Morals

I believe I have a solid grasp of what's right and wrong, and feel bad about wrong actions enough to avoid them.  I blame this on parents who remain happily married, and sunday school when I was a kid.  This brings a real sense of naivety as I expect others to  feel the same way about their actions.  To feel guilt or "sin."  But no, most people commit wrongful actions without remorse, or at least suppressing any remorse.  Actions are justified or rationalized, defended, or unquestioned.  For all its flaws, at least Christianity gave me a solid concept of what's acceptable and what's not.  I don't mean feeling morally superior, I mean being an all around decent person. 

Yet there are always people who don't care about how they act.  Is it how they were raised, the environment they grew up in, or their lack of a supernatural boogeyman watching them all the time?

What if instead of churches there were moral-philosophical centers, that would discuss varying degrees of acceptability for different actions.  Some of it would seem to common sense, but even the common sense doesn't seem to be emphasized anymore. 

I mean basic awareness of harmful actions such as theft, rape, child abuse, property destruction, murder, etc.      

I've always supported the idea of having logic and philosophy classes in public schools. Not just high schoolers either, elementary kids too.

But I think the biggest factor in this morals business has to do with being in a happy and loving family with involved parents.  Everything else (religion, school, athletics, etc.) is just an addendum to that. 

Children should be taught how to be critical, fully flung logic and philosophy unfortunately is about the same complexity as college level mathematics. Elementary and high school level critical thought can be aimed simply at asking questions. People ask questions all their lives, the skill of knowing what is relevant and how to find it is self-evident and everyone picks them up, it is just a matter of getting children to realise that politics is important and they should question everything. Not just authority, but the people who criticise authority and themselves, question history, question the physics teacher about how the ammeter works, question people who you trust and think never lie to you, when someone gets angry ask them why they are angry etc etc..

I used to be a charlatan, posing as security guards and cops etc etc.. and the one thing I dreaded was people asking questions, it never happenned, so I was never caught. I must have stolen $40000 of property and sold it off for 1/4 the price. I dread to think what someone in charge of $1000000s of other people's money would get up to in a question free environment.

>>1 There is no good and evil. There is only perception, and assigning immesurable values to certain actions that through you own personal experience you deem to be unpleasant. You can justify anything. One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter.
Nazis were not EVIL. They simply assigned different values to actions than you did. Social health isnt black and white/ good and evil.

>>4 I think freedom and collaboration is humanity's natural state, and that all decisions that reject or prevent this are "evil", as in "generally a really non-goody idea". Good and evil are unneccesary words used unwittingly and with manipulatory intent, so they are not useful terms. No one wants to do what he/she considers evil, but what we can do is give people the factual basis that allows them to make every decision as constructive as possible. Conservatism places too much weight on the law of unintended results, liberalism relies too much on virtues and socialism is too afraid of liberties becuase it can't prepare the people for the liberties. I think it boils down to the interaction between government, the zeitgeist of the people and the accumulated culture. A good society wants people to be more free, in a better society people have liberties and the best society prepares the people for these liberties.
>>3 Well, the person half of America wants to represent them has spent ca 1,2347878458972837487844 simoleons on a worthless war because no one really paid attention, so you have a point.

>>4

If you assign a positive value to actions that benefit mankind as a whole. You are no different, no "better", no "worse" than those who assign a positive value to helping the weak.

What matters is who has the power. All you can do is fight for whatever ideal has been embedded within your mind by society.

Thats memetics people.

Killing people and taking their stuff is less good than being charitable/hospitable.

>>7
Proof?

>>8
Imagine how nice it would be if someone were charitable or hospitable towards you.

Then take your most precious items and all your money to some hobo and jump off a bridge.

As you plunge to your doom, compare and contrast the happiness and unhappiness generated between the 2 situations and contemplate the repercussions sentient beings as a society and which is preferable.

>>8
Killing people and taking their stuff is not good.
Being charitable is good.
Charitable is more good than killing people and taking their stuff.

There is no such thing as good and evil, right and wrong, only nutrality, for every action is an equile and opposite reaction, for every person you save a person shall die, for every kind word some one shall be slanderd, you have no chance of making the world a "better" place and no chance of ruling it with "evil". Your actions mean nothing exsept to your self. So go out there and kill a baby, murder a nice old lady it wont matter :)

>>11
Prove it.

Proof is one of those things that doesn't exist for anything.

If there is a good grasp of right and wrong, we shouldn't need laws. However, this is very utopian.

>>13
So you think you don't need proof to prove things? I guess I win the debate?

>>11
Morality isn't basic physics, numbnuts.

>>16
Actually they are related. Through philosophy!

>>13 This really does deserve an explanation.

You see, there is no good or evil, truth or lies, right or wrong.
There is only perception. You can perceive corralation between events. Once you have a record of corralation, you can make a prediction. If X, then Y. That is the basis of all conclusions about EVERYTHING.

Example. Gravity.
If you calculate the gravitational constant a thousand times with a thousand experiments that happen in the real world (with lots of random inhibitors, more on this in a moment) NOT happy-physics-land, then a few times you will calculate, say, 9.7 meters per second per second instead of the average/accepted value 9.8 m/s/s. All that you have in your head is corralation data. Using this data and NOTHING ELSE, you can conclude that gravity is not constant.
Accepting 9.8 means getting more data, from many experiments, and finding that when you test somthing an infinate(or REALLY high number) of times, at least once the data will difract from the expected value.
Since there is always an inperfection, you can NEVER acheive a 100% corralation between events.
But why not? why cant we create a happyphysics scenario?
The answer is entropy.
Within a closed system there will always be entropy- chaos, random shit happening because energy itself is constantly changing between its different forms, eventually leading to heat energy (the "heat death" of the universe).
Within a CLOSED SYSTEM (this assumes the universe has an END, more on this later) you can NEVER attain perfect corralation between events.

Since you can never perfectly recreate an event within a closed system, (our existance basically) every event that occours will be perceived slightly differently by each individual unit that can observe and record data.

You and I can look at the same point on a 3d grid in space, though from 2 different perspectives, and see slightly/completely different things.

A puppy is killed at point (A)
You stand at point (B) and look at (A)
I stand at point (C) and look at (A)
Based on your memory/past experiences/events you have witnessed/aftermath you have witnessed/data you have collected through your 5 senses, you have a 51%corralation between action "killing a puppy"(X) and conclusion "thats bad"(Y)
Based on my memory/past experiences/events i have witnessed/aftermath i have witnessed/data i have collected through my 5 senses, i have a 51%corralation between action "killing a puppy"(X) and conclusion "thats necessary in this situation"(Y)
Because identical memetic makeup is an impossibility, I have contained within my mind data that you do not. Example continued; I know that if you dont kill the runt of the litter the rest of the puppies will be weak - you do not have this information, therefore your corralative data is 2% off from mine and you make a different conclusion based on what is (very very very very almost) the same visual information (puppy being killed). However, when witnessing the same event our perceptions /veiwing ability can never be the same beause of energy ancting on us in diffent ways, ex: i have light shining in my eyes, there is a .0000000001newton force acting on your retina because a cell just died, etc.

This is how people see relatively the same thing/have relatively the same "data" and draw different conclusions.

---end
---backtrack
Okay, because the universe EXISTS: cluster of quarks bound together through quark bonding withing a (sea) of nothingness, this quark cluster has a begining and an end. Nothing is infinate (which is why i tried to avoid using the word earlier) if it exists, it has a set value that denotes its "existance".

"this quark cluster has a begining and an end. Nothing is infinate"

eh?

>>18
Stop missing your scientific philosophy 101 classes, science is about finding correlations within certain ranges, it doesn't have to be 100% perfectly accurate. You can be certain that earth's gravitational pull lies between 9.80 and 9.82 ms^-2 and that when you lift up a pencil and let go it will fall until something stops it.

>>20
The point was here a moment ago but you *just* missed it.
All information unique ---> all memetic makeup different ---> every person assigns different imaginary "good and evil" values to witnessed events ---> right and wrong (in the sense of good and evil AND information:LAW=100%Corralation) dont exist.

Our tools of collecting and analising data are still to limited, to make any point you think as fact/100%, think of it as in the past when there was no microscope and every one thought we were the center of every thing and god created the earth some 4000 yrs ago, the thing is in 2000 yrs or tools will change and what we think will change, we may find that quarks are made of even smaller particales and those particales made of even smaller ones. we may find a true way of messering light particales and find a way to see anti matter, and black matter. so don't get all bound up in what we think is fact today because in time time we all may be horrificly wrong and may hurt the world be thinking it. and my post of there being no right and wrong only human perseption of morals given though culture, is turning out to be more true every day. read lovecraft and see, the elder ones are Amoral and give a great counter view to human moral perseption.

Counter point, the very human idea of morals is given by culture, morals are not part of humans physicly, but rather are learned by exp, this learning process have been going on for so long that you don't even make mental note of it, example, when you were a child and hit you brother you parents yelled at you, you then over time by maybe repeting this more than once coralate hiting your brother with being yelled at, being yelled at you coralate with bad, so hitting your brother is bad and on a even more basic level hitting is bad. over the corse of you life you have seen and reacted to millions of events and those events based on the reactions of others and yourself have built a moral bases, this can be shown by looking at other cultures, tribes is africa thought it was moraly right to kill members of  other tribes"head hunting". Aztec offerd human sacrafice to the gods every day to keep the sun rising, they belived it was right to kill these people to keep the sun going. Nazi germany, people belived that by them being german or arian they were in fdact better than other human beings and could could rightfuly strip other of their freedoms, even the freedom of life. Give me a closed group of people and 1000 yrs and i can make a group of people that moraly belive that it is alright to comite rape, murder the old, and eat human flesh, its all a matter of human conditioning over a long period of life starting from birth.  

yha becasue if you create tradition based on these things people will see it as OK, i get it. this is totaly on fact. it must be culture that makes morals.

>>22,23,24

Welcome to Memetics

Will there still be people in that society that feel such actions are intrinsically wrong?  Such as understanding the tribe has a custom of killing and rape, but personally finding it wrong even after being raised with it?

The scientific definition of morality is correct.

>>27

The tribe would have no outside contact with people with other ideas, they would only know that killing and rape go on and no on seems to look down on it, some even support it so it can't be a bad thing. Unless outsiders imput other ideas, the idea that rape and killing is wrong would never even enter the tribe.

>>28
Eventually the tribe would develop complex philosophies which explain the world around them nad apply these ideas in diferrent places to see how far they can go. They would create a system of writing and define abstract concepts using differnet sciences, metaphysics and mathematics. At first things would be shaky, but the general idea that sentience exists and sentience in other people may be as important as your own life would emerge. Soon people would shed their superstitions, lose religion and come to a rational understanding of their world including the ideas of justice and liberty due to their self-evidence.