If there are two groups of people in the world and one group say that cars are modes of transport with four wheels and the other say they are small swimming things that live in rivers, how do we decide whether the thing I'm driving to work is car or not? It's the same question, morality isn't special in this regard. The reality is we don't have two such cultures so the issue does not arise.

Are you using the word bad here as that which one doesn't hope or desire for? Like for example saying ice cream is good. If so then we're basically saying the same thing. If not, can you explain what context you are using the word bad? — SonJnana

The point is, it doesn't matter how I am using the word bad. It's no different to asking how I'm using the word 'flat' when saying the earth is flat. I can be wrong about the earth being flat only because we all broadly agree on the meaning of the word 'flat', but the most important thing about it is this doesn't stop being the case if one person in the world decided that 'flat' means "curved like a ball". The fact that most of the world agree on the the properties of things that belong in the group "things which are flat", is what allows me to say that someone claiming the earth is flat, is wrong. I compare the earth to the widely agreed upon criteria for membership of the group "things which are flat" and decide that it does not meet these criteria, therefore the person is wrong. It doesn't matter if a small group of people dispute the criteria for membership of the group "things which are flat".

Morality is no different. We have a widely agreed upon group "things which are bad". The edges of that group are very blurred, but this is true of many groups. You think you know what a car is, or a table, but it's not difficult to think of ambiguous object which would be difficult to classify (an amphibious car, a piece of furniture designed to be both sat on and eaten from). This does not in some way invalidate the group "things which are a car/table", we get along quite well with blurred edges to our definitions.

So morality is not some special case, it's exactly the same, we have some things which clearly fall into the group "things which are immoral/bad", like murder of innocents (remember, the fact that one or two people might disagree about the definition of a group does not invalidate the description any more than if I now declared that only green things are 'cars', that doesn't suddenly make the use of the term 'car' ambiguous). We also have blurred edges, like adultery, where there is discussion about whether they fall into the group, but this is resolvable by the second point about definitions,

Group membership criteria are not defined first. No-one ever said "all small modes of personal self-propelled transport with four wheels shall henceforth be called cars", the first thing to be called a car was simple called that, and all subsequent things were compared to it for similarity. If they were similar enough they were called cars, if not they were given another name.

Deciding if a thing belongs in the group "moral behaviour" or not can be approached the same way, is it similar enough to other things in the group to justify inclusion. If it is not, then we can justifiable say someone claiming it to be "moral" is wrong. Murder of innocents clearly does not share the characteristics of other things in the group "moral types of behaviour", it is about as unlike to all those things as anything could get, so someone claiming that the murder of innocents was moral behaviour would clearly be wrong.

So you believe that the feeling of free will is an illusion but it exists just because there is a stimuli for it? — bahman

No, that's not quite what I'm saying. The theory is that conciousness is the effect of the brain monitoring the stimuli it has received from all the different sources and expecting them to be coherent. That expectation is the sensation that we are one entity, aware of all our actions and responses. The evidence pretty clearly shows that we are not. Scientists can tell you 'you' are going to move your arm before you actually decide to move your arm, it's pretty irrefutable, it doesn't matter how hard it is for anyone to understand or get how such a thing might have evolved. 'You' are not in charge.

Is there a point to this? — T Clark

Are you serious? The guiding book of one of the world's most popular religions is filled with misogyny, homophobia, genocide, and racism and your response is basically, so what?

One of the leading theories is that consciousness is simply the brain's model of all the competing stimuli-respone actions going on that it uses to keep track of everything.

The advantage of being able to 'watch over' these responses is (rather ironically) that illusory stimuli can be more easily identified as such because they do not concur with other stimuli. The only way the brain can do this (so goes the theory) is to 'expect' all received stimuli to concur. That feeling is what we describe as consciousness.

I am however puzzled by the fact that why there is such a great correlation between what we expect to happen and what happens. — bahman

Its quite simple, our bodies do not follow our conscious decision. Our bodies follow the subconscious instruction, then we construct an illusion that we consciously instructed it. There's no mystery about the correlation. It correlates perfectly because the brain is making it up ten seconds after the event. It has all the benefit of hindsight to get the feeling exactly right.

We know that decision and consciousness are real. My hand goes where I decide and I am aware of that. — bahman

How do we 'know' this? When we see a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat it seems as if it has appeared from nowhere but that's definitely not the case. Just because it seems to us that we decide where our hand goes, doesn't mean we do.

Brain scans have consistently been able to identify the neural instructions to move a hand as much as ten seconds before the subject actually 'intends' to do so.

The monist argument is that free-will and consciousness are 'illlusions' that emerge from materialism, so your issue is simply that you hold to a dualist philosophy, and of course that is incompatible with materialism which is a monist philosophy.

The heart has reasons the mind knows not. — TheMadFool

Last time I checked our thoughts did not have labels attached to them; 'heart' or 'mind'.

Its not an unreasonable principle that our intuition (which is what I'm presuming you mean by heart) is privy to information that our conscious brain is not, but then we are still left with distinguishing one from the other. What reason do we have for thinking our first thoughts are more 'intuitive' than our later ones?

Not in the Book of Genesis. — TimeLine

No? My mistake, it's just what I was told at Sunday School. I must admit I've never read it, I preferred The Lord of the Rings.

, you're wrong because the earth really is not flat and that is demonstrable. — SonJnana

You're still missing the point of how we're using the words. "The earth is flat" is 'wrong' because the earth (the thing we live on) can be shown to be not flat (a plane extending either infinitely, or to edges) by looking at a photo of it showing its plane to have no edges. This is only possible because we have defined 'the earth' and we have (at least broadly) defined the group 'things which are flat' sufficiently to say that 'the earth' does not belong in that group.

Now take the statement "murder is wrong". Superficially it doesn't conform to the previous one. 'Murder' is just a single word, not a proposition, so to ask if it can be wrong is meaningless. Taking a more generous interpretation we could say the proposition is that "murder is bad". Now we have a statement where it is grammatically possible for it to be wrong. It might be that 'murder' does not fit into the group 'bad things'. But in order to check this, we'll have to define the group 'bad things'. If we refuse to define such a group, then the question is not proven, it simply becomes meaningless (like asking whether the proposition "all cats are slithy" is wrong when we don't know what 'slithy' means). If we disagree about the definition of the group 'bad things' then that is the discussion we need to be having. If we agree on the definition of the group 'bad things' then we can confidently make objective claims as to whether murder is in it or not, in exactly the same way as we did with the proposition "the earth is flat".

Despite it being clearly pointed out by some deleted user several pages back, everyone seems to have merrily ignored the fact that what is 'good' and how to get there are two completely different arguments. It is perfectly possible that what 'good' is is objectively innate, but how to get there is an opinion.

In this case, that opinion, whilst never provably wrong, can be shown better or worse. Evidence can be brought to bear demonstrating that some moral code is less likely or more likely to bring about 'good'. Even Hitler (if you can bear to read any of his disgraceful writing) thought he was going to make a better world, where the expulsion and extermination of the Jews would be a sacrifice which would lead to a world where everyone (remaining) would be better off.

The 'world where everyone will be better off' is still the goal, something innate (even in monsters like Hitler) still drove him to make a 'better world'. He was just massively wrong about how to get there. This is not my opinion, it is demonstrably an objectively justified theory. I have evidence which can be brought to bear that exterminating a race will not bring about a world in which the remaining humans will be better off, thus I can justify a valid theory that Hitler was objectively wrong.

I am consciously aware of situation and can decide too about whether I should move my hand or not. There is always a fork when a decision is involved, so called options. I choose the branch which I wish. So the chance that laws of nature exactly dictates what I decide is 50% if there are only two options. People makes decisions at each instant. This makes the chance even lower. — bahman

For someone so offended by those who claim something is simply 'true' when it is, in fact, a belief. You seem remarkably certain that consciousness is a real thing and not, for example, an illusion, as neurologists like Bruce Hood believe.

Far from your overstated claim that materialism is impossible, all you're saying is that materialism is incompatible with a dualistic understanding of free-will. Well, no ever said it wasn't.

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

What does 'wrong' mean in this context? You seem to be asking the impossible. Something can be objectively 'true' outside of human opinion (for a physicalist) but something can't be objectively wrong without defining 'wrong'.

Even in maths 2+2=5 is objectively wrong only because we've defined 'wrong' as being an answer that does not allow further functions within that framework.

If the point you're trying to make is that the meaning of the word 'wrong' is created by humans, then I'm not sure you'd have anyone disagree with you. If not, then you need to specify what meaning, in this context, you're trying to claim is unprovable for moral statements.

So, doesn't that mean that people are inherently bad? — TheMadFool

Why have you concluded anything inherent from your observations and understanding of the last few thousand years of the modern human race's 200,000 year history? It seems a bit of a jump to say that because in agri-industrial civilisations we break laws and fail to pursue good, that we must be inherently evil. Such societies have only existed for the last 6,000 years or so. The remaining 194,000 years we spent in a completely different societal structure about which we have very little by way of historical record.

It just seems a bit counter-intuitive, you obviously think that our current behaviour is bad, so does pretty much everyone (at least the aspects of it you describe), does that not advise at least first testing out the theory that we've simply gone wrong somewhere, rather than damning the entire race?

I'm more intrigued by the type of tree he had — TheMadFool

I'm pretty sure it was an apple tree, on account of it later producing an apple.

Dear lord...I feel like I'm talking to a malfunctioning A.I. — JustSomeGuy

I think that's the idea. The guy's supposedly written some fancy A.I software and now he's answering all the questions as if he was a computer program. He's obviously getting his kicks out of imagining we're all slowly beginning to wonder if we're really talking to a human or not.

I suggest we don't humour him.