Is There a Point To Living a Moral Life?

[genkaus]

Biological imperatives would apply in terms of the species - these are the qualities the species might need to survive.

Are you going for equivocation here? Because not all qualities that a species needs to survive are biological or imperative in nature nor do all biological imperatives aid in survival.

Wiggle room, if you like, is provided by "naturally inclined to" for the individual.

If that was the case then it'd be the wiggle-room that's the concern for morality - not the naturally inclined part. However, as I said, the natural inclination may have nothing to do with the biological imperative at all.

Further you have ignored my allowance for higher centres of the brain to over-ride programming - which covers all of your examples of how you might assess a given individual.

What your biological programming should be overridden with is the concern of morality - not the programming itself. I thought I had made that point clear in my argument.

No problem with the summary so we got to the same point. I expressed it as "At its most basal level its going to be very hard to differentiate ethics and morality from instinct."

That's the opposite of the point I was making. At its most basic level ethics and morality are fundamentally different from instinct.

What you haven't addressed, however is my last statement "If we accept that instinct is pre-programming then fundamentals of ethics morality may well be too."

Note the use of the word - fundamentals.

Did you not read the argument or did you simply not understand it?

My description of how your emotions and rationality determine your inclinations was to show that we don't have any pre-programing that could serve as a fundamental basis for our ethics and morality. The role our capacity for self-reflection plays in determining our morality indicates that its fundamentals are not pre-programed.

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You and Genkaus can both agree that the quality of being considered sets human morality apart from mammalian pro-social behavior generally. But as you say, all that does is add a capacity to over-ride. It remains however deeply rooted in mammalian pro-social behavior. We haven't become angels or something entirely different than what we were when we started out.

"All it does"? Do you not get the gravity of change here? The quality of being considered is what results in the capacity to override. It effects a fundamental change in human morality. The "mammalian pro-social" behavior no longer serves as the adequate root for human morality - it has to be found elsewhere. It has made us into something entirely different than what we were when we started out.