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Originally Posted by Lord Larehip
That's the fictional narrative that your conscious mind creates to explain the subconscious desires and inclinations that we all act on. You can test it by asking yourself if you've ever done anything for which you could be arrested and sent to prison. If the answer is yes, then you don't abstain from activities out of fear of going to prison.
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The answer is yes. I've broken many laws, some reasonably serious. However, those actions were not at odds with my general sense of morality. They were at odds with legal expectation. Furthermore, I've done things that I consider immoral that have no legal ramifications, and I've felt bad about them enough to go to great measures to prevent such actions from reoccurring, based on the effect they had on the parties involved, who I care about. I don't understand how you're willing to speculate that all of humanity acts out of fear of reprisal, and simultaneously are unwilling to entertain the likelihood that most of us genuinely care about the well being of others because it's just part of who we are (most of us), which is far more evident than your sweeping assumption, which can be quantified as unlikely if you walk into a prison and see people occupying it without being able to classify them all as psychopaths.
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We could have evolved any type of moral code or none at all and the results wouldn't be appreciably different in terms of survival. Psychopaths have survived quite admirably.
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I hope you're aware that the majority of the human race is not psychotic... The human race as a majority is what drives the whole. To use a statistical minority to make assumptions about the majority is fallacious. In fact, had the majority not been successful at co-existing with its own species, the deviant minority would not have survived either, since it's still part of the species. So in all actuality, that minority owes its survival to the co-existence of the species as a whole, which evolutionary morality supports in the first place.
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It's not fear of hell either. It's a subconscious feeling that once the deed is done it has a price attached to it. It cannot be unwritten. Nothing more than that.
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Since you have unrequited access to the collective subconscious of our entire species, please tell me why people still feel remorse for things that are commonly forgiven.
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Cynical it is. The scientific finding that we don't have any idea why we do what we do and believe what we believe and must make up narratives to explain is about as cynical as it gets. But it has been proven. Do we actually care about others and why?
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Cynicism isn't in the detached analysis of behavior. It's part of behavior.