What do moral philosophy and the science of morality study?

In my opinion, Whether they all agree or none of them agrees, the fact is what is good is good and what is evil is evil. Ignorance is the only excuse, hence the greatest sin/flaw

Yes there is and I believe this should be the standard. The individual makes the community so the individuals quest for ultimate morality (as his current information agrees) is what I’ll preach.

And where does most of that information, to work with, come from?
You think it can be self-generated?
But you were born from your mother, and probably raised by parents, culture gets poured into you before you can even think clearly. Heck, while your brain is still all sponge, soaking in everything around it.

So God did?
That gets us nowhere.
Who is God, but a creation of your, our, own imaginations?
What are these “universal” truths?
Where (how) are these truths to be found?

From nurture and nature right ? So the body is the tangible of a person and the mind/soul/spirit i the intangible.
If you eat carcinogens your body gets sick. If you mentally mop up intangible carcinogens your min suffers. It could even die and then you have to kill the body a la suicide.

You can simply eat good food and the body is nourished and grows. But when you take that body to the gym and lift weights you get a few extra points, better stature, even become/appear taller.
Same as the mind. You eat clean daily and it grows but if you mental gym it becomes a wonderful computer. Limitless really.

Btw if the body dies before the mind I believe that’s what is called Legacy, because the intangible essence continues to nourish earth people, while the tangible essence nourishes earth plants :potted_plant:.

Most likely this conversation has veered off from the original posters intentions and I apologise for that.

Since this is a largely skeptic gathering I like to blame Nature and the Universe (God??) and while I’ve not had to answer this before I like the laws of nature and perhaps these laws are wired into our nature through seeing what Natural selection does to those who don’t help keep the Laws of nature. What do you reckon ?

It certainly has, my apologies to Markus. Perhaps you should start a new thread, although after reading

I’m probably not the person you’d want to talk to anyways, I come at all this from an evolutionary perspective and I don’t see any of that reflected in what I read there.

I’m personally happy to leave creation discussions. Decoded is a data-based science book and not a religious book, don’t let the title fool you. I hope you’ll read it patiently as I’ll love to know what your (I suspect) academic evolutionary mind thinks of what I think is the next evolution for humans interaction.

Hi pablozen,

We agree that:

“The goalposts of Good and Evil are fixed since the beginning of time and we can only do better as we learn better.”

And I expect we agree that:

The Golden Rule summarizes morality (Mathew 7:12)

However, I am not religious and do not believe in gods or witchcraft.

I am interested in presenting the science of morality in ways everyone, including religious people, will find useful for resolving moral disputes.

What percentage of religious people do you think might be interested in knowing as purely a matter of science, not religion:

  1. How the goalposts of good and evil were fixed at the beginning of time.
  2. Why the Golden Rule summarizes morality.
  3. Why the Golden Rule is a heuristic (a usually reliable, but fallible, rule of thumb) rather than a moral absolute.
  4. When it is immoral to follow the Golden Rule.
  5. What moral guidance can science provide when it is immoral to follow the Golden Rule.
  6. The arbitrary origins of food and sex taboos such as “eating pigs is an abomination” and “masturbation is a sin”.
  7. The shameful origins of moral norms such as “homosexuality is evil” and “women must be submissive to men”.

Could this be interesting at all? Or will this only sound like offensive nonsense?

How could this be presented (assuming all is true in the normal provisional sense in science) as new knowledge about morality that would be useful to religious people?

Oh you’d be mistaken not to, witchcraft is real sir and it’s not religious but Science

Thank you . I believe and live by this below picture hence being spiritualist.

image

In my opinion (the wise book also says something about it but I’m rusty), the narrations in the Bible are not to be taken at face value “lean not on your own understanding”. As a spirituality practitioner I am awed by and try to revere the Universe because she provides everything I need.

We are still flawed creations especially considering the fact we can mostly only learn from our mistakes which invariably hurt one creation or the other. Nobody expects anyone to be immaculate and I think we should live our lives as persons who try their best to live a life of Net Good while working towards Total Good. That being said let’s go to the next point I’ll quote.

I don’t believe this should be taken literally. Maybe pigs is a representation of the crap chemical-filled carcinogenic foods, lifestyles and indulgences we indulge in ? Obviously if you let your soul wallow in self pity and regret and resentment, you poison the soul.

Energy can neither be lost nor created … maybe masturbation isn’t the best activity for your body and soul/mind longterm health ? Perhaps that’s what these mean

many judge others to forget their own issues so I say judge yourself in my music

I believe Ignorance is evil. We should want to do better, otherwise that feels like being a cancer. Chase knowledge with as little bias as possible and pray to whatever you pray to to open your mind to see (wisdom), unless you believe you’re satisfied with your current vision.

Again on ‘lean not on your own understanding’, “Praying” doesn’t have to mean kneeling down and talking to the unseen. Instead if you become more quiet in this Brownian field where we exist, you’ll probably hear more than the other excited, agitated particles.

I don’t see anything here that will help me better explain to religious people how the science of morality can be useful for solving moral disputes. Oh well.

I consider myself a pragmatist and not a philosopher, though in my latter years I seem to be getting dragged into it right and left. I say this my way of introduction, and to explain that the Golden Rule always made a lot of sense to me and I never really tried dissected it before.
You got me to do a little web-surfing and I started an article with a very cynical state of mine, but by the time I was halfway into, it was like, ‘well done’, excellent points, never quite look at it like that, …

Fair enough, but so far you’ve simply alluded to something, when are you going to share details?

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I probably misunderstand Sir, but Religious people believe in a god, how’s that hard to achieve? Simply tell (threaten) them that there’s going to be judgement day or that Law of karma will catch up, or tell them to be more like Jesus by living by his teachings so as to avoid hell or other forms of eternal condemnation. Seems like the easy part

Hi citizenschallengev4,

The platinum rule the article quotes is

“Do unto others as they have explicitly informed you that they want done unto themselves.”

I do not anticipate making a practice of asking everyone I might interact with to explicitly inform me what they want done to them. Except for some unusual circumstances, it is not a practical rule for guiding morality. But perhaps you would like to try it out on everyone you meet and see how it works? The Golden Rule is a practical rule because people commonly, but not always, want similar treatment.

But what irritates me most about the article is the way it is so carelessly factually wrong. If you knowingly treat someone the way they would like to not be treated, then you have violated the Golden Rule. Do you want to be treated the way you do not want to be treated? No, of course not.

The Golden rule is commonly said to summarize morality because it advocates initiating perhaps the most powerful cooperation strategy known, indirect reciprocity. But if you know how they want to be treated you should start with that (rather than how you would like to be treated) and the chances of cooperation ensuing will be increased.

Rest assured, no one who has thought about the issue will knowingly treat someone in a way that reduces the chances of future cooperation and think they have acted morally (except in unusual circumstances such as when dealing with criminals and in wartime).

Nicely summarized.

Yeah, that wasn’t making much sense.

I did find the article interesting and helpful in enunciating perspectives I’d never thought about, still I find your description much easier to swallow. Seemed to me by the time I got to the end that there was a hint of Ayn Rand.


Let me bring it back to the thread. But I gotta peel off for tonight, my wife wants some company.

Yes it is interesting.
I doubt anyone around here would be offended, big topic.

What moral guidance can science provide when it is immoral to follow the Golden Rule?

citizenschallengev4

The reference to being offended was addressed to the religious commenter. I am sincerely trying to figure out how to present the science of morality to everyone, including religious people. There are a lot of them.

I’d like to provide some background first and discuss those in their own threads. The main reason I am posting here is to help figure out how to explain it in ways that make sense to people. The science is easy, the presentation is devilishly difficult.

The claim that we were set back 2 million years was a little weird. But, we do need an update. Mad magazine pointed out the problem when they defined a sadist, noting that if a masochist asks to be harmed, the sadist would say no. We don’t always know what’s best for us.

Paraphrasing Sam Harris from memory, we can view the moral landscape with hills and valleys and find some clear locations where improvements can be made. Some will require a little research and discussion.

Not all religious sects, not even all Xian sects, can agree with what you just said.

This was based on the fact that trichinosis is prevalent in domestic pigs and in days of old there was no treatment for trichinosis. Hence the taboo.

Trichinosis (trik-ih-NO-sis), sometimes called trichinellosis (trik-ih-nuh-LOW-sis), is a type of roundworm infection. These roundworm parasites (trichinella) use a host body to live and reproduce. These parasites infect animals such as bears, cougars, walruses, foxes, wild boars and domestic pigs. You get the infection by eating the immature form of the roundworm (larvae) in raw or undercooked meat.

When humans eat raw or undercooked meat containing trichinella larvae, the larvae grow into adult worms in the small intestine. This takes several weeks. The adult worms produce larvae that travel through the bloodstream to different parts of the body. They then bury themselves in muscle tissue. Trichinosis is most widespread in rural areas throughout the world.

Trichinosis - Symptoms and causes - Mayo Clinic

The Trolley Problem.

Would you kill 1 person to save 5 others?