In searching to understand natural worldviews, one of the things that keeps coming up is the need to develop a system of morals. Ethics is generally part of religious worldviews, but it seems generally accepted that ethics in a natural worldview are developed from reasoning, logic, and some sort of shared values. For example, sentience is often considered valuable, so that particular shared value can form the basis of an ethics.

After looking at several rational, naturalistic approaches to defining values and morals, I’m left wondering about the general approach taken in developing these frameworks. One of the common elements seems to be that they are based on an assumption that the process can be approached as a rational exercise. In other words, given one or more shared values as described earlier, one can then apply some sort of logical or rational reasoning or thought process to develop an ethical framework.

The problem with this is that modern psychology and cognitive science have pretty clearly shown that humans are not generally rational, logical thinkers. Mind you, that doesn’t mean that rational thought plays no role at all, simply that it’s only one of several things that go into our mental processing, especially regarding things like setting values.

Seems like this raises a question: Should we really expect human ethical frameworks to be based on rational thought instead of taking into account all that it means to be human? In other words, why should we expect it to be possible to rationally establish human values and morals when humans themselves are not rational? * Continue reading →