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Moral Behavior

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11 views2 pages

Moral Behavior

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Aruba
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Humans live in groups that are socially organized, and so do other primates.

But primate
societies do not approach the complexity of human social organization. A distinctive human
social trait is culture, which may be understood here as the set of non–strictly biological human
activities and creations. Culture in this sense includes social and political institutions, ways of
doing things, religious and ethical traditions, language, common sense and scientific knowledge,
art and literature, technology, and in general all of the creations of the human mind. Culture “is a
pool of technological and social innovations that people accumulate to help them live their lives”
(ref. 4, p. 65). The advent of culture has brought with it cultural evolution, a superorganic mode
of evolution superimposed on the organic mode, which has, in the last few millennia, become the
dominant mode of human evolution. Cultural evolution has come about because of cultural
change and inheritance, a distinctively human mode of achieving adaptation to the environment
and transmitting it through the generations (3, 5–9).
Moral Behavior
I will define moral behavior for the present purposes as the actions of a person who takes into
account in a sympathetic way the impact the actions have on others. A similar definition is
advanced, for example, by David Copp in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (ref. 10, p.
4): “[W]e can take a person's moral beliefs to be the beliefs she has about how to live her life
when she takes into account in a sympathetic way the impact of her life and decisions on others.”
Altruism may be defined in a similar way as, for example, “unselfish regard for or devotion to
the welfare of others” (11). Altruism, however, is usually taken to imply some cost to the altruist
for the benefit of others, and this is the sense in which I will use “altruism” here. Moreover,
“altruism” is often predicated on the behavior of social insects and other animals, in which no
intentionality is involved but rather comes about as a result of genetically determined behaviors.
This is biological altruism, or altruismb, in contrast to moral altruism, or altruismm (12).
I will use the term “ethical behavior” as a synonym of “moral behavior,” and “morality” and
“ethics” as synonyms of each other, except when explicitly noted or contextually obvious that
they are used with a somewhat different meaning. Some authors use “morality” or “virtue ethics”
in a broader sense that would include good feelings in regard to others and exclude inappropriate
thoughts or desires, such as entertaining sexual desires for somebody else's wife or wishes that
something harmful would happen to others. So long as these thoughts or desires are not
transformed into actions, they will not be included in my use of “morality.” Actions that may be
thought to be evil or sinful in some moral systems, such as masturbation or eating pork, will not
be included either in my use of “morality,” so long as the actions have no consequences for
others.
Theories of Morality
People have moral values; that is, they accept standards according to which their conduct is
judged as either right or wrong, good or evil. The particular norms by which moral actions are
judged vary to some extent from individual to individual and from culture to culture (although
some norms, such as not to kill, not to steal, and to honor one's parents, are widespread and
perhaps universal), but value judgments concerning human behavior are passed in all cultures.
This universality raises two related questions: whether the moral sense is part of human nature,
one more dimension of our biological make-up; and whether ethical values may be products of
biological evolution rather than being given by religious and other cultural traditions.
When philosophers consider theories of morality they distinguish between metaethics, normative
ethics, and practical ethics (10). Theories of metaethics seek to justify why we ought to do what
we ought to do. They are the primary concern of philosophers, who favor different theories, such
as “divine command” (God's commanding is what makes a particular kind of action moral);
“moral realism” (there are moral facts; our moral judgments are made valid or not by the moral
facts); “utilitarianism” (the moral value of an action is determined by the expected benefit to the
largest number of people); “positivism” (there are no objective rational foundations for morality,
but rather moral norms are determined by social agreement or, in the individual, by emotional
decisions); “libertarianism” (moral values are measured by the extent to which they maximize
personal freedom and limit the role of the state to the protection of individual freedoms); and
several others.

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