Rajat's Question

As far as I know we are not born with an intrinsic sense of morality.
Morals come under the category of learned behavior to a great extent and are directly linked to our tendency to survive.

Any biological entity we see today is a product of evolution. The ones that we don't see evolved as well...but they did not evolve well enough to be here anymore. The fittest survived and the rest perished.

Now we need to remember that we don't guide evolution consciously, it happens to everyone and some get lucky while the others don't as they face newer ecological situations.

Now lets talk about ourselves and the human brain. We tend to have a very complicated picture of the brain and its workings because of the complex social and cultural processing that it achieves and we are aware of...
However when looked at from an evolutionary angle it has a relatively basic purpose...to survive. We for the most part have not developed cannibalistic tendencies because our brain is developed enough to know that it is not a fruitful outcome in terms of what its other desires are.

We are a species that wants to see future generations thrive. We have a herd type tendency where not only our own but to a certain extent other members of our species should benefit as well.

When we see a person being attacked by a bear we will not go and help the bear or even feel like it because we have a greater affinity for our own species than the other (this is getting a little complicated now because one might not feel like helping the other person if he/she is a potential threat or competitor for mating purposes! It is therefore important to keep these situations at bay for a while)

Anyway..Back to morals...We developed a brain that was suddenly capable of much more than what it needed to survive (or maybe it did need all that to survive... I'm again a little confused about this). We started manipulating our environment to a much greater extent than any other specie to suit our needs. When we say that there is a center for morals it is fallacious because as such there is nothing that tells us to do one thing over the other unless it is directly related to our survival and reproductive instincts. Morals are a by product of the interaction between these instincts and the society/culture/civilization that we developed. For matters to remain relatively conducive for survival it is important that we adhere to the morals and the other guidelines of society.

Free will definitely exists (which has been so scientifically proven by the Matrix trilogy!)

Our likes and dislikes may or may not have an actual source in the brain where it gets influenced by our learned behavior. What I want to know is whether there is a "perceptual" paradox that conflicts with the "learned behavior" or not.

One of things that I have trouble with whenever I've described this question before is that it is so hard to explain...

I'm not prying into normal behavior nor is this exactly connected to morals. It is a very basic question and frankly i wonder why no one has ever thought about this before (or maybe someone has...who knows!?)

I need to clear my head and rewrite my initial post so that it would become clearer...:P