Shifty Morals

While personal morality can be thought of as proper behavior, communities develop a moral set due to what’s functional for them. While we’re all the same species and have all the same basic forces acting on us, we come up with drastically different sets of morals because of changes in context. Our context determines what kind of issues we have to solve and, more importantly, how we need to address them. For example, the use of children in the workplace has historically been a controversial issue, like within manufacturing plants or coal mines for the sake of cheap labor. However in the case of a family ranch, having children help may be essential to the survival of the ranch, simultaneously educating the child and creating a stronger family bond. A long-term view is required to assess survivability because some communities might create enthusiasm and look promising, but actually have a bad track record or become unable to fulfill their promises.

Conversely, the universe formed due to the consequences of physical laws. Stars, planetoids and the arrangement of orbiting patterns all formed because of these laws. Just as the static of the radio seems random, every little blip or fizz has an origin somewhere. What we call “random,” we often mean to call “of an unknowable source.” Similarly, lower levels of math are very exact, while higher levels make numbers impossible to pinpoint.

The same consequential forces that created the Earth are the same organizational principals that drive biological evolution. As our solar system developed as part of the Milky Way galaxy, our planet Earth was being composed by those ‘accidental’ physical laws. After it cooled considerably at the surface, torrential flooding occurred and eventually created the context that would support life. It was in the nutrient-rich pools of an approx. ten billion year old Earth that life started developing which followed the same accidental physical laws of events previously, but at a much faster time scale. Complex structures could be built faster due to biological cooperation.

As it turns out, biological cooperation has survival value basically because two types of cells (or cellular components) working together can produce more effective behavior than either cell alone- this creates increasing complexity like multicellular organisms as well as increasingly diverse combinations. With more combinations of cells, you get greater deviance of ability with what they can do. While each combination will be adhering to contextual functionality, its actions will differ greatly from another similar combination if it’s within a separate context. Increasingly complex organisms vie for resources and the ones with the greatest fitness survive to reproduce.

I once heard the saying that there are no straight lines in nature which I interpret as saying that everything is prone to change. I believe that our personal and collective sense of morality is developed in reaction to the physical world we live in and will continue to change over time.