Some interesting responses here, and although I didn’t read through all of them, I read enough to get a sense of the kind of approach most people seem to be taking here.
As someone who was where you are now about five years ago, I will share the way I think about it, especially since it seems quite distinct from the approach most people are taking here.
Short answer (and hot take for this crowd): it’s not. The kind of morality I believed in as a Christian (an objective truth about things being Right and Wrong) is not possible without a god.
The illusion of such a world, however, is very possible, and in fact predicted by some pretty prominent evolutionary psychology theories of behavior. If you have not read The Selfish Gene, I highly recommend it as Dawkins’ treatment of this issue is the best I’ve heard and the (I’m pretty sure) origin of every other good explanation I’ve heard from elsewhere.
In essence, the illusion of a world with an objective moral reality is the evolutionary response to the cooperation problem associated with repeated games where actors have the ability to hold a grudge: for any single game, the optimal strategy is to pursue the course which grants the maximum individual reward (the defect strategy in the prisoner’s dilemma), but with repeated games in a population with the ability to hold a grudge, this strategy is out-competed by a “tit-for-tat with initial cooperation” strategy. Therefore, a person who is likely to cooperate with others trying to work toward the optimal group strategy, at least until betrayed, will outcompete someone who looks out only for himself. The tendency manifests as a general feeling of “the right way to do things” was the easiest evolutionary pathway toward achieving this tendency.
But why not have a sense of “pretend to cooperate until no one is looking, then do what’s best for yourself”? Well for one, because then you wouldn’t be righteously indignant and impassioned when you caught someone else following this strategy (important for the tit-for-tat part), but also because pretending involves lying. If the evolved strategy is to lie, then an expected co-evolution would be the ability to detect lies, a feedback loop would then result until a solution is developed so that a person can lie without realizing it himself so that he doesn’t give himself away. This is in fact what we find when people passionately defend their behavior that to everyone else is blatant hypocrisy: they are self-deceived and therefore don’t realize the inconsistency (this is also a large part of many of the fallacies discussed in the sequences).
Let’s test this against your (and some of the others posted here) example: murder. What we consider to be “murder” is usually undeserved killing, usually to benefit oneself. Does this improve the outcome for an individual game? Yes, you get to take what he has. But what about repeated games, where other players can hold a grudge? No, the other villagers will gang up on you when they see what you have done. And when the other villagers execute you as a group, this is “justice”, not “murder”. Why? Because it solves the cooperation problem by disincentivizing potential murderers. (Incidentally, this is why it’s so easy to come up with ethical dilemmas involving killing; because we pit two competing psychological solutions against each other: “don’t kill” vs. “justice”.)
How else to test this? Go through the commands the Bible, and do your best to answer “would I feel this way if I hadn’t read this?” I predict that >90% of the ones for which you say “yes” can be shown to solve a cooperation problem found in the ancestral environment. (With lesser confidence, I predict that >50% of the ones for which you said “no” can be shown to have solved a cooperation problem found at the time of its writing.)
In retrospect, the alignment of psychology to the ancestral environment that the sequences demonstrated was one of the arguments which most strongly (downwardly) updated my belief in God. Why does the killing of a pre-pubescent seem so much worse than someone older? because the older person is a competitor, rather than a descendant/kin. Why does abortion seem so much worse the older the baby gets? because it is becoming increasingly viable. Why am I more emotionally motivated by the fate of those close to me than the fate of an entire neighboring city? because increased relatedness means more shared genes.
One final note: from a purely practical perspective, consider how much utility you are currently gaining from your beliefs. It may be too late to just choose to not pursue this to it’s conclusion (it was for me), but consider the possibility that if you’re wrong, knowing doesn’t actually improve your utility. It was world-shattering for me to change my mind on this, and I honestly don’t know what I would do if I had an “unknow” button.
Some interesting responses here, and although I didn’t read through all of them, I read enough to get a sense of the kind of approach most people seem to be taking here.
As someone who was where you are now about five years ago, I will share the way I think about it, especially since it seems quite distinct from the approach most people are taking here.
Short answer (and hot take for this crowd): it’s not. The kind of morality I believed in as a Christian (an objective truth about things being Right and Wrong) is not possible without a god.
The illusion of such a world, however, is very possible, and in fact predicted by some pretty prominent evolutionary psychology theories of behavior. If you have not read The Selfish Gene, I highly recommend it as Dawkins’ treatment of this issue is the best I’ve heard and the (I’m pretty sure) origin of every other good explanation I’ve heard from elsewhere.
In essence, the illusion of a world with an objective moral reality is the evolutionary response to the cooperation problem associated with repeated games where actors have the ability to hold a grudge: for any single game, the optimal strategy is to pursue the course which grants the maximum individual reward (the defect strategy in the prisoner’s dilemma), but with repeated games in a population with the ability to hold a grudge, this strategy is out-competed by a “tit-for-tat with initial cooperation” strategy. Therefore, a person who is likely to cooperate with others trying to work toward the optimal group strategy, at least until betrayed, will outcompete someone who looks out only for himself. The tendency manifests as a general feeling of “the right way to do things” was the easiest evolutionary pathway toward achieving this tendency.
But why not have a sense of “pretend to cooperate until no one is looking, then do what’s best for yourself”? Well for one, because then you wouldn’t be righteously indignant and impassioned when you caught someone else following this strategy (important for the tit-for-tat part), but also because pretending involves lying. If the evolved strategy is to lie, then an expected co-evolution would be the ability to detect lies, a feedback loop would then result until a solution is developed so that a person can lie without realizing it himself so that he doesn’t give himself away. This is in fact what we find when people passionately defend their behavior that to everyone else is blatant hypocrisy: they are self-deceived and therefore don’t realize the inconsistency (this is also a large part of many of the fallacies discussed in the sequences).
Let’s test this against your (and some of the others posted here) example: murder. What we consider to be “murder” is usually undeserved killing, usually to benefit oneself.
Does this improve the outcome for an individual game? Yes, you get to take what he has.
But what about repeated games, where other players can hold a grudge? No, the other villagers will gang up on you when they see what you have done. And when the other villagers execute you as a group, this is “justice”, not “murder”. Why? Because it solves the cooperation problem by disincentivizing potential murderers. (Incidentally, this is why it’s so easy to come up with ethical dilemmas involving killing; because we pit two competing psychological solutions against each other: “don’t kill” vs. “justice”.)
How else to test this? Go through the commands the Bible, and do your best to answer “would I feel this way if I hadn’t read this?” I predict that >90% of the ones for which you say “yes” can be shown to solve a cooperation problem found in the ancestral environment. (With lesser confidence, I predict that >50% of the ones for which you said “no” can be shown to have solved a cooperation problem found at the time of its writing.)
In retrospect, the alignment of psychology to the ancestral environment that the sequences demonstrated was one of the arguments which most strongly (downwardly) updated my belief in God. Why does the killing of a pre-pubescent seem so much worse than someone older? because the older person is a competitor, rather than a descendant/kin. Why does abortion seem so much worse the older the baby gets? because it is becoming increasingly viable. Why am I more emotionally motivated by the fate of those close to me than the fate of an entire neighboring city? because increased relatedness means more shared genes.
One final note: from a purely practical perspective, consider how much utility you are currently gaining from your beliefs. It may be too late to just choose to not pursue this to it’s conclusion (it was for me), but consider the possibility that if you’re wrong, knowing doesn’t actually improve your utility. It was world-shattering for me to change my mind on this, and I honestly don’t know what I would do if I had an “unknow” button.