ProfessorLayton said:
If murder isn't all that evil to you, what's stopping you from doing it yourself?
I hear this kind of thing all the time, and it's absurd.
Nothing is really good or evil. However, you don't see me going around killing people, because I dislike the concept of
prison, or
guilt. people can still regret their actions, and feel bad about things, not because the action is 'evil', but because we've been conditioned during our upbringing to feel bad when we do something like that to someone. This is helped by our natural sense of empathy. I do not want to put myself in the shoes of a murder victim, so I'm repelled by the thought of murder.
It's the same way people give to charity. They believe that it's the morally right thing to do. The fact of the matter is, once again this is the result of mental conditioning of our beliefs of right and wrong. Thanks to this, performing selfless acts, which are deemed as 'very good', results in the person feeling better than if they'd spent the money on themselves.
Everything we do, we do because of a false sense of duty (fed into us by our society throughout our lives), the avoidance or negative feelings (physical or emotional), or the pursuit of positive feelings (physical/emotional). These three reasons can work completely separately, or combine. Mix that with our evolved intelligence, allowing us to plan ahead, or anticipate consequences, and you have the basic structure behind everything we do, or have done in the past (including Nazi's and Taliban).
