Serious Questions about Pregnancy and Abortion

You misunderstand what is meant by moral relativism. It doesn't mean morality isn't important; it means that there is no absolute, extra-social source for morality. Morality is something that humans invent as a way of binding themselves together as a society. It applies to humans in society, and only to humans in society. Hence, as long as we want to be part of a society, morality is going to be important to us, whether we call ouselves moral relativists or moral absolutists.Similarly, meaning is a human invention. Nothing in the universe has meaning in itself, only in relation to us (not because we're sooooo important, but because we are the only thing we're aware of that assigns meaning to things). So things have meaning for me, and they have meaning for you, but they don't have meaning in themselves.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

That's what I said . In my clumsy way I was saying that there is nothing outside individual societies that you can use to measure morality against. (And so you can't make absolute value judgements between societies). That's not something we can test. We don't survive if we don't have society. Even feral chidren grow up in the society of other animals.(One qualification I'd make to my original claim is that human morality is likely to be a development of some natural animal faculty, so the statement 'It applies to humans in society, and only to humans in society' perhaps should be amended to 'It applies to moral animals in society, and only to moral animals in society'.) I think we have a tendency to overestimate how 'individual' our morality is. It seems to me that our moral behaviour is like an iceberg, the vast majority of it submerged within a sea of social training, with just a tiny little promontory of individual choice peeking above the waterline.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I don't disagree. I just think we have a tendency to overestimate the individual variance (because we spend so much time on it), and underestimate how much of our moral behaviour is just learned and pretty much unconscious. An interesting problem...trying to test moral behaviour without interacting . Possibly, but would that be morality?

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I think there may be fundamental problems with any such experiment (apart from the immorality).Firstly, even mecahnical interaction to provide food and attention could end up simulating a social context. In fact, you'd have to provide some simulation of social context in order to provide the cues for learning.Secondly, testing whether the child has a moral sense would be very difficult. Would it be possible to judge whether the child had a moral sense without seeing how it interacted with others?Thirdly, the development of a moral sense may, like the development of language, require particular kinds of training during a particular window of development. If your experiment provides that training then it doesn't prove the point you're trying prove; if it doesn't, then your child will never develop a moral sense, and your point will appear to be disproven. I may be wrong, but I would have thought that the notion of cheating oneself was rather sophisticated - isn't it dependent on first developing the notion of cheating others?

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang