Question from Sam:
Where do humans get their moral standards and conscience from?
Answer by SmartLX:
The short answer is, from each other, from their own instincts and from a long line of social ancestors.
My earlier piece on right and wrong answers your question in much greater detail. There’s also a short piece on the foundations of morality.
The question, and where you’re asking it, implies that God’s instructions via some sacred text would be the usual answer. Well, every sacred text has a lot of instructions even most religious people don’t use anymore, like killing people for eating shellfish or working on the wrong day. Those who use these texts as a moral guide are choosing which parts to use – but that means they’re judging the text based on some independent moral standard. Therefore, even believers are getting at least some of their ethics from the simple experience of being a human among humans.
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I certainly hope we don’t get it from religious texts. Even in a text as sublime as the Bhagwat Gita in Hinduism, Krishna calls women “inferior” in some paragraph somewhere. I am probably quoting him out of context though (Hindu fundamentalists … don’t come after me with your swords and swears) … but goes to show that all religious work reflects morality and social mores of the time when it was penned down.