Is it true that there is no absolute morality?

[bennyboy]

Because they are. What you describe is not objective morality, but consensus morality. This is not objective. It is still dependent on your opinion.

It just happens that humans are predisposed towards certain opinions. This is objective fact, but it does not make the basis for the value judgments being made any less subjective.

Opinions themselves are the culmination of a series of physical interactions, and are not more than that. Unless you are going to argue free will or indeterminism, then you are trying to separate diametric opposites which aren't actually diametrically opposite. "Subjective" is just a word for those objective processes of which one has the capacity to be aware. You don't have control over the causal chain which leads to you manifesting particular ideas-- you are just a witness to their manifestation.

In the search for the ultimate source of morality, it will easily be seen that it is not only arbitrary-- it is not even MOSTLY arbitrary. This can be seen by looking for moral behaviors in worms, in lizards, in birds, in higher mammals. You can clearly see that the motives for moral ideology are more apparent in mammals, and in apes in particular. The love of self and others, guilt, social fears, and so on are ingrained in us. That they manifest in different sets of rules means that those moral rules (called "morality") are highly subjective That they are omnipresent in humanity, and that all human societies have moral rules of some type, means that the moral impulse (also called "morality" but holding a different meaning), are intrinsic to the species.

That other apes also show at least some signs of the same impulses shows that they developed before humans did; research shows that chimps and gorillas have a sense of right and wrong and of fairness, for example. Our instincts as social animals, therefore, represent an objective morality-- and the details of moral systems represent a subjective morality.