Objective Morality, Anyone?

[xpastor]

If morals are subjective what arguments you gonna propose against lets say bullying? Bullying comes from evolution.
Lets say there is a continent on which bullying is considered fine thing. How are you gonna argue against it?

First of all, I will go with the people who are saying that objective morality is not the best term for what you are talking about.

I would suggest a term like "nearly universal morality." I think I have already discussed my reasons for this, but I will repeat briefly. Morality is based on certain impulses implanted by the evolutionary process. They are part of the equipment of the normal human being just as two legs are. However, we have to use the qualifier "nearly" because a few individuals (e.g. psychopaths) seem to be born without any sense of morals as other unfortunate individuals are born with physical defects.

Morals are species-specific. We seem to share a lot of fundamental morality with some species like dogs and apes. However, other species have moral norms quite different than ours. For instance, among both horses and lions a new alpha male will often kill the immature offspring of the previous leader.

As you point out, we humans have conflicting impulses implanted by evolution. It has been shown in experiments that dogs and non-human primates share with us both empathy and sense of fairness with regard to the other individuals in our ingroup. Unfortunately, we also have a tendency to suspicion and hostility towards those outside the group we grew up with, just like the members of a chimpanzee troop who will attack and kill members of other troops.

Humans differ from other animals (so far as I can tell) in that we can modify the application of our instinctive responses by means of cultural conditioning. Over thousands of years this has gradually reduced the number of people that we see as outsiders.

At first the change was caused by changing social conditions. People were brought in contact with more and more others as we changed from small isolated groups of hunter-gatherers to a more complex agricultural society and eventually nation states, so that we would see most people who spoke the same language as part of our group.

The 18th century Enlightenment increased the scope of our acceptance of others by teaching that all human beings are entitled to be treated fairly, an idea that had been suggested before its time by a few Greek and Roman philosophers. Perhaps it needed printing and near-universal literacy to catch on.

So how ya gonna argue against bullying? By appealing to culturally-conditioned norms that all people are deserving of respect and fair treatment. It boils down to the argument that Sam Harris makes in The Moral Landscape, that "maximizing the well being of sentient entities" is a principle to which most people will assent.

However, there is a weakness. Culturally imposed norms do not have the strength of biologically-based instincts produced by millions of years of evolution. Right now it is still conceivable that a twisted mind could succeed in convincing large numbers of people that jews or blacks or some other group are evil-subhumans. Maybe some day we will evolve beyond that.