Morality and Religion
Aug. 29th, 2024 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithDo you need religion to be a moral person?
Religion is a product of, and not a source of, our evolutionary moral dispositions.
This article has some interesting observations about how morality works.
A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2007 showed that in answer to the question ‘Do you need to believe in God to be moral?’, the overwhelming majority of people in countries outside Europe said yes.
There are two problems with this question.
1) Many people define "moral" specifically as following the rules of their particular religion. By that definition, only members of their religion can be moral. This starts a lot of wars.
2) Religions vary greatly in which actions they consider to be obligatory, desirable, permissible, or forbidden. What is obligatory or desirable in one may be forbidden in another.
Studies led by my colleague Oliver Scott Curry have shown that much of human morality is rooted in a single preoccupation: cooperation. More specifically, seven principles of cooperation are judged to be morally good everywhere and form the bedrock of a universal moral compass. Those seven principles are: help your kin, be loyal to your group, reciprocate favors, be courageous, defer to superiors, share things fairly, and respect other people’s property.
These are popular concepts. I would add, the only universal rule that anthropologists have found about sexuality is that it shall not be unregulated.
However, the order of those principles varies greatly.
Help your kin and be loyal to your group are variations on the same thing. They work best in moderation. Too much devotion to others at the expense of oneself leads to misery and burnout. It also supports abuse and intolerance. Too much individuality at the expense of relationships leads to social breakdown. Families and societies can lean quite strongly in one direction or the other, but the most successful tend to fall somewhere in the middle. Tyrannies can spread far before tearing themselves apart, but they really don't have the staying power of healthier societies.
Reciprocate favors is the root of economy. It works well in gift economies and pretty well in barter economies. But once you introduce cash-like concepts, it drastically undermines relationships by bending things strongly toward a reductionist exchange of goods, rather than something like a relationship bank account.
Courage is another one that really needs balance. Too much becomes recklessness or abusiveness; too little becomes timidity or lethargy. It is more a skillset than a trait, and you need both the logic to calculate when a risky gamble is worthwhile and the emotional intelligence to manage your feelings for best action.
Deference to superiors is among the most variable. Different societies arrange dominance in different ways to different people. Some are intensely and intricately hierarchical. Others are egalitarian -- the study seems not to have featured those -- and some use "situational authority" in which each leader is in charge of their own sphere of influence but will defer to someone else in his or her sphere. So for instance, some cultures have a "war chief" and a "peace chief" or "men's business" and "women's business." Hierarchy seems to be the path of least resistance in human cultures, but that doesn't make it an absolute, and in fact when it comes to promoting cooperation, participatory decision-making far outstrips it. But collaboration requires more skills than brute force.
Sharing things fairly is popular but also fragile. The motivation for selfishness is strong and difficult to overpower. But this is also a case where you want to be close to one extreme (precisely equal distribution) but not necessarily right at it. Too unequal and people will eventually rebel. A leader who takes the best things from followers will not stay a leader for long and will endure many challenges. But if everything is distributed exactly equal, then it tends to undermine reward for effort. Why work harder, learn more skills, or do a nastier job when everyone gets the same resources anyway? If it doesn't have intrinsic motivation (e.g. some people enjoy hunting despite the risk and mess) then people probably won't do it.
Respect for property is another fragile one, largely because of hierarchy. When people are equal in rank and have the same resources, there is little motivation to steal or deface anyone else's stuff. But it's pretty widespread in human societies that you don't really own anything, not even your own body; instead, the most powerful people own everything and can take anything they want from the less powerful at any time. That's parasitism, not cooperation. And it is very often explicitly framed as a legal and moral right to take things in that way, which is a serious problem.
Basically, all those hardwired moral principles work if and only if they are applied equally or almost so. They're great when balanced and disastrous when not. What's worse is how easily they can be hijacked and how hard it is to fight that even when you know what is going on. Occasionally you see bizarre cases of a society lauding things that are usually considered vices, such as glorification of violence or modern America's many advertisements promoting selfishness: "Go ahead, eat it all yourself." They literally print that on packages in some cases. 0_o
On the bright side, these principles aren't actually absolutes. Humanity has safety catches. In order to get the whole picture, you have to study that too. Courage is actually a safety catch for most of the others, what allows people to stand up and say "This isn't right." Family and group loyalty will break down under extreme circumstances. Terramagne has Primordial Lilith (the earliest common female ancestor among those who left Africa) as well as Primordial Eve (the earliest common female ancestor of all).
What are the safety catches and what activates them? Once you determine that, you can avoid a lot of problems by stopping them at the warning signs, before things really explode. So for instance, you need to keep a tight watch on riots. Those are signs that group ties are breaking down, usually because the authority part is malfunctioning and abusing people. It starts to become an "us vs. them" problem and when you have core principles crossing each other, bad things happen.
Moreover, the same seven principles of cooperation on which these moral ideas are based are found in a wide range of social species and are not unique to human beings.
Not unique to humans, but neither are they universal. It depends on the survival strategy of the species. Hyenas, for instance, are intensely social creatures. They're also scavengers, and especially kleptoparasites: they like to gang up on other predators and steal their kill. In hyena culture, stealing isn't just a virtue, it's a whole way of life. And it's a very hierarchical culture in which the matriarchs tend to be tyrants.
This new idea was quite a big deal because up until then it seemed quite reasonable to assert – as cultural relativists have always done – that there are no moral universals, and each society has therefore had to come up with its own unique moral compass.
I would say, there are trends rather than absolutes, and the trends come from convergent evolution. Certain success modes are easy to discover, like sharing. Certain failure modes are also predictable, like selfishness. Most of the time, sharing increases survival, so it spreads. But there are plenty of times when selfishness improves survival, so it sticks around too. That diversity is a good thing. Diversity is life. It's what allows a species to adapt in changing circumstances. And that's why cultures are different.
Genetic mutations favoring cooperative behaviors in the ancestors of social species, such as humans, conferred a reproductive advantage on the organisms adopting them, with the result that more copies of those genes survived and spread in ensuing generations. Take the principle that we should care for (and avoid harm to) members of our family.
That's also why it takes around 8 attempts for an abuse victim to escape an abusive spouse, and why society so often blames the victim. A distortion of principles meant to keep people safe does the opposite. Hence the need for logic and balance.
And deference to superiors is another way of staying alive, in this case by allocating positions of dominance or submission in a coordinated fashion rather than both parties fighting to the death.
Which works if and only if the leader is not murdering people outright, or creating conditions that greatly shorten life and reproductive success.
To qualify for inclusion, each society had to have been the subject of at least 1,200 pages of descriptive data pertaining to its cultural system. It must also have been studied by at least one professionally trained anthropologist based on at least one year of immersive fieldwork utilizing a working knowledge of the language used locally.
On the bright side, this makes a very solid study ... for the parts that it counts. However, it excludes a lot of other data, and that's where they are probably losing the outliers, which are rare by definition. When you use mass as your selection factor, you are selecting for the most common examples.
In 961 of those instances (99.9 percent of all cases), the cooperative behavior was judged morally good. The only exception was on a remote island in Micronesia where stealing openly (rather than covertly) from others was morally endorsed. In this unusual case, however, it seemed to be because this type of stealing involved the (courageous) assertion of social dominance.
That's a key divergence among societies: what order they place those principles. It might be interesting to see if there are 7 types of society based on their top-rated principle, or even their bottom-rated one (given that egalitarian societies put hierarchy on the bottom).
One element of the universal moral repertoire does seem to be intuitively connected with our religious instincts: one that takes us back to the early developing expectation that supernatural agents will be socially dominant.
That depends on the religion. Later ones do tend to be very hierarchical. But nature religions think not in hierarchical ladders but in webs, circles, spirals: the buffalo eat the grass, we eat the buffalo, when we die we become the grass, which the buffalo eat. Ancestral religions are all about family ties, which is a very different relationship than a leader-follower one. And contract-based religions have a lot of very straightforward exchanges of "here is X, give me Y" or "if you do A, I will give you B."
In the preceding section I described our research with babies, showing that even before they could talk, they expected agents with supernatural powers to win out in a power struggle with an agent lacking such powers.
Well, duh -- more power tends to win most fights. But there's also a very strong tendency to root for the underdog, because sometimes David beats Goliath. That too is baked into the genes of literally every mammal, because our ancestors survived the dinosaurs (not counting the birds).
This suggests that our relationship with the spirit world is underwritten by a moral concern with deference to authority. The gods and ancestors will tend to be our masters and we will tend to be their servants: we will bow down to them and not they to us.
True of the currently dominant religions, and that will influence the available samples. But it's not true of all religions, and most earlier ones really were not into bowing and scraping, because the hierarchical aspects of religion hadn't been invented yet. You can see this if you look at records, slanted though they are, about clashes between different cultures as monotheisms and other state religions started to become a thing. For a long time everyone else thought they were batshit.
Sometimes, our moral reasoning seeps into our religious beliefs; at other times, it does no such thing. It depends on the cultural tradition you happen to live in.
Yep.
Religion is a product of, and not a source of, our evolutionary moral dispositions.
This article has some interesting observations about how morality works.
A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2007 showed that in answer to the question ‘Do you need to believe in God to be moral?’, the overwhelming majority of people in countries outside Europe said yes.
There are two problems with this question.
1) Many people define "moral" specifically as following the rules of their particular religion. By that definition, only members of their religion can be moral. This starts a lot of wars.
2) Religions vary greatly in which actions they consider to be obligatory, desirable, permissible, or forbidden. What is obligatory or desirable in one may be forbidden in another.
Studies led by my colleague Oliver Scott Curry have shown that much of human morality is rooted in a single preoccupation: cooperation. More specifically, seven principles of cooperation are judged to be morally good everywhere and form the bedrock of a universal moral compass. Those seven principles are: help your kin, be loyal to your group, reciprocate favors, be courageous, defer to superiors, share things fairly, and respect other people’s property.
These are popular concepts. I would add, the only universal rule that anthropologists have found about sexuality is that it shall not be unregulated.
However, the order of those principles varies greatly.
Help your kin and be loyal to your group are variations on the same thing. They work best in moderation. Too much devotion to others at the expense of oneself leads to misery and burnout. It also supports abuse and intolerance. Too much individuality at the expense of relationships leads to social breakdown. Families and societies can lean quite strongly in one direction or the other, but the most successful tend to fall somewhere in the middle. Tyrannies can spread far before tearing themselves apart, but they really don't have the staying power of healthier societies.
Reciprocate favors is the root of economy. It works well in gift economies and pretty well in barter economies. But once you introduce cash-like concepts, it drastically undermines relationships by bending things strongly toward a reductionist exchange of goods, rather than something like a relationship bank account.
Courage is another one that really needs balance. Too much becomes recklessness or abusiveness; too little becomes timidity or lethargy. It is more a skillset than a trait, and you need both the logic to calculate when a risky gamble is worthwhile and the emotional intelligence to manage your feelings for best action.
Deference to superiors is among the most variable. Different societies arrange dominance in different ways to different people. Some are intensely and intricately hierarchical. Others are egalitarian -- the study seems not to have featured those -- and some use "situational authority" in which each leader is in charge of their own sphere of influence but will defer to someone else in his or her sphere. So for instance, some cultures have a "war chief" and a "peace chief" or "men's business" and "women's business." Hierarchy seems to be the path of least resistance in human cultures, but that doesn't make it an absolute, and in fact when it comes to promoting cooperation, participatory decision-making far outstrips it. But collaboration requires more skills than brute force.
Sharing things fairly is popular but also fragile. The motivation for selfishness is strong and difficult to overpower. But this is also a case where you want to be close to one extreme (precisely equal distribution) but not necessarily right at it. Too unequal and people will eventually rebel. A leader who takes the best things from followers will not stay a leader for long and will endure many challenges. But if everything is distributed exactly equal, then it tends to undermine reward for effort. Why work harder, learn more skills, or do a nastier job when everyone gets the same resources anyway? If it doesn't have intrinsic motivation (e.g. some people enjoy hunting despite the risk and mess) then people probably won't do it.
Respect for property is another fragile one, largely because of hierarchy. When people are equal in rank and have the same resources, there is little motivation to steal or deface anyone else's stuff. But it's pretty widespread in human societies that you don't really own anything, not even your own body; instead, the most powerful people own everything and can take anything they want from the less powerful at any time. That's parasitism, not cooperation. And it is very often explicitly framed as a legal and moral right to take things in that way, which is a serious problem.
Basically, all those hardwired moral principles work if and only if they are applied equally or almost so. They're great when balanced and disastrous when not. What's worse is how easily they can be hijacked and how hard it is to fight that even when you know what is going on. Occasionally you see bizarre cases of a society lauding things that are usually considered vices, such as glorification of violence or modern America's many advertisements promoting selfishness: "Go ahead, eat it all yourself." They literally print that on packages in some cases. 0_o
On the bright side, these principles aren't actually absolutes. Humanity has safety catches. In order to get the whole picture, you have to study that too. Courage is actually a safety catch for most of the others, what allows people to stand up and say "This isn't right." Family and group loyalty will break down under extreme circumstances. Terramagne has Primordial Lilith (the earliest common female ancestor among those who left Africa) as well as Primordial Eve (the earliest common female ancestor of all).
What are the safety catches and what activates them? Once you determine that, you can avoid a lot of problems by stopping them at the warning signs, before things really explode. So for instance, you need to keep a tight watch on riots. Those are signs that group ties are breaking down, usually because the authority part is malfunctioning and abusing people. It starts to become an "us vs. them" problem and when you have core principles crossing each other, bad things happen.
Moreover, the same seven principles of cooperation on which these moral ideas are based are found in a wide range of social species and are not unique to human beings.
Not unique to humans, but neither are they universal. It depends on the survival strategy of the species. Hyenas, for instance, are intensely social creatures. They're also scavengers, and especially kleptoparasites: they like to gang up on other predators and steal their kill. In hyena culture, stealing isn't just a virtue, it's a whole way of life. And it's a very hierarchical culture in which the matriarchs tend to be tyrants.
This new idea was quite a big deal because up until then it seemed quite reasonable to assert – as cultural relativists have always done – that there are no moral universals, and each society has therefore had to come up with its own unique moral compass.
I would say, there are trends rather than absolutes, and the trends come from convergent evolution. Certain success modes are easy to discover, like sharing. Certain failure modes are also predictable, like selfishness. Most of the time, sharing increases survival, so it spreads. But there are plenty of times when selfishness improves survival, so it sticks around too. That diversity is a good thing. Diversity is life. It's what allows a species to adapt in changing circumstances. And that's why cultures are different.
Genetic mutations favoring cooperative behaviors in the ancestors of social species, such as humans, conferred a reproductive advantage on the organisms adopting them, with the result that more copies of those genes survived and spread in ensuing generations. Take the principle that we should care for (and avoid harm to) members of our family.
That's also why it takes around 8 attempts for an abuse victim to escape an abusive spouse, and why society so often blames the victim. A distortion of principles meant to keep people safe does the opposite. Hence the need for logic and balance.
And deference to superiors is another way of staying alive, in this case by allocating positions of dominance or submission in a coordinated fashion rather than both parties fighting to the death.
Which works if and only if the leader is not murdering people outright, or creating conditions that greatly shorten life and reproductive success.
To qualify for inclusion, each society had to have been the subject of at least 1,200 pages of descriptive data pertaining to its cultural system. It must also have been studied by at least one professionally trained anthropologist based on at least one year of immersive fieldwork utilizing a working knowledge of the language used locally.
On the bright side, this makes a very solid study ... for the parts that it counts. However, it excludes a lot of other data, and that's where they are probably losing the outliers, which are rare by definition. When you use mass as your selection factor, you are selecting for the most common examples.
In 961 of those instances (99.9 percent of all cases), the cooperative behavior was judged morally good. The only exception was on a remote island in Micronesia where stealing openly (rather than covertly) from others was morally endorsed. In this unusual case, however, it seemed to be because this type of stealing involved the (courageous) assertion of social dominance.
That's a key divergence among societies: what order they place those principles. It might be interesting to see if there are 7 types of society based on their top-rated principle, or even their bottom-rated one (given that egalitarian societies put hierarchy on the bottom).
One element of the universal moral repertoire does seem to be intuitively connected with our religious instincts: one that takes us back to the early developing expectation that supernatural agents will be socially dominant.
That depends on the religion. Later ones do tend to be very hierarchical. But nature religions think not in hierarchical ladders but in webs, circles, spirals: the buffalo eat the grass, we eat the buffalo, when we die we become the grass, which the buffalo eat. Ancestral religions are all about family ties, which is a very different relationship than a leader-follower one. And contract-based religions have a lot of very straightforward exchanges of "here is X, give me Y" or "if you do A, I will give you B."
In the preceding section I described our research with babies, showing that even before they could talk, they expected agents with supernatural powers to win out in a power struggle with an agent lacking such powers.
Well, duh -- more power tends to win most fights. But there's also a very strong tendency to root for the underdog, because sometimes David beats Goliath. That too is baked into the genes of literally every mammal, because our ancestors survived the dinosaurs (not counting the birds).
This suggests that our relationship with the spirit world is underwritten by a moral concern with deference to authority. The gods and ancestors will tend to be our masters and we will tend to be their servants: we will bow down to them and not they to us.
True of the currently dominant religions, and that will influence the available samples. But it's not true of all religions, and most earlier ones really were not into bowing and scraping, because the hierarchical aspects of religion hadn't been invented yet. You can see this if you look at records, slanted though they are, about clashes between different cultures as monotheisms and other state religions started to become a thing. For a long time everyone else thought they were batshit.
Sometimes, our moral reasoning seeps into our religious beliefs; at other times, it does no such thing. It depends on the cultural tradition you happen to live in.
Yep.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-29 11:49 pm (UTC)Considers the question
Considers the History of Religion
...
laughs hysterically for a full five minutes
Yeah.. no. It's definitely more the opposite based on historical evidence. Religion is the source of Immorality, since usually it gives people a 'get out of hell free' card. It also encourages people to abrogate responsibility for their actions, since 'it's Gods will' or variations thereof.
or at least, that's how it goes with most of the worlds dominant religions. There are others, but honestly, I suspect they're less popular because they don't make it easy for their adherents to follow their baser nature.
Yes ...
Date: 2024-08-29 11:55 pm (UTC)Considers the History of Religion
...
laughs hysterically for a full five minutes <<
*high five*
>> Yeah.. no. It's definitely more the opposite based on historical evidence. Religion is the source of Immorality, since usually it gives people a 'get out of hell free' card. It also encourages people to abrogate responsibility for their actions, since 'it's Gods will' or variations thereof.<<
This is true of many religions. Not all of them, but certainly the dominant ones. Look at the people who claim to be moral, while forcing a 10-year-old girl to bear a child born of incestuous rape.
>> or at least, that's how it goes with most of the worlds dominant religions. There are others, but honestly, I suspect they're less popular because they don't make it easy for their adherents to follow their baser nature.<<
Well, you're not wrong.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-30 01:15 am (UTC)As it happens, this is pretty much the meaning I ascribe to "moral" and its derivatives. I use "ethics" and its derivatives to refer to goodness or badness of behaviour, as judged by something other than a set of rules imposed from on high.
Humans generally have a somewhat blurry sense of fairness, justice, and similar, and it creeps into systems of morality. There are also reasonable or traditional ethical heuristics worked into most pronouncements of how the powerful demand that everyone behave, whether those powerful beings are gods, priests, or dictators.
This helps people confuse the two concepts.
But when "morality" is imposed on people, the part that needs to be imposed most vigorously tends to be the part less consistent with ethics. This is not to say that people don't somewhat routinely do wrong. But they usually only rebel against requirements that run contrary to their instincts, including but not limited to ethical instincts.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-30 03:00 am (UTC)Now, is this immoral because it's incestuous? Or is it immoral because it disgusts some people. Or is it immoral because animals have to avoid incest because of the genetic complications it produces (like the Hapsburg Jaw or Victoria's sons' hemophilia).
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-30 08:32 pm (UTC)