What is morality?

[Jared.L]

I believe morality is a gut feeling.It derives from fears.Freud says our morality is shaped as part of oedipal fears.Also there are studies that show when brains are scanned when people are making moral desicions , parts that are engaged in fear responses are engaged.Same for emphaty.It isnt a coincidence psychopaths who are devoid of morality are also fearless.You take away someone's fears , give them power and they will become amoral.Morality prevents us from truly having fun.Fear makes us weak and weakness causes us to like other people that are also weak like us.We emphatise and identify with their weaknesses.Someone fearless will easily get bored with other people and only like themselves because they can give themsevles everything (except sexual love).Also we sometimes admire power and love people that are stronger than us.

Can you prove or argue otherwise?

Can't be proved - neither can any opposite or in-between. Possibly fear can be described in chemical terms but that fails to take account of the experience and the actual circumstances. I'm always sceptical of studies carried out in vitro. You can't easily brain scan someone under a real threat of death or violation.

These studies may keep mendicant scientists off the welfare queue but what value does such a finding really serve? It changes nothing. They're no closer to raw data.

Morality comes mostly from social conditioning that includes sanctions using pain, deprivation and suffering as controls. You have to know how to invoke fear to make it work. Once you start to question the controls over moral dogma they usually seem pretty hollow. Our spiritual practices / progress teach us that. Only threats pf violence work easily. But even the punishments meted out in the Middle Ages failed to deter.

Great fear can also generate great courage.

So, to expand on your post, how do you take away someone's fears? And... power brings an additional dimension. They are separate. It's just as difficult to prove whether given power a person relinquishes morality or a person who's relinquished morality gets given power. As you see in our materialist "society" where the individual is sovereign, morality doesn't stand for much. But it doesn't put most people any nearer power either.

Most powerful people work to a morality but it is not ours. They often form a community of sorts when they have to work together. In fact, it's often been the powerful who set the morality of ordinary people.

...

[Starman]

Morality often goes hand-in-hand with ethics, but while ethics deal with behavior and how we act on the outside morality deals with our inner code which may or may not inform our behavior.

Our morality can be shaped by fear or it may be shaped by selflessness, but I feel most of the time our morality is shaped by our own sensitivity to ourselves and others, or the lack thereof.

[Horse]

Morality is the innate knowing that comes from the heart. The more open the heart is, the more clearly we know whats right. Contributing to the well being and happiness of all sentient beings is whats right. Listening to the heart, and its all as clear as clear can be.

[lemex]

Deleted thought

[lemex]

Maybe back then, but today? We've moved from that to the idea of the inner child, which is much more progressive. This is more universally accepted, since we tend to find reasons for fear from other causes.

Most do see morality as being socialized but it is internal to as you have said. For instance hiking down a trail on a beautiful day and might think of wild animals and fear of attack springs up or meet some one on a date and then fear springs up which you think of loss. So parts are not from socialization but is biology centered. Everyone has the same fear centers in the same location that does the same thing (function). This shouldn't be a surprise.

The observation, empathy and fear using the same areas of the brain is a good example, different emotions use those same areas. These thoughts may be built in. That which you call gut morality might be also a program of information (DNA).

Certain aspects of nature (itself) are encoded in every cell and the brain made up of cells. Here's the thing, it doesn't seem to be very efficient in fear all the time, but to resolve fear and even morality uses the same areas of the brain.

In some aspects we're not free. Also, what about conditional causes. How can one say this is strong or that is weak, it's simply something that occurs. We're taking about bio-chemical and hormones that are released and processed that influence the mind. So whether you are thinking of this in terms of social or non social, they go through the same areas of the brain which give it it's similarity.

[Starman]

But what about a person who is immoral, does that mean they are not in touch with their heart?
Although what one person may think is immoral another may think is not immoral. Morality may be
what is acceptable in the mainstream of a culture or society.

[Within Silence]

[quote=Jared.L]I believe morality is a gut feeling.It derives from fears.Freud says our morality is shaped as part of oedipal fears.Also there are studies that show when brains are scanned when people are making moral desicions , parts that are engaged in fear responses are engaged.Same for emphaty.It isnt a coincidence psychopaths who are devoid of morality are also fearless.You take away someone's fears , give them power and they will become amoral.Morality prevents us from truly having fun.Fear makes us weak and weakness causes us to like other people that are also weak like us.We emphatise and identify with their weaknesses.Someone fearless will easily get bored with other people and only like themselves because they can give themsevles everything (except sexual love).Also we sometimes admire power and love people that are stronger than us.

Can you prove or argue otherwise?[/QUOTE

"There are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena"
-Nietsche

[Jared.L]

Originally Posted by Horse

Morality is the innate knowing that comes from the heart. The more open the heart is, the more clearly we know whats right. Contributing to the well being and happiness of all sentient beings is whats right. Listening to the heart, and its all as clear as clear can be.

Morality seems to be different for everyone. So can it be used a measure?

[Tanemon]

Jared L - I believe you've adopted a questionable polarity or conflict: morality versus fun. I'm sure there's some worth to that idea in the case of imposed or conditioned morality. But many people figure out that there's value to the notions of "act toward other people the way you'd like them to act toward you" and "don't do to other people what you would not like them to do to you". In many cases, when people are young they don't understand the value of this principle, but as they mature many people sense it. At least I've observed this to be true. In this case "morality" or an ethical element develops from within the person.

This thread could become a lengthy, complex discussion. So I'll leave my post short. It'll be interesting to see what others have to say.