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.

Tzikin

I consider that the developmental stages each has its specific morality, meaning the everybody has the spectrum within them. The one that is followed is learned by experience.
One specific level of morality that must be mentioned is that those who live by rational thought and abstract concepts are the only ones capable of altruism beyond those that they meet on a daily basis. Knowledge, objectivity and rationality are central to the concept of psychological assertiveness and considering the outcomes of their actions. Those that have learned to live by their emotions and the emotions of others have not reached this level of morality.
Well that just about explains the state of our society.

TimTimmy

I don't like when people say things are because of "genetics". Sure it may play a role in some things but a lot of people write it off as "meant to be" and "no control over it".

I think morality is learned and how you were raised such as parents, media, school, environment, etc.

Tzikin

Genetics is used as the ultimate excuse but so to an extent is learning. What about free will, especially when it comes to a subject like morality. Once you are an adult, you are largely able to choose your environment and learning experiences.
The only problem with free will is that choices are clustered in a similar way to the Locus of Control.

Internal Locus of Control - Knowledge and rational decision making are clustered with doing good deeds for the common good and also honest self-evaluation and taking responsibility for self-improvement and self-confidence. Assertiveness, which boils down to forethought about outcomes, is dependent on objective, rational and informed decision making.

External Locus of Control - Ignorance, subjectivity, emotional decisions, self-adoration, passive aggressivity and co-dependency. If there is one objective evil in the world, it must be co-dependency, destroying a person that you allegedly love and care for for the sake of blind egoism.

Clustering means that unless you choose knowledge, rationality and objectivity, and the difficult process of honest self-evaluation and taking the blame for your part in life's problems, you will be co-dependent. The problem is that in the world of ratings, sales and facebook likes, what sells is the myth that you can have your cake and eat it. People are being told that they can be irrational, overemotional, ignorant and subjective and be independent and empowered. They can have self-confidence that is independent of others rather than a brittle shell of egoism. They can be moral.

So their free will is corrupted in a society filled with myths and lies. Their decision making process is corrupted.

That appears to be the major influence of learning on morality.

exfret

I do not know for sure if morals are genetic, but it does not seem to me to be otherwise. Sure, there might be free will, which, by the way, might not even exist, but how would so many cultures choose basically the same set of morals? You do not see anyone killing anyone else because they believe it is "right." In fact, pretty much our whole society has adopted the same set set of values. Ask almost anyone and they will almost certainly say that killing is wrong. I find this much too coincidental to even be a learned behavior. Sure, there are cannibals, but even they do not eat everyone. And, what about the moral of self-preservation? You may not consider it a moral, but if the idea that one should not die has somehow survived the ages, then how else could it have been passed down if not for genetics? Sure, there are depressed persons in society who choose suicide over self-preservation, but they make up the minority by far. Self-preservation prevails in every culture, and I do not even see how it can even be a learned behavior. For example, if a little kid tries to ride his/her tricycle without a helmet, his/her parents might say to him/her, "Wear a helmet, it is dangerous to go without one." The kid immediately understands that it is bad for something to be "dangerous" (this does not mean that they won't still argue, though) even though the parent has never specifically stated that the kid should be worried about self-preservation. Even if you find a way that self-preservation is learned somehow through imitation or something like that, then how would the behavior be accepted? Why would the behavior be learned? Even if the parent specifically said to the child, "Remember self-preservation!" then why would the child listen to the parent? How would understanding and listening to authority be a learned behavior, as well? If the child learns self-preservation through imitation, then why would the child be imitating things? And finally, what about feelings? Have you ever seen people say that they don't like happiness, besides goths (I hope I'm not being stereotypical by saying that goths don't like happiness, but that is my understanding of them), which are, once again, an insignificantly small minority? Happiness is not a learned behavior, yet almost 100% of the population experience and like it. Even if it was a learned behavior, then there would have to be some behavior in society that is passed down from generation to generation so that the set of morals adopted by each person in our society was so similar. Otherwise everyone would have a completely random set of values, or, more likely, none at all, which obviously isn't the case for our self-preserving, imitating, happiness-loving, and curious society.