(June 30, 2013 at 7:54 pm)Inigo Wrote: No. I am saying that real moral instructions would have to be the instructions of a powerful supernatural agent of some kind because this is what it would take for there to exist instructions with which everyone has reason to comply whatever their interests.
If this were the case, then human societies would have had the same morals all along, which does not seem to be the case. There seem to be numerous important moral and ethical views that have changed over time, and even today different cultures have differing moral codes. If morals were "built-in" then we'd have been getting along just swimmingly over the past few thousands of years, wouldn't we?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
