Why do we need morals?

[Darkstar]

If -your- life is not valuable to them - this says nothing as to whether or not -their- life is valuable to them, whether or not they extend value to your life based upon the value they assign to their own is an issue that touches on hypocrisy or reciprocity ( a whole host of unspokens, really), not directly upon whether or not they value their own.

I suppose that is true. If they don't value anyone's life but their won, society will disintegrate, but there could still be the devaluing of human life in a tribalistic sense (us vs. them) that wouldn't destroy societies internally. If only people could see the "us" as all of humanity. Maybe they will someday...and we will be united in our racism against space aliens.

I haven't seen any self evident rights, I've seen people claim them, but in each and every case -some explanation is required-, to me, anyway.

Well, I suppose in the sense that the concept of rights must be explained, yes. The value of life seems self-evident (at least from the perspective of organisms), but framing it in the context of a right takes an additional step.

As a little sidenote, I see empathy as an offshoot of self-interest. We imagine -ourselves- in the shoes of another and what -we- might feel exposed to what they have been exposed to and then reach some conclusion as to how it might affect -us-. Perhaps that's why I find the idea of saying "I don;t want x done to me, so I won't do it to you, because I can reasonably infer the consequences of doing x to you would be that x could be done to me in return."

That may very well be the case.

Those stone tablet laws are subjective as well, in that different stone tablets have upon them different scribblings - specific to the peoples who did the scribbling.

Well, I was referring to one that was somehow magically perfect. Not that it could really exist...

But...we don't "know objectively" what constitutes suffering, or why it is to be avoided...we don't know, objectively, how a life is valued and upon what metrics, or any means of deciding between two opposed metrics or values which to favor except by preference or by stated goal.

Well, when I say "objective", I'm not referring to any objective metric per se, but rather...
Maybe I should use a different word...it's just that when I hear "subjective" I instantly think that is synonymous with arbitrary, for some reason. Maybe these theists are getting to me...

I don't think it gets messy, I think that it starts that way and just keeps getting messier the farther we go - but I don;t think that this is a problem.

To put it another way. Coming up with a solution for a complex problem doesn't have to be clean - it would be nice, but it isn't required. A good example, between the two of us, is that since I;m just shooting for a goal our different ways of deciding that something is wrong are unimportant to me. The floor is littered with mess...but so long as we hit that target, I don't care. I'd say "whatever reason or intuition floats your boat is a-ok by me so long as we're going to reach this goal". People can opt out, of course, but then I no longer extend all of those courtesies and "rights" (which might explain why I'm such a pacifist as a civvy while having been a very eager combatant).

Yes, I agree. The method for figuring right from wrong is not defined by any objective metric. If this is what is meant by "subjective", then I would agree to that. The only thing I wonder about is the goal of which you speak. Surely, one would think, there is some way that has at least a little objectivity by which we can determine how close we are to the goal (reasoning out a good moral rule) we are. But objective tools (i.e. utilitarianism, the golden rule, etc.) are applied subjectively (i.e. the decision of which tool to use is not objective).