Morality without god

That's why I say it is both subjective - my morality is different from everyone else's - and collective, the sum of our feelings as represented in our secular laws (mostly do no harm) and in our codes of behaviour taught by society and institution, family, religion, schools, work etc. (which include 'Do good')We can all think differently but our actions are conditioned by the society we live in and are brought up by. I suspect you're overthinking this and trying to be too mechanistic. Morality - or our sense of it - is an emotion. It's similar to love, anger etc - it can be seen in action using fMRI. It's partly instinct and partly learned. So some heroic actions are almost a reflex, certainly not a calculation.The teachers who protected their children in the recent shooting and were killed for it are heroines, but they're also simply human, doing what we would expect people to do.In fact the human instinct to protect and help is often so overwhelming that it results in really stupid, non-heroic, actions. At this time of year, it's usual for a few people to die in floods and storms. There's always someone who feels compelled to jump in to help and is killed as well. They just can't bear to stand on the river bank and watch helplessly even though they must know that there is no hope.The emergency services have to be trained hard out of their natural desire to help if it means endangering themselves.

Nope, typo :-) Yeh, well, I can't really help you there.Our sense of morality is simply another emotion which we are born with then trained to use. There's no requirement nor evidence for any supernatural interference.

And yet no-one can describe the method we are supposed to use to determine the absolutely right answer. If you properly read the trolley problems you will see how quickly your ability to choose the 'right' answer fails you. So in paedophilia, morality is a series of subjective opinions and no single individual will come to the same conclusion about the answer. Therefore not an absolute.I doubt that my daughter will ever be old enough - her boyfriend seems to disagree with me.We also know this because different cultures come to differing answers by nominating an average age at different ages and at different times in our cultures - some to our mind disgracefully young. And, of course a real paedophile is totally convinced that HIS view is correct, not yours or mine.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Well, yes, obviously a fireman puts himself in danger at every fire, but he's trained to take calculated risks, not run heroically into a burning building in the hope of rescuing someone.Unlike this guy:
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&...Interesting too, to useMan drowns while attempting to rescueAs a search term in Google. People just can't help themselves, we've all got a stupid hero in us.

I think it would take enormous guts to watch someone drown and not try to help - knowing it's hopeless. and you'd question yourself ever after.A while back my dad fell off a bridge into a shallow river, I ran like hell to get to him and I distinctly recall wondering whether I'd ruin my boots if I didn't take them off - made me pause for a micro-second before I jumped in.Weird how the mind works.

I doubt we have a word for it.It's a combination of intellect and restraint - an anti-heroic response.If you were a firefighter declining to enter a building because there was an unacceptable risk, you'd call it professionalism. If your child was in the house - well, we don't have a nice word for it, we're expected to die trying.It always makes me think on aeroplanes when the emergency procedures are being talked through. The instruction is to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others to do it (they mean your children). How easy would that be?

I think you're just dissembling now; the existence of differing ages of consent in different parts of the world and at different times in the development of society is proof that these things are not absolute and that there is no absolute moral standard that can be applied.That's just one example but there are hundreds of others, from the treatment of animals to the treatment of slaves, women and homosexuals. Simply saying that the standard that you apply NOW is more right or that someone in the future applies will be even more accurate is not proof that there's an absolute standard out there somewhere, it's proof that what we feel is correct moral action changes over time. In other words, it's developmental.What we do agree on is that we have do actually have this moral sense - the golden rule. But we now know that its an emotion, like anger or love. It's a brain activity that we can physically see. Just as people have different tempers and ability to love and hate, people have different feelings about morality. When areas in the brain are damaged - the part responsible for empathy, the pre-frontal cortex - it changes their sense of morality. Ie it's plastic, not absolute and it's a brain function, not a spirit.Psychopaths' brains show differences in structure and function

And I think it's a huge error to ascribe an 'ought' to a biological function. People 'ought' not to get angry, but they do because it's a human function. People feel empathetic to others because it's a biological function - they can't help it or stop it. The best we can do is control our feelings.Great evils HAVE been justified by our differing versions of morality. Wishing it were different doesn't get us anywhere.But there's more to us that emotions, our intellect has allowed us to overcome many of our baser emotions and the development of our societies has allowed us to create social rules of behaviour that benefit all of us. If you want to call this morality you can, because it's an extension of our individual sense of what's right and wrong into a collective one that's enforced by society - it governs individual behaviours and hopefully prevents the 'great evils' that we are capable of.

Well i think there is and it seems that you do too. In fact we all appear to agree that morality exists, so maybe we can put that aside. I didn't actually say that we 'ought' to control our feelings - I said that controling them is the best we can do. But I'll accept it.It's self-evident that we should control our feelings where to do otherwise would harm us or others. And it's self-evident that if we use our intellect to create institutions that formalise this into rules of behaviour then this helps us all get along better which is good for us all.It's self justifying. You seem to require some external, academic or philosophical justification for this fact of life. I don't. I accept that it's the way we are. Our sense of morality is a biological function that tells us how to treat each other; if you wish to be pedantic, it therefore consequently tells us how we ought to treat each other inorder to get along better. You're making a distinction without a difference.

That's just plain silly. We both know that there are things that we call good and things that we call evils and we know the difference and can agree on them. Those that don't know the difference we call either criminal or mentally ill or both. As a society we have agreed this and all societies that there have ever been agree this.Searching for intellectual absolutes is pure intellectual masturbation. For some reason you feel it necessary to use the emotive and pejorative term 'mob' instead of using a more positive and constructive term like society. Why do you think that is?I see the development of our civilisation and society as the defining achievement of human beings. The establishment of secular institutions and legal instruments like the European Human Rights Act, the UK's Magna Carta and the US Bill of Rights and Constitution - amongst others are - are all founded in our sense of morality and are all defences against what you call mob rule.We're obviously not ruled by a mob, we're ruled by our institutions and society which is s development from our individual and collective biological sense of morality. To hope for more is daft.

All other things being equal, yes, of course. If that was what was regarded as correct and moral behaviour then, then what else is there to do? There was no absolute, so the behaviour they knew was their morality. If such a thing as an absolute morality actually existed, Mohammad and his society would have applied it. And again, all other things being equal, yes of course. Neither you nor I can have a different opinion because neither you nor I know the 'correct' form of marriage. (I do know that over 50% of marriages in the UK end in divorce causing a lot of harm to children - I doubt that it is as high as that in Pakistan.)
The fact that you or I might personally dislike the idea of arranged marriage has nothing to do with the relative moralities involved. What standard? There is no standard that all human action can be judged against. All you've come up with is the Golden Rule which is something every society ever would claim it upholds at the time. That's just wrong. You're applying your own personal beliefs and feelings to another person in a different culture. It simply is not the case that arranged marriage is universally immoral and to think that way is normally regarded as a form of racism and cultural snobbery. Our ability to identify harm and willingness to do something about it is changing for sure - apart from the odd set back like global war, famine and school shootings - but if you believe that an absolute morality exists, then what was the point in your god hiding it from us (by limiting our ability to see it.)If an absolute morality exsited we'd be using it.

Both you and I and everyone reading this thread would agree on what is good and what is evil.Here's a test.Was the the holocaust good or evil?
Is rescuing a baby from a burning building good or evil?Did you pass? Correct. But you passed the test above too didn't you. Explain why. I think you need to re-think or re-phrase this because it's loaded with supposition, strawmen and assertion. Simplify it and you may have a point. Do you really mean to say that law enforcement is mob rule? Are you sure? There are many? If there where as many as a majority claiming our institutions were evil, we wouldn't have the institutions we have - you know, that's why we call it a democracy, the majority opinion wins.And btw, I have plenty to say to them.

I really hope so - I'm generally not a fan of intellectual snobbery. Plain, low-brow, thoughtful a precise, non-jargon filled speaking is fine by me. You obviously missed where I said that morality is instinctual (we are born with the base emotions that allow us to empathise with others which forms the start point of our morality) and is informed by our society and community and that it is developmental. We have developed skills that transcend generations - ie language and writing, so that the generation following us can learn from us and society can progress - instead of rediscovering what works every time.

And yet we both agree - and so would anyone reading this thread - that the holocaust was wrong and saving a baby from death is right. How do you explain that?(Btw, things can't be evil - actions can be) I don't have to demonstrate it, I know it. It's a messy human emotion not a computer algorithm or logic puzzle that can be solved using the power of thought alone. I must have missed your case. what was it? No. There are some actions that are black and white and some that are shades of grey. Saving the baby is normally a clear decision. Saving the baby whist killing the mother is not at all clear.Genocide is always wrong - we all know that. But was the human sacrifice of the Aztecs wrong? Can't tell from here - all I can say is that it certainly feels wrong to me now. Of course we can say what we think about actions that are harmful to others no matter where we find them. That's the only test we have, but it doesn't fit neatly into some set of absolute rules that you appear to need it to.

Everything's fine and normal until you get to here: You want something beyond ourselves, something outside ourselves that will solve the difficult moral issues for us.But then you go on to contradict yourself. The morality isn't outside ourselves it's now inside ourselves (which is where we thought it was all along btw) Well no, obviously. But i have now just realised that your 'new' moral ideal is the 'do no harm' bumper sticker that we spoke about earlier. I thought we'd gone a bit further than that. My mistake (genuinely). You see, I think it's a cliche and you think it's a moral heuristic. [Cliches always contain truth of course.]We're not going to disagree here. There are some attempts to claim that the victims and their families were pleased to chosen - and there may be some truth in it, just as there is obvious truth in the fact that the 9/11 terrorists wanted to do what they did - but we can't get inside another's mind to actually know.Which is what you say here: But nothing you have said does anything that I haven't already said. Your attempts to go beyond the individual and beyond instinct - which you want to do here: is merely what we do when we settle our indivual instincts into societal codes of behaviour and secular law and includes the 'do no harm principle' which I've already pointed out many times.Where is this transcedance, where is the absolute??Edited by Tangle, : Bloody quote slashes - why are they so hard to get the right way round??