Why "mysterious ways" don't matter.

[Esquilax]

Disregarding religious-related rules (which since they have an identifiable source, they would not qualify as any kind of "built in" or "discoverable" moral value), I am still confused as to the source.

If there is as Esquilax said, an objective framework (reality) in which we can discover moral values, then murder, slavery, abuse, etc. was always wrong from the beginning.

It seems that Jenny and Rasetsu believes that we chose a set of values. This, I think, by definition makes them subjective.

If then, objective moral values and duties exist, the question is what is the foundation and could evolution have produced it? If we had evolved differently with slight modifications to our brain or instinctive behavior, would these values and duties be different?

Stated a different way, if some current primate group's cognitive ability evolves enough to begin behaving in a civilization--co-existing with us, would you say that they would have a different set of moral values and duties or would ours apply? If different, why?

I think the problem is that you're separating the morals from any other concerns. That makes sense in a world in which morality is dictated to you from a basis you'll never understand or have explained to you, but then, that's not morality anyway, that's just obeying orders, with the assumption that those orders are moral.

But as an atheist, I don't believe we live in that world; morality to me is intrinsically linked to us as thinking agents, and the values that we hold to be important. Yes, our morals are subjective in that they are developed and given import by us, but the basis for them is factual analysis of the context we find ourselves in. Our nature, as biological entities existing on a planet, having evolved in the way that we have, is a core part of how we derive our morals. We are animals that thrived based on cooperation and the formation of social groups, we literally require those things to survive, and so we can't be the sort of lone wolves that get brought up in argument against this sort of morality. "If you don't have an objective source for your morals, what's to stop someone from just deciding that killing people is right?" goes the typical argument from theists. To which my immediate answer is, someone could easily do that, but unfortunately for him the rest of us have been configured as group-surviving animals and won't take kindly to that.

Subjectivity is only a problem if you accept it at an individual level, because social grouping is wound into the very fabric of our psychological makeup. The reason the killing example is abhorrent to you is because you have empathy, and you can envision the pain and distrust that would foster in the community. That's the advantage that led us to rise to dominance on this planet, and to become a species that has traveled into space. Cooperation works, and hence our morality isn't subjective on an individual level, but subjective on a species level. We derive our morals based on our needs as the advanced species we are, and in a world where we recognize that we aren't the only conscious entities we extend that same moral consideration to animals and so on because that's the only logically tenable path to take. Any other, and we'd be using double standards.

If another species evolved in a different way, then their morality would necessarily develop in accordance with a different set of factors. But that wouldn't make our morality any less applicable to us, and at a certain level of consciousness it would be entirely possible for our two species to communicate and expand our moral framework based on the new situation, in which the two groups have to either co-exist or cooperate.

Too often theists want to pretend that if morality isn't dictated to us by god, then there's no basis for it at all, let alone a solid one. All I have to do is point to the ground beneath my feet, and the six billion other people I share the planet with, none of whom become phantoms if god is taken off the table. I wonder why theists seem to think that they do?