As long as religion exists, there will be reason for immoral behaviour. Get rid of it, and our species pretension for moral good, will shine. I always have said, that you have to be religious, to act immoral.

The high point for me were the words "trained biologist".

Many years ago as a second year apprentice Fitter someone cautioned me never to claim expertise in anything, as you were almost certainly setting yourself up for a fall. His words have always rung true, and that was before I understood what an appeal to authority fallacy was.

Has anyone else noticed rat's habit of rolling on without any pretence of ever admitting when he is wrong, but just moves on to his next raft of claims? I know it's stating the obvious but his posts suggest he has something of a chip on his shoulder about being wrong, to put it mildly.

BAM!
Agreed oh great chimp.

@RATTY: You are no trained biologist, you know nothing at all about modern biology.

" A growing number of animal scientists, however, are going over to the dark side, and at least flirting with the idea that animals can act morally. In his book Primates and Philosophers (2006), the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal has argued that animals are at least capable of proto-moral behaviour: they possess the rudiments of morality even if they are not moral beings in precisely the way that we are."

"American biologist Marc Bekoff has being arguing for years that animals can act morally, and his book Wild Justice (2009)"

"Russell Church, now professor at Brown University, Rhode Island, demonstrated that rats wouldn’t push a lever that delivered food if doing so caused other rats to receive an electric shock. Likewise, in 1964, Stanley Wechkin and colleagues at the Northwestern University in Chicago demonstrated that hungry rhesus monkeys refused to pull a chain that delivered them food if doing so gave a painful shock to another monkey. One monkey persisted in this refusal for 12 days."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofpYRITtLSg&feature=youtu.be

"we should not postulate any more than we absolutely have to. In other words, we should not explain the behaviour of animals in complex, moral terms when another — non-moral — explanation is available."

The evidence for moral behavior in animals absolutely demonstrates behavior above and beyond non-moral explanations. Animals are capable of love, belonging, and caring not only for one another but for other species as well.

All you are arguing is that when, for example, compassion, occurs in an animal, it is not the same sort of thing as compassion when it occurs in a human. When it occurs in an animal, compassion has no moral status, and so even if the animal acts through compassion, it is still not acting morally. Absent any other reason for animals to demonstrate love, affection, caring, bonding, and care taking behaviors, your position is untenable.

"Our morality is rooted in our biology rather than our intellect......"

"If this is true, then the reasons for thinking that animals cannot act morally dissolve before our eyes. What is left is a new understanding of what we are doing when we act morally and, to that extent, the sorts of beings we are. Those beings are, perhaps, just a little more biological and a little less intellectual, a little more animal and a little less spiritual, than we once thought."

https://aeon.co/essays/if-a-lion-did-a-good-deed-would-we-understand-it

Your position is untenable and illogical given current trends in BIOLOGY.

"So we’ll done."

Priceless.

"Especially in light of your bare minimum understanding of it. "

Ah you're wheeling out the appeal to authority fallacy again, theists do love repetition of their fallacies.

"You are taking natural survival mechanisms and you are ascribing human concepts like right and wrong to them. Which makes you a git."

You asked for an explanation in evolutionary terms, the wrong behaviours would be the ones that got you killed before you are able to reproduce, like a lion cub whose evolved instincts made run away into the wild away from the bigger dominant male, rather than the correct evolved behaviour where it's fear enabled it to avoid being killed by the dominant male, whilst remaining in the pride and having it's protection. I am not ascribing the concept to the evolved trait at all, simply calling it a concept is a tautology you've produced, as if this unevidenced claim makes it just a human concept. Try evidencing that morality is merely a human concept in the light of all the contrary peer reviewed research that shows us that all societal animals have evolved the ability to understand the difference between right and wrong behaviours. Did humans teach them this???

You are the one anthropomorphism this, not me, because you can't understand a simple dictionary definition.

Morality is the concept of understand the difference between right and wrong behaviours, it's not limited to humans. Again it's astounding a trained biologist can not know this? Then again it's also true that there is a wide range of abilities in that term, as in all fields. Your ad hominem is as pathetic as your grasp of English, and that's language by the way, not literature as you hilariously claimed in another thread. Unless you think the inability to spell you are as an abbreviation is a result of not studying the classics.

" The fact that concepts are socially constructed should be obvious - "

You understand an animal can have an evolved ability without understanding the concept humans have created to explain it right? Again you're creating a begging the question fallacy using a simple tautology. All animals that have evolved to live in groups show an ability to understand the difference between right and wrong behaviours, they could not have survived without those abilities and natural selection "selected" them to survive and reproduce.

"at least as obvious as the fact that evolution on a genetic level does not create “concepts”."

So you're saying that right and wrong behaviours don't exist in reality, but are merely concepts, again simply making the claim it is a only a concept is not evidence, and your claim implies societal animals have no practical understanding of right and wrong behaviours, and each new generation just quickly learns anew every single behaviour, and which are right or wrong, and so avoids being killed in infancy, that's absurd.

Hmm....

"But in The Bonobo and the Atheist, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that there’s another answer that fits the data better: morality comes from our evolutionary past as a social primate. Like our closest relatives the apes, humans evolved in small, tightly knit, cooperative groups. As a result, again like the apes, we are exquisitely sensitive to one another’s moods, needs and intentions.

This well-developed empathy provided the trellis on which morality later flowered. De Waal, who is based at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has been making this case eloquently for many years and over several books, notably in Good Natured back in 1997, and in Primates and Philosophers, 12 years later."

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21829172-300-tracing-the-roots-of...

and the article goes on "If humans inherited morality from our ancestors, though, what are we to make of religion? Here de Waal moves into territory he has not explored before. Clearly, religion must do something important, since every human culture has it. But instead of religion giving us morality, de Waal turns the tables. Morality, he argues, probably gave us religion as a way of reinforcing the pre-existing community concern."

...and on...

"If he’s right, then there may be no absolute code of right and wrong out there to be discovered. Instead, each individual’s evolved sense of empathy and concern for the group may help shape the group’s consensus on what kind of behaviour is appropriate. In short, says de Waal, morality may be something we all have to work out together. It’s a persuasive argument, and de Waal’s cautious and evidence-based approach is one that many New Scientist readers are sure to find congenial."

Now he is an expert in evolutionary biology, so I am going to see you your appeal to authority fallacy, and raise you from a mediocre but trained biologist to a world renown expert in evolution, whose ideas are being published in well respected peer reviewed journals..

I’m not a theist for fucks sake

What would you prefer? Theitard? Religitard?...maybe, God?