Does Morality Do Us Any Good?

[Hume]

When the German philosopher Hanno Sauer titled his ambitious new book “The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality” (Oxford), he made it clear that he sees morality as quite different from science. In his account, morality—that body of judgments about good and evil, the practices that reflect those judgments, and the blame, guilt, and punishment that sustain them—hasn’t always existed. That’s why it had to be invented, rather than discovered.

Does Morality Do Us Any Good?

Our basic sense of right and wrong appears to be the product of blind evolution. The hard question is how unsettling that should be.

www.newyorker.com

 

[Hume]

"For Sauer, the story of the invention of morality is really the story of the evolution of humanity. The processes that produced our morality are simply the processes that produced us, produced us as beings who have this morality—rather than, say, the norms that govern ants in their caste-bound colonies, or wolves in their packs, or the snow leopard in its solitude. To understand ourselves as moral creatures, we have to understand that we’re built that way.

 

[Diogenes]

No.

 

[Daylight63]

This is a SUPER interesting topic since it sounds like Sauer is possibly wrong. Moral instincts in many cases do appear to be instinctive to social animals like humans.

Indeed no one came to the conclusion "murder is wrong" through reason. No one came to the conclusion "theft is wrong" through reason. We see moral instincts in groups of other primates.