Conscience and the Moral Argument as Evidence for the Goodness of God.

[Belacqua]

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You're pretty much agreeing with my ideas. Thanks and cheers.

OK, that's interesting. 

Is it fair to state it this way:

1) Morals are emergent properties from the actions of physical systems. 

2) Emergent properties are real and not simply subjective judgments. 

3) Therefore, Morals are not subjective judgments, but real effects of physical systems. 

I wouldn't have phrased it this way before, but this seems fairly close to Aristotelian Virtue Ethics. (And its many variations over the years.) He claims that human beings have certain characteristics which make them human, and which are common to all humans. You might express this sort of like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which is a lot later than Aristotle, but claims to be true of human nature, and not merely a subjective choice or societal trend. A person who is flourishing is attaining a high level of this Hierarchy of Needs, and someone who prevents you from flourishing is immoral.

So for example, someone who chops the arms off of healthy babies for fun is immoral because he is harming the flourishing (an emergent property) of that baby.

In short, we can say that because people are a certain way, we can determine with some degree of specificity (not too much) what it is for people to flourish. The emergent properties which constitute flourishing are not something that varies from society to society, but from species to species. (Cat flourishing is not the same as human flourishing.) So although there is a lot of wiggle room for individual variation, in general morality is determined by the kind of animals we are, and is not something that can change, as long as we continue to be this kind of animal.