Gillipig wrote:And btw, trying to find an absolute morality is pointless, it's a man made concept that varies between different times and places and individuals, my morality for example is different from yours, you can find out what an average human considers moral but it changes with time, making it impossible to determine what "humans consider moral and immoral". And there's nothing guaranteeing that our great grandchildren won't agree with Hitler's view on morality just as there was no guarantee that his generation wouldn't.
I think we have to be clear about the meaning of the terms we are using. I think there does exist such a "thing" as objective moral truths - but I think that these are dependent on concious beings existing. Under some definitions that would seem to imply it's subjective, but what I mean is not that morality exists independent of minds to conceptualise it, but that there exists a moral framework theoretically accessible to us and built on entirely objective phenomena. That might well end up being vaguely defined if you're talking in general terms (like "health" is vaguely defined in a general sense) but with the right process we can apply it to specific cases to get specific answers (like "he's got appencitis, we need to operate").
If you accept that emotional states are the products of brain states, then what remains only in the realms of subjectivity that is both something which theoretically could provide moral value distinctions and something that we are able to evaluate reliably (not necessarily objectively, but reliably)?
Also, what we observe about morality doesn't work like that. Slavery doesn't go in and out of fashion, neither does theft or rape or murder. Once a convincing case has been made for why something is moral or immoral then that thing generally stays moral or immoral until some new case is made challenging that judgement. In practice, moral progress mirrors the nature of scientific progress in this way. Mistakes and mis-steps are made along the way, but there is a clear directionality overall.
tzor wrote:I think you can make a general argument that no religion really deals with morals that go into the dilemma zone. One can make a case for a religion's attitude on how to treat others, but they generally don't concern themselves with moral triage situations. In essence there is no "correct" answer. There are practical answers, but even these may not always be the correct or proper answer. (Indeed there may be no proper answer short of armchair quarterbacking.) Another factor is the various levels of needs for all of the patients, but if the question is eventually who lives and who dies, well any attempt at a "solution" is going to involve decisions that goes against the general notion of the equal dignity of all persons, resulting in a lose/loose situation no mater what you do.
I think the problem is that most or all of the current religions (and yes I include those who say "I don't follow the church, I follow Jesus") are built not on providing us with a framework or process by which moral decisions can be made, but instead a series of pronouncements of what is moral and what is not. When the value judgements relevant to any given moral decision are extremely complex, a series of instructions for what values to hold can be less than helpful. Better is a process by which we can agree, as a society, which are the primary values and which are secondary and which are irrelevant and then apply those values to a problem in proper proportions.
Yes there is no correct answer to any given dilemma (or it wouldn't be a dilemma) but the point is that the superior moral system is one that gives us the tools by which to try and work out the best choice to make in a consistent manner, rather than the one which gives limited or contradictory commands. Shickingbrits said he'd dose all the christians that acted in such a way that made him confident they were already saved with a butt-load of morphine (effectively killing them in that context) and leave the hospital looking for sick people if he was the doctor in the dilemma. Yet he also, from his own testimony about his religious opinions, would find it binding that Jesus said "You shall not murder" (notice no conditional exemptions in those verses - Matthew 19). If a system says "you must sometimes do X and also never do X" then the system is broken.
That's the strength of the "veiled" approach. In every situation it approaches the moral choices as individual events and forces us to evaluate intentions, consequences, etc and balance these among myriad values criteria within the context of the situation. There are no dogmatic rules that X is always wrong or Y is always right, just a process by which we can work towards a better understanding of the objective moral truth of the situation within all the relevant contexts.
