Certain behaviour is just that behaviour that allows us to be sociable. So we call it, not surprisingly, sociable behaviour. It’s the hard wired stuff I mentioned earlier. It’s the reason I didn’t berate the young girl in work in front of everyone. And social conformity is a reaction to living in a society. Not many people want to be the outsider. We all have a (hard-wired) need to belong to a group (let’s not mention religion here). So we try to fit in. We match social mores and attitudes. You may have even noticed people listening to someone talk in a group situation mimicking the stance and the way of talking of the person holding forth.
Here you go creating causation out of correlation as if you have answered the question without begging it.
By “match[ing] social mores and attitudes” you create the association, but then you go on to assume that trying “to fit in” is the cause of the moral or ethical beliefs that ALL people have. Now it may be true that some people do find their morals and attitudes in precisely that way, but – just as with developments in other realms of human endeavor – it may also be true that creative thinkers and moral agents go about assessing the current social situation – the “social mores and attitudes” that do exist – and find it wanting.
If your view is correct, and “mimicking the stance” is ALWAYS the way mores and attitudes come about then where does the stance come from to begin with? You cannot have an endless series of mimicking or what you will have is an infinite accidental series – endless buck passing – and no explanation for where it (the morality) actually came from.
No, what you are describing is how morals – or, as an analogy, contagious diseases – MIGHT be passed on, but it goes nowhere in terms of explaining why there are morals – or diseases – to begin with.
People may “try to fit in” mindlessly but that does not even touch upon the question that many reasonable people will ask: Should I try to fit in to the particular way in which my culture is doing things or is there something fundamentally wrong with that way and should it be changed?
No reasonable person will try to “fit in” for its own sake. There will always, at least if the person is serious about morality, an equally serious endeavor to change the society by influencing it to be the best it can be by creating a “stance” that is worthy of mimicking rather than merely mimicking the stances of others.
Mere mimicking is not an ideal in economics, science, philosophy, art, nor literature, so why should it be the ideal with regard to the origin or development of morality?
You can’t pick them. You are right there. But they are all hard wired. There isn’t a person on the planet who doesn’t feel shame, pride, lust etc. Morality is a result of these feelings. We don’t do things that may make us feel shame. We try to do things that will make us feel pride.
But we don’t – at least not reasonable people actually concerned with being good moral agents – create morality from feelings of pride or shame as if merely being in a culture that encourages or discourages certain behaviours is sufficient to make those behaviours the moral standards by which we are prided or shamed. No, any decent moral agent will always question for himself whether he ought to be proud of or ashamed of doing some action or other.
Even in – or especially in – modern secular culture, there are frequently alternate sides taken on virtually every position – say, for example, promiscuous behaviour. Any particular person’s level of pride or shame concerning their sexual behaviour is not going to depend upon what others think because what others think is all over the map. It will come down to your own conscience AND if you are an autonomous moral being you will have arrived at your moral position NOT based upon feelings of pride or shame but from thoughtful and sound moral judgement.
That determination might make you feel ashamed when you fail to live up to the standards you know to be true and honorable when you do, but the feelings do not determine your moral position – unless of course you are a sycophant with regard to the society around you.
Maybe you misunderstood. If you drop me back in Weimar Germany knowing what I know now about social behaviour and social conformity, then I would be able to look at the situation as almost a passive onlooker. I would be able to see why people developed certain attitudes. I would, I would imagine, be able to resist ‘conforming’ because of that. But if I had grown up there, then who knows. Very many right minded, reasonable people took the wrong path. And religious beliefs didn’t help, either. So there but for the grace of God…
And your assumption is that individuals in Weimar Germany couldn’t help themselves with regard to falling into taking on the attitudes of the Nazi regime, but you living in a more “enlightened” culture today could and would. Sounds like chronological or, at least, cultural ethical snobbery to me.
And there’s me taking all this time and making all this effort to explain just the opposite. That morality is based on an inbuilt need to be, for lack of a better word, sociable.
No. Morality – at least for me – is based upon an inbuilt need to realize the good both for the society within which I live and for myself personally.
It may be true that somewhere down the line the good for society will align with making it the most sociable one, but only if the individuals making up that society have a common view of the good.
A band of thieves or barbarians will share to some degree a common ideal of what it means to be “sociable” and may even get along with each other and base their “society” upon getting along with each other, but that, in itself, does not make the society a moral one.
