The moral instinct

Morality does not arise from the dictates of religion: secularization did not lead to the feared collapse and anarchy. It is not the contingent product of culture. It certainly does not originate from reason. Rather, morality is driven by instinct.

Consider any cooperative species. Individuals, driven to maximize their own reproductive chances, will always want to game the system, and behave in an uncooperative manner, benefitting themselves at the expense of the group. What is nature's remedy? The moral instinct.

How does the moral instinct work in humans? In two primary ways.

The first causes us to become automatically angry at someone who has behaved uncooperatively towards us, who has benefitted at our expense, in other words, who has committed an injustice against us. What is every child's first moral utterance? "It's not fair!" This is instinctual morality in it's purest form. No parent is going around teaching their kids to say this.

This is well and good, but not enough. The outcome on the group scale would be fights between immoral individuals and their victim, the subjugation of the weak by the strong, and the breakdown of the cooperative group.

So, there is an additional mechanism: we instinctively feel anger when someone behaves unjustly towards another group member. While this anger may not be felt as keenly as when the injustice is towards us, collectively this is a powerful force indeed, and works to impose significant costs on immoral individuals. When they behave immorally, they face the wrath not only of the victim but of the group. When we talk about morality in the abstract, we are speaking of concepts derived from this instinct to adjudicate injustice between others. Legal systems are externalized formalizations of this instinct, albeit filtered through (and perhaps perverted by) cultural mores and norms. The concept of justice itself has not changed much over the years, as it is instinctual. What has changed is the concept of group belonging, of whom justice does and doesn't apply to, which has expanded as the world has become ever more globalized.

What is *not* included in the moral instinct is any impulse to be just, to be cooperative, ourselves. This is must be learned. Anyone who believes this is an instinct should reflect on their own long and arduous moral training, and the training you might have in turn visited upon your children. This training is internalized as guilt, and by our need for an egoic self-concept as a good person.

As this is trained, not inborn, it is inherently fungible. We can certainly talk a good moral game. But then the doors are locked, the cameras are off, no one knows you are there, and lo and behold, the cash box is unlocked. Suddenly, everything changes, and the key question more often than not becomes, "will I get caught?". Conceptually, we may not like this about ourselves, and we might loudly protest our own moral purity. But all this is exactly as nature intended. The individual learns to be moral, to benefit from participation in the cooperative group, but may flexibly behave immorally as far as the situation presents an advantage.

While there is no instinct to be moral ourselves, there is an additional, separate, inbuilt, and more primitive mechanism: empathy. Empathy works through mirror neurons: if someone inflicts pain on someone else, they are punished with the echo of that pain in themselves. This serves to prevent group members from directly harming one another. But as anyone knows who has dealt with a bully in school, this trait is variably expressed, reflecting variability in genetic moral strategies. The safest strategy is to be highly empathetic, while the riskiest is to possess little to no empathy at all: such people end up dead, imprisoned, marginalized, or as CEOs and political leaders.

All together, our instinctive outrage at injustice against ourselves and other group members, along with empathy, along with the moral training any human must learn to thrive in the group, serve to maintain the smooth functioning of a cooperative group against the inevitable "bad actors". What is evil? Evil is no more and no less than to behave uncooperatively, to act for your personal gain with indifference to the costs and harms you are imposing on others. Good is the opposite, it is to behave in an especially cooperative manner, to benefit others of the group, at your own expense. These concepts are direct reflections of the moral instinct.