The Origin of Morality: Freedom of Will and Morality

The article deals with the specificity of formation of common moral concepts. It is noted that this process involves consciousness, sub-consciousness and intuition. At the same time, intuition brings moral ideas to such an extent of abstraction to which consciousness, due to the selfish interest represented in it, can not bring them. Sub consciousness provides for automatic behavior and, at the same time, completes our ideas to systemic integrity. Moral thinking, awareness of the relationship with others constitute an important aspect of the formation of human consciousness as a whole. The article also deals with the problem of freedom of will and moral responsibility. The author criticizes the views of analytical philosophers who believe that free will is an illusion. It is demonstrated that freedom of will is already included into the mental mechanisms associated with the orientation ability on the basis of ideal images. It arises because the brain works through all possible action situations in a hypothetical reality, the state of which refers to a certain moment in the future. It makes you put yourself in the place of another, and, thus, a primary moral attitude arises. To some extent, higher animals are also capable of this, but a human being can analyze the action situation more deeply, and refer his ideas to a distant future, because the language allows him to overcome immediate emotional reactions to the situation. In resolving the problem of free will, we accept the theory of emergent causation, i.e. the idea that some neural networks can control others, and this allows us to interpret the Ideal on the basis of the Material. The Ideal in this interpretation turns out to represent a sense generated by complex interactions of brain networks. At the same time, the senses generated by the work of the brain take into account the phenomenal experience of the participant, his past emotional reactions to various events of his individual life. This makes it possible to classify events, to separate the important from the unimportant when planning future actions.

Consciousness, will, freedom, responsibility, character, brain, neural networks, images, causation, emotions

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