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Journal of Cognition and Culture , 9 , — The young chimpanzee does not need an oracle to tell it to honor its mother and to refrain from killing its brothers and sisters. Of course, family squabbles and even murder have been observed in ape societies, but such behaviors are exceptions, not the norm. So too it is in human societies, everywhere and at all times. The African apes — whose genes are ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent identical to ours — go about their lives as social animals, cooperating in the living of life, entirely without the benefit of clergy and without the commandments of Exodus, Leviticus, or Deuteronomy.
It is further cheering to learn that sociobiologists have even observed altruistic behavior among troops of baboons. More than once, in troops attacked by leopards, aged, post reproduction-age males have been observed to linger at the rear of the escaping troop and to engage the leopard in what often amounts to a suicidal fight.
The heroism which we see acted out, from time to time, by our fellow men and women, is far older than their religions. Long before the gods were created by the fear-filled minds of our less courageous ancestors, heroism and acts of self-sacrificing love existed.
They did not require a supernatural excuse then, nor do they require one now. Given the general fact, then, that evolution has equipped us with nervous systems biased in favor of social, rather than antisocial, behaviors, is it not true, nevertheless, that antisocial behavior does exist, and it exists in amounts greater than a reasonable ethicist would find tolerable?
Alas, this is true. But it is true largely because we live in worlds far more complex than the Paleolithic world in which our nervous systems originated. To understand the ethical significance of this fact, we must digress a bit and review the evolutionary history of human behavior.
Today, heredity can control our behavior in only the most general of ways, it cannot dictate precise behaviors appropriate for infinitely varied circumstances. In our world, heredity needs help. In the world of a fruit fly, by contrast, the problems to be solved are few in number and highly predictable in nature. That is to say, most behaviors result from environmental activation of nerve circuits which are formed automatically by the time of emergence of the adult fly.
This is an extreme example of what is called instinctual behavior. Each behavior is coded for by a gene or genes which predispose the nervous system to develop certain types of circuits and not others, and where it is all but impossible to act contrary to the genetically predetermined script.
The world of a mammal — say a fox — is much more complex and unpredictable than that of the fruit fly. Consequently, the fox is born with only a portion of its neuronal circuitry hard-wired. That is, they may or may not hook up with each other in functional circuits, depending upon environmental circumstances.
Learned behavior is behavior which results from activation of these environmentally conditioned circuits. Learning allows the individual mammal to learn — by trial and error — greater numbers of adaptive behaviors than could be transmitted by heredity.
A fox would be wall-to-wall genes if all its behaviors were specified genetically. With the evolution of humans, however, environmental complexity increased out of all proportion to the genetic and neuronal changes distinguishing us from our simian ancestors. This partly was due to the fact that our species evolved in a geologic period of great climatic flux — the Ice Ages — and partly was due to the fact that our behaviors themselves began to change our environment.
The changed environment in turn created new problems to be solved. Their solutions further changed the environment, and so on. Thus, the discovery of fire led to the burning of trees and forests, which led to destruction of local water supplies and watersheds, which led to the development of architecture with which to build aqueducts, which led to laws concerning water-rights, which led to international strife, and on and on. Further, the lack of social consensus on many issues makes it impossible to equate ethics with whatever society accepts.
Some people accept abortion but many others do not. If being ethical were doing whatever society accepts, one would have to find an agreement on issues which does not, in fact, exist. What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues.
Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that impose the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud. Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty.
And, ethical standards include standards relating to rights, such as the right to life, the right to freedom from injury, and the right to privacy. Such standards are adequate standards of ethics because they are supported by consistent and well-founded reasons. Morals and religion these two words are often confused as interdependent entities which flow from one another, but the truth is quite different.
Let me start by stating the obvious first because though it is obviously still all the confusion stems out of the Understanding or May I say the misunderstanding of these two words. Religion as we know it today has evolved and has been codified over the centuries with changes in the social dynamics and social structure to suit the societal needs of contemporary times. A set of rules, norms, and conditions were spelled out to extract a favorable response from the practitioners of the religion towards the society.
These rules changed according to time, place, and more importantly convenience of the society as a whole. Though the religions of the world desire a favorable outcome, acceptable by the majority, the over-enthusiastic practitioners and implementers digressed from the novel origin to more dogmatic ways. Whenever a choice has been in front of the human the right and the wrong start weighing in his or her mind. Having said that, I feel that both the words seem to germinate out of each other.
It is actually the position or place from where the differentiator is looking at and on what ground the differentiator finds itself grounded. Now the question comes: Can morals exist without religion?
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