You seem to be implying that morality is subjective, which I think is a dangerous belief. People may believe their actions are ethical, but that doesn’t necessarily make them correct.
Jonathan Haidt's work on "Moral Foundations" could be worth investigating. They determined 5 major cross-cultural "moral foundations," to which each person assigns various degrees of importance: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity, suggesting these stem from a biological/neurological source. From Wikipedia:
> Haidt and Craig Joseph surveyed works on the roots of morality... From their review, they suggested that all individuals possess four "intuitive ethics", stemming from the process of human evolution as responses to adaptive challenges. They labelled these four ethics as suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity. According to Haidt and Joseph, each of the ethics formed a module, whose development was shaped by culture. They wrote that each module could "provide little more than flashes of affect when certain patterns are encountered in the social world", while a cultural learning process shaped each individual's response to these flashes. Morality diverges because different cultures utilize the four "building blocks" provided by the modules differently.
Perhaps these four "building blocks" -- suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity -- are sufficient for an objective basis upon which an intersubjective understanding of morality can be determined.
Then again, even the notion of objectivity is questionable and culturally-dependent...
I don't believe that myself, but I do believe that people advocating for a specific ethic are usually supporting their own point of view, which may be closer or further away from the ideal.
kerkeslager|8 years ago
Nav_Panel|8 years ago
> Haidt and Craig Joseph surveyed works on the roots of morality... From their review, they suggested that all individuals possess four "intuitive ethics", stemming from the process of human evolution as responses to adaptive challenges. They labelled these four ethics as suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity. According to Haidt and Joseph, each of the ethics formed a module, whose development was shaped by culture. They wrote that each module could "provide little more than flashes of affect when certain patterns are encountered in the social world", while a cultural learning process shaped each individual's response to these flashes. Morality diverges because different cultures utilize the four "building blocks" provided by the modules differently.
Perhaps these four "building blocks" -- suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity -- are sufficient for an objective basis upon which an intersubjective understanding of morality can be determined.
Then again, even the notion of objectivity is questionable and culturally-dependent...
steve_g|8 years ago
See Arthur Leff's article: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/2814/
pmarreck|8 years ago
Even the "Christian Post" will agree he's "partly right": https://www.christianpost.com/news/atheist-sam-harris-right-...
beaconstudios|8 years ago