A Levite and his concubine

[Esquilax]

Np. I agree with you said here. There is some objective evidence on your side, but there is also objective evidence to show that murder, for instance, can be beneficial to the world.

Yeah, in very specific circumstances, the killing of a person can be morally justified; self defense is the usual example. Sometimes our objective standards can conflict with one another, but even in those cases there's a best attainable scenario, a moral pinnacle, that we can strive for.

I think the world would be worse.

Why do you need more than that to make an accurate moral determination?

Can you demonstrate how the world would have been better off it the Romans had not conquered most of the known world at the time by the sword? And be objective please. The same goes for if the European settlers and the US government had not massacred native Americans.

Well, all the people that they killed would still be alive, the things they destroyed would still be around... I'm not saying good can't arise from immoral acts, but surely you agree that the advancements you make on the corpses of others aren't morally optimal?

I guess when you say that your psychology is "wired" to feel good about helping others, that means that you learned to feel this way, since morality is a learning process.

It's also borne of evolution; altruism benefits the group, and other members of the group are more likely to embrace and protect those that benefit them. It's a survival skill for a species so dependent on each other.

It seems that maybe the Romans learned that trampling everyone around them is good morality. Maybe they actually believed they were doing the wrong thing, but did it anyway....

or maybe they figured it was actually benefiting the whole world. [/quote]

Rule one of good writing for villains and antagonists: nobody is actually motivated to do the wrong thing just to be evil. No doubt the Romans were motivated by what they thought were good reasons, but that doesn't mean they were actually right. It took us a while to understand the value of life; like you say, morality is a learning process. It's imperfect, but it's what we have.

Actually, it is pretty simple. Do I really have to reference an objective study to show that children are selfish? Children generally adopt the morals that are instilled in them by parents, teachers and role models.

Children are selfish, because they have poor impulse control and still developing cognitive faculties. But that doesn't mean that they are exclusively selfish, or don't possess some rudimentary concept of fairness, which is also demonstrated through psychological studies. Hell, this is even true of monkeys; there are studies that show certain types of chimp understand fairness.

Accepted morality changes in societies over time. Fifty years ago in the US homosexuality was almost universally unacceptable to society, but is now accepted by majority. The same goes for abortion and other sexual morality. People tend to adapt their moral outlook over time. Unless you purposely hold to an unchanging morality, it's going to become relative to you. And what you've been saying supports my contention that morality is subjectdive.

Morality changes, but the framework behind it does not. Being alive is still preferable to dying, being sick is still bad, being in pain still signals injury. All you're saying when you talk about homosexuality, abortion and so on, is that people realized they were wrong about the moral content of certain actions, and changed their position. Because, to be clear, there is no rational argument for why homosexuality or abortion is immoral, just religious objections based on a much older, even wronger period of history.

Morality is not subjective, but it does change. It's in a continuous state of improvement, that doesn't mean it's just up for opinion. It's not, unless that opinion comes with an argument that actually follows and reflects the real world.

And you know what we call opinions like that? The truth.

We've just shown that morality is learned and that may people don't believe in or follow your ideas of what is moral or not. In fact, life on this world involves a daily struggle of good against evil, or right ways against wrong ways as you might call it. This struggle goes on inside of us as well as outside. There's a continual struggle within us about whether to do the right thing or the wrong thing. There's definitely no inherent tendency naturally built into us to do the right thing.

You're partially right, and partially wrong. Morality is partially learned, and partially a component of our basic psychology. But we do have certain inherent altruistic behaviors in us too.

I don't see where you have shown that it's logical or objective to support the assumption that your moral beliefs are correct.

For any given moral belief that I hold, there is a corresponding argument which supports that position. Those are the objective reasons why my moral framework should be supported, but since we're talking about morality in a general sense I don't have a single overarching reason why they are correct, because they aren't some collective "Esquilaxist" moral system. They are a collection of individual moral positions with specific support behind each one, which only makes sense, because reality is diverse and there really can't be a one-size-fits-all meta argument that fits every possible scenario.

Evidently many great civilizations didn't share your view of morality and they benefited the world in many ways.

Yes, they sure did. But there was undoubtedly a better way, one that didn't involve so much suffering. You understand that the suffering itself was never the reason the world benefited from those civilizations, right? It was the power and influence that they took by force that allowed them to do those things, of which the immoral acts were but a means to an end. In truth, they aren't connected; the good could be done without committing the bad.