Good and Evil

[bennyboy]

No, emjay. I was responding to bennyboy and, benny, I really do admire your general rigor even though I disagree with your Idealist stance. At the same time, I do believe your statements about emotion are not reflective of your usual open-minded approach. I hope you can forgive my curt response. - Chad

In that case, you have misunderstood me. I'm not saying that feelings make everything moral. I'm saying that moral ideas are rooted in feelings, and that since we are born with feelings, morality is rooted outside the conscious self-- in a physicalist/determinist view it's rooted in the successive interactions between DNA of ancestral organisms and environment over a very long time. In other words, human morality may in a physicalist/determinist perspective be seen as objective.

This does not mean, however, that there is a "right" floating in space somewhere which is right in an absolute sense. In fact,it means like so many other things in our understanding of the universe, morality would be a statistical model: "x% of people consider baby-eating wrong, and y% consider it a fun weekend hobby." You could then view behaviors through deviations from the norm, correlate them with phenotypes (race, gender, etc.), and so on. But you could no more say "Good an Evil are X" than you could "The electron must be in position Y."

In the end, I'd say that no matter where our moral sense comes from, that we experience moral ideas is not enough to say that we own them, and in that sense morality may always be seen as objective-- even though it varies greatly among individuals.