Vinay Kumaran

Consider an animal in a resource-scarce environment. It makes a crude kind of sense to be selfish. The animal, presumably being stronger than other animals, takes the food it needs and mates with partners of the opposite sex without or without their cooperation and leaves more progeny than weaker animals. However, this animal comes up against a problem if other animals, individually weaker than it, learn to cooperate. With force of numbers, they can fight off the selfish animal. They can cooperate to look after progeny and thereby, their progeny have a survival advantage over those of the more selfish animals. They form herds and prides and the purely selfish animals die out. The herds/ prides grow into tribes as intelligence increases and we get a situation like the human animal which seems set to take over the entire planet and then perhaps starve to death as the resources are used up by uncontrolled population growth. Humans are at a stage in evolution when they have clearly sur...

Where do morals and ethics come from and is there a difference between them? If you ask a religious person they will say that morals come from religious books and represent a kind of code of conduct handed to us by God. They use the Bible or the Quran or the Upanishads or the Torah or whatever their religion prescribes as their moral compass. Whatever is written in the Holy Book is God's message to humans and should be followed without question as a matter of faith. This can be corrupted and has often been used to justify Crusades or Jihad. Killing someone who belonged to a different faith became 'moral'. Religious people are deeply distrustful of atheists. They think that since we do not accept the 'word of God' as given in the 'Holy Book', we must be immoral people. They seem to think that without religion (fear of God) there is nothing to prevent humans from killing, raping, stealing and the various other crimes that their 'Holy Book' proscri...