Is morality genetic?

gravenewworld

Thought this was an interesting piece on 60 minutes last night:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRvVFW85IcU

BenG549

Hi, unfortunately the link you provided is not available in the UK but for what it is worth... I think it is more than likely morality has an evolutionary basis, ancestors that learned to treat each other well and act in a 'good' way are more likely to survive... (although someone with a background in evolutionary biology might qualify that a little better) and hence genetics, and subsequently socialisation are likely to play a definitive role in how you think and feel about the world and hence govern your morality.

viryan23

The Definition of Morality, retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/, April 21, 2013.

The term “morality” can be used either

1) descriptively to refer to some codes of conduct put forward by a society or,
some other group, such as a religion, or
accepted by an individual for her own behavior or
2) normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.

Morality is not genetic. It is conceived from the interaction of people. The common idea from above's definitions is people. Human beings are social animals. Check this link for more information: http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2011/0...come-from.html

ImaLooser

I think that morality is both learned and genetic. If you send any time around animals it is pretty clear they have a moral code. It seems obvious that ants and bees have a generic moral code.

The ant/bee moral code is simple and not learned. In the case of dogs it is a bit more abstract -- loyalty to the group and all that -- and partly learned and partly innate. With humans it is even more abstract and more is learned and less is innate, but the basics are in there. Loyalty to the group is important. The question is, what is the group? Everyone has a different concept of the group, so that complicates things. Unlike ants, two groups may develop moral codes that are quite different. But I think that the basic moral principles are more or less the same for the great majority of people.

When I was at Harvard the ideas of BF Skinner dominated the psychology department. Basically it was that everything was learned. I thought that was a crock. Later the idea fell from favor, largely due to the work in linguistics of Noam Chomsky, who convinced most that the basics of language are innate.

I don't really know, but think Chomsky won like this. Marvin Minsky and the artificial intelligence people wanted to do automated understanding of language. They went to the then-orthodox Skiinner faction and were told that there were no innate rules and everything was learned by trial and error. Minsky tried that and it didn't work. He then went to Chomsky, who was also at MIT, and they figured out what the innate laws of language were. That worked.

zoobyshoe

I didn't watch the whole thing but noticed something fishy. When they offered the babies a choice of the good guy or bad guy they only held them both equidistant from the baby in the case of the first baby shown. With the babies after that the good guy was always held closer to the baby than the bad guy, making the good guy an easier reach, a fact they obscured with a tricky camera angle.