I'm still young and stupid, so forgive my ignorance if this is all common knowledge, and feel free to educate me in the finer points of moral philosophy. That being said, I've recently decided that every moral system, every ethical line of thought, is born from the idea that we want humanity to survive. Even if there is some prejudice, some hate for a certain part of humanity, everyone who develops a sense of right and wrong develops it thinking that it will be better for people. So someone can sacrifice themselves for the lives of others even though it obviously goes against their personal interests.
I'm going somewhere political with this i promise. Kant said that it's not enough to be moral or ethical, that there has to be some value behind those morals to make someone behave in a good way. This meant religion for the vast majority, or at the least a belief in a higher power of some kind, and that belief was not a bad thing if it brought about morality.
But why do we need it at all? why are we making up these values? It has to be because we have a sense of survival for each other the same way we do for ourselves. In some way or other, we all come to believe it's more important to be there for each other than it is to just look after ourselves. I know I'm not the first to think of this as I've found evolutionists and sociologist have said some form of this line of thought for a while now.
Ok, we all realize that we want to live, and by we i mean the whole human race, even if the individual self suffers at that expense. To put ourselves and our own interests above the interests of the whole, whatever we perceive the whole to be, is to act immoral, no matter what the moral system is. Greed is the arch-evil, if you will, the point of acting against the survival of the species.
Greed is when someone says, "I'm more important than all of this. My wants and needs supersede the needs of any other consideration." Just as self-sacrifice is the most moral, the most "good," act someone could do, greed is the most immoral, "bad," act someone could commit. Just to be perfectly clear, greed is selfishness at someone else's expense, especially if it means inflicting suffering as opposed to simply not relieving suffering, although that is certainly deplorable too.
The political implication of working towards group survival as the basis for morals is this: certain aspects of conservative ideology are built around the idea that greed is good, even the entire point of life. this line of thought states that acting in our own interests is ultimately acting for the best of society(The Ayn Rand and economic libertarian types). Either they have no morals, or they've built their morals around what makes them rich. As we've seen, especially over the last thirty years, it doesn't work. wealth is not an unlimited thing to be accessed by anyone with a certain amount of hard work, rather the few getting super rich means the many get poorer. They're greedy. The best example, i think, is the environment. We have acted in certain ways since the industrial revolution in the name of making life better for ourselves, only to create a situation where we could potentially kill the earth if we don't change things. The first moral obligation of society today is to save our planet, while the first threat to us and to what is right are those who, for example, say that global warming does not exist, or who pursue profit at the expense of responsible operations.
I am not sure of all the ramifications of this, as I haven't thought it all the way through. I feel like this advocates anarchy/communism, or at least socialism, which may be morally sound, but certainly not practical or even achievable at this time. Still, it's obvious that conservatism does work counter to human survival at this point, and that's a worthy place to start working for change.