Reply To: Burn Baby Burn

[Simon Paynton]

I don’t know about 25 words, and I don’t know if this is definitive.  But

human morality is an evolutionary response to the need to thrive, survive and reproduce in a harsh environment.  The earliest humans began cooperating and acting as a team, as each individual couldn’t make it on their own.  So we have evolved a set of prosocial instincts that make us want to cooperate, get along and treat each other well.  If  we didn’t have these instincts, no laws could impose order on us.  The best religious morality encodes these prosocial instincts.