General question about the possibility of objective moral truth

[Michael Wald]

Welcome to the forum.

Social convention.  I'm reading "Touching a Nerve" by Patricia Churchland right now, and she talks a lot about how humans are blank slates when it comes to morality.  We pick up what is right and wrong from social cues and our parents.  Churchland often cites(she's actually citing another author) the Inuit people, which have drastly different morals in certain areas.  In that culture, if you eat the flesh of another human being, even if you did to keep from starving, you are to be killed.  There was a case mentioned in the book where a woman ate her husband that had died and fed some to her child, and an elder from the tribe strangled them both.  What he did was considered a moral action to their people.

If you grew up in a society where killing people was acceptable, you would also most likely believe that killing people was acceptable.  I think, however, the reason we like to think of not killing someone as objective is due to many people's strong belief in inalienable rights, and taking a life is an extreme violation of those rights.  We can see, though, from studying isolated cultures that morals vary greatly.

Thank you for your answer!
About different moral ideas in different cultures: I don't think that we can say that there are such big differences. Your example of the Inuit illustrates that: They kill people who eat human meat. That's really not that far from our thinking. Of course we are not as wild anymore as the Inuit. We don't kill someone who eats human meat. But we send him to prison for sure. Because also in our culture it is seen as a really terrible thing to eat human beings.
And the same you can see in cultures of the past. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never
amounted to anything like a total difference. If you compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, you will see how very like they are to each other and to our own.
Men have differed as regards what people you are supposed to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you are supposed not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining "It's not fair". A nation may say treaties do not matter, but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and
shown that, whatever they say, they really know about the truth of this rules just like anyone else?