The religious and some philosophers are confused about where humans get their moral values, and as a result implement ever more barbaric moral edicts to keep people in line. It might help if the religious had a better understanding of where our morals come from. It’s not from their imaginary god.
Evolution and Society
Inanimate objects and most animals have no moral system.
Inanimate objects respond to the world passively – forces cause them to move, to change chemically, and to chemically react. Superficially, lightning, volcanic eruptions and other natural events appear to be active (we even describe a volcano as ‘active’). In less enlightened times such natural events were thought to be active in a teleological sense, as if the event its self was a god, or the action of a god.
Most biological objects are invisible to the human eye. But when seeing them with microscopes they look more active, more purposeful. But they have no brains, so their activity is also reactive. Even food seekers are reacting to internal biological/chemical processes, automatically. They are un-thinking automatons.
It’s not until we see other animals with brains are we able to more reliable infer intent. Even so, for many, their brains are not as capable of the thinking that we are. Nevertheless, we often see in them as having human-like qualities they do not possess.
Anthropomorphism treats the non-human thing as if it literally has human-like mind, speech, or behavior. We ascribe agency to the thing itself. Personification is when we attribute a human trait, feeling, or motive to something non-human for expressive effect. We engage in both these mental activities when we observe both inanimate objects and non-human animals.
Higher animals, like dogs, they are genuinely minded creatures, but not human ones. Dogs can distinguish intentional from unintentional human actions in experiments, which suggests some sensitivity to intention rather than just outcome. But that is not the same as saying they form human-style reflective intentions; rather, we often interpret their actions through a human lens, which can overstate what they actually represent.
Ants are often read as intentional because their collective behavior can look goal-directed, but research shows some striking goal-like patterns can emerge from local cues and group coordination rather than individual ant “plans.” For example, cooperative food transport can produce anticipatory obstacle clearing that looks purposeful, yet the study reports that individual ants did not need an internal representation of the final goal for the behavior to occur. That means ants may show teleology in the pattern of the colony’s behavior, while individual intent may be much thinner than it appears.
Dogs are different because they are social mammals with more flexible individual cognition, and they can read human intention cues in a way ants do not. Still, even in dogs, it is best to distinguish between genuine intention-like sensitivity and a full human conception of purpose, planning, and reasons for action. So when a dog seems “guilty,” “jealous,” or “vindictive,” we are often personifying; when we say an ant colony “decided” to reroute a load, we are often describing emergent teleology rather than individual intention.
Teleology means explaining behavior in terms of ends or purposes. Humans naturally read both ants and dogs teleologically because purposive-looking action is easy to detect and useful for prediction, but that habit can mislead if we slide from “looks goal-directed” to “has a human-like intention”. A good rule is: the more the behavior can be explained by simple rules, cues, or collective effects, the less warrant there is for attributing rich intention; the more it depends on flexible social understanding, the more cautious but plausible intention attribution becomes.
Humans too are biological organisms, so our behavior, feelings, and motivations arise from bodily and neural processes rather than from anything separate from biology. Emotions and motives are linked to brain circuits, hormones, and homeostatic systems that help us seek rewards, avoid threats, and keep the body in balance.
A human action is not just “a choice” in the abstract (important when thinking about ‘free will’ and moral actions); it is also the output of a living nervous system, endocrine signals, prior learning, and current bodily state. Hunger, fear, attachment, curiosity, and fatigue all reflect biological processes that shape what we notice, want, and do. Even our most reflective decisions depend on a brain working inside a body that needs energy, safety, sleep, and social connection.
Feelings are not separate from biology; they are part of how the organism registers its condition and prepares action. Motivation can be understood as the system that pushes behavior toward rewards and away from punishments, while emotion helps organize arousal, attention, and response. That is why a feeling like anxiety can change posture, focus, breathing, and decision-making all at once.
This also helps explain the continuity between humans and other animals. The same broad biological principles — neural circuits, hormones, survival pressures, learning, and homeostasis — operate across species, even though humans add far more language, reflection, and cultural interpretation. So when we compare ants, dogs, and humans, the difference is not between “biology” and “not biology,” but between different kinds and levels of biological organization.
In practice, this means we should be careful about attributing rich intent too quickly, whether to animals or even to people. Human behavior often looks fully intentional from the outside, but the underlying causes still include automatic, emotional, and physiological mechanisms. So the right view is not that biology cancels meaning, but that meaning, intention, and feeling emerge from biological life.
And Morality?
What has this to do with morality? Morality is a social system of behaviour, and rules we invent, to satisfy our biological wants, needs and motivations in social interactions. Morality is a human invention. Humans invented it.
Some other brained animals have shadows of it because they too are driven by wants, needs and motivations. It’s always associated with brained social animals. Wolf packs have ‘rules’. They are not stated in a written or oral moral code. For wolves they are are a combination of evolved and learned behaviour. The parents growl and snap at the young when they are not behaving as the pack, or individual, wants or needs.
Evolved human morality is similar. Early humans will have had similar social structures and learned behaviours, but before language development there was no way to express these wants, desires, motivations except through action.
The development of oral languages, and story telling, was an opportunity to codify the desired and required behaviours of others. Written language allowed rules to be imagined, debated, and agreements understood.
But why do we have moral codes? Why should humans invent ever grander moral systems?
The basics of morality emerge from the fact that animals, including humans, are survival machines. We can’t help it. It is a natural drive. We need to live, and to live we need to eat, and to eat we need to find and appropriate food, and keep food from competitors. To survive as a species we need to procreate, and to procreate we need to acquire mates, and also keep them from competitors.
This means we want to live, and not to be killed or harmed. We want to possess things, like shelter, food, mates, offspring, and so we oppose the theft of those by competitors. Humans, being evolved social animals, want to achieve those goals, while at the same time cooperating with potential competitors, the other humans in our group. This is where moral codes are useful, from learned behaviours prior to language, to oral and written rules, built with the use of language.
For most of humanity the basic moral principles have been “do not kill” and “do not steal”. If we can agree to those, then we can get along socially, and have a thriving community.
All other morals are built on top of these, and are often added to, to make some aspect of social living easier … though sometimes that means making it easier for the dominant member or members of the group. Tribal leaders, kings, dictators, tyrants, always seem to find the need to add rules that benefit them and their retention of power.
The Objective vs Subjective Dilemma
The question of the objectivity and subjectivity of moral systems arises. All moral systems are a combination. We have the objective reality of evolved and socialised human groups that have the basic needs to get along without having our lives and possessions taken from us, without being harmed. Most rules are associated with these objective realities of human life.
The subjective aspect comes from the fact that while the evolved species level drives are objective reality, as thinking feeling individuals we can perceive our individual wants, needs, motives with a large degree of subjectivity, and this leads to social systems with a great deal of variety in how we implement the basic moral codes. In particular, we see a lot of subjectivity and variability in how different social moral systems punish transgressors.
And this is where religious dogma gets it wrong. The description above is where our morals come from. The religious simply pretend there is a God that dictated the rules to us. But, the gods are capricious and arbitrary. Just look at the punishments that different religions apply, and how they have varied through the ages.
Western Moral Systems
Western societies have come to develop more rational moral systems, based on reasoned approaches to the moral systems that came before. If “do not kill” is such a valued moral code, then killing thieves seems excessive. But, our societies recognise this dilemma. To maintain a healthy society sometimes means relaxing our moral codes in various directions. It becomes necessary to kill people that are attacking and killing us. It becomes necessary to take the liberty of someone that continually harms or steals from others. Morals are not simple absolute abstract rules, but complex problems of balancing our basic principles against those of people that do not conform.
Collective system like socialism and communism have a tendency towards authoritarianism “for the greater good”. Despite the claims of many socialists to be “nice people” there are countless examples of their nastiness and violence towards transgressors that will not tow the party line.
The collective system of Islam is an ideology stuck in the past of 1400 years ago, with strict and barbaric punishments of death for apostasy and blasphemy, stoning to death of adulterers, and the endorsement of slavery and sex slavery.
Modern Christianity has moved on from its barbaric past of burning people at the stake and torturing sinners, to a suicidal empathy for anyone perceived (usually through propaganda) as being a victim, even if there is a very clear record on barbaric responses from those in their care.
Governments become authoritarian, sometimes with what they really think are good intentions but are the result of a delusional attempt to appease groups that tend to be violent. Coupled with the fear of being considered not nice, this leads to ignoring the rape of thousands of young girls, and the jailing of those that speak our against rapists and extremists, because those accused are part of a community that will raise hell if you offend them.
Morality Beyond the Basics
In the above I focused on the basic morals that most systems share: do not kill, do not steal. But our moral systems include far more than those basic proscriptions.
Sex – Why are religious moral systems so concerned with sex? Historically it has a reasonable basis. The biological requirement is to have one’s own offspring survive. That means protecting your mate (the female) from access by other men. There was a time, not so long ago, when DNA testing (and even blood typing) was not available to determine the father of a child. Visual clues were all we had. It was far easier to make adultery a mortal sin. And to avoid a pregnancy cause prior to acquiring a mate, virginity of the female was another safeguard. The male lion will kill the cubs of a mate acquired from another male. Humans may not go that far, but it’s not that unusual for children of earlier mates to be driven out of the home. But thankfully humans can generally get past the deep biological need to protect and promote one’s own progeny at the expense of another’s. And contraception has made sex safer and freer. While our societies are more relaxed about sex, our religions cling to their ideals to a point of being immoral to the rest of us.
Feminism – The descriptions above, of course, are based on deep animal biological reality of male domination in the human species. Not all species are the same. Females can dominate in some aspects of the culture for other species, even where the male remains the strongest. But in some the female is larger and more dangerous than the male. This variability illustrates the somewhat arbitrary nature of human morality – arbitrary in an evolutionary sense, in that it could have been otherwise. Nevertheless, this is where we are. It’s a man’s world. But male and female brains are sufficiently similar for women to naturally want to enjoy many of the freedoms and benefits that men have: careers, freedom of sexual partners, relieve from the burden/boredom of home making. Voting. We are still in transition. We are still learning. And there have been obstacles. And uncomfortable realities. So much so that feminism now not only includes the freedom to do as men do, but also the right to be protected from men. Having the freedom to be free form abuse by men has now taken a turn to opposing transwomen, being men, having access to female safe spaces, and sports. Males and females may be able to compete equally at chess, but not so much at football, running, swimming, boxing. The limits of female power and strength have also become an issue with front line fighting in the military. As with many issues, it’s not an absolute one; there’s no objective morality to appeal to. Many women can out-power and out-perform many men. But the elite women cannot compete with the elite men, and often not with average men. We are still working this out.
Homosexuality – A plausible part of the background to homophobia in humans is that many human societies were organized around reproduction, inheritance, and paternity certainty, so behaviors seen as not directly reproductive could be treated with suspicion. The “Yuk!” factor may also be natural, as staright people feel yuish about gay sex, and many gay people feel the same about sex with the opposite gender – but we can learn to tolerate many things that discomfort us initially. So, hostility to homosexuality is not a direct instinct hardwired by evolution; the evidence points more to prejudice being amplified by social norms and group dynamics. Even without homosexuality, many members of a society do not reproduce, so it’s not an evolutionary requirement that a society be completely heterosexual. Some cultures are tolerant of homosexuality. A strange example, again, is Islam. Homosexuality is punishable by death, yet Afghanistan and Pakistan tolerate bacha bazi – the term is commonly glossed as “boy play,” from Persian roots, but that translation hides the reality: boys are sometimes dressed as girls, used as entertainers, and then sexually abused or kept as sex slaves. Reports describe it as associated with poverty, coercion, weak law enforcement, and abuse of power.
Racism – Racism is truly a nonsensical and immoral perspective. Even if it were to be proven that some races are more intelligent, socially adaptable, … nice … than others (put aside whether you think it can or cannot be proven), we are always dealing with statistics and the variability of humans. It would only ever be true that on average, one race, as a whole, was more so than another, in some measure. Individuals are not a whole race. If race X has a slightly higher mean than race Y on some measure, it would still be the case than near half of race Y (upper half) would be higher than half of race X (lower half); and it could still be the case that the best of Y is still better than the best of X, on the same measure. And even if one race were wholey inferior to anotehr, where would be the moral justification for racist discrimination? Racism is another example of the follies of collectivism. Individuals are real humans, races are statistics. So, we generally acknowledge that it is immoral to judge someone on their race. Unfortunately, not all members of all societies are capable of understanding this.
Multi Culturalism – Cultural Moral relativism is actually immoral. It should be obvious to anyone that there are ways of running a culture, and instilling cultural values, that are better or worse than others. Other than a few Muslim Palestinians and white supremacists, I don’t think anyone else thinks Nazism and Hitler’s Germany was a great culture. Who would want to welcome Nazis to our multicultural society? So, clearly, the simplistic notion that multiculturalism is a good is mistaken. To maintain a functioning society we need to maintain our good moral codes, and prevent pollution by bad ones. We have failed. That is not to say there are no decent people from toxic cultures. We should welcome and save more ex-Muslims from the punishment of death for apostasy, for example. We should be far more prepared to assess cultures rationally, against our own stated values, and avoid importing too many people that would do our culture harm. We don’t have to be irrationally discriminatory, but we can be more discriminating, to avoid the moral failure or our politicians that has endangered the lives of our own citizens – including the lives of immigrant citizens that genuinely escaped the dysfunctional members that we now import.
Tolerating Intolerance – This is perhaps the greatest moral dilemma the West faces, and its suicidal response to appeasing the intolerant threatens to be its downfall. The West has created a problem for itself in being indiscriminately welcoming to people from other parts of the world. It is partly guilt and a confused moral outlook that sees “white colonialism” as the cause of all the world’s evils, and that as a penance the West must take in and nurture every non-white face that wants to come here, no matter what their intentions might be. These psycho-empaths suffer from racism of low expectations, as well as guilt. Just as “do not kill” has necessarily to be put aside to avoid our own death, so too our tolerance needs to be measured, and we should not be so naive it leads to our society’s own downfall. For example, we can tolerate genuinely peaceful Muslims, in small numbers; but even that is not protection enough because the children of peaceful Muslims can become radicals, and to add insult to injury, that exposes other citizens to radicalisation – it should not go unnoticed that a number of white converts to Islam joined ISIS. Islam is a political ideology, closer to Nazism than we wish to admit, and it is itself intolerant of Western society’s freedoms, and would impose its own values, were there sufficient numbers – because then, the actual peaceful Muslims no longer have an effect, as the radicals dictate what Islam is.
Other Moral Codes – The above are some of the common moral perspectives that societies have developed and struggled with, and explains how they might have derived from our human evolutionary and social development. There are others:
- Kinship duty: obligations to family, clan, and descendants; helping relatives can be treated as a moral duty rather than just a private choice.
- Reciprocity: the rule that benefits should be returned, often expressed as loyalty, gift exchange, or mutual obligation.
- Hierarchy and deference: respect for elders, chiefs, rulers, or superiors as a moral good, not merely a social convenience.
- Fair distribution: ideas of equity or “equal share” in disputed resources.
- Property rights: respecting prior possession and ownership as part of moral order.
- Purity and sanctity: rules about sexual conduct, food, bodily states, or ritual cleanliness, often tied to religion.
- Community obligation: the idea that people are embedded in roles and responsibilities within a group, so conduct is judged by loyalty and duty.
- Divine order: moral rules grounded in obedience to God or the sacred, where an act can be wrong even if it harms no one directly.
Morals and Laws – We have many laws that are created to promote the smooth running of society, but some of them have a moral aspect too, … moral in the sense that to infringe upon them has some moral impact, some harm to others.
- Treason: framed as a betrayal of political community, so it carries strong moral language about loyalty and disloyalty.
- Tax evasion: often treated as more than a technical breach because it is seen as cheating the collective system that funds public goods.
- Driving offences: dangerous driving, drink-driving, and reckless speeding are moralized because they expose others to avoidable harm.
- Perjury: lying under oath is both a legal offence and a moral wrong because it corrupts truth-seeking and justice.
- Bribery and corruption: these are moralized because they undermine fairness, trust, and equal treatment.
- Child protection laws: offences against children are often seen as especially grave because they violate care and vulnerability norms.
- Theft and fraud: legal wrongs that are also morally loaded because they violate property, trust, and reciprocity. Of course theft has roots in our survivability, as described above.
Where We Are Now
There is zero evidence for gods. Gods are human inventions, and we know this because of the many gods that humans once thought existed are now rejected, even by the religious of today.
With zero evidence for gods there is zero evidence that gods dictated our moral systems.
There is ample evidence, from human behaviour and its similarities with other species, and the evidence for evolution, that morality is the social encoding or wants, needs, motivations, based on evolutionary and social development, and extended to arbitrary degrees to include rules and laws that superficially have nothing to do with the biological origins directly, but which still are understood in terms of harms when those laws are broken.
There is sufficient evidence from human history that moral codes have a basis in the objective reality of human nature, both biological and social, but also that in encoding and and enforcing our moral systems there is a great deal of subjectivity that leads to variety across societies.
The religious are mistaken when they claim their morality comes from god. They are also mistaken when they think that atheists can have no grounding for morality.
It’s actually the opposite. Atheists have a greater opportunity to develop workable and fair moral systems, because they rely on science and reason to figure out what is best for humans, and can examine past moral systems and evaluate them in the light of modern knowledge. It’s complicated, often requiring the solution of competing wants, needs and motivations. But progress is possible.
The religious do not have that flexibility. Some religions, of course, do in fact adapt their moral systems to the current moral trends of society – showing that their morality is not in fact from their god. But others. like Islam, are fixed in the past, because, “The Quran is the literal and perfect word of Allah, valid for all time. And, Mohammed is the perfect example (as described in the Hadith).” That’s why slavery is still permitted in Islam. So, religions are worse moral systems because THEY are the systems where “anything goes”: it takes only a persuasive charismatic false prophet to tell you god wants you to rape female slaves for that to become encoded in the moral system.
All atheists are not immune to poor moral reasoning. There are many professional philosophers that are atheists and still think there is some objective moral truth, out there in the universe, for us to discover. And atheists that adopt other extreme ideologies, like Fascism, Communism, are so convinced that their ideology is correct that they are capable of highly immoral acts to sustain it.
What about the future? There cannot be a single objective moral system, because humans and human societies develop over time, and create different ways of managing the complexities of life, and of technology.
It is unlikely that Christianity will get to a place where witch burning is a thing again. But Islam has a lot of catching up to do. It is astonishing to many people today that death for apostasy is a thing. Just as astonishing is that the Church of England has such a dangerously suicidal outlook on Islam.
And the Red Green alliance is a thing of immorality to behold – LBGTQ+ activists sympathizing with Islamic terrorists that mow them down in a car ramming, or throw them off high buildings, or hang them from cranes.
And these same lunatics march for Palestinians that have a record of killing Jews, and each other, in the most brutal ways imaginable, while blaming Israel for fighting back, and ignoring the many other cases of Islamic butchery going on around the world … they don’t even know how antisemitic they are in their “no Jews, no news” anti-Israel activism.
And British MPs, those of the “let’s be nice” parties, dismiss concern for eleven year old girls being raped by Pakistani Muslim men as a “far right dog whistle”, because they are more worried about their Muslim vote, or they fear the “Islamophobia!” outrage of Muslims, or they fear being labelled racist … yes, their moral compass is so twisted they will look away from the rape of young girls and demonise anyone that calls it out. They are so deranged, they would even prosecute and imprison citizens that speak out, while simultaneously claiming they support free speech.
Yes, moral systems of all kinds are plagued with so much subjectivity the followers would see they are immoral even by their own standards, if only they were able to view themselves rationally rather than ideologically. Despite the West’s progress on developing ever fairer moral systems, it is not beyond regressing into authoritarian immorality.
No doubt, this perspective will be seen as another opportunity to score points against Islam … it will be perceived as Islamophobic. Well, then yes it is. Islam as an ideology is one I oppose. I oppose other religions too, but the West has learned to live with them and curtail their nastier habits. But the West has been naive about Islam. It is not Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism … Islam is currently unique. It is only recently that the wider Western public has begun to realise this. The problem is: many of our elites are immune to its problems because they are distant from its consequences; and our left wing anti-West ideologies are allied with Islamists, and are equally naive about the consequences for them.
So, yes, I could have excluded any mention of Islam in a post about morality, but it would have been remiss to avoid mentioning an ideology of which many of its tenets are directly opposite to Western moral values. Had this been the 1940s or 1950s or 1960s I could have used Nazism or the Soviet Union as examples of immoral systems. But, here we are now, a different world, and different dangers.
Ramblings 