Is it true that there is no absolute morality?

[bennyboy]

Maybe, but does that mean that the hypothetical best action is available to us, or, that even if we knew what it was we would be capable of actualizing it?  I don't think we have to do the best thing we could do to satisfy a moral imperative in any case.

No, I don't think so either. "Don't be a dick" is usually good enough-- if 100% of people did that, we'd have a pretty

That's not what objective morality means. A species wide social instinct is a shared moral opinion. Broken record, but.... a moral fact is not the possession of an evolved moral opinion.

I wouldn't count instinct as "opinion," personally, but I don't want to get into this as I mentioned, because it's not what we're talking about currently anyway.

It's not, at all.  The things you call objective moralities often are...but this actually isn't, even if it might not have anything to do with genetic fitness.  Do we murder our oppressors or do we kill them?  What are the moral facts of the matter, if any, that make one killing, and another murder?  We obviously possess such opinions.  They probably find, to some degree or another, their origin in evolved social instincts.......but do they correlate to any moral facts?

I'm going to get in dangerous water with this line, but maybe just for hoots, we can take a little diversion. I consider our genetic makeup, individually and as a species, a collection of facts-- a record of a gazillion interactions among mates, among prey and predators, between individuals and weather, and so on. In that sense, any instincts related to a sense of right or wrong, of social justice, and so on, are moral facts-- not in the sense that they determine what ideas represent moral truth, but in that they inform the way we are capable of thinking about right and wrong. In a sense, you could say that "morality" is really a word for a collection of social feelings, and that all the ideas about morality are moral facts-- records of the interactions between the social feelings and the specific details of the environment at a given time and geography.

The importance of the subjective perspective in determining moral ideas is pretty overrated if the self is not more than the physical expression of the DNA, and if ideas are not more than that physical expression's interactions with the environment, no?