Why do we need morals?

[Darkstar]

Well, I mean.."it seems that there ought to be" isn't any indicator that there is. That's what I was talking about when I mentioned wish thinking. I think, personally, that even if there were some objective morality that we could eventually discover or manufacture, having some quantifiable, goal based system would do a hell of alot of good in the interim - and as to the thread title, in that light one can wax on about all the reasons we might need this or find it useful. Similarly, I don't imagine that an absolute and objective morality would really be all that useful to us (and I positively demand that the tools we carry be useful). I'm of the opinion that we'd always find a need for qualifiers, ameliorating circumstances, exceptions. If this were true, then an objectve and absolute morality wouldn't be so entirely different from a pragmatic goal based one.

I don't think that an objective (i.e. well supported by reason, doesn't mean that it must be defined in a quantifiable way) need necessarily be absolute. One could say "it is generally wrong to kill", and this statement could be agreed upon, even though there is the qualifier "generally". I think that for almost any moral rule one can imagine an exception to it if they try hard enough. The existence of qualifiers and exceptions doesn't IMO make the system of morals weaker, but in fact makes them stronger. The exceptions are going to be there, whether one recognizes this or not.

Ultimately, moral rules are applied on a situational basis in reality, so, one might think, these exceptions would come naturally (lying to protect Jewish people during WWII, for example, would be perfectly moral). The only thing that needs to be objective is a starting metric. Life has value, living things want to avoid suffering (we can tell it is bad only from our subjective experience, but that is still important), and most people have an innate sense of fairness. Knowing these three things, what do they mean, and what else can we conclude? (And what other metrics might we invoke?)