Is morality an illusion?

Abstract

For well over two millennia, philosophers and theologians assumed that morality presupposed compliance to a set of ideals used for the regulation of human conduct, in consideration for other individuals with whom a moral agent shared his or her social space. Accordingly, ethical inquiry was pursued with the primary aim of discovering these ideals. Beginning from the second half of the 19th century, however, Charles Darwin (1871) redefined morality as an innate trait evolved by biological organisms in their struggle for existence in otherwise hostile primordial environments. Subsequent moral theory, fed by the naturalistic temper of post-modernism, and its new conception of freedom, developed an individualist ethics, whereby morality is to be left at the discretion of the individual. The assumption is that each individual can only automatically elicit the appropriate behaviour as the need arises, owing to their biological moral constitution endowed by natural selection. This has, to a very large extent, made Western ethical theorists to focus, rather narrowly, on the biological explanation of the evolutionary mechanisms of moral behaviour, viewing human morality as a biological illusion prompted by genes. This paper addresses this issue through the re-examination of the meaning of morality, as well as that of ethics. It explored and delineated some basic indices that it considered essential for proper characterisation of human morality. It argued that, under any judicious reckoning, morality, being a phenomenon that fundamentally arises and goes on in the concrete daily concerns of humans, is a factor that gives human existence and interaction its meaning. As such, morality, adequately conceptualized and understood within its social context and framework, is not an illusion. This connection is to be taken into cognizance for ethical inquiry to remain a worthwhile exertion.

KEYWORDS: Ethics; evolutionary biology; human; illusion; moral reasoning.