down the rabbit hole

Harry Cahalan was quite a fellow.  He was five or ten years older than us and while we were little more than street rabble he was an actual Dean of the University.  We basically just drank in the same bar and eventually he became part of our group.  When he learned about our poker parties he was curious and when we learned how terribly he played no matter how crowded the table was we always found a way to add a chair for him.  After awhile he got pretty good and he had to find his own chair.  He was always a bit pompous, but he carried that with a subtle dry wit.  I'll be thinking of adding more Harry stories in the future.

emotion is certainly one way to determine right from wrong.  Another way would be reason, and another way would be religion.  I agree with Beagles here, and my money goes on emotion.  Way back in our evolution, I'm guessing when we started walking upright, freeing our hands for other tasks and devising those heralded opposable thumbs, it became advantageous to be a little smarter, and that called for a bigger brain, which called for a bigger head, which was not going to make it through the birth canal.  Enlarging the birth canal was not practical so the way out of this mess was to be born with smaller heads that could grow bigger once we were out and about, but that would take time of course and hence our long childhoods which take a certain set of mind, dare I say a moral state, and those with that state of mind successfully raised their kids to adulthood where they passed on those genes to their children.

That's where I think we get our morality from, our emotions, if not from the heart, from our genes.  A lot of philosophy is devoted to ethics, in essence to using reason to figure out what is right and what is wrong.  But reason is basically math and the square root of negative one does not care if you are nice to your mother or not.  The philosophers of ethics seem to slip in some idea of what is good without defining it too specifically because after all we all know what good is, don't we?  When you read about ethics you are constantly testing it by going to your heart and it doesn't feel right you are tempted to discard it.

Religious people think that good comes from their god, that if you don't hear His word you can't be a good person, but I think their moral god is just an incorporation of the basic human idea of good into their religion.  If a religion doesn't have that soul-satisfying feeling of doing good then it is not going to become a major religion.

The law is a whole other story, part doing the right thing and part clever guys slipping in rules that will work to their advantage whether it's right or wrong.  I assume we'll be getting there in the course of this discourse.

Do the dawgs want to get to the rabbit hole of where does idea of right and wrong come from?