What do moral philosophy and the science of morality study?

[citizenschallengev4]

@Markus7

Moral philosophy … three big questions: “What is good?”, “How should I live?”, and “What are my obligations?”

The science of morality … “Why do cultural moral norms and our moral sense exist and how do they work?”

@Markus7

overlapping domains OR as distinct domains …
with moral philosophy studying what morality ‘ought’ to be
and the science of morality studying what morality ‘is’?

Nice clarification, thank you.

@Markus7

To your point, … based on what is objectively moral independent of culture?

But, is there morality independent of culture?
To me it seems there’s nothing about our thinking that’s “independent” of the culture we’re embedded within? (It’s like wondering if this or that particular storm is influenced by global warming - when the entire freak’n system has warmed with impacts and drivers cascading throughout the entire system - and nothing happens within that climate engine that’s independent of AGW’s cascading influences, it’s simple physics - even if few dare to say it that bluntly).

@Markus7

Regarding babies, we can judge their behavior as immoral in an objective sense without judging that they should be punished.

Can you break that down, babies is a big range,
we have the <100 days old crowd, then those transitions that come with crawling, walking, talking and such.
It feels to me like ego starts asserting itself at that 100 day period,
as they grow I guess perhaps immorality might slowly enter the picture.

I guess there’s no denying some kids are simply evil, environment and genetic. But aren’t most are mischievous, which is part of learning bounds and more - with morality being in the eyes of the beholder.

Mind you I never actually thought about it from this perspective, but I have had a chance to experience a number of growing babies and children during various and extended periods of their lives, so have plenty of hands-on observation/experience “feelings” - no study and you seem a scholar, so there’s that . . .
Which is why I’m curious to hear more from you.

This is off track, but reading your thoughts reminded me about pragmatic dealing with situations and an important lesson I’ve learned, namely to keep in mind there’s a difference between reasons and justification - and understanding reasons for actions is important, and that trying to understand the reasons has nothing to with “justification” - which is an entire different matter.

@Markus7

A group could, for example, understand from the science 1) why we would want to follow the Golden Rule, 2) when it would be immoral to follow the Golden Rule, and 3) what to use for moral guidance when the Golden Rule fails us.

Groups could rationally decide to implement a morality based entirely in science so long as they could avoid making unsupportable claims about what the group’s goals and values ought to be.

Imagine these groups cannot agree about what moral philosophy is telling them their moral goals ought to be – the common situation.

No problem! The group would just find shared goals and cooperatively pursue those. I expect those goals would include some kind of flourishing or well-being.

The above is close to defining an attractive moral system based only on science and whatever a group’s shared goals are.

Interesting. It seems to me the “founding fathers” of our country did something very close to that.
Or as close as humans might be capable of, given the proper circumstances, and I look at that country and wonder what happened, immorality has become accepted behavior, breaking contracts, cheating on taxes, lying as a public strategy has been normalized, heck perhaps institutionalized at this point.

@Markus7

The above is close to defining an attractive moral system based only on science and whatever a group’s shared goals are.

What happened. What can a science of morality accomplish?