Originally posted by Tassman
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I was thinking recently about what exactly the moral values dominant in New Zealand tend to be, and I think the answers that most readily come to mind are "kindness" and "fairness". e.g. here is an official government covid poster:
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And an American historian who visited New Zealand was so shocked during our elections by how the word "fairness" was in the mouths of every politician where he was used to hearing the word "freedom" from US politicians, that he wrote a book about it:
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I also think "be considerate of others" and "equality" are solid contenders for core New Zealand moral values, but I think those are pretty much covered within the concepts of kindness and fairness and are other ways of saying the same thing.
Secular humanism is NOT rooted in Christianity or any philosophical system. It derives from biology and natural selection. In short, our evolved instinct for cooperation and altruism promotes the social cohesion necessary for our survival as a social species. The same can be seen in other intelligent animals to a limited extent in simpler forms.
Everyone, consciously or subconsciously, spends quite a lot of brainpower trying to gauge the intentions and values of others and searching out whether they are positive or negative towards you and others around you. Since I would tend to say that "morality" is nothing but "valuing others" I would describe this as a 'moral assessment' of others that everyone makes day in and day other, even people who don't want to call valuing others as "morality" still do this assessment. It's not something they can escape from just because they make a thread to try to pretend atheists can't have morality. Such assessments of the values and intentions of others are utterly intrinsic to human nature as a product of evolution in a competitive and aggressive environment which has created structures in the human brain that automatically assess others for positive/negative intentions and values toward others. That is why valuing others is a fundamental universal moral code, which everyone automatically checks for adherence to. Even those who choose to call something else 'morality' still check for adherence to this moral code, they can't help but do so. And it is, of course, rational that they do so, because early detection of someone with negative intentions toward you is obviously in one's self-interest, and equally detection of someone with positive intentions toward you can bring benefits.
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