this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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Let's be honest, they do so by adhering to cultural norms with the exact same devotion and lack of scrutiny that religious people do.
"Why do we do it this way?" "We've always done it this way!" "Why is it wrong?" "Because it's just wrong!"
The very small subset of actually moral people decide between good and bad choices not depending on social norms, not depending on laws, not even depending on morals or ethics, but by what motivations their actions arise from, whether they come from Ego or understanding.
You can never know whether an action is good or bad, you can only know whether your motivations are good or bad.
i'm sorry to shatter your worldview, but this is wrong. people need an "ego", and more "understanding" is not always better.
The "ego" is a symbol for the human stomach. Every time we eat, it's actually a gross and disgusting thing. nobody wants to see it, how you put your teeth into the soft and defenseless food. you're literally devouring, destroying precious food. gross. anyways, people need to eat, otherwise they die. it's the same with what you call "ego". sure, people are "egoistic" sometimes, but if they never are, they never gather the resources that they need and then they die. does not work that way.
"understanding": the more people understand, the less physically active they are. people who do science often sit around all day. nobody would work physically and society wouldn't advance. there need to be people with limited understanding. just saying.
Eating isn't gross and that's not what the Ego is. Ego is the idea that you have of yourself as a concept in your mind, the image of yourself. From that comes the idea that rhis imaginary image can be enlarged or diminished by other fictional things. Like how you think if someone insults you you have to fight them back, or if you people like you, you're more important. It's a complete absurdity where people fight over mental images and go to wars over ideas that do not exist in reality.
Religious people act like they're more moral or have morality that's special because they believe in God. However when you ask why all those pious people back in the day: cheated, stole, murdered, adulterer, were racist, had slaves, raped kids and stuff. They would say that it was the norm at the time and nobody else knew better.
To paraphrase Stephen J Fry: "then what are you for?!"
Sure, but so do atheists. They just believe their morality is special because they believe in the current social norms, within the current societal context. In 10 years they'll be different, should a catastrophe happen it will shift completely. It's just as flippant in its own way.
There's pretty solid evidence supporting empathy as a beneficial evolutionary trait, it's not like it's random that "don't be shitty to each other" is a social norm.
if empathy was truly universally favored by evolution, then there wouldn't be any non-emphathetic humans today and we wouldn't have this discussion, just saying.
That's not at all how that works. First at no point have I made any "universally" claims. Nothing in evolution or psychology is 100% universal. Second, empathy, on average, is good for the health of the species. Selfishness is a gamble: it can dramatically increase the individual's odds of passing on their genes but it requires enough non-selfish targets to exploit or it actually has a negative impact. More simply, jackasses fighting each other are worse off than pacifists working together.
So what's favored is for most people to be altruistic and a small percentage of predators take advantage of them.
But social norms aren't empathy. They are adhered to because of the punishment that will result if you break them. Before you have any chance of developing empathy or emotional intelligence, you are taught as a child that breaking social norms will result in punishment, and from then on your only motivation to follow them is fear of punishment.
And that is exactly the same mechanism as religious morality.
I'm sorry to hear about your sociopathy, but no this is not how most people work.
Deflection beats introspection, eh? It always amazes me how easily insults come to the "morally righteous".
At least now you know how people become bad - they don't have the courage to question whether what they're doing is actually good.
It's not an insult It's illustrating the ridiculousness of your claim. Your faux-intellectual philosophy is not convincing.
Of course, when you call people psycopath it's not an insult, but if someone else were to say it to you, it would be.
And it's like this with everything, isn't it? But you're the good guy.
First, I said "sociopath" not "psychopath". There's different connotations. Second, it's a description of a pattern of thought. Because you're saying that the only reason people don't to terrible things to each other is because of the fear of punishment, not some intrinsic internal sense of fairness or social cohesion. Like a sociopath would think, because they don't feel normal emotions or empathy.
"Psychopath" would be an insult but also an accusation of malice or cruelty. I don't think you're cruel. (I think you're high on your own farts, and that's not so much an insult as an observation because you're doing the same kinda shit over in one of the Ed Sheeran threads. You sound like a young 20-something with some 100 level psych classes under your belt, and the one-day-old account screams "my main account got banned".)
There's no distinction between sociopath or psycopath, both were dropped from the DSM in favor of ASD.
I'm gonna assume you're not arguing in bad faith and have just been brought up sheltered or in a cult - the reason we have POLICE which enforces laws through VIOLENCE is that people generally need fear to not do bad things.
It's not something religious people need, nor people with ASD, the majority of the people in our jails are not mentally ill.
It's something every society in every era of history has recognized as a necessity, including the one you live in right now.
People WILL do bad things unless they have fear of punishment, people are not naturally empathetic or oriented towards social cohesion. That's why crime and punishment is a perennial instution throughout all recorded history.
I'm going to avoid all the insults at the end, I don't know your past history but the voracity with which you sling insults whenever someone disagrees with you has apparently never occured to you to be immoral, unempathetic, or against social cohesion, so I doubt it will land today either.
They're both not currently official diagnoses but they mean different things in common use.
"People" do not generally need fear to not do bad things. Some people need fear to not do bad things. Outliers do not define the norm.
Religious people are not less violent or criminal than nonreligious people. See all of recorded history. I don't have data for ASD other than that until quite recently it was under-diagnosed and very poorly understood so there's little value in historic comparison.
Law enforcement looks pretty different across time and cultures but the general through line is not "every person has to be watched lest they descend into barbarism" (despite what thin blue line types would have you believe) it's that an unguarded flock is easy prey. Predators are rare and always have been.
People are naturally empathetic and we aren't the only animals like that. Toddlers have empathy well before they can be taught the cause-and-effect of possible punishment. Altruism is a very valuable trait for social animals to ensure survival of the species. The specifics of etiquette are taught but basic principles of fairness and comfort are in our DNA. Crime and punishment exist because the natural systems aren't perfect, and desperate/traumatized people are more likely to take advantage of others for personal gain. It's worse when society rewards amoral self-enriching behavior, as it does under Capitalism, because hate and selfishness can be taught just as surely as morality is. (Morals and ethics aren't exactly the same thing, and they do differ between cultures, and some pretty heinous things are enforced thanks to religious indoctrination.)
Your claims aren't backed up by any kind of science. And if you think that's a cavalcade of verbal barbs maybe it is your first day on the internet.
The term of sociopathy was retired in the 60's, so no, it doesn't mean anything. You aren't talking to anyone who was alive back then, so if you've heard it used it's been misused.
The idea that children are born with empathy is hilarious, while there are interesting baby studies suggesting this, any school yard or classroom will quickly dissuade anyone of that notion. Anyone who has gone to a school or worked as a teacher knows this.
And it's a good example to go into, because once again, the only thing that keeps a large subset of children from doing bad things is punishment, and usually that just makes them better at avoiding it.
And humans... come from children, and they largely don't change or mature as they grow up, studies who have tried to estimate the general mental age of humans find that they are stuck around 13-16 years old and stay there. And when we see how most people are just one bad day away from exploding, getting out and fighting someone in another car, or similar, that's not much of a surprise to anyone.
I don't know what "thin blue line" is, I assume it's American thing, but no when it comes to greater civilisations throughout history we actually do find that law enforcement looks about the same, and that people can be exceptionally cruel and callous even when they don't gain anything from doing it except the pleasure of inflicting pain, emotional or physical.
There's no evidence that people are naturally empathetic, and if they can be found to be so at the toddler stage we are effective at growing out of it. But you are right to point out some important point, we have invented Capitalism, probably the least empathetic system of governance we could come up with in which the individuals ability to take as much from everyone else is celebrated and deified - and whoever fails is seen as a loser who just didn't try hard enough. As expected, it's no manifestation of some innate empathy there.
Then there's the fact that at any given time there's at least a 100 different armed conflicts going on on the earth at any time. Oh, and currently a Genocide too.
Then there's our enormous system of law, which is always in an armsrace trying to illegalize the new ways in which people attempt to break the rules so that they can gain from taking from others, or just destroy what others have so that they have less. From giant corporations fighting each other, to simple neighbour feuds where two people simply cannot manage to coexist even if there weren't any problems between them to begin with - strife is the nature of humans on all levels and it needs constant arbitration to find out who was wrong, who was right, and how much they need to be punished.
And they certainly don't need any religious excuse for these things, they're quite happy to do it without any divine justification. The ills of religions are simply an extension of the ills of humanity.
I appreciate you pointing out that if you're on the internet you apparently should be ready to be insulted, because otherwise you're what, weak? Or naive? Once again the default human assumption is that we should expect there to be no consideration, probably that someone will hurt us, and if we don't like that, we better just toughen up because humanity is just so damn empathetic!
Alright well I showed an actual study and you continue making unfounded claims so I'm done. You're not interested in the truth, just reinforcing your jaded cynicism.
We live in a world of constant strife and lack of empathy, and every answer you've given here has been full of unnecessary contentiousness and zero signs of empathy.
You yourself have proven your own argument to be wrong with your conduct, it was never necessary to bring in the rest of humanity or any studies.
Lost in your idealist platitudes about the goodness of mankind, you completely failed at empathy right here and now in a real human interaction, and when called out about it, you literally said: "Toughen up buddy".
This whole thing reads like a comedy sketch.
You were the quintessential refutation of your own argument from your very first reply, and it only got worse from there.