for that is ethics. Ethics is societal expectations. Ethics may (and does) influence what one considers to be moral or immoral, but what is moral or not is independent of what society (or an individual) says.
At least, so goes my viewpoint.

2007263 But if morality lies with the person, then the murdering of an entire family would change your view of morality as well others, people will question this as well resulting more in a question on the marality of the crimes, even if it is deemed moral by society.

Morality is something we develop ourselves.
You think you are MORALLY right when you say "Hitler was evil."
But likewise, he believed he was morally right when he butchered million's.
Morality is not something that has a right and wrong answer.
I doubt even an all powerful God could tell us a version of absolute morality.
But that's just my opinion.
Megatron out.

2006553

One's morality may come their society, but if that were true what would happen if two societies have two diametrically opposed moralities? How could anyone know which is right, and which is wrong?

Morality is subjective. It isn't inherent to the workings of the universe itself like E=mc^2 is or anything like that. It's something humans have created. You cannot "know" which is right and which is wrong because they are BOTH right AND wrong. Or rather, what is right and what is wrong is dependent on who is making the judgement.

2007263

By the answers given so far, if society murdered your entire family and it was deemed morally right you couldn't deem it "wrong"

As already noted, sure you could. It just wouldn't be objectively wrong. Because there IS no objective right or wrong. Likewise, even if society says it was morally right that wouldn't make it objectively right.

, even though in all of your hearts if you saw your sister being sexually assaulted and killed right before your very eyes you would know the Truth of right and wrong

You would know YOUR Truth of right and wrong, you wouldn't know THE Truth of right and wrong because such a thing doesn't exist.

Right and Wrong are just as subjective as say, one's taste in music. Of course, most/all societies and individuals place much more emphasis/weight on morality over music choice.

I had an incredibly lengthy debate with someone on this very topic a while back. I'll try to go find a link to it or something later, but I have company over right now. I apologize.

EDIT: 2007393 does a good job of saying what I was trying to say myself, before I even said it.

EDIT2: 2007305

you could argue that that's an objective property of roundness, but it's not an ordained property, which seems to be what people instinctually mean by that.

I suspect I have been misusing "objective" and "subjective" and "ordained" and all that, could you please clarify/teach me their proper useage?

2008153
I was really just improvising with that; what I meant to convey was that people usually think of an objective characteristic of something as having some kind of unitary, inherent, timeless existence - Something you could point to and say "that's the part of it that is X," whereas with something like morality or the roundness of wheels, it's not a property of those things in themselves, but necessarily emerges from the interactions of individual social beings, or a rolling object on a flat surface, as a more efficient way of doing something that everyone is going to gradually converge on, given similar goals.

To continue the wheel metaphor, there are lots of different ideas about treads and tire pressure, but everyone can agree that being round as opposed to square is important, just as with morality everyone agrees that, say, avoiding harm and promoting fairness are a requirement. That's a kind of objectivity, but not the kind most people mean in this instance, which is usually a universally correct set of rules... somewhere out there... for anyone, at any time, to apply in any given situation. Usually a deity figures in here at some point, though Plato did a very good job shooting that down.

It's not something built into the universe in any hard, physical sense, but at the same time has a landscape of better and worse arrangements (just as there are better and worse ways to build pretty much anything, given what you want it to do) predicated on us being the type of creatures we are with the type of minds we have. Similar beings throughout the universe would probably have similar conceptions of morality (and it could be argued none of them could be that psychologically dissimilar because of game theoretic pressures, something again universal but with no objective, concrete component), and that could be considered objective morality in a metaphorical sense, as, ironically, a matter of personal taste.

tl;dr - When people balk at subjective morality, describing the most heinous thing they can think of and saying you couldn't justifiably say it's wrong, and yet tacitly and correctly expecting everyone to agree that it's generally wrong, and that anyone who thinks it's right has a blinkered, mistaken view or is just playing intellectual games, that's telling us something.

There is no such thing as right or wrong. ~ Bellum Facio

I say morality is something that can only be decided and placed in how a person views it, making whatever the person believes is a moral or not a moral completely up to him. ~ DoctorStrange

Morality is not something that has a right and wrong answer. ~ Lord Megatron

You would know YOUR Truth of right and wrong, you wouldn't know THE Truth of right and wrong because such a thing doesn't exist. ~ Humanist

Not going to lie guys (pun intended), I'm actually rather disappointed in my findings of the "Intellectuals" group.

Morally right doesn't exist?

Morally wrong doesn't exist?

I'm going to have to, as respectfully as possible, disagree based on plain as day evidence. However, if you all are so adamant about your position I erg all of you to be firm in your believes in real life when faced with decisions that require a moral input. Say these things to the people who have given, suffered, and lost many loved ones in evil acts. I say you would not be so steadfast

2010352
What do you want me to do? Tell a comforting lie? The universe doesn't care about the construct known as morality. We, as humans, do. We created it, after all. We also often disagree over what is right and what is wrong, because... well... because there is no True Answer to check our answers against.

I am not saying that moral right and wrongs don't exist, only that they aren't Universal Truths or anything like that. They aren't "built-in" to the universe. They are human creations and nothing more. And isn't that enough?

Different groups of people believe different things to be morally right or morally wrong. There is no True Right or True Wrong, just what different people (and societies) believe to be right or wrong.

In fields like say, physics or math, there ARE objectively true statements. The number of electrons in a (non-isotope) Hydrogen atom, for example. The relationship between kinetic energy, mass, and velocity is also something that is objectively true. These can be seen to be objectively true because they are measurements or analyses of the mechanics of the universe itself. They are "built in" to the universe, they are things that are always true no matter what an individual might believe about them.

Morality isn't like that. Morality is a human social construct. It is artificial, it exists only in the minds of humans. It is not something that can be measured/determined objectively. Again, that doesn't make it any less meaningful or important (especially since Meaning and Importance, in that sense, are determined by individuals).

There are people who would watch the video clips you linked and disagree with the message you are trying to convey, or even be apathetic to it. The 9/11 terrorists didn't think that what they were doing was wrong, they thought that they were Good and that their victims were Evil who deserved what happened to them. You'd say they were wrong. I'd say they were wrong. But that doesn't mean they were OBJECTIVELY wrong. In India before the British came, it was common practice to burn the widowed wife of a man. If you had been raised in that society, you would have likely been perfectly fine with such a practice, you would have seen it as Good. There are likely a great many things that you consider to be Good that other people would NOT see as good. Likewise for a great many things that you consider to be Evil. Your morals are shaped by your genetics, your environment, and your experiences.

Many of the basic rules of Right and Wrong that are shared across different societies exist. These rules tend to be ones that result in greater evolutionary fitness for the group as a whole. Individuals that held certain moral beliefs were thus more likely to pass their genes on to future generations. In other words, many of the moral principals that are nigh-universal (though not COMPLETELY universal, there are exceptions) across the human race can be traced to natural selection.

EDIT:

I'm going to have to, as respectfully as possible, disagree based on plain as day evidence.

The evidence presented does not contradict my claim, as I noted above.

However, if you all are so adamant about your position I erg all of you to be firm in your believes in real life when faced with decisions that require a moral input.

Of course. Again, there are many things that I consider to be right and many things that I consider to be wrong. I am of course willing to fight or even die for what I believe in. I am just not arrogant enough to believe that what I consider to be right is Objectively Right.

Say these things to the people who have given, suffered, and lost many loved ones in evil acts.

I would likely NOT say these things to those people, because they would likely find it hurtful and so I would consider it to be wrong. Again, that isn't to say it would be objectively wrong. Some people feel that even though the truth hurts it is preferable to a comforting lie, and would feel it would be more wrong NOT to say those things to those people. I confess that I personally prefer a painful truth to a comforting lie, though generally I apply that to myself and do not try to force said truths on others. Incidentally, that's one of the reasons why I do not feel that the Golden Rule is a perfect moral code.

I say you would not be so steadfast

Would I go up to them and start telling them out of the blue that there is no such thing as objective morality? Hell no. If they initiated the debate in the first place... Actually, I probably would.

Sure, morality is a human invention. But it, like all inventions, has an objective purpose: the welfare of humans. Whether a moral rule actually secures that is an objective question--but only in principle, because we've yet to agree on what it even means to be good.

Yet we do have at least an inkling, enough to say that murdering your child is bad and loving your child is good.

2010856
The problem is, as you said you have to agree on what it means to be good. You have to agree on what is meant by "welfare of humans".

And then you get the standard thought experiments like whether or not you would kill one person to save ten. Would you murder millions of innocents to save billions? Would that be good or evil? Some might call it a Necessary Evil, but what is the difference between Necessary Evil and Good if the standard on which we are judging Good and Evil is whether it contributes to the welfare of humanity?

If you murdered your child to save others, would that be bad? If you loved your child so much that you prevented him from being harmed/killed/imprisoned despite him being a very real threat to others, is that still good? Why or why not?

EDIT: Also, I'd like to point out that for some people, "welfare of humans" isn't even a consideration (or at least isn't the primary, underlying consideration) in their moral system. See the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

2010352
Your logical fallacy is: Appeal to emotion

Try again when you have an actual argument.

2011252

Also, I'd like to point out that for some people, "welfare of humans" isn't even a consideration (or at least isn't the primary, underlying consideration) in their moral system. See the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

It's not like they want people to suffer. They are advocating the extinction of the human race from purely voluntary refrainement from reproduction. It has less to do with the welfare of humanity and more with its continued existence

2012080 Unfortunate, I know. I was actually aware of that when I was typing it. I just felt like it needed to be said because no matter how one slices it, morality can always be tied back to emotion, thus always an appeal to emotion.

I could argue how there are similar moralities among diverse populations, like, being kind to a neighbor or charity that tie back to ultimate morality. Though this argument is less subtle with its emotion, it still has it tied in. I just I'd go in full fallacy rather try to hide it.

P.S. Why'd you join CutieMarkCrusaders group? I believe you were one of its first members.

2012781
You posted two questions in the OP:

Where does morality come from? How do you justify your morality?

The first question doesn't require any appeals to emotion. The second one, assuming you are using a subjective moral framework does.

However there is nothing illogical about making an argument that assumes "x" is true, even if there is no logical justification for x.

For example: I can argue murder is wrong, because if murder was accepted and widely practised, society would collapse, we would loose all the benefits of civilization and would probably die young.

That argument is perfectly logical, but it only works if we assume social collapse and all of that is bad, and there is no logical justification for that, it is an emotional thing, however the argument works, and does not constitute an appeal to emotion, because it is made under the assumption that both participants agree that those things are in fact bad, and builds up the argument from that.

P.S. Why'd you join CutieMarkCrusaders group? I believe you were one of its first members.

...
....Because it seemed a good idea at the time?

2013003

...
....Because it seemed a good idea at the time?

You're a beautiful person.