Where Does Morality Come From?
Spoiler: I don't know, but I have ideas...
Okay. Someone recently told me that my Substack is like a “lab notebook for the soul.”
That sparked joy in me for a couple of reasons. First, lab notebooks are where you put observations. They are documentation of work in progress — nothing polished, little certain. Second, the idea that the topics I circle here might have enough depth to be associated with the soul tickled me. The word captures a lot. It evokes things immaterial and immortal, and it invokes things that are emotionally and intellectually demanding.
If that’s the space where I’ve found myself, then it seemed worth laying out the framework I’ve landed on for morality — the domain where I was raised to believe my soul interfaced with the world.
I start from a premise that is not moral at all. It might be wrong, but it’s where I start.
The Universe Exists
The universe exists. It is all there is. There is no external frame of reference against which it moves, no outside vantage point from which its contents can be judged as large or small, meaningful or meaningless. If the universe expands “into” nothingness, that nothingness provides no coordinate system. The universe is not traveling anywhere. It simply is - the substrate within which all structure, motion, and meaning must arise.
Within this universe are laws of physics: gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear forces, weak nuclear forces, and thermodynamics. These laws do not encode intention or value. They permit many outcomes and forbid others. Nothing violates them. What we experience as surprising or counterintuitive reflects our limited understanding of constraints, not exceptions to them.
Life is one such surprising outcome.
At first glance, life appears to defy entropy: it builds order, maintains structure, and persists against decay. But this impression comes from local accounting. Life does not oppose entropy; it participates in it. It dissipates energy efficiently by organizing matter into bounded, self-maintaining systems. Globally, entropy still increases. Locally, structure persists.
This distinction matters - but it is not the whole story.
Information is Fundamental
Alongside thermodynamics and these other physical laws, the universe appears, to me, to exhibit another organizing principle: information retention and propagation. Information is not merely a convenient description of physical states. Increasingly, it appears to be ontologically fundamental - conserved, irreducible, and woven into reality at its deepest levels. Systems once thought to erase information entirely, such as black holes, instead appear to preserve it at their boundaries or return it in encrypted form through radiation. The laws governing entropy and the laws governing information are not separate regimes, but different expressions of the same underlying structure.
If this is true, then life is not merely good at processing information. Life is what information does under certain physical conditions: a mode through which the universe preserves, copies, modifies, and complexifies its own structure. Evolution, in turn, is the filtering of informational strategies by physical reality. Genes persist not because they maximize entropy, but because they encode solutions that survive contact with constraint.
At some threshold, a new regime appears.
Certain species - humans most notably - develop higher-order information-organizing systems no longer confined to biology. Language, tools, culture, institutions, and technology externalize information and allow it to propagate on timescales far faster than genetic evolution. These systems do not escape evolution; they supersede it as the dominant adaptive mechanism. Selection no longer acts primarily on bodies, but on ideas, norms, technologies, and social structures.
At this point, I think species-centric morality becomes unavoidable.
When information-bearing systems can model the future, understand constraints, and anticipate the consequences of their actions, evolution ceases to be blind. The question is no longer merely which strategies survive, but which strategies we choose to implement. Biological selection is a lesson learned by the dead; morality is a simulation run by the living to avoid paying that cost in full.
Moral norms, ethical systems, and social rules are not arbitrary overlays on human nature. They emerge from what we are: social, information-rich organisms whose futures are interdependent. They function as regulatory mechanisms governing how information propagates, how power is exercised, and how irreversible loss is managed once natural selection is no longer the sole arbiter.
Seen in this light, religious and philosophical moral traditions are not aberrations or errors, but historically successful information frameworks. Religious systems encoded moral norms in narrative, ritual, and authority structures that allowed information to persist across generations under conditions of high uncertainty, limited literacy, and weak institutional capacity. Their stability often depended on closing certain questions, reducing ambiguity, and anchoring behavior to shared symbolic structures. This closure was not incidental; it was adaptive to the constraints under which these systems evolved - and the most enduring traditions retained mechanisms for reinterpretation when conditions changed.
The Enlightenment did not abolish this function so much as reconfigure it. As information storage, transmission, and verification improved, moral coordination could rely less on authority and more on critique, experimentation, and correction. Stability was traded for adaptability; certainty for openness. Moral systems became more fluid - and more fragile. Each represents a different solution to the same underlying problem: how to coordinate moral behavior among information-bearing agents when the cost of failure is borne by the future.
For beings whose existence consists in the persistence and propagation of information, concern for informational loss is not optional - it is constitutive.
But not all information is equally salient to such beings. Moral concern does not attach to information in the abstract; it attaches first to the information systems we are. Our moral intuitions evolved to regulate threats to the informational structures that constitute individual humans, families, and immediate social groups - not to all information-bearing systems indiscriminately.
Only gradually, and often reluctantly, does moral concern expand to encompass broader informational systems: cultures, institutions, ecosystems, or civilizations themselves. Until a system comes to recognize that threats to these larger structures are also threats to its own continued existence and propagation, it does not naturally take up their mantle of protection. This is not a moral failure. It is a structural consequence of what we are and how we came to be.
If information is fundamental and conserved, then its destruction is not merely inconvenient - it represents a real loss of structured, accessible, future-generating possibility. By destruction, this does not mean violation of physical conservation laws, but the irreversible collapse of informational organization that could have shaped future states.
Some actions work with the structure of reality - by preserving informational richness, adaptability, and future option space. Others work against it, collapsing diversity, coercing agency, or foreclosing correction. Constraints ensure that not all information can be preserved; moral reasoning often consists in choosing which losses are least destructive when tradeoffs are unavoidable.
This framework does not resolve which informational structures merit protection when they conflict, or whose futures weigh more heavily in the balance. That question is not answered by physics or biology. It is the ongoing work of moral reasoning itself - the project that begins precisely where blind selection ends.
In this view, “good” moral systems are those that preserve future possibility, stabilize cooperation, protect high-value informational structures, and remain correctable when they fail. “Bad” systems are those that enforce informational closure: they silence feedback, erase diversity, and sacrifice long-term viability for short-term coherence. They are dangerous not because they are “evil” in a mystical sense, but because they have dismantled their own brakes.
I am not a theologian, but by and large this strikes me as perfectly consonant with the Catholic understanding of morality. Only the terminology is different.
You say, "The universe is not traveling anywhere. It simply is - the substrate within which all structure, motion, and meaning must arise." What you here call the substrate, we would call the ground of being. As Bishop Barron says, the atheist makes the mistake of thinking of God as a being. But God is not a being. God is that which permits being to be: the ground of being, or, in your terms, the substrate. God is the name we give to that thing which simply is, the uncaused cause, the ground of being.
Similarly, you say that information is fundamental. We say, in the beginning was the Word. It all begins with information, with the Word. C.S. Lewis, in the Narnia books, has Aslan sing Narnia into existence. God is the word. Christ is the Word made flesh. The Word, the information, creates the universe and gives it form and, if you like, meaning.
And so morality is indeed not divinely imposed, in the sense of being the arbitrary dictate of a divine being, but the expression of the nature of the God who is not a being but the ground of being and the Word that brings the universe into being.