conscience

[leo9]

I wonder, are we born with a conscience, a sense of right or wrong? Or is it learned in a social environment?

All social animals have instincts to guide their behaviour to their peers, but there's a learned element even for primates. We know, from some revoltingly cruel experiments in the mid-20th Century, that apes raised in isolation grow up to be sociopaths. Contrariwise, feral children - ones raised by animals, not isolated ones - seem to learn the basic respect for others' rights which is the bedrock of morality. (Significantly, the only feral child that is recorded as behaving violently to everyone was apparently raised by a leopard, a species that doesn't live in packs and drives others from its territory.)

Or a religious one?

Unless you believe, as some do, that morality is dictated by God(s), "religious" is a subclass of "social." But even a total atheist will agree that one of the social functions of religion is to codify and enforce moral rules, and that includes teaching them from the earliest age so that they form part of the learned moral code we call conscience.

Is the idea of having a conscience a fictionary concept? Is there a (more or less) universal idea of right and wrong? Or is it all just grab and run?

So far as I know, there isn't a single moral law which is followed by absolutely every culture in the wonderful rainbow variety of human behaviour. But on average, there are a bunch of principles which most cultures at least claim to respect, which are the sort of thing that common sense suggests are necessary to make a collective work. Don't kill your own kind, in fact don't get too violent with them; respect other people's stuff; help the weak and the sick, feed the hungry, never harm a child.

(One of the most famous homo habilis fossils is, in effect, a fossilised moral lesson. The subject had a crippling bone disease, but her remains show that she lived for months in the African bush after being struck down - which could only have happened if others brought her food and water, and probably also drove away predators. Apes might do a little for a sick mate, but not that much, so we know that those pre-humans took really seriously the duty to care for their sick.)

I saw a film recently called 'The Road' which took place in a post-apocalyptic society with a destroyed nature and no animals, only humans which were also dying out. The two main characters were a man and his son, and he would do anything at all for his son's survival, but not for anybody else. There were gangs hunting and eating other humans, and people who stuck together trying to help each other.

In a society with plenty, would there be more helping each other than in a society with little?
Which would be more effective? I guess that depends on whether you think in terms of survival of the individual, or the species?

As a general rule, with dishonourable exceptions, people become more co-operative and more respectful of each other's needs when times are hard. In terms of the primal clan, this makes perfect sense. When there's plenty of fruit on the trees, it does no harm to fight over the ripest ones, nobody's going to starve. When there's not enough to go round, the survival of the clan depends on making sure nobody goes short.

And contrary to the individualist belief, it's not good biology to let the weak die, either genetically or pragmatically. If your clan comes through the hard times as a big band of scrawny survivors, you've a much better chance of rebuilding to a thriving population than if you come through as a handful of big strong bullies who stole the others' food to stay fit, but who now have to survive alone.

I think that when people have much, they seem to want more. When they have little, they share.

Yes, and this is interesting because it suggests that "conscience" is more instinctive than I would have thought, if circumstances can switch it on and off like that. In the same way that so many other instincts lie unnoticed in the backs of our minds until the right button is pressed, and suddenly we find ourselves doing something we never planned to, and thinking up reasons for it afterwards.

This also goes a long way to explaining why we commonly struggle to keep to moral rules. In the primal clan, the trigger to our conscience was right there in front of us - someone is hungry, someone is hurt, help. But as we expanded the clan to a tribe to a people to a nation to a world, the issues became ever more abstract and distant and cerebral, and more out of touch with the intinctive triggers.

As Desmond Morris noted, even if a disaster relief charity actually wants to drill wells or build shelters or something, the picture they use in their adverts is a hurt or hungry child, because that pushes the instinctive button that says someone needs our help.

Would we be able to survive a world wide catastrophy without having a conscience - or maybe simply a sense of group??

Would we be able to survive under any circumstances like that? Not for long. The selfish and exploitative survive as parasites on the co-operative majority, and always have. If we all became parasites, like those zombie plague movies, we wouldn't have anything to live off.