Morality quiz, and objective moralities

[robvalue]

A couple more thoughts for anyone not utterly tired of my drivel:

It is important to make the distinction between discussing an individual and their personal sense of morality, and what appear to be societal norms. Unless this is made clear, people can be talking at completely cross purposes. The norms represent only a general trend, and no particular person necessarily agrees with any of it in that society.

As far as Harris goes and his landscaping, I'm happy to agree that we simply define morality to be analysing the effects of actions upon wellbeing. I'll agree with him that if someone is defining it any other way, I'm not interested. Not so much that I would tell them that they are "wrong", but that they are using the same word to mean something unrelated to what I mean by it. If I was to have a discussion with such a person, that is where going back to absolute fundamentals is important. This only ever happens, in my experience, with (some) religious people and a very small minority of the remainder. People without empathy, for example, may find the whole thing utterly bizarre and far from obvious. Unfortunately religion seems to sometimes teach that empathy itself is something of a conspiracy theory, ridiculous though that sounds.

A very weird argument I've had a few times though is where a religious person will totally agree with me regarding empathy, but will then say (not in so many words) "but we might not have agreed and so there must be some other explanation". But if we didn't agree, we'd no longer be talking about the same subject, as in the above paragraph. So of course the discussion would then be different.