Ethics, our laws and civilization itself are products of our shared preferences, or desires. We desire food, clothing and shelter. All things being equal, we prefer not to have a knife stuck in our back or our eyes poked out. If someone runs at us menacingly with a knife or a sharp object, we will flee or fight back; we will seek the assistance of the community to defend and protect us, and expect that it will do so. These basic preferences are the core of civilized life.

Our basic preferences can be categorized as health, satisfaction of material needs and wants, pleasure, longevity, happiness and fulfillment. A stab in the back is unhealthy and unpleasant. Significant hunger is unsatisfying. Death at an early age is undesirable in itself. We avoid unhappiness and seek to be happy, and to be fulfilled.

These basic preferences are the necessary bridge from our sensations, emotions, thoughts and actions, to ethics, law and society. The brain’s processes create experiences, which we may interpret as sensations, emotions, thoughts, actions, or a combination of domains. Those experiences have both a content and a quality. Because humans agree on fundamental points about the quality of experience – we have a common ground of broadly shared preferences – we can understand and appreciate each other’s desires, bond together in families, communities and nations (imagine a universal human family without boundaries), adopt and enforce laws, develop ideas about justice, and strive toward a better world in which all people live to the fullest, while stewarding and preserving foundations for the future. People marry, each partner imagining a future together; many marital disputes arise when preferences are not shared. Parents may have one vision for their child’s future, while their child has another vision. Sometimes the parents do not agree on what is best for – what they prefer for – the child. Communities and nations are divided over political preferences, sometimes with disastrous consequences. The theory proposed herein traces obvious points (e.g.. people do not wish to have needles stuck into their eyes) back to their origins, and connects the dots forward. Seen another way, if we start building at the bedrock, then perhaps we can better understand how our common preferences can be used to bring us together into a more unified human community.

Without our preferences – our desires – there is no such a thing as morality, ethics or religion. Set in ideas about good and evil, right and wrong, morality implies a set of preferences, such as life over death, as in “Thou shalt not kill.” Similarly, ethics implies an evaluation of conduct that either serves or disserves desires. The entire field of religion is a set of narratives and prescriptions for everything desired, from the desire for rain to the desire for a sense of peace. Messy though they are, our preferences are inescapable. They form a necessary bridge into moral, ethical, religious and spiritual development.

Our preferences have their foundations in our character as human beings. The organic brain is to ethics as chemistry is to biology: its essential foundation.

Cosette in her shadow, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire. Destiny, with its 
mysterious and fatal patience, slowly drew together these two beings, all charged and all 
languishing with the stormy electricity of passion, these two souls which were laden with 
love as two clouds are laden with lightning, and which were bound to overflow and mingle 
in a look like the clouds in a flash of fire.