Good and Evil

[Hatshepsut]

But that was my fault for doing what I usually do on this forum, and which never goes down well, which is to a) talk about brain processes and expect people to understand or even care what I'm talking about, neutrally, in those terms...I was explaining an emotional brain process...

Or care about it neurally, perhaps?  

I think the brain process angle is fascinating because it shows the gulf we insert between emotion and reason is artificial. Formal reasoning does have mechanistic rules allowing arguments to be structured on paper, while the rules underlying the computation and generation of emotional states by the brain are poorly understood. Yet it's almost certain they are there; the brain, including its emotion computers, can be unreliable but it doesn't operate in a willy-nilly or stochastic manner-even if individual neurons do to some extent.

I've held on this thread that emotions are a form of intelligence.

The main problem under discussion, of whether "the good" also follows necessarily from deterministic laws, seems unresolved to me. As if ethics can be neither subjective nor objective, having features of both. If no subjective self existed, we wouldn't even need to discuss a notion of "the good." Yet principles for ethics don't arise in a willy-nilly way either; reasoning must be used to make ethical arguments.