Eric Harrison ponders the nature of morality and what it means for us as individuals within an increasingly complex society.

All moralities have a simple, but surprisingly selfish, idea at their core: that what is good for me personally is right, and what is bad for me personally is wrong. The reason we don't habitually lie, steal and rape is not that God will be angry with us. It's that it doesn't work. We may score a few perks, but that kind of behaviour is bad for our health in the long run. Criminals lead very stressful lives, and prisons are full of disappointed, broken individuals.

Human beings are not naturally self centred loners. We are social, hierarchical primates, who function best within the context of families, tribes, nations and countries. The more we cooperate with the people around us, the more we all benefit, and the stronger our group becomes. The loners and the small groups lose out in the evolutionary race, and the big, cohesive groups survive.

The inclination for social animals to care for each other is as primal as eating and breathing. Darwin put it this way: "I believe that any animal endowed with well marked social instincts, the parental affections being included, will inevitably acquire a moral sense of conscience."

Religions give divine sanction to this kind of cooperative behaviour, but the Dalai Lama is quite right in saying that none of it requires belief in a god. We need each other and we like to be liked. Helping each other makes us feel good and really is good for us. The instinct to care for others, and the evolved behaviour that ensures that we do so, is hundreds of thousands of years older than any Johnny-come-lately religion.

Social groups can be large or small, durable or transient, but they all work by rules which are enforced through a system of rewards and punishments. Even a family, a sports team or a workplace has its particular concepts of what is right and wrong, and its supporting network of customs, beliefs and laws. These can be very diverse and peculiar, but their fundamental purpose is identical: moralities evolve to strengthen the social cohesion of a group, to the benefit of all concerned.

For this reason, moral principles are very similar across the planet and across time. Don't be selfish. Think of others. Observe the golden rule. Be cooperative, friendly and helpful. If you look after me, I'll look after you. Be obedient to the powers that be. Above all, follow the rules, even if you don't understand them. If you do, you'll be rewarded, now or later. If you don't, you'll be punished, now or later. The Pope, the Dalai Lama, the local imam and the Minister of Police would all be in perfect accord with all of that.

In a state where the rule of law has broken down, most people will suffer and the few that thrive will always have to watch their backs. In a cooperative, law abiding society, however, most people will benefit, most of the time. Even if you have to sacrifice some personal liberties, it usually pays in bucketloads to be good, most of the time.

Moral codes are "good" because they promote the wellbeing of a group and the people within it, but for this very reason they also have a huge potential for evil. Groups need to be strong because they are competing for the world's resources with other groups. Despite their claims to universal application and divine sanction, moralities invariably operate on a primitive "us and them" mentality. We love and care for "us", but the rules don't apply in relation to "them".

For example, the French Revolution promoted the ideal of "fraternite'", or the Universal Brotherhood of Man. What could be more noble and beautiful? No more racism or sexism. No more class or religious distinctions. No more prejudice and persecution. Surely, this is what a fractious world desperately needs.

However, the writer Chamfort cleverly glossed the idea of "fraternite' "as, "Be my brother or I will kill you!" He soon proved his point. For his irreverence, he was sent to the guillotine - a rare piece of poetic justice, if ever there was one. Those who believe in Big Ideas hardly ever have a place for jokers.

Similarly, the Christian God preached "Thou shalt not kill" in the Ten Commandments, but that was only in relation to "us". A few chapters later, he exhorted the Israelites to commit genocide. As they go to war, he commands, "You shall save nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites . . ." He wanted the men, the women, children and even the animals to all be slaughtered.

God wasn't contradicting himself. Moralities are always about strengthening the "us" against the "them". The logic of morality is inexorable: what is good for us is right, and what is bad for us is wrong. You just can't argue with that. And hardly anyone ever does, especially in wartime.

For example, as a general rule, we regard the deliberate massacre of civilians as a crime. However, it is particularly barbaric when the other side does it to us! So when the Germans killed a few thousand civilians during the London Blitz, "they" were committing an atrocity! But when "we", the British, carpet bombed German cities for years, and systematically killed hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children (the men having all gone to the Front), that was justice being served to criminals! Of course they deserved it! Even the babies and the grandmothers. They started it!

We can always see the faults of other societies, but it is extremely difficult to see when we violate our own standards of justice. In retrospect, we find the problems usually arise when people are too moral, too obedient, too willing to do what their society expects from them. This is invariably the easiest course for any individual to follow.

It is much harder to make up your own mind and act upon it. It is literally unnatural to do so, and frequently too dangerous to contemplate. We build memorials to the soldiers who massacre civilians, and easily excuse their "inadvertent" mistakes. On the other hand, no one admires the courage of a whistleblower or a conscientious objector. So foolish! They usually achieve nothing but shame for themselves and their families. What were they thinking of?

Hitler, Stalin and Mao deliberately killed maybe 70 million of their own countrymen between them. To do so, they needed millions of good citizens to do all the dirty work, some to wield the knives and some to do the paperwork. There is never any shortage of the kind of people who have been rather unfairly called "Hitler's willing executioners". They may well be 20 to 40 per cent of any population.

Though we don't like to admit it, we don't regard people who say they "were just following orders" as criminals. They hardly ever get punished, and we know why. They are just like us. They have all the characteristics of good citizens everywhere. As Solzhenitsyn said, it would be so much easier if we could simply isolate the bad people and punish them. Unfortunately, "the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart. And who is willing to destroy part of his own heart?" We can hope to avoid doing evil, but we can't avoid the inclination towards it.

It is far from easy to be good, even according to one's moral standards, but are there universal moral principles that apply, or should apply, across all cultures? This is where the religious leaders greedily put up their hands. Without God, all is moral relativity and chaos, says the Pope.

I suggest that there is a hierarchy of moral values, and that some cultures really do have better values than others. One good way to test a morality is to see how it manages the us/them quandary, and to see whether it adequately protects the rights of the individual.

All the religions, old and new, East and West, fail dismally on the first count. Any religion that claims universality and the authority to interpret it, is guaranteed to be hostile towards others. They may not now have the power to enforce their views, but we only have to look back in history to see what happens when they do.

Most moralities tend to place the rights of society above the rights of the individual. Most of the time, this doesn't matter much, since the social good tends to benefit the individual anyway. If this tendency goes too far, however, people become obedient robots, which contaminates both the society and the individuals within it.

So we can ask whether a morality gives adequate weight to the rights of the individual? For example, in certain societies if a woman has been raped, her "punishment" is to be stoned to death by the members of her village. The rapist gets off with a mild rebuke, since he couldn't help himself. You know what men are like!

In this way, justice is served, and the community values are strengthened, even though an unfortunate woman dies. The individual suffers for the good of all. We also see this principle lingering on in our society, when a judge "makes an example" of a particular offender.

Most traditional moralities fail drastically to support the rights of the individual. Christianity encourages obedience. Islam literally means "submission". Buddhism, with its doctrine of "no self", denies any value to the individual. Hinduism is hardly any better. Thank God that none of them except Islam has the power they once had. A religion with teeth is a dangerous beast.

Fortunately, in the West, we have now largely escaped the nightmare of religious and political tyranny. For thousands of years, it was always the man at the top, the king or the priest, who decided right and wrong, and that was that! Nowadays, our liberal democracies guarantee a plurality of views and so tend to protect the rights of the individual as well.

Although most people will always go along with a nuanced version of popular morality, we now have a choice we didn't have just 200 years ago. We can now think and speak freely and safely. We also have all the information and alternative views that we could ever need to come to an intelligent decision on any matter. This is an extraordinary debt we owe to the revolutionaries of the past. Questions of right and wrong used to be decided solely by the men in power. Now we can make up our own minds, if we choose to do so.