Is There a Point To Living a Moral Life?

[genkaus]

I am dying to know why you are so against this at a conceptual level.

I thought I had been clear on that. Subscribing to a fundamentally biological view of human morality ignores the actual evolution of morality through the ages and dismisses its current role in our lives. Further, if the position was true, all the debates about human morality would be pointless. If we had such a fundamental, biological basis for morality, then that morality - in the truest sense - would be the objective moral code that should be universally adhered to.

In the meantime I have started to do a bit of research on the subject and there is a lot to follow up on:

Try this one : http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/c.../819.short - (Does morality have a biological basis? An empirical test of the factors governing moral sentiments relating to incest)

The Westermarck effect, which this study is about, says nothing about the actual morality of incest. While strong sense of disgust - whatever its source - is often confused with a sense of moral condemnation, it is demonstrably not so.

This one makes passing reference from what I can see : http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/jksadegh/...secure.pdf

But I haven't had time to read the whole thing.

Neither have I.

http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v6/n10...n1768.html "Here, we propose a cognitive neuroscience view of how cultural and context-dependent knowledge, semantic social knowledge and motivational states can be integrated to explain complex aspects of human moral cognition."

I don't see any mention of biological pre-programing here. In fact, this supports my explanation of how your rationality and emotional states affect your moral cognition.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...5082920693

"Morality may be defined as the problem solving activities of a moral community, a primary group which uses a wide range of sanctions directly to reduce conflict, which also sanctions perceived causes of conflict, and defines and controls other deviances judged to be antisocial. So defined, morality is a precondition for law. In comparing human with non-human primates, conflict management is one of the most impressive parallels. This empirical parallel is built upon, to construct an evolutionary scenario for the development of morality and law in their proto-forms."

Consider the italicized portion of the abstract. Redefining morality and finding parallels for it in non-human societies does not make for a convincing evolutionary basis for human morality.

OK - I'm getting bored cutting and pasting. I Googled "evolutionary basis for morality." Knock yourself out.

I have. A long time ago. And you are not throwing anything at me that hasn't been considered before. And all those arguments fail for one reason and one reason alone - they are not explaining morality or ethics as the question has be posed philosophically.