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Introduction

This book is for everyone who has lived, and wondered what was the right way to live. It may be easy to know what you want to do at the moment, but how should I live my life the right way that will preserve what I have short term gain, only to find that I have squandered more in the long term as a consequence.

Ancient philosophers debated ethics and morality, which is the topic of how to live the right life (also called the good life or eudaimonia). It is a question that was probably first asked at the time mankind first began to talk.

Many of of my non-religious friends struggle to understand what should be considered the source of morality. These are fine upstanding moral people. They understand what it means to be fair, good, and kind. They would not live their lives any other way. But they are not really sure where morals come from.

So much written about morality comes from a religious point of view. The Christians and the Muslims each arrogantly claim to have an exclusive access to morality, and readily spew invectives calling everyone else is baseless immoral heathens, especially atheists. History is replete with examples of religious wars, religious persecution, burning atheists at stakes for not believing the right things, and so many examples of religions not living up to the claim of being moral.

Most non-religious friends live as moral a life as any church-goer. Like most people, they have a sense of right and wrong. But the question remains: where does that sense of right and wrong come from? Is it, as the Christians insist, the result of a God commanding us to behave a certain way? If not God, then how do we explain that there are right and wrong ways to do things? Did they occur randomly? Many atheists turn to the idea that morality is subjective, that the best way to live is whatever you decide it to be, I will show that to be a mistaken concept as well.

What I aim to do here is to blaze a middle path along the golden mean which postulates that a pattern of right behavior does exist, and they come neither from God, nor are they random. Moral behavior is as it is because of the form of human interaction with each other and with the world. Humans have learned how to behave morally through a self-reinforcing natural process that can be readily seen in the world once we know how to look for it. Moral guidelines are not an accident, nor are they commandments from the supernatural. Instead we can say succinctly: we discovered the best way to live because it is the best way to live.

That may sound confusing at first, so We will proceed cautiously:

  1. The first chapter will start with some definitions so that we have a foundation to discuss morality with confidence. So much has been written that most words are used in many ways, so we will set out with some care what we mean here.

  2. Goodness is not an arbitrary preference. There is a fact to the matter, that good actions are meaningfully good in that they consist of behavior that helps the tribe to survive. A tribe that adopts bad morals would not survive. The connection between survival and the goodness of actions has been largely overlooked, and that connection makes morality real.

  3. Subjective morality is the first trap and the place where many non-religious people tread feeling that there is no other choice between that and religious morality. This is a mistake, and we will explore the various ways that subjective morality does not fill the need.

  4. Moral Relativism is the second trap we will explore is which is professed by few however it is important to clearly distinguish what this is and why it is not reasonable.

  5. There is no magic in the formation of objective truths. I will cover a couple of analogous situations in which objective truths emerge from the physicality of the universe. This will support the idea that objective moral truths emerge from human behavior in an evolutionary fashion.

  6. We then glance quickly at religious/biblical morality as a form of objective morality but it has traps of its own.

  7. Moral Objectivism is then presented in a way contrasted with the other approaches.

  8. Love is the concluding topic of the book.

  9. Call to Action, how to use this in your daily life. How to talk clearly about moral foundations with others.

  10. References and Resources

I hope you will join me though the complete journey.