What is the purpose of morality?, And what is moral and immoral?

The purpose of morality is, in my opinion, a fundamental question, suitable for the inquiring mind of a philosopher. Or a dungeoner, as the case may be.

Is the purpose of morality to serve some higher being (ie. a god)? Or is there innate importance to moral laws?

Perhaps morality is all about maximising pleasure for some subset of the entities in existence or satisfying your conscience? Or maybe it's simply about ensuring others don't wreak vengeance upon you?

And what is moral and immoral? How does this fulfil the purpose?


Discuss.

Or maybe morality is an evolutionary adaptation? My money has always been on that because of the obvious advantage in a social species of not killing/maiming/stealing from/raping each other. Not all the time, anyway.

There are different levels of morality, after all. There's the basic taboos, and then theres restrictive rules based on popular opinion of the time. Morality is flexible, but it is not completely nebulous.

As to its purpose - beyond the obvious advantages - I suppose that having a sense of morality, of right and wrong, helps unite people. Why, are you going to build your own very special set of dungeon morals?

Nah, not yet anyway. I just thought it was an interesting question to inaugurate.

Personally I agree with you that it's an evolutionary adaptation, in the form of the conscience+the vengeance urge (which is IMO actually more intimately connected to the conscience than many would think) but I think that in the individual case behaviour in a moral sense is a combination of the desire for the pleasure of the conscience and for the approval of others.

What would you consider the moral core? And what do you think of people who don't always obey those rules?

There's clearly a scale of human behaviour. Some people are utterly, totally against say, killing someone. I, on the other hand, am not - not if I had a really good reason. There are certain core concepts to social morality I reckon - thing like don't kill your neighbours without due cause* and so on. What's quite interesting is that these rules which we see in societies very often don't necessarily apply to outsiders - especially enemies. I think there are situations which would motivate many people to deny their inherent morals, with differing levels of justification. I guess I always use murder as the basis because it's the most universal taboo in many ways. (By murder I do not mean things like war, self-defence and state-sanctioned killing - although I am heavily anti-death penalty - because these things are examples of people suspending 'normal' morality in special circumstances.)

Morals are also often based in self-interest as well. Do as you would be done by and so on. If you don't antagonise the people around you, they won't have a reason to do the same to you. More deep-rooted than that is empathy. We have a tendency to condemn things that we wouldn't want to happen to us, we can imagine the suffering of others as if it were our own.

There are people without empathy. They're called psychopaths.

Morality is a fabrication of society as it innately functions best if most of it believes in the same thing. I don't think there's any true "good" or "bad" at all, there are simply things we are taught as such.

More to come, I gtg.

You have yet to respond to that morality thread I posted in RC harby. Then again I've quit RC so I guess you might as well respond here. Morality is the rational or reasoning to do the things we do or rather a justification. Other wise, the rational mind would come down to one ultimate conclusion and arrive to nihilism if nothing mattered or had no meaning. In order to get to where we are today without killing, maiming, etc. each other, we all had to have agreed to some basic principles of civilization and society whether it be law or biologically.

Ghost-Agent, out of interest, how would you consider Law and Morality to be related?

Law was meant to be the means by which morality is enforced. Without law, there will be no cooperation between individuals, and society cannot exist without cooperation at a fundamental level.

However, "good" and "evil" are concepts each person must wrangle on his or her own. the purpose of a society, at a fundamental level, is to improve the quality of life for its citizens overall.

That's simple enough, check out my massive thread.
http://forums.dota-allstars.com/index.php?showtopic=190374

Basically sums up my take on morality and law.

DOTA is gay

Do you play any of the other WC3 custom maps?

Personally, I've always been into the various tower defence games.

Tower defenses are even gayer.

Angel Arena and Tower Wars are where it's at.

Not that I mind the outburst of randomness... But lets steer this back. Here's a quote from D-A of mine (I'm the one responding, thus the one below).

Simple. Ideas don't exist, only laws. If we had any set and "true" way of acting, we'd know it already. Not only that, we couldn't act anyway else. Everything in the universe follows innate laws or seemingly doesn't have one at all (like the quantum energy release thingy that's apparently random, bored to explain further). Nothing "learns" to act up to some set archetype, it can either work by an innate law or have no law whatsoever.

Thus, morality is either just an immaterial idea with no innate laws behind it (what I'm arguing) or the law of morality is for it to constantly shift and change without the existance of a perfect one (since that's what its been doing so far, and what I've shortly addressed by the stuff TGA pointed out).

Gravitation is only a theory (edit: post count 42).

Theories in physics represent more or less what we currently think is true, and thats sometimes as close as we get to laws. Note that there is a gravitational law, as gravity does act consistently to certain set of rules, its just that the law hasn't been defined yet (hell, "gravitons", the bearers of gravitational force haven't even been proven to exist yet). So yeah, the fact we might not know how a law goes doesn't mean the law doesn't exist.