(December 4, 2016 at 9:48 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Morality is made up of should's and shouldn't's. These do not appear to be natural categories as there are no such norms in nature. This is why most moral arguments devolve to other moral values. Many of these are in dispute. Is abortion moral? It's less than clear that there is a brute fact of the matter. If Shelly is simply asserting that they are brute facts without any explanation, then so be it. But I don't think he affirmatively endorses that opinion. Nor do I find his presentation in this video clip to be much of an argument for accepting the position. What I got from this video was that he adequately explains why morals do not apply to lions, but does a less than adequate job of explaining why morals should apply to humans. That's another should that seems unexplained. Is it just a brute fact that we 'should' be moral, whatever that means?
I think there is plenty of evidence that our morals have something to do with our evolution as animals. Perhaps we are the only social animal capable of reflecting on our behavior, but we don't seem the only animal capable of acting on moral impulses. The specifics of our evolution as a social species seems to have everything to do with the morals we adopt with respect to our species. Would an animal that has thousands of offspring have the same morals regarding abortion as ours does? I doubt it. This seems to indicate that our morals are likely a contingent fact of our existence, and not mere brute facts. If our morals are contingent, then they depend on something; they have an explanation. I'm just not convinced that the tingling in our gut is as deep as we can go toward understanding the origin of morals.
Morality certainly exists among other animals. If you have ever seen the movie (now parodied a half-a-dozen times) The March of the Penguins, there is a scene where a female penguin loses her chick, and then out of despair, tries to take another chick from another mother, but the collective does not allow her to do so. It is doubtful that the "Penguin God" imposed such a moral code on the penguins, and instead, it is likely an evolutionary adaptation that aides their survival, such as their huddling together during the frigid Antarctic winters, taking turns at the center and edges so as not to freeze to death.
