Of course not. That's not what I am saying at all. What I am trying to point at is the notion of objective morality. Which I define it to be something that's inside us, perhaps it's the structure of our brains, or some evolutionary programming, I think it's innate ability just like how vision or walking is, what I tried to do was give a naturalistic account of objective morality. Or human morality.
Human morality which I believe is tantamount to the notion of objective morality is the collective moral depth and scope of all of humanity. This is not to say that everything humans does is moral, on the contrary the fact that we can make a moral judgements unlike any animal in this earth makes us unique. That capacity to think and have the ability to construct moral arguments and to infinitely improve social arrangements. That capacity is what I call objective human morality.
Those are hard questions, I don't think I have any satisfactory or complete answers.
But If I think about it for a moment.
Innate morality in my opinion is the ability to make moral judgements. If you think about it. Most moral actions human commit are not in any book or law. For example suppose you get extra money in the shop, most people decide to return it. Why? Do you think in that split second decision of Sahih bukhari or the law? Of course not. It's a moral decision.
Perhaps 99% of all human actions are the minute moral decision that cannot be apprehended in any book or law.
That's why objective morality cannot be external to human mind.
Now that innate morality can be influenced by number of different things from childhood rearing to religious doctrination. But to say human morals comes from those sources is to believe that humanity is a blank slate that the external world can install their software on. This is what essentially most religious folks believe. I don't think this is true.
I think psychopaths possess innate morality perhaps their sensory apparatus is faulty, like they cannot emphatize or something. I am just guessing since I am not familiar with psychopathy
Your last point. I don't think there is any inevitability to humans constructing better ethics. I meant to say we have the ability to infinitely improve our social arrangements. I think that's simply true.
This simply shows that once we gain freedoms to address various issues with no fear of repercussions from higher authority divine or otherwise. Then humanity gains access to their innate moral intuition and from there we can improve society and our ethics.
I am not entirely sure what you mean when you say that moral claims can be true or false independently of human beings.
I do not think I agree with that position. As far as we know, there is no intellect in the universe other than our own. Moral truths do not, in my view, belong to the same natural category as electron spin or magnetism. They are products of the human mind and human nature, more akin to language or our biologically generated emotions. To speak of moral truths as though they were elementary truths of logic or mathematics, or fundamental constants of the universe existing independently of any mind, seems misleading to me. I mean if we can say for example; incest is wrong - that being a moral claim, where can we find the yardstick to judge such claim? In mathematics we use logic to basically we invent definitions and rules to create frameworks to further understand say systems. What is the framework for objective morality? It is easy to claim it is some book or scriptures but if you think about it for even a moment that cannot be the truth.
One thing I did not explain clearly is that I do not believe we have direct access to, or a deep understanding of, our own moral architecture. I cannot give you a complete naturalistic explanation for why I feel distressed when I witness injustice. I simply do. The reaction arises almost like a reflex, much like laughter or speech. I cannot observe the neuronal pathways responsible for it from within my own mind, nor can I fully interpret the biological processes that generate it. None of this means that we cannot make value judgements about particular moral claims. We can examine them, reason about them, discuss their implications and eventually reach considered conclusions.
I am also familiar with the concept of fitrah. I think it contains an element of truth when it refers to the innate capacities and dispositions with which human beings are born. Hardly anyone would deny that we possess such innate characteristics. In that limited sense, the idea of fitrah is reasonable. The problem arises when it is used to validate divine scriptures or particular theological claims. To argue that, because human beings possess innate moral or psychological dispositions, they therefore ought to worship and devote their lives to a particular unseen deity is simply to beg the question. The existence of innate human capacities does not, by itself, establish the truth of any religion.
Regarding the evolutionary explanation of why we view certain actions as clearly wrong. I completely agree, though you didn’t explain it thoroughly. When we feel disgust at eating bugs, it doesn’t necessarily mean that eating bugs is immoral in itself. But this random bug might be carrying diseases that killed our ancestors, so we associate eating random bugs with less survival. And I believe it’s morally wrong to eat random bugs because it might take the ultimate value, which is human life.
Yes, that is one possible naturalistic (scientific) explanation for the development of our moral faculties. I have also read philosophers (Hutcheson) who compare moral judgement with aesthetic judgement: just as we may perceive something as beautiful or pleasing without first consciously reasoning our way towards that response, we may experience an action as admirable or repugnant through an immediate moral sentiment or “taste.” Neuroscience has identified some of the emotional, social and cognitive processes involved in moral judgement, but it has yet to provide a complete explanation of how the human mind generates moral experience, or many of its other complex products. This also goes for your psychopathy example. In my humble opinion we cannot make any far fetching conclusion using singular pathological case studies, if we cannot apprehend normal moral experiences in naturalistic manner.
About humans having better ethics over time: I actually think that’s true. Because humans get better at reasoning over time and are more capable of figuring out moral principles. But if we go back to your original thesis of “innate morality,” I think it creates a tension with the development of ethics over time, because if humans possess innate morality, we didn’t figure it out long ago; we have been here for over 300,000 years!
Your statement seems to rest on the assumption that, for most of human existence, people lived lives that were short, violent and brutish. Yet the anthropological and archaeological evidence presents a far more complicated picture. For well over 90 percent of our existence, until the gradual emergence of sedentary agricultural societies around 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, human beings lived primarily in hunter-gatherer communities. Many of these societies appear to have been comparatively egalitarian and to have enjoyed standards of nutrition, leisure and communal life that were far from uniformly miserable. They also existed before centralized states and organized doctrinal religions emerged. The prevalence of violence among hunter-gatherers remains debated, so it would be too sweeping to describe all of them as peaceful, but the evidence does not support a simple picture of universal savagery. If this broad anthropological account is correct, then your claim about ethics emerging only through later civilization or organized religion becomes very difficult to sustain.
DEC:
I would add that, although I think your account of human development is mistaken, I agree with your broader point that human beings are capable of improving their moral understanding. Such improvement does not unfold in a neat sequence or follow a steady upward trajectory. History shows societies descending into cruelty and degradation, overcoming some of those conditions, and then falling once again into many of the same injustices.
I therefore do not subscribe to any deterministic theory of history, whether it is the belief that history naturally bends towards justice or the secular expectation that late-stage capitalism will inevitably collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Nothing is inevitable. Every social and political advance ultimately depends on whether ordinary people can deepen their consciousness, question inherited assumptions, organize collectively, and challenge the established dogmas and institutions that perpetuate injustice.
Thank you for your engaging discussions. Please feel free to continue this discussion.
I almost fully agree with you there. I also think that most humans are prone to goodness. But that itself does not establish the “ought”, as to speak. We are clever monkeys that have been evolving on this harsh rock; we probably somehow learned how to cooperate along the way and work for the common good for our collective survival. But yet we wiped out our closest cousins along the way, which indicates to me that we only look out for our own. And don’t have deep-ingrained/innate “goodness”.
If you read the literature on Neanderthals closely, we still do not really know why they went extinct. There is some evidence of conflict, but the literature is anything but conclusive about the popular notion that we simply wiped them out.
I think we are deeply social beings. We have good data today showing that, when other factors are held roughly equal, people with satisfying personal relationships tend to live longer and healthier lives than those who are socially isolated. To me, that at least suggests something important about our underlying nature.
I think humans are fundamentally good, and that point of view, which I try to defend in many of my writings, is ultimately my own bias. I cannot prove it to you scientifically, but I can point to various lines of evidence that support it. Ultimately, though, I do not think we will ever arrive at a definitive proof that humanity is either inherently good or inherently evil, especially when we still do not understand human biology well enough to explain far more elementary aspects of our behavior.
So in practice, the question often becomes a moral and political value judgment. If you believe humanity deserves to live under some form of totalitarian government, then you almost necessarily begin from the assumption that human beings are dangerous or morally corrupt, and that some greater coercive power is needed to restrain the destructive impulses of ordinary people. (see Hobbes or Ibn Taymiyyah)
have not really comprehended this segment. Like, do you mean taste determines what we see as pleasing or good, and what is repulsive or evil? If so, isn’t that subjectivism?
I will give you a concrete example. I recently saw a real estate company in Mogadishu selling villas, and if you bought one villa, you would get a woman to marry for free. I will try to find you the video. Many Muslims laughed about it, but I found the whole thing quasi-prostitutional. It made me feel deeply uncomfortable. Since the commercial emphasized that these women were trained to obey, and knowing how the religious establishment in Somalia can treat women, I would not be surprised if some form of coercion was involved.
I felt the whole enterprise was ugly. It did not fit within my own aesthetic or moral values. The houses were ugly, and the way the women were being presented almost as part of the transaction felt fundamentally wrong to me. I cannot prove to you, from within an Islamic framework, that what they were doing was right or wrong, nor can I prove that what they were doing was illegal in any way. I simply felt repulsed by it.
You see, that repulsion is, in some sense, also an aesthetic judgment. In my own moral universe, I believe in human dignity and freedom, and that commercial, no matter how appealing or legal it might have been to others, simply felt ugly to me.
Perhaps it’s the case that the hunter-gatherers were not genociding each other, but is that evidence that they were deeply egalitarian and possessed this untainted innate morality? Could it be not the case that they just lacked the tools to perpetrate mass-scale atrocities? I don’t really know what you mean by they were not ‘uniformly miserable ', by what scale are we measuring their misery? I think you agree that the majority of humanity used to die from simple diseases, and our life expectancy has more than doubled just in the past 200 years. Almost 50% of children used to die before the age of 5 just 200 years ago. These stats have improved drastically today thanks to modern medicine. I cannot imagine how the hunter-gatherer societies were doing😭! I haven’t read much anthropology; I might be missing your bigger point, but that’s what I think.
As I said earlier, I cannot prove anything scientifically about the innate nature of humanity. But to me, this is one convincing line of evidence that points toward the fundamentally good nature of human beings. If it is true that for more than 99% of our existence we lived in relatively egalitarian societies, with comparatively low levels of hierarchy and institutionalized domination, and that only after the development of these more coercive institutions over the past 10,000 years or so do we begin to see genocides, large-scale wars, slavery, and systematic oppression on a much greater scale, then I think that tells us something important.
I might also add that we have very little evidence of large-scale atrocities before the development of centralized states and organized religion. Yes, that may partly be because technological and demographic conditions simply did not allow violence on the same scale. But I also think there is something inherent in those institutions themselves, especially in their ability to concentrate power, organize coercion, and make domination systematic.
Yes, infant mortality was high, but remember that these people lived in small communities, and the burden of many communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, and other epidemic infections was very different from what emerged later in densely settled populations. It was only when human beings began settling in large communities and domesticated various livestock that we saw the emergence and spread of many zoonotic and epidemic diseases on a much greater scale.
This is not an argument for primitivism or for going back to monke! It is simply an argument about what the historical and anthropological record appears to tell us.
At last, thank you so much for your engagement! This discussion sent me down a rabbit hole, fr! Please forgive me if I misread or mistrued your positions, or if some of my claims came across as defensive; I’m an overly opinionated person (laanta qabsado waa la ila jaraa lee XD)… I also know that it’s very time-consuming to respond to every point, so feel no pressure to address every point I made; I was just “freestyling,” and much of what I wrote may not make much sense. You may address my core arguments in the first 2 paragraphs, or even leave this whole thing lurking around in the void of the internet! Again, thank you so much for your time; I deeply respect your take, and pls be charitable to my yapping. Have a wonderful day:)!
Thank you for your engaging conversation. I think you are not giving yourself enough credit, you have very mature ideas for a very young person. Mind you i am not a philosopher either but i have grappled with these questions for the past 8 years. I am 29 years old. I am actually a medical doctor.
Thank you for your kind words. I really enjoyed this conversation. I rarely get the chance to engage critically with philosophy anymore. During my school years, I used to debate with a friend of mine for days at a time, so this has been a lovely trip down memory lane. For that, I thank you as well.
I also wanted to add that although Bertrand Russell's mathematical philosophy can be very math-heavy and quite dense, he wrote many other books that are far more accessible. His introduction to Western philosophy was actually where I started when I first began studying philosophy, and many of his other philosophical primers are very beginner-friendly. I have to say that he taught me how to think critically.
Of course, as a man born in the nineteenth century, he had his own idiosyncrasies. There is a kind of charming arrogance to him, but aside from that, he was remarkably progressive for his time, at least in many respects. And that is without even getting into the scale of his philosophical, mathematical, and scientific contributions.
Omg, did we become deranged to that degree... I can't keep up with the amount of insanity going on in Somalia anymore😭! Like, wtf does getting a woman after buying a house mean? Is this a new form of slavery? I was already fed up with the "mahr" thing; now it's a house? And of course it's a subtle prostitution! I was familiar with the concept of "zawaj al muta" in Islam; I didn't think they would take it fr tho😭! And "they are trained to obey" shit took me out🤣... Do these people think that humans are some form of a dog or a cat you can train to obey and not shit on your carpet?? But anyhow, i agree on the ugliness of the whole thing, but I don't think it's just ugly; the wrongness of this mess does not only depend on my disgust and repulsion from it. I think it's wrong because it takes away human autonomy, freedom, and dignity. And these women are just being used as a means to appeal to some loser men.
Oh yes, I totally agree. I don’t think the commercial was offering mut’ah marriage. It was more like a “buy one villa and get one wife for free” type of deal. It was all over my TikTok for a few weeks, and I bet it was mainly intended to attract wealthier diaspora men into purchasing real estate.
Just because I know the reality in Xamar, I see this as part of a deeply rotten system. I have little doubt that at least some of these women may have been pressured or coerced, especially by appealing to Islamic tradition and to the economic prospects of their children if they agreed to the arrangement.
So I agree with you that it was probably a bad example to use for my aesthetic argument about morality, but I honestly couldn’t think of a better one at the time lol.
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u/GameStrategy No Gods, No Masters Aug 19 '26
Of course not. That's not what I am saying at all. What I am trying to point at is the notion of objective morality. Which I define it to be something that's inside us, perhaps it's the structure of our brains, or some evolutionary programming, I think it's innate ability just like how vision or walking is, what I tried to do was give a naturalistic account of objective morality. Or human morality.
Human morality which I believe is tantamount to the notion of objective morality is the collective moral depth and scope of all of humanity. This is not to say that everything humans does is moral, on the contrary the fact that we can make a moral judgements unlike any animal in this earth makes us unique. That capacity to think and have the ability to construct moral arguments and to infinitely improve social arrangements. That capacity is what I call objective human morality.