I am non-religious. But I do have a strong moral compass. Without any apparent higher being that I am deferring to, or any expectation of an afterlife, people have wondered where it comes from.
This is my attempt to articulate how I think about morality.
First, let me give my definition of morality. Morality is what I should do, think, feel, or otherwise be — independently of how it would affect myself. In particular, making a morally correct decision may confer no personal benefits or even cause personal harm.
It may also lead to personal gain. My point is that my own considerations are irrelevant to the morality of any particular decision I make.
Recycling falls in this category. Most people who recycle, myself included, are not doing it for themselves but do so because they feel a sense of obligation to keep the planet habitable for future generations.
This example hints at where I think morality comes from. Morality comes from feeling a sense of obligation to something greater than ourselves. Religion and I actually see eye to eye on this. What I don’t agree with is that this greater something needs to be a particular being, let alone something humanoid, let alone a man.
The feeling of obligation arises from the feeling of belonging. How much obligation we feel we have to something is proportional to how much belonging we feel to it.
An uncontroversial example of something greater than ourselves is our immediate family, which we often feel a sense of belonging to, and hence, a sense of obligation. Many parents would starve to feed their children and die to save their lives. These are not pleasant for parents to do. No one is all that happy in either of these situations. But parents feel fulfilled when they do these things; they have literally fulfilled their purpose.
And this is what morality feels like. Choosing the morally correct option feels fulfilling, because we are fulfilling our purpose.
This is an area where religious devotees may be approaching it from the wrong angle. I have run into many Christians who explain that they hope to use their apparent joy and happiness to draw people into their religion. Their strategy is to get people to think, Why is that person so happy and can I be that happy too?
But as mentioned above, fulfilling a moral obligation may actually lead to personal harm, not happiness. There are many immoral or amoral ways to achieve happiness. Some people find happiness that is apparently similar to religious happiness in meditation or yoga. There are even drugs that increase the feeling of happiness. But as far as I know, there is no practice or drug that leads to feeling fulfilled. (Drugs in particular are very unfulfilling, which is why many users keep wanting more.)
Some readers at this point are thinking, Why would someone choose to live a moral life if there is no God and no afterlife?
I don’t think we choose to live a moral life. Religion is predicated on there being free will, which I don’t think there is. Instead, what we do, think, and feel are the product of our composition and our inputs, both of which change over time. This may seem simple, but it gets complex very quickly: A substantial percentage of inputs to any given organism comes from other organisms (as well as non-organisms), each with their own ever-changing compositions and inputs.
It only seems like we have free will, because understanding ourselves is beyond what our collective intelligence so far can do with the collective experiences we’ve had so far. The free will that we appear to exhibit is like the “random” numbers that come out of a pseudo-random number generator.
One day, we will realize that morality is a tendency of ourselves in the same way that objects have inertia. Our understanding of the laws of the universe will one day grow from the level of subatomic particles to encompass morality.
In another writing, I will explain why I think that, if we all tend toward behaving morally, some of us still behave immorally, not to mention the other thoughts I have on this topic.
But I will close this one by saying that the great moral authorities are not coming out of religious institutions anymore. For example, it is Elon Musk, who is taking the early actions needed to colonize another planet, e.g. Mars, while also keeping an eye on greenhouse gas emissions in our current home. It is Bill Gates who has been working on preventing the spread of malaria. Both of these people feel a great sense of obligation to some or all of the human race. Either of them are greater moral authorities than the minister who refuses to marry a gay couple who are in love.
