So, recently I have been wondering: where do morals come from?
When I was researching this idea, I was reading on Stoicism and other ideas from Zeno, the "chief Stoic", and I came upon something interesting.
During a discussion between the heads of the Socratic schools of thought, the stoics came to a conclusion, that from a metaphysical perspective, morals rely on physics.
So what does this mean? The idea is, that there is a structure to the nature of existence itself, and that morals, while different among people, are derived from this structure. While morals may change, they all believe that what they're doing is for the good of others, society, family, etc. This of course brings upon the idea, that there may be some form of "ultimate truth".
Thoughts?
Edit: People seem to be conflating certain sets of morals with the concept of morals themselves. This isn't regarding sets of morals, this is regarding the concept of morals themselves. Keep that in mind.
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Morals are sets of unofficial laws between groups of people, e.g. don't steal. Philosophy is the study of morals and what happens when you apply logic to a set of morals. While yes, all morals came from basically the same place, a mutual need to survive as a species, the more you study morals the more different and contradicting rules are, and finding unifying rules is harder. For every new breakthrough, more questions arise than are answered, so it seems to be getting farther away from a universal truth than closer. Anyway, just some of my thoughts on metaphysics (would this be meta metaphysics?). This is a great thought-provoking post.