Quote:
Originally Posted by
Piobaire 
Back to my question: if you feel you act moral, why? Is it fear of punishment/bad outcomes? Is it because you feel a "duty" to your fellow humans?
It is a bit silly to ask
why a person would act morally. They act morally because it is
the right thing to do. If you act with the expectation of some sort of reciprocal favor, your action was not guided purely by moral considerations. People in this thread are finding different ways of saying, "I act morally because it puts my conscience at rest," which, of course, is exactly as it should be, but almost borders on tautological (if we define 'conscience' as the sense of disturbance that comes from acting
immorally) and doesn't really provide anybody else with usable advice. There also seems to be a lot of awfully pollyanna and simple-minded conceptions of what it means to benefit others, as if the "nice" way of behaving towards others were in every instance a self-evident, cut-and-dried thing, and as if morality in every instance reduces to a binary decision of whether or not to act in this "nice" way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Sir Humphrey Appleby So people don't fuck you over and to make sure they like you and might want to give you a leg up. Ultimately that is what your brain is thinking when it makes you be moral.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Sir Humphrey Appleby Yes - because it makes me feel good about myself and the rest of the world, but I know that it makes me feel good because it is (in theory) benefitting me. Obviously be nice to the wrong person and they may well punish you for it, but that's my take.
Trying to reduce morality to a calculus of self-interest is destined to fail, since there will always be scenarious where it is possible to benefit from somebody else's loss without anyone else finding out. Yet lost purses still get returned on a daily basis.
