I remember we had a thread like this on the previous board, and I'd like to bring it back. My own worldviews have been going through constant change over the past few years, so I enjoy engaging in these discussions and seeing where they lead me next. I also remember having a discussion with Pntball about the moral value of humans vs. animals before it got cut short, which I'd be happy to continue . Although my views have been refined somewhat even since then.
So basically the point is to share views on morality. This is not supposed to be a theistic debate, although I acknowladge that some of those aspects will probably be impossible to avoid. Discuss differences, similarities, dilemmas, contradictions, values etc. in a respectable manner. You know, get a good conversation rolling. No one should be left feeling like their views are being attacked. Any differences in opinion can be presented as polite questions or points without calling anyone an ignoramus, so that everyone gets the most out of the whole debate experience.
(Don't be a d*ck, is what I'm saying..)
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To start things off, I'll present my own view on morality as of now. As I said, it's been under constant change. Right now my views are pretty close those that Sam Harris outlines in "The Moral Landscape". And that is that morality has to do explicitly with the well-being of conscious creatures.
Although he calls it moral objectivism, which I don't think it is. The way I see it the most general possible source you could find for any morality would be our nature and the way we as humans experience consciousness. Any possible moral truth out there is still subject to the fact that our consciousness is such that we value happiness and disvalue suffering, which is not an absolute fact. This is just a result of how our consciousness has evolved within the organism we call "life" on Earth. So I don't think such a thing as objective morality outside our conscious minds could ever exist.
However, although I support moral subjectivism on that front, I don't support moral relativism. That is to say I do think there are right and wrong answers to all moral dilemmas, given the basic assumption that morality has to do with the well-being of conscious creatures. Well-being is something that can be measured with scientific facts. This is true even though we don't have an all-encompassing definition of "well-being". For analogy, just because because there is no ultimate definition of "health", that doesn't mean we can't make clear decisions of what is healthy and what is not. Similar to how there still isn't a really good definition of "life", yet we still have the thriving science of biology based around it. A science which is based purely on facts.
So to not write a huge big wall of text explaining my whole current view in detail, I'll summarize here. And maybe leaving my explanation a bit open ended might catalyse the discussion forward a bit.. I'll bring up other points as they become necessary. But in short:
There are such things as right and wrong opinions on moral values, but I don't concede that there is anything outside our minds asserting these moral values.
Discuss away!