Morals come from society.
They have always come from society.
They will always come from society.

Morals are the products of our innate instincts and empathy as social animals, refined by our experiences in our families and society.

Religion creates a poisonous pseudo-morality consisting of self-righteousness, hatred, spite, hubris, and judgmentalism. Religious morality is manifested in oppression, honor killings, holocausts, inquisitions, and religious wars.

I have made two rather extensive posts on morality:

Thread: "Differences in Approach" (12/15/2016 14:02)
Thread: "Differences in Approach" (11/23/2016 01:02)

Morales come from you treating others how you want to be treated. Humans have made laws against immoral acts, that punish the law breaker with prison time.

Experts like Harvard's Steven Pinker and Yale's Paul Bloom have written a lot about where morals come from. Based on their and others'research it seems that shared interests of members of a species will lead to what we think of as a component of morality. Reciprocal behavior is a big part of it. When a Rhesus monkey grooms another monkey, they expect the same in-kind treatment. If the receiver of the grooming does not oblige the first, the sense of inequity is infuriating to the cheated monkey and future acts of grooming are withheld from the ungracious monkey. We see examples in essentially all primates and a great number of other species.

Shared responsibility is also a large component. Wolf pack members that don't contribute to the hunt are eventually excluded from the rewards of the hunt.

There is a lot of research around empathy that is instructive as well. Chimpanzees that are given the option to take a treat with the addition of seeing a fellow chimpanzee immediately be subjected to a small but painful electrical shock when they take that treat have been studied. The chimpanzees offered the treat often notice the correlation and turn down the treat to save its compatriot from pain. Chimpanzees are notoriously hostile to non-tribal members but have real devotion to their in-group members.

So shared interests, reciprocal behavior, and empathetic pain awareness seem to play a role in the evolution of morality. A key area of current study is altruism, which is positive behavior toward an individual with little or no apparent benefit to the individual performing the good deed. Paul Bloom argues that this instinct is also directly tied to long term reciprocal behavior. Richard Dawkins suggests that it is really tied to something far deeper, which is that our genes are mindlessly acting in their own survival interests. Any set of behaviors that leads to the gene's survival will be passed on to future genes, and any behaviors that are detrimental will suffer Darwin's curse and be removed from the gene pool. Like I say, there is a lot of study on altruism.

Morality in humans is then, in my opinion, an evolutionary set of traits that has proven successful. Morality is natural for an intelligent herd-like species like humans.

Morals come from an innate need of individuals to be treated fairly by treating others fairly. I always found christianity to be immoral by allowing a loophole that forgives all past crimes and transgressions if one repents prior to dying.

What I have never quite understood, and what has never been satisfactorily answered by folks who think morals can come only from their gawd, is where they think I, as someone who identifies as atheist, get mine.

So, does it matter?

Does it matter from where morals actually come? Is it not more important that we don't squash others based on our own bs? Really. If a xtian claims superior morals and yet hurts others...if a Buddhist claims they really care about all life but kills, if a Muslim says they are peaceful but think death for apostasy is correct, is any one of them moral? Does it matter if they claim to know the source of morality? Isn't the proof in the pudding?

construction of human....

Morals are arbitrary rules of conduct voted into existence by the popular majority of any given society. Oftentimes, they are deployed by a single dictator or monarch. They are also determined by the outcome of civil war or by violent protest. The outcome of the moral compass that a society ultimately lays down is then enforced by said society thus infusing the belief that morals are absolute. These morals that they value will shift over time depending on the makeup of opinions doing the voting, doing the dictating or doing the warring. Morals are a human construction that varies by Time, Geography and Circumstance. All of the morals we value today will someday become "outdated" by a future society that no longer feels the same way.

Thus, morals are rules generated by the consensus of like-minded individuals. It evolves over time as the structure of the social network evolves. It does not "improve" or "degrade" over time - it simply changes based upon the shifting desires of a given social system. Morals do not exist in some aether of matter nor does it exist in the stars or the trees. It also does not exist when a human being is alone. It only emerges when humans form a group. Thus, morals are not imbedded within us. It is entirely a social phenomenon.

Today, most of those wildly different social spheres have largely dissappeared - replaced by a more or less globalized moral system whose societies are now wholly interconnected through vast trade agreements and international resolutions through the United Nations Security Council and the General Assembly.

What kind of morals would you have if you were born some 2500 years ago, into the legendary tribes of the Mayans?

Would you have the morals of a 21st century American even though *America* was not yet discovered and shaped through decades of protests, rallies and a full blown civil war?

No. You would be a Mayan and believe wholeheartedly in the Mayan ways of life. Would you have been born in the Wrong Place .... at the Wrong Time?

Moral relativism however, does not mean there are no morals at all. Moral relativism states that there ARE morals which are created by each society independently from one another - from different locations to different times.

American morals for example are decided by the popular vote of the American citizens - hashing out our differences on the streets, at rallies, at city conferences and in congress. Sometimes they are hashed out in civil wars - like the one Lincoln fought for. Chinese morals on the other hand, are hashed out quite a bit differently from ours where only a small percentage of the population decide what is right and what is wrong. These rights and wrongs that all societies build independently are then enforced by each society on their own thus causing each to believe that they have the moral superiority.

Morals are not only relative by location but are also relative by time. A hundred years ago in America, introduction of same-sex marriage bills would get you lynched by a mob like the KKK. Today, its sweeping the nation because the society that is now doing the voting is comprised of people who feel very differently from the society that existed 100 years ago.

@Audrey

Defining Morality:

- principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour.
- a particular system of values and principles of conduct.
- the extent to which an action is right or wrong.

Religion used to be the source of morality. In the West there is a new source of morality: Universities. The morality from universities is based on equality and is very often the opposite of Christian morality.