OK, excellent post. I think you've got a very valid point here. We did construct it out of necessity.The Dreaming wrote:My point is that morality developed because when we live in higher population densities, we NEED to follow specific ethical codes to live harmoniously. Our needs *stem* from our biology of course, even if we never evolved to live in cities of several million people. Like I said, we have taken control of our own development. We developed morality because we have the astounding ability to control our environment. Instead of waiting for biology to instill us with a new set of imperatives, we developed rules and morality, to efficiently and harmoniously fulfill our needs as well as possible. Such enormous population densities make certain concepts *inevitable*.
That's what I'm driving at. Mankinds self-driven development works like nothing in nature, but our needs were tuned by the environment that developed us. We have changed that environment WAY too fast for biology to keep up, so we made the changes ourselves. That's what rules are for.
What I'm driving at is that morality is as natural as anything else we need to survive, like a sex drive. Though we constructed it ourselves, we constructed it out of necessity. We are "developing" to a higher state of harmony with ourselves and our environment. Though opinions can differ, what we are driving for, what we are intending to do *with* our rules is universal, natural, and above all true.
That only goes to show though that everything is moral or immoral only within our social context. In other words, it's only wrong to kill people because we decided it was. And we decided it was because it made communal living impossible unless we forbade it.
Dunno about the "true" part though...

--A