Religion is a poor source of morality

[robvalue]

Additional thoughts:

Imagine if scientists do "discover" this magical way of measuring the wellbeing of a society. If morality is simply about maximizing wellbeing and nothing more, that has some troubling implications.

Say it is found that society's wellbeing would be significantly improved by killing everyone in a certain category, say people like me who can't hardly work. What do we do with that information? Do we round people like me up and kill them? Why not, if all we're concerned with is this wellbeing figure?

It brings into question everything from aborting children because they're not good enough, or influencing them in the womb, killing old people, anything. Once you've got a system where "computer says X is moral", what have we become? Are we going to blindly follow the computer's readout, which we have confirmed is objectively correct? If we do, we're now amoral ourselves and we've made science our god. If we don't, what's the point of doing it in the first place? "Hmm, that's interesting. Kill all oddly shaped babies. Yeah, we're not going to do that. Next... Ah, same again. It really doesn't like those babies. Maybe we should...?"

I don't feel ready to accept that in any given situation there is always a most moral action. I used to say that, but I have retracted it. I believe morality is subjective and relative, and some actions are clearly better than others. But when several competing factors are in the balance, allowing science to decide how to rate these is dangerous. There have always been moral quandaries, and there should be. I'd be really scared if people started saying science has "solved" them. If science's readout is considered as just another opinion, we're straight back to subjective morality.

Of course, in everyday life, decisions are not usually that complex. Do I hit this guy for no reason as I walk past him? No. Do I help this person through the door? Yes. Do I steal this bike? No. There's no real conflict, so science is not needed. The "trapped in burning building" scenarios happen so rarely that setting up a science based way to assess them if you discovered them personally seems... creepy and unhelpful.

If we're just trying to say morality(west) > morality(crazy country) then sure, there's so much common sense injected into the science so far that I don't see the need to invoke science at all. Just say it. It won't achieve anything, either way.