(October 25, 2013 at 5:32 am)bennyboy Wrote: Yes, but an equivocation has to be resolved here: there's morality, as in the tendency act morally, and there's morality, as in the body of ideas or world view which determines what is considered moral and immoral.
And we've been talking about the latter from the very beginning - as indicated by the definition of morality I provided at the outset. I haven't once talked about any tendency to act according to any moral code.
(October 25, 2013 at 5:32 am)bennyboy Wrote: The tendency to adhere to a known moral code is probably an evolutionary trait-- strong in some, weak in some, but basically identical in all where it's present. I think that's the morality you're talking about, and since each person has no control over his own genetics, that trait (or motivation) is certainly an objective basis for morality from that person's perspective.
First of all, no, that is not the morality I'm talking about.
Second of all, if you have to add from that person's perspective in front of objective, then what you are talking about is not objective at all.
Third of all, I have not given the slightest indication nor presented any evidence to show that there is any such "tendency to adhere to a known moral code". Don't go about creating strawmen.
(October 25, 2013 at 5:32 am)bennyboy Wrote: However, there are still two issues:
1) there IS a feedback loop between moral ideas and genetics, in the form of mate selection of females, which select for reliablility and a willingness to sacrifice the self (i.e. the self of the husband) for other (i.e. the women and their offspring). So even that genetic impulse is mediated by ideas that women ancestors have had about what behaviors were desirable. At best, we're talking about a moral chicken-and-egg.
2) the kind of objective morality you're talking about has nothing to do with a shareable moral code or a standard by which all people are intrinsically (and therefore objectively) bound. I'd go so far as to say that a mythological God, with a list of rules some dude thought up 2000 years ago, is still more useful than self-justified motivations predicated on instinct and desire: at least it's a try at a common behavioral system, rather than an "I'm okay, you're okay, pass the A1 sauce."
Given that these issues are about the strawman you've created and not applicable to my actual position in the least - I see no point in addressing them at all.
(October 25, 2013 at 5:32 am)bennyboy Wrote: I find your argument similar to theist arguments: you are talking vaguely about something but can't demonstrate it, and saying it exists without showing that it does. Give me any example of objective morality-- a specific, real, example of a human behavior that can sensibly be defined as objectively moral in the way that you are defining it-- and we can talk. Otherwise, we're talking about invisible pink unicorns.
You mean you find the strawman you've created to be similar to theist argument - and I agree. And I've already given you the examples in replying to the moral dilemmas you presented.
