Is Morality an Emergent Behavior?

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ulises Ali Mejias[Edit][Delete]: Is Morality an Emergent Behavior?, Ideant [Edit][Delete] January 27, 2006

I didn't mean for this week's newsletters to have morality as a theme, but a post today from Ulises points back to this link, making it three days in a row for me to touch on the topic. Perhaps that's just as well. In this item, he advances the proposition that morality is not based on reason (in fact, reason actually impedes it), but rather, "morality is actually an emergent behavior - in other words, a behavior exhibited by organisms acting according to very simple rules requiring little reasoning." If this is the case (and I believe something like it is) then it would seem to me that we sense, rather than infer, the morality (or immorality) of our actions. More...