Morality: Hardwired?

[kuzadd]

To be honest with you, I didn't look at my statistic. I just picked 3.5 since it was half of 7. haha

defintely a man!

[Mad_Michael]

With all the discussion in various threads about morality being 'religiously' divined I ran across this article and thought I'd toss it up for discussion. When reading the other threads here I kept thinking that morality was born of a natural alturism, demanded by our evolution as a social creature. It seems that some neurologists have found out this might actually be the case:

If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

excerpt:

"The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable."

snip

"Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.

No one can say whether giraffes and lions experience moral qualms in the same way people do because no one has been inside a giraffe's head, but it is known that animals can sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.

What the new research is showing is that morality has biological roots -- such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in Grafman's experiment -- that have been around for a very long time."

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VERY interesting - though I admit it is along the lines that I have always thought.

There is a great deal of evidence to show that even the infamous "incest taboo" is not universal. It is cultural.

Some behaviours may be perceived as 'inate morality' when they are really just species-level evolutionary statragems adopted long ago.