Morality without god

Morality, then, is a term that equates to customs. Meaning that, in your estimation, the practice of keeping slaves, for example, is as equally moral in a society that practices it as it is immoral in a society that does not practice it. You would say that the keeping of slaves in the US was moral behaviour in 1840 but immoral behaviour in 1870?I maintain that there is a method to determine that slavery was always and always will be immoral regardless of the society that it is practiced in.

Is there anything else you would consider to be always immoral regardless of the society or the time period? What are your reasons for that decision? What if another fellow disagrees with your reasons and has other reasons why they could be considered moral?

Not really, no. It's less arbitrary than a mere custom - like eating fish on a friday - because it's a human emotion, not a man-made tradition. We can't help ourselves feeling sorrow when others are hurt for example. Our sense of morality is related very closely to our sense of empathy. From here, I agree with you. But I don't know what my position would have been back then.In order to keep slaves and not feel that it was wrong, I think you'd have had to have been born into that society which normalised it. It would help if you could also be led to believe that the slave was not actually human or at least not of your tribe. Mentally putting your victim outside your realm separates them from you emotionally - it's the way we are able to go to war - we first have to demonise the other side.Whether you agree or not, the simple fact that previous societies were able to own slaves is evidence that those societies did not think they were behaving immorally - their sense of morality was self-evidently different to mine and yours now.A better example is murder; it's the nearest thing we have to an absolute morality. There are no societies that I'm aware of that thinks murder (within the group) is moral. There is obvious evolutionary advantages to this - a society that allowed murder would quickly not be a society.

Except of course, that we still have cultures today that consider ritual killing even within the family as not just not murder but as very moral.

But that is a bit circular.
Murder is "unlawful killing" - and laws are affected by morality.
Killing per se is not immoral: only certain specific killings are immoral.e.g. When someone kills their daughter and claims it is an honour killing; it would not be considered murder in all countries.Edited by Panda, : No reason given.

And there are societies that believe execution of criminals to be a moral act. Both me and my culture do not (at the moment.).No moral rules are absolute. Which is my point.

I will point out again that just because someone believes their behaviour is moral does not mean that it is. Just because a society enshrines immoral behaviour in law doesn't make it moral behaviour.There is no dispute that people used to believe that keeping slaves was morally acceptable behaviour. There is no dispute that some followers of Sharia law today believe honour killings to be morally acceptable. There is no dispute that some nations execute gay people or drug users. The fact that this behaviour might be the law of the land does not make it moral behaviour. It just makes it legal.For many people, legality is all they require to justify their behaviour. For others, like abolitionists and gay rights activists and civil rights activists and 14 yr old Pakistani girls who champion the right of girls to go to school, there is a different standard.The simple and unchanging metric is to ask if the behaviour causes unnecessary harm. If your behaviour causes unnecessary harm then it is immoral regardless of the prevailing social conventions. This never changes.Edited by Dogmafood, : No reason given.

And I will point out again, that until we - ie the society we live in at any one time - has its consciousness raised so that it suddenly realises that a particular behaviour/law/action is immoral, it does not know that it is. The reason is that no-one can produce a definitive set of absolute rules about these things. If you could, you would have done so. the golden rule is a good start point - we've all agreed that - but it's NOT an absolute; it's an ideal which can't be met in real life. At any one time we have to measure relative benefits/damages - so we go to war and kill millions of innocent people (an obviously immoral act) in order - in our best judgement - to save even more life. We call the use of chemical weapons immoral even though they may be efficient and so on. We do our best at the time according to our own mores.You can provide no set of absolutes - just a general overarching ideal. (And that idea has its origin in a set of emotions designed to help us work together.)

I would argue that He provided the choice of absolute. We need but accept it rather than endlessly trying to make our own ideal.

It's a pretty rubbish argument though isn't it? There is a choice of absolute but we don't know what the absolute is? How does that work then?

The absolute is Jesus Christ. The choice is ours.

Yes, ok Tangle, but you are not taking in what I am saying. The fact that someone does not know that 2 + 2 = 4 does not change the fact that 2 + 2 = 4.The fact that moral calculus is complicated and full of hidden variables does not change the fact that, in the end, there are actions that cause less harm than others. Not knowing the end result of your actions may excuse you from culpability but this does not change the end result of your actions. It is when we can be reasonably expected to know that our behaviour causes harm that we can be said to be acting immorally.It is by this metric that I can say that a slave owner in 1840 was acting immorally. If the slave owner put himself in the slaves position he would know that the keeping of slaves was/is immoral regardless of what his neighbours were doing or what the law of the land was. This is why things like civil rights have evolved in spite of the prevailing laws. If you are a moral person then you do your best to cause no harm based on your knowledge about what causes harm. As our knowledge is limited, we can only work toward a perfect moral behaviour. As our knowledge increases so does our ability to approach a perfect moral behaviour. Our present inability to act in a perfectly moral way does not impact the possibility of acting in a perfectly moral way.Your position requires that even if I had a perfect knowledge of all of the ramifications of my actions that I would not be able to determine the most moral course.

The fact that I accept the golden rule - do no harm, do some good - ideal, means that I accept that there are good ways and bad ways of living.I dislike and distrust philosophical arguments because they are purely hypothetical constructs that never resolve anything - science shot philosophy's fox some time ago - but if you want to get philosophical, you can extend the ideal out far enough to say that with perfect knowledge of everything that will happen as a result of an action it would be possible to determine the best action to take.In other words, you'd have to be a god - or at least have god-like knowledge.We don't have that knowledge and never can. Our morality is practical, not theoretical and time and place limited; it evolves as our society evolves. We can never get even close to this theoretical absolute morality which you speak of and even in simple cases we will never agree on what is and is not moral.If people that call themselves Christians can't agree about whether it's right or wrong to execute a criminal, how can there actually be an absolute for real human behaviour generally? We just muddle along doing the best we can.

That seems a rather naive statement to be coming from an educated person. Science itself is based on a philosophy. From the mighty Wikipedia

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In an older and closely related meaning (found, for example, in Aristotle), "science" refers to the body of reliable knowledge itself, of the type that can be logically and rationally explained (see History and philosophy below).[2] Since classical antiquity science as a type of knowledge was closely linked to philosophy. In the early modern era the words "science" and "philosophy" were sometimes used interchangeably in the English language.[citation needed] By the 17th century, natural philosophy (which is today called "natural science") was considered a separate branch of philosophy.[3] However, "science" continued to be used in a broad sense denoting reliable knowledge about a topic, in the same way it is still used in modern terms such as library science or political science.

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In any case, could I summarize your position as being that because we can never achieve a perfect moral behaviour there is no such thing as a perfect moral behaviour? If this is an accurate summary, is it not the same thing as saying because we can never achieve the speed of light that there is no such thing as the speed of light? I suggest that we agree more often then we do not regarding what is moral behaviour. I would also say that agreement is not essential and has no impact on whether or not an action is moral. I think that if you start with the basic conditions that1 — All people have the same rights and value to begin with.
2 — The morality of any action is inversely proportionate to the harm that it causes.With these parameters we have a method to determine the morality of any action. The determination of harm is self referential and this is the relative part. The formula, however, is universal. Edited by Dogmafood, : add link