If a psychopath says he wants to murder because he enjoys murdering and doesn't care if other people don't like it, what reasoning do you have for telling him he shouldn't do it.

Is it because it goes against what you or majority of people desire? In this case the act of murdering is simply an act that goes against what other people want.

Is it because it is wrong in the context of presupposed value of life? In this case if "life" isn't important to the psychopath, then he's just doing something that goes against what others find important and in some sense just acting against others' desires.

Or is it because murder is just wrong for some other reason? — SonJnana

Psychopathy is an illness, so this is an unfortunate demonstration.

Murder is principally wrong because it goes against the nature of life itself. This can't be demonstrated as if it was a scientific fact, but can be demonstrated on other ways. Doesn't the fact that societies around the globe progressively traveled from allowing killing in many situations towards universal ban on killing tell you something?

My point is that if you say the earth is flat, you're not wrong because people think you're wrong, you're wrong because the earth really is not flat and that is demonstrable. And so if someone for some reason thought that that it was flat, it could be demonstrated that the earth is not flat. — SonJnana

For physical laws, that is the dead world, we can state scientific facts about it because we can put distance between it and us. But when we come to life experiences, that is life, it's impossible to us to make this distance. Therefore we can't talk about objectivity of morality on the same way as we can for scientific facts. But we can on an indirect way, which you constantly refuse.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by softer, but what I'm asking is for you to demonstrate that it is wrong to kill because it actually is, not because it goes against what is important to organisms. — SonJnana

Here lies the problem. Morality has no other reason to exist except to serve organisms. If you refuse to make this leap and accept that we can't talk about morality as we do about physical laws, but only in the context of life that we are living - this is what I meant under 'softer' - than you are not only asking the impossible, but also opening a more general discussion about objectivity in general, foremost the existence of objective world unrelated to our subjective experiences.

Thanks a lot.

So in other words, you see feelings of guilt as an emotional reaction to damaged integrity. This seems to me a keen and simple answer, thanks.

@bahman I am also interested in the phenomenon of guilt, but I think we should first learn more about it. Your question seems too simplistic to me. I started another thread where I hope people who know more on the subject will shed some light on what often plagues many of us.

@SonJnana I tried to avoid stating this, because it is basically off-topic, but you are right that we can't demonstrate objectivity of moral values on the same way as we can for physical laws. BUT this doesn't make morality relative, which is what I tried to demonstrate and most people seem to think the same. Objectivity of certain moral laws still can be shown on 'softer' ways than what you demand in this thread.

If we hold the opinion "killing is bad" as merely a subjective value with nothing objective that gives it content, than it would be equally viable that all animals and people just slaughter each other, as it is to continue living. If we accept that life objectively strives towards preserving and continuing itself, it then follows that refrain from killing is also objective, whatever some group of people may think. History knows for very blood-thirsty tribes, who saw killing as normal, and yet it is not.

i understand your position. And as I have said, we reached a point that leads us towards a more general discussion: the relationship between subjective and objective in general.
You simply hold those two to be disjunctive. But I don't see the world that way. I believe there is a strong connection between subjective and objective. Now, in order to explain the details of this belief of mine, I would have to write a whole essay, which I can't do in this moment. I would just invite you to think for yourself: can you divide the world on subjective and objective as if those two are unrelated?

The way I see it is that if something evolved over time on the level of all that is living, that automatically means that it had to be so as the consequence of an objective universal principle. If the act of killing is an exception (a deviation) in all that is living, doesn't that mean that there is an objective principle behind it? If think it has to be the case, and if we don't agree here than this discussion must go towards more general subject than the one we are now discussing.

Just because life did not have the ability to needlessly kill doesn't not mean that it was due to some objective moral principle. It may have been due to the fact that the laws of physics were only able to create life that was too unsophisticated at it's inception to have the ability to needlessly kill. — SonJnana

It may have been so, but it's very unlikely and to me doesn't make much sense. If you believe that killing is not natural on an objective level, things easily come together and phenomenons that we can observe around us fit in. If you from the other side believe that killing is just as natural as non-killing, all kinds of facts become difficult to explain, like for example why there is relatively little bloodshed in nature compared with peaceful life today, why there was no predation in early stages of life (the argument you try to make does not stand, since viruses for example are extremely simple organisms yet they are destroying cells more complex than them).

The way to distinguish that it is 1) that applies and not 2) is this: if 2) applied, than refrain from killing would be an evolutionary phenomenon, and killing would be a fundamental phenomenon (which was there since life's inception). However, it's the opposite: it is killing which is an evolutionary survival strategy, and life without killing was the original state. This original state is the emanation of objective universal law of life: killing is bad. So our world is basically what you describe under 1).

All the way I was presuming that organisms feel and act as they do as the consequence of the universal law. If we view life as a complex system, that system has certain objective rules (maybe not rules in strict sense of the word, rather general principles). These objective general principles show themselves exactly through behavior and thinking of animals. In this sense, showing the general behavior of animals and humans is in the same time showing the objective general principles behind those behaviors.

Well, killing is nothing else but a survival strategy. When you say "objectively morally wrong to kill", you are basically abstracting away killing as if it existed outside of the natural world. But since it doesn't, we can only discuss it as it happens in the world of biology. When life becomes abundant and resources limited, predatory behavior will arise. That is where killing comes from. But it remains an exception, rather than the rule of life. Being an exception, we can say that killing is basically unnatural, that is, it can be said to objectively have negative moral value.

I can demonstrate what you ask. It has been shown by scientist that not only man, but animals in general have an innate emotional refrain from killing (obviously this does not apply to predators and theirs natural pray). In other words, it is objectively unnatural to kill, even if killing does sometimes occur in nature.

SonJnana, I think you don't understand that people and life itself are not one and the same thing. People indeed have different moral ideas, but life itself, when viewed on the long run, prefers some behaviors over others. If we look back to the beginnings of history, certain values and conducts became universally accepted as positive over time, while others are universally discarded as negative. Also, the answers on the question of what is virtuous/moral reached by wise-men of different cultures are largely the same. All of this points toward the conclusion that morality is not relative. This is, of course, not to say that some specific moral ideas accepted in one society must be universally true, nor that different people in the same society must have the same moral consciousness.