the existance of a so called 'universal morality' means absolutly nothing to a person living within their own moment.

If it means nothing to a single individual at any given moment it is (by that very fact) not a truth. (not universal).

morals come from a believe in two things
first a believe in an after life. If a person treats others with morals and ethics or as they would like to be treated even if they are not sure there is an after life they dont want to take a chance so if they act morally they will stand a better chance of having a good after life. In the feudal period of ancient Egypt there is a tomb of a noble and engraved on the door was the following.
I (name) tried to do right. When the river flooded and the serfs land unproductive I let them plant on my land so they would not starve. When there were times of prosperity I did not ask to be repaid. I didn't despoil the daughter of a serf even though that was my right by law. And so on for quite a long list of the good deeds hand high morality of the noble in hopes he would be remembered well by the gods and just plain people who came along later.

Secondly people who don't believe in an after life act morally and do well be others in hops they will be thought of in a good way and treated the same by friends and a acquaintances.'

The last is a guess since I am not sure there really are any atheists in a fox hole. Certainly there are less of the later than the former.

Laws come from the same place and are only laws because there are some people who are not naturally ethical or mora

Having spent 7 years researching the formation of religious thought this is the conclusion I came to. I may be wrong but this is my opinion

Show me that your belief that morality is not universal is sound. Looks to me like your mind has already been made up, and that unshakable conviction is being mistaken for soundness. I'm asking you to justify your claims. It's no semantic mystery.

What makes you think that that is a sound belief?



False. Your presuppositions are clouding your judgment.

My understanding that universal morality must be extant and instantiated by young children prior to having acquired language is not the same thing as my understanding what you mean by morality "occuring". My asking you to explain your claims shows that I do not understand what ground those claims have. I am not a mind reader. Asking you to explain what you mean is a matter of courtesy. It offers you the opportunity to clearly put forth your reasoning, which I will not presuppose for you.



When did it begin, Thorb? I am asking you to explain what you mean so that I can understand your position better. You've yet to have begun attempting to clarify. Rather you resort to personal slights while not showing any signs of attempting to understand my position, which requires that you put your pre-existing beliefs aside for the moment and look at things from another's point of view.

The fact that one may not understand what a universal morality is does not make universals contingent upon everyone understanding nor agreeing with them. If that were the case there could be no universals. Let's look at some uncontroversial ones in order to clarify what I'm saying here.

Gravity effects everything and everybody. "Gravity", the term, does not mean something to every individual, however. It is still a universal truth that gravity exists and effects everything, because that is not contingent upon the label meaning something to everyone. Likewise, the same holds good for universal morality. The label "universal morality" need not mean something to every individual in order for universal morality to exist and to effect/affect everyone.

http://www.maaf.info/expaif.html

Now you can be sure. There are atheists in foxholes.

they are handed down as tradition from families and a socio cultural influence to help meet the needs of the social group and maintain a certain amount of harmony

not sure how they started...probably been around since the first men in Asia Minor had to figure out how to divide the spoils of the hunt

Gravity can be measured...

Please measure me the measurements of 'Universal Moralality'...

such a thing exists not. (at the level of human understanding)

AB,

It was an counterexample to show the immunity that a universal truth has to being meaningful to everyone, which was the ground of the objection.

Personality, integrity, honesty, and many many other things cannot be mathematically measured in the same way that gravity is. That does not deny that they exist at the level of human understanding. The same holds true for universal morality.

You do raise an apt point however...

The conventional measurement of morality. Throughout history it has been good/bad and right/wrong. Which brings up the irrevocable importance of how those terms are being defined; what they refer to. They do not refer to mathematical measurement. My position, hesitantly I might add, is that they likely refer to human wellbeing/suffering.

I haven't been following this thread, but just to toss in my 2 cents, I personally think that our "morals" are basically nothing more than a reflection of what we personally feel is either "pleasant" or "disgusting".

For example, the Golden Rule is accepted by most everyone as a fair guide to moral values. If you don't like to have it done to you, then you label it as an immoral act typically.

Also, a person probably accept the morality of most everything that they enjoy. Although they my reject some of those activities if they an associate something disagreeable with them in the bigger picture. Like doing drugs my be pleasant at first glance, but it could have long-term health problems, or addiction, etc. So perhaps it's immoral once again based on "disgusting things" that must ultimately be associated with it down the road.

In fact, some people will then argue that to use drugs in moderation would be "moral" because if used in moderation that will theoretically remove the negative disgusting aspects later.

Straight people feel that it's immoral to be gay because for them being gay is disgusting. People who are gay do not find being gay to be disgusting so they can't understand why it should be immoral.

Morality is almost always decided upon by what we deem to be disgusting or pleasant.

Would it be immoral to kill a murderer/rapist who is attacking your family? Probably not, because even though you might feel that killing in general is disgusting (and thus immoral), the idea of allowing a criminally insane idiot kill and rape your innocent family is even more disgusting. So the least disgusting action wins as the most morally justified.

I personally feel that morality is truly nothing more than just another label to describe whether or not we feel that something is disgusting or not.

Just my thoughts.

What do you do if you find morals growing between your toes???

If you like them cultivate them...

If you don't scratch them out...

They are passed generational influenced societally amongst new fads created generational just the same as language becomes influenced and changed and challenged.....

Humans cannot choose to obey or disobey Gravity, but we can choose to obey or disobey the natural law. That's why there are debates on if natural law exists or not.

So you still hold that natural law exists, but you aren't interested in why or how? That's an interesting position to take. It's like a farmer in the 1500's finding a truck in his field and spending all of his time wondering how it works, without ever thinking "Who made this" or "How did it get here".

Take your example only change the truck (something we know was created) and replace it with a crystal, something we know formed naturally.


Now how does that work? Better, ahhhh.

So you are saying that universal morality is a naturally formed part of humanity? If the morality is universal, that means it's shared by all humans and is unchanging. If it could change, how could an isolated village in the Amazon jungle have the same universal morality as possessed by people living in New York City or London? So you are saying that part of human nature is an unchanging moral code that applies to every living human and it somehow occurred naturally? Care to explain how that could be?

The last time I saw morals was when I watched Leave It To Beaver back in the 60's

Think about it from a different perspective. Could there be something 'genetic' that
1. every human is predisposed to
2. has some kind of survival function
3. some environmental cue stimulated a universal moral behavior
because of that predisposition
4. it is generaly instinctual, but can be 're-conditiond' either by
classical or operant conditioning (learning).

It would be difficult to provide examples because every example I can think of is currently considered a conditioned response, meaning we have learned it.

But we learn some things much easier than others when we are genetically predisposed to that something. In every culture there are some type of morally accepted codes of conduct with regard to killing other humans.

The fact that this exists in every culture may be related to some genetic factor which predisposes us to be the social creature that we ar; dependent on others for survival of the group. Therefore we may have a MORAL genetic predisposition not to kill other humans.

BUT - culturally, there are many different rules regarding killing other humans - there is absolutely no doubt that those rules are learned (conditioned)but could it be that it is easier to condition different rules into humans simply because the genetic predisposition not to kill other humans already exists?

Wouldn't that be a universal moral????

Shuttle, Voyager, Hubble Space Telescope... Just to name a few 'human' tools that we have 'taught' to disobey EARTHS gravity...

If you held the belief that THOU SHALT NOT KILL was an absolute moral code...

and then found yourself upon a desert where no other food existed but an animal... Would you kill to eat... or die for your 'morals'...

There is (at our current level of maturity as HUMANS) no 'universal morality'...

They don't "disobey EARTHS gravity".

That's a nice try, but I'm not a six year old (which is how old you would have to be to buy that load of bull).

Gravity can be overcome by pushing with enough force away from the source of the gravity, that's part of the Law of Gravity. Let one of those "tools" come an inch too close to earth and we'll see how well they can disobey gravity.

Are you inferring that we advanced to the point of superceding our instincts and no longer respond to the universal morals of our nature?

OR

Are you inferrring that our intellect has not recognized that we may be conditioning human morality right out of existance?