I recently posted a piece I wrote some tme ago, and I got some interesting responses,but I now seem not to be able to bring up any of it anymore. So this post is a reply to some of those who responded.

I used the term "utilitarian" in my claim that morals and ethics were not somehow delivered on high nor were the rules of conduct and behavior originally considered in any religious, legal, or philosophical sense; the simply came about as the result of observations of their necessity.

In the earliest times of humans, and of course there is no concrete evidence of this, only scientifically based and reasoned speculation. Just as in the case of the discover of fire and its role in human development. There is scientific evidence of the beginnings of fire, but there are no photographs or recordings of any kind of how its use actually developed. There is for many years in archaelogical discoveries no evidence of fire linked to humans, then suddenly evidence is found, and discoveries of evidence of the type of dwellings changed, eventually evidence of the first cooking of food over fire was discovered, and so on. That's roughly how it works. But t his isn't intended to be a kind of archaelogy 101 statement.

At some point in pre-history, evidence suggests that early man discovered the utility of banding together to hunt and for protection. What actually went on in those groups is, of couurse not known, but common sense logic reveals to us that there is no reason not to believe that living together, hunting together, sharing the fruits of the hunting, and so on, led to some of the most ordinary of problems among humans. Survival was not a TV show or a game; it was real to the extent that it meant if someone didn't eat within three weeks or so and didn't get any water within the space on only three or four days, he was history. Sharing, then was critical to the survival of every individual, but wanting more than his/her share to help insure survival was also a feature of human behavior, so it was inevitable that one or more persona attempted to take someone else's portion surreptitiously. Now that would have been a good way to cause the group to break up, thus destroying everyone's hunting effectiveness and mutual protection. Not to difficult to speculate that a rule, even though it might not have been articuated in words at that point, was agreed upon. In the religious version of hundreds of thousands of years later, it would be referred to as "Thou should not steal." And stealing became the precept of a moral rule. I won;t bore anyone by going on with the other code of conduct that most of us recognize and follow today, but suffice it to say that all such attitudes and behaviors were born out of necessity not from some list of such rules delivered from "on high." That was essentialy my contention in the original post.