15 minutes presentation in seminar of freedom of religion 2009-02-20

1. Religious and secular morals
   • Religions tend to assume monopoly on morals
     • Atheists assumed immoral beings
     • Secular society assumed to lead to chaos
     • Kick stones or old ladies, no difference
     • Raping and killing bad only because there is a god that has forbidden those
2. Reasons presented for religious morals
   • Omni-potence, omni-science, creation, stability of content -> All weak
   • Content-based reasoning: this shows only our ability to select
   • Selecting good and bad -> irrelevant both cases
   • Exception: fanatics going against conscience

1. Secular morals: reason and emotion
   • These are left when absolute / godly moral is found without basis
   • Vary from person to person, time to time -> subjective
   • But no random variation -> common patterns
2. Only rationality?
   • "Rational decisions" (traditionally "good")
   • "Emotional decisions" (traditionally "bad")
3. The fallacy of 100% rational decision
   • "Banana shopping failure" of emotionally handicapped people
   • Fallacy of evil robots taking over the world
   • Nazis: Fact of evolution -> only strongest should survive -> weak/defective should be killed
4. Types of questions
   • Continuum from factual questions ... fact/moral ... moral
   • "God created all living species" (100% factual / rational)
   • "Taxes should be decreased" 25% moral?
   • "Capital punishment should be abolished" 50% moral?
   • "Thou shalt not kill" 100% moral?
5. Emotions present in all moral decisions
   • Better in explicit form than implicit (hidden below 100% rational argumentation)
   • Emotion / Will / Conscience / Moral feelings
   • Wikipedia: "Conscience is an ability or a faculty that distinguishes whether one's actions are right or wrong. It leads to feelings of remorse when one does things that go against his/her moral values, and to feelings of rectitude or integrity when one's actions conform to our moral values."
   • Martha Stout ("The Sociopath Next Door") conscience as "an intervening sense of obligation based in our emotional attachments."
6. Rationality is good tool in pre-analysis
   • Preparing the facts for emotion/will to decide on
   • Mistaken facts or false logic can lead to fallacious moral decisions
   • Eg. "Taxes should be decreased"
     1. What are the effects? (rationality)
     2. Do we want those effects? (emotion/will/conscience)

1. Nature/mechanism of moral emotions
   • Brains science of emotions
   • Brain areas: Limbic system (hypothalamus, cingulate cortex, hippocampi)
     • With the arrival of night-active mammals 180 million years ago, smell become dominant sense
     • Olfactory lobes gradually formed the neural blueprint for what was later to become our limbic brain.
   • Chemicals: testosterone, estrogen, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin
     • Alteration with rats, one can induce love, binding etc.
   • Cultural/learned effects
2. Origin/explanation of moral feelings/conscience
   • Genetic/inherited effects
     • Evolutionary psychology
     • Eg. The problem of Altruism
       • Seeming contradiction with darwinian "battle of survival"
       • Resolved in evolutionary psychology by inclusive fitness models (W. D. Hamilton et. al.)
       • Revision to simpler original Darwinian fitness
       • Kin selection
       • Evolutionary game theory (non-kin group interactions)
       • Memetic selection
   • Interplay between genetic/inherited aspects
   • Moral variation and common patterns
     • Like genetic differences and similarities

Conclusion: Kicking stones or old ladies does consist of movements of atoms at the lowest level but for a human being is makes a moral difference.