The Art of Doing the Right Thing
Doing the right thing is more of an art than an analysis.
I’ll explain.
For a long time, I wanted to find reasons to be moral. I wanted to know why people should do the right thing. But try as I might, I could not convince myself of any “self-evident” or “deductive” reasoning that led philosophers like Kant to conclude that ethics and morals can arise out of reason or reasons.
I’ve since come to believe we, the apes, place too much causal power on our so-called, “reasons.” (But that’s another topic.)
This does not mean that I believe morality is relative. To the contrary. I have come to believe there is a“core morality,” coined by Alex Rosenberg, generated in humans by natural selection. (From here, I diverge from Rosenberg’s conception.)
Human beings evolved prosocial feelings and behavior as group-hunting mammals so that we could live, work, and hunt in groups. This gave us an advantage in nearly every environment on earth, and made us the apex predators. Doing what is right is an adaptive trait for working in groups.
Core morality, which is a “sense,” or sensibility, contained in the mind-body, is objective in the same way that human sight is contained in the eyes and nervous system, and is objective.
