What would happen if we lived life without morals?

[The One King]

Just a question that im wondering if anyone has anything interesting to say on it.

personally i believe that if we lived life without morals then humanity would divide by zero and frazzle into nothing.

[Helm]

Put two families on an island with only enough food for one family to survive until rescue and you'll see their moral standards shift to accomodate their new situation.

[Bongfu]

Put two families on an island with only enough food for one family to survive until rescue and you'll see their moral standards shift to accomodate their new situation.

The family that survived would define our mortals. It is impossible to have life without morals, because a dominant party will always impress its own values on other humans.

[My Favorite Martian]

Read reports of what has happend in concentration camps and I think you find a range of answer to the question, of what happens if you live in a world without morals.

[Watchman]

No morals = kiss society goodbye.

[The One King]

Which would apply how if there were no morals?

not saying its not true, because it is.

[Sevasti]

It all depends on whether you classify "no morals" as "immoral" or "amoral". There's a difference.

[My Favorite Martian]

This is the classical Bonobo question according to a pretty and klug student from Luxembourg that had been around some years ago. - I am sceptic in this however and think we are closer to the chimpanzee and accept biting as a strategy to solve conflicts not seldom.

[Helm]

Everyone has their own individual morals, society just reaches a general consensus of what the majority of people believe to be right and wrong.

[My Favorite Martian]

Well, morals are conventions insofar they are social.

[Watchman]

Society holds together because of any number of formal and informal systems to *enforce* the necessary minimum level of morals for sustainable coexistence are followed, you know. Remove the morals, you remove the thing that allows people to even see each other without getting casually murdered.

[My Favorite Martian]

I think it is important to see that there is not only one moral but morals in the sense of standarts of moral. I agree nevertheless that there are also necessities, e.g. to cooperate, that require agreements or pacts between members participating any type of exchange-system for the sake of the success of the goal that has been set by the participants.

[Denny Crane!]

Our morals are most definitely mostly due to our genes when it gets down to the issues that would have faced our distant ancestors, but when you get to more recent issues such as complex governments and societies, countless and conflicting information available easily and the growing scientific power to change life in ways we have never known a lot more comes down to nurture as opposed to nature, even if they are based on the basic, naturally selected morals.

Obviously, the recent and (survival wise) absurd attrocities of our history proove that it is possible to completely go against our genetic moral code.

Its all just an extrapolation of basic instinctual morals or societal memes conflicting with distortions based on ideology.

[My Favorite Martian]

Naja, between instinct, society and methology, there exists probably a lot of space to fill.

[Watchman]

To a large degree human morals are the end product of being a social animal and hence requiring various "rule sets" to regulate intra-group interactions and relationships. Pretty much all but the most rabidly solitary animals have something of the sort, too; if nothing else most need to find a mate at some point and procreate before getting et (though some famously eat the male either during or immediately after copulation...).

We're just way better at coming up with new, artificial ones as necessary.

Anyway, this is why I put the "=" between the evaporation of morals and the nigh-instant end to any kind of society; the two are inseparably interwined. "Morals" *are* what makes "society" of any kind possible in the first place. The exact details are frankly irrelevant; the point is people need to articulate their interactions through some kind of matrix of customs, rules etc. to even coexist nevermind cooperate. Even in the most abject Third World warzone hell-hole there exists some form of such framework, no matter how primitive, brutal and minimal; even the worst bandits and warlords in fact follow *some* version of such, simply because their bands of cutthroats could not exist otherwise.

[Desperado †]

As Bongfu said, there will always be some sort of a moral code, but this changes from person to person, from society to society and throughout history. The general genetic cocktail of morals and emotions has come from natural selection to help us survive. Becoming radically less moral by our current standards, or more moral, would probably result in humans being less successful organisms, and most definitely create very differently structured societies. Humans being able to co-operate is most definitely the deciding factor that made us a dominant species, changing this would make things very different indeed.

[Denny Crane!]

You can't it is inbred, genetic, you don't really choose a lot of them. Those who don't are the people who are sick with a disorder or abuse as a child and by that I mean paedophiles and serial killers.

[Playfishpaste]

You can't it is inbred, genetic, you don't really choose a lot of them. Those who don't are the people who are sick with a disorder or abuse as a child and by that I mean paedophiles and serial killers.

He is saying if that gene were removed.

If this were the case, not much would be different except probably more random killings or fights.

[Denny Crane!]

He is saying if that gene were removed.

If this were the case, not much would be different except probably more random killings or fights.

Without reciprocity there would be no social structure.

[Tankbuster]

Without reciprocity there would be no social structure.

Exactly. Our ability to emphatise with other human beings is what makes society (and our survival) possible in the first place.
Humanity would die out.