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I haven’t decided whether I support net neutrality or not, because I can’t figure out what the hell it is people think net neutrality is.You see, I keep hearing people running around screaming that “without net neutrality Facebook/Amazon/Netflix could not exist!” and demanding that we make new laws requiring ISPs to “respect net neutrality”.And that makes my brain hurt. We need laws that require ISPs to behave in a manner, that they’re presumably not already behaving, in order to allow for things that we already have to continue to exist? That makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Clearly, if net neutrality is a necessary condition for Facebook/Amazon/Netflix to exist, we must already have it, because these things exist. I remain open to discussions as to how the Internet ought to be governed, but the Chicken-Littlish screaming about how Facebook is doomed if we don’t Take Action Now doesn’t contribute one whit to such a debate.So, until you can convince me that there is an actual, real, tangible threat to actual, real services that people actually use and want, I’m going to sit firmly on the position that “no action is required”. There does not appear to yet be a mad rash of ISPs seeking to block Facebook, Amazon, or Netflix, or indeed any other content, or even to “downgrade” such content on their networks. ISPs who make noises about doing this get absolutely pilloried in the media. To the extent that I understand what “net neutrality” is, it seems to be something that the Internet has, and has had since not later than April 1995, when the NSF dissolved the NSFNet and terminated the last vestiges of the old NSFNet AUP that prohibited “commercial use” of NSFNet resources, a process that started in 1994 and really as far back as 1991 (when the NSF amended the NSFNet AUP to allow limited commercial use). The Internet was definitely not “neutral” prior to 1991; before that date, the use of NSFNet for commercial purposes was quite clearly prohibited, and so commercial traffic, if discovered, was subject to being discarded at whim without recourse. There were small pockets of the Internet even at this early date that were not part of NSFNet, but the backbone at that time was the NSFNet and you couldn’t go far without running into that restriction. Most NSF partners would not allow a commercial entity (not already an NSF partner, at least) access to the NSFNet unless they agreed not to engage in commercial activity.The only complaints I’ve seen that I think have any merit at all concern Vonage and other independent VOIP providers who allege that Comcast (who has its own VOIP service) has downgraded Vonage traffic, not relative to Comcast’s own VOIP traffic (which I believe Comcast has all the right in the world to do), but rather relative to “generic” traffic. But if they are, in fact, doing that, then we have a remedy without new legislation: that’s an “unfair trade practice” which can be remedied by the FTC administratively or the federal courts judicially.The notion that the “special carriage” arrangements between, e.g. Comcast and Netflix represent a “breach of net neutrality” also confuses me. If these regulations are going to prohibit Comcast and Netflix from negotiating to form a mutually beneficial relationship (and indeed one which is beneficial to not only Comcast and Netflix but also both of their customers), in which Netflix gets not prioritized carriage on Comcast’s network (which, as far as I know, it doesn’t) but simply a shortcut to Comcast’s network, then that too would seem to me to be a bad idea.Since I can’t figure out what the people who are for net neutrality are actually demanding, I’m not for it. I’m generally not in favor of things I can’t understand. Since I’m at least somewhat knowledgeable about the Internet’s gross architecture and the manner in which Internet transit is bought and sold (certainly more so than the average person), I’m forced to conclude that the people arguing for what they call “net neutrality” are either totally confused, or are lying to me about something. Or both.I wrote the part below in response to a comment by Sterling Christiansen, but I think it deserves not to be buried in the comments, so I’m appending it to this post. Sterling had suggested that the Internet should work “like the mail”, and I wanted to address the degree to which this ignores some important history of how we got to the mail working the way it does today.Today, you can generally expect an item sent in the mail to be delivered to its ultimate destination, even in another country, under the terms that you agreed to when you deposited it with your national postal authority and paid the tariff established by that authority for the type of carriage you requested.However, this has not always been the case. Prior to the establishment of the Universal Postage Union in 1874 by the Treaty of Bern, if you wanted to send mail to another country, you had to pay the postage established by your national postage authority and also the postage appropriate for the carriage of that mailpiece by the postal authority in the destination nation, as well as for every intermediate country that the mailpiece would have to pass through on the way. You might also have to explicitly identify the routing to be used, by explicitly indicating third party expediters along the route. And you would have to pay their expediting fees.In 1863, the United States called for an international congress to address this situation, which was clearly an impediment to international communications and commerce. It took 11 years to bang out an agreement. As a consequence of this agreement, each member nation of the UPU (which today is every UN member except for four countries, each of which has an agreement with a UPU member to handle their mail for them) has agreed to accept mail from every other UPU member nation without the payment of an additional fee, and to forward it along toward its destination as long as that destination is also in an UPU member. In 1969, a system was introduced in which nations with high levels of mail traffic pay dues to one another based on the differential volume of mail they send and receive.The original (pre-1969) system is essentially equivalent to the peering system of the “public internet” (which observes neutrality): all traffic moves in the manner requested by its original sender, but only the originating country (resp. ISP) receives payment for that traffic. All other carriers do so gratuitously. This system proved to be problematic because some countries send far more mail that they receive (for some reason, China falls in this category), and some countries are the destination or intermediary for more mail than they send, because they have larger and more developed mail delivery networks (most significantly, the United States). This results in a country (resp. internet connectivity provider) that established a more advanced network with more connections being forced to subsidize, without compensation, smaller countries (resp. internet connectivity providers) that have less established networks with fewer connections. While this was vaguely tolerable for a country (countries are not required to operate at a profit, and a country might reasonably decide that the benefits to diplomatic comity that arise from subsidizing mail services are worth that expense) it is clearly not tolerable for a for-profit industry, which the “public Internet” has been since the decommissioning of the NSFNet in 1995. As a result of the 1969 modifications to UPU regulations, when you send mail from Ecuador to Swaziland, you only pay Ecuador a fee, but it’s likely that Ecuador then pays either Peru or Colombia a fee for the mail you sent, and then that country pays another country, and so on until your mail finally arrives in Swaziland, at which point Swaziland will be paid a fee to deliver that mail to its ultimate destination. Part of the fee you paid Ecuador goes to cover the costs of what Ecuador is charged in dues by whatever country Ecuador asked to carry your mailpiece. You aren’t aware of this, but it still happens. Part of the reason you’re not aware of it is that the system has been in place since 1874 and so you take it for granted, without being aware of the massive century-plus-old bureaucracy that makes it all work. It’s been in place for so long and has worked for so long that most people just take it for granted that this is how it has always worked and is the only way that it could work. The postal system works the way it does because there’s a bureaucracy (today operated by the UN) that facilitates it working that way, and that bureaucracy is the end result of over 140 years of ongoing multilateral diplomacy that has taken place apparently entirely without your knowledge.The Internet originally established its tradition of neutrality when it was being operated entirely at public expense by the National Science Foundation as the NSFNet. There was no reason for peers to demand payment for costs because all of the costs were being borne either by the federal government (mainly NSF or DARPA) or by nonprofit research entities, mainly universities, for the purpose of advancing their nonprofit research purpose. All that changed when the NSF disbanded the NSFNet and handed the core internet off to the NAPs, each of which was run by a for-profit telecommunications company. These companies continued, amongst themselves, the practice of peering: providing transit to traffic originating anywhere in the network without assessing fees, largely because the contracts they had with NSF and with one another required them to do so. However, as the network expanded and reshuffled, more and more connectivity providers came into existence that were not bound by the original NSF peering contracts. Some of them negotiated for peering arrangements similar to those between the original NAPs; others did not, instead purchasing IP transit at whatever terms they could negotiate. There is an underlying expectation that when one pays for transit, one is paying not only for access to the network of whoever you’re buying it from, but instead to its final destination. Like the postal system, the accepting ICP is required to cover any costs that that traffic incurs along the way to its next handoff, and so on until the traffic is ultimately delivered. This is either implicit or explicit in the contracts between the various parties, and is the embodiment of “net neutrality”.There has never been any obligation on providers to offer more than one class of service. The standard for traffic accepted for transit, absent a special agreement, has always been “best effort delivery”: the traffic will be delivered, if possible, as soon as possible, but without either favor or disfavor to any other traffic also accepted for “best effort delivery”; at the same time, there are no delivery guarantees. Providers may elect to offer more than one class of service within their own network, but generally speaking a provider has no guaranteed ability to offer expedited handling beyond their own network. The peering agreements that govern the core public internet do not allow for expedited handling; if you want expedited handling (“express mail”) you have to negotiate that yourself and the route your traffic takes will have to avoid the core public internet. If a provider elects to reserve some of its capacity for classes of service other than generic, that’s their business.The problem I see with how many people express what they think “net neutrality” is that it has fairly little to do with what net neutrality actually is. I agree that providers should not be permitted to downgrade “generic” traffic based on analysis of that traffic, especially for the purpose of gaining unfair competitive advantage, but such things have always been illegal both under the standard language in peering and transit agreements and under federal unfair competition law, at least in the US. However, I don’t see it as a violation of net neutrality for a specific customer to approach a specific provider and make special arrangement to have their traffic prioritized on their network, in exchange for additional compensation as negotiated. I’ve done this for businesses I’ve represented. In some cases the ISP I’ve had a contract for “preferred carriage” has had to enter into subsidiary agreements with further ICPs in order to serve the agreement of the contract, because that ISP did not have a presence in a location where we needed service, and so they had to enter into agreements with ICPs along the way to get a clear path with preferred carriage to the endpoint we wanted. That’s their cost of doing business, and presumably they passed on that cost to us in what they charged us for our contract for preferred carriage. Some of the conceptualizations of “net neutrality” I’ve seen put out there seem to make such arrangements illegal, and I’m steadfastly against that because the businesses I represented saved a lot of money by using such arrangements.

WHAT IS MORALITY? WHAT IS THE DOMAIN OF MORALITY?To determine whether morality is a trait that evolved and to determine whether the moral domain varies across cultures requires delineating the moral domain. Distinction can be made between a normative sense of morality that refers to the correct guide to follow, and a descriptive sense that refers to guides that people have actually sought to follow and that are not necessarily correct.What it means correct morality? If a psychiatrist sets out to investigate the effectiveness of a new drug against depression, or an astronomer attempts to investigate the properties of black holes, they cannot but make assumptions about what it means to suffer from depression or to be a black hole. Lack of shared assumptions about the meaning of morality means that someone may question any empirical and metaethical view on grounds of their failing to address the true or real moral judgments. There is a mutual interdependence, conceptual questions depend on empirical answers and we must know what counts as a moral judgment to find empirical answers. If moral facts do not figure in our best scientific explanations, thus we are not justified in believing in the existence of moral facts. This argument assumes that the empirical is our only source of knowledge about moral facts, and that there is not a priori moral knowledge. However, we have good reason to think that the empirical sciences are much better equipped to discover the nature of things than a priori reflection. We want an analysis that helps explain why some things rather than others are morally good. We did not discover that heat is mean kinetic molecular energy by a priori reflection on what we mean by “heat”, but by empirical investigation. We could not object to the view that heat is mean kinetic energy on the ground that this is not what we mean when we think a priori.What distinguishes moral norms from etiquette norms, coordination norms, prudential norms and other norms? Experiments with different religions, Chinese, Westerners, including small-scale societies, show that it is not possible identify a criterion for a moral and nonmoral normative distinction. Most people would judge that showing up naked at your grandmother’s funeral is more serious than stealing a pencil. Perhaps in the future philosophers and psychologists may simply drop the term “moral judgment” and focus instead on normative judgments. There are number of subclasses of normative judgments that are natural kinds. Normative judgments about purity, reciprocity, authority, and kinship may well be examples of distinct normative natural kinds. But the conviction that there must be a natural way of dividing normative judgments into those that are moral and those that are nonmoral is an illusion. ( See Kelly, D., Stich, S. P., Haley, K. J., Eng, S. J., & Fessler, D. M. T. - Harm, affect, and the moral/conventional distinction Mind and Language 2007;Knobe, J., & Fraser, B. Causal judgment and moral judgment: Two experiments. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology ) As numerous authors have already noted, people’s moral judgments appear to be generated by the very same sort of cognition that one finds at work in generating nonmoral normative judgments. There is no important distinction between moral and nonmoral cognition. No brain area or network is common and peculiar to moral judgments of wrongness. If the moral domain were a fundamental feature of human cognition, we would expect the distinction between moral and nonmoral norms to be lexicalized in every language. But there is not a universal moral normative domain at all, and many cultures have not formed such a domain different of nonmoral normative domain.Many moral norms do not aim at cooperation. For example, retributivist norms of punishment, such as “eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth violence”, can lead to disharmony. Many people throughout history have believed, and some still believe, that masturbation is immoral, often based on the claim that masturbation is unnatural, they seem to think that masturbators have too much fun. This and other moral norms too do not aim at cooperation, the disgust as moralizer is another intuitive example. Certain disgusting behaviors are seen by many as immoral notwithstanding the absence of cooperation: consumption of genetically modified food, insects and recycled water. In a survey 46% of respondents said they opposed genetically modified food and would maintain their opposition for any balance of risks and benefits. These participants agreed that genetically modified food should be prohibited no matter how small the risks and how great the benefits. Many norms that aim at cooperation are not moral in nature, as the linguistic rules of syntax, they enable cooperation by enabling communication, but they are not moral. (See Scott, S., Inbar, Y., & Rozin, P. Evidence for absolute moral opposition to genetically modified food in the United States. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2016).Is morality the normativity that would be universalizable?Universalizability cannot be a definitional feature of morality. A judgment is universalizable if and only if it can, without contradiction, be willed as a universal practical law. But it is not clear just how the universal willing of a maxim such as “All human beings will be defaming or ridiculing other human beings whenever this is a safe and effective way of promoting their own self-interest” give rise to any sort of contradiction. To say that the willing of this maxim as a universal law would be imprudent is not to say that doing so is contradictory. Here is the recipe for a possible universalizable moral rationality, but immoral to some religious people: Agree that a rule applies to oneself, even if it means death. It is rational believe that there are things worse than death, being in terrible pain, for example: “All anencephalic neonates with painful terminal cancer should be euthanized.”An agent may reasonably decide a case in one way without implying that anyone else should decide it similarly. Suppose Sophie and her two children are at a Nazi concentration camp. A guard confronts Sophie and tells her that she must decide one of her children will be allowed to live and one will be killed, informing Sophie that if she chooses neither, then both will be killed. Sophie then has a morally compelling reason to choose one of her children. What should Sophie do? Whoever feels the force of conflicting moral demands on him and finally decides, is logically not committed to accepting that anyone else in situations like this should do the same. The fact that an individual adopts a moral norm of conduct for his own use does not entail that the person requires it to be adopted by anyone else. An individual may adopt for himself a very demanding moral guide that he thinks may be too difficult for most others to follow. One who judges morally in complex situations finds out something about himself, rather than anything one can speak of as holding universally.Is morality the normativity that overrides all other normativities? Is morality categorical?Being categorical and overridingness cannot be defining characteristics of morality. Moral objectivity view holds that moral propositions are analogous to propositions about chemistry, biology, or history, they are mind independent, in so much as they are true despite what anyone believes, hopes, wishes, or feels. When they fail to describe this mind-independent moral reality, they are false, no matter what anyone believes, hopes, wishes, or feels. A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary, without reference to any other purpose. Morality would be a supreme set of categorical norms, their applicability would not depend on our contingent ends or desires. Categorical would be guaranteed to be backed by decisive reasons. But reasons stem only from our objective interests and subjective desires, there is simply no guarantee that a morally required act always is supported by decisive reasons. If all practical reasons must be able to connect with something that concerns us, then no moral reason is categorical. A distinguishing characteristic of the morality cannot be that it applies to people even if they have no desires that would be satisfied by conforming to them. Just plain ought is an incoherent fiction, if the reasons that favor a morally required action are always incommensurable with the reasons of, for example prudence or self-interest, then the totality of relevant reasons will not uniquely favor morality. A person’s reasons for pursuing her own aims are stronger than her reasons to advance someone else aims. It is not necessarily irrational or mistaken for an individual to deliberately decline the demand of moral rationality of a group. Overridingness is the thesis that moral determinations are always supreme whenever they come into conflict with the determinations of distinct normative domains. The overridingness of morality presuppose there is always a rational way of justifying the priority of morality over the priority of self-interest, prudence or other nonmoral rational ends defined independently from morality, but there is not.To be categorical will not distinguish morality of etiquette, which may also be taken to make demands of individuals independent of what they desire. Empirical evidence does not show unequivocally that people universally distinguish between the moral and conventional holds within and across different cultures. This raise the question of whether there is a distinction between morality and the conventional, and it is clear that some rules of etiquette are relative only to a society or group.What is the origin of morality?Dolphins are documented as saving humans, beached whales, and dogs from drowning and even from sharks. Dogs have been documented adopting kittens, baby foxes, tiger cubs, fawns, ducklings, lambs and more. Chickens have been documented adopting baby dogs. This behavior is selflessly altruistic, as a dog could not expect any benefit from caring for a member of another species. There are over 70 recorded episodes of humpbacks intervening in killer whale attacks on unrelated species. Just searching Internet “elephant saves” will result in many examples of elephant saving other species. A leopard is documented caring for a baby baboon, and there are documented episodes of apes helping injured animals and even human children who fall into their enclosures. Evolutionary accounts of the origins of our moral capacity do not require any appeal to knowledge of moral truths. The cultural way we behave is usually governed by what the people around us are doing, especially those we perceive as belonging to our own social group.Trying to explain why morality resists strict definition may lead to the idea that the concept of morality has a prototype structure rather than a classical definitional structure consisting of necessary and sufficient conditions. A prototype concept of morality consists in features embodying the average or most typical instances of the concept. To define morality in the way a theorist favors will not correspond to the way that some others use the term. Moral skepticism about moral codes holds that we must make our ethical theorization in terms of a good life, or virtues of exemplary men, there are not moral codes. What compliance with moral and nonmoral norms allows us to do is to justify our behavior to others in ways that they cannot reasonably reject because it is a matter of an equal accountability. But there may be no common universal justification for normativity for all groups.Why is possible that morality in the normative sense has never been put forward by any society, by any group at all, or even by any individual?When persistent moral disagreement is recognized concerning what rules are moral rules, or when it is justified to violate these rules, those who understand that morality has no authoritative judges and no decision procedure that provides a unique guide to action in all situations, admit that how one should act is morally unresolvable. If it is possible to disagree with the value of objectives even agreeing with all non-moral facts, or if at principle it is not possible to know with certainty whether a non moral premise of a moral judgment is valid, then the unreliability defeats all claims of a universal a priori or intuitive moral judgments.The general meaning of ought involves a relationship between an action and its effectiveness in advancing interests. In any form of morality the most plausible definitions of moral words include reference to someone’s ends connected with her needs, interests, desires, attitudes, goals, purposes, plans. These definitions involve things that can vary from person to person. No amount of reduction of interests to brain processes, biological evolution, or common cultural heritage would reveal goodness as a non-subjective property.What makes ends relevant will be what someone desire. Something’s good-making features may be open to legitimate disagreement. The property of being a good car involves a fit between its objective features and what we want from a car, and that will vary somewhat from person to person. Our ability to explain why we evaluate a particular motor car as a good one gives us no guarantee that there is one objectively best set of specifications for a motor car. There is no prospect that “goodness” can be reduced to a naturalistic property with no subjective component. No amount of scientific investigation and empirical reduction will ever demonstrate that some actions are morally wrong.Is there a metaethics that explain why there are significant differences in values across cultures, but also significant similarities? Is there any general theory of moral judgments as innate or culturally variable, or as based in rationality or intuition?Moral rational deliberation and verdict activate different brain areas, moral judgment includes both rational deliberation and verdict. Only verdict is intuitive. Many people who sincerely claim that they have nothing against, for example, black people or gays, still associate black faces and gay sex with something bad. Their attitudes of implicit prejudice conflict with their beliefs of explicit prejudice. The psychological and neural processes that constitute implicit moral attitudes are distinct from the processes that constitute explicit belief, what we reflectively endorse and commit ourselves to. The process of deciding how to answer a moral question might require weighing public statements, in which case it might be rationally deliberative in a way that our implicit moral attitudes are not. It seems possible that implicit moral attitudes are innate in ways that explicit beliefs and answers are not. We need to distinguish verdicts from rational deliberation, and explicit answers from implicit attitudes, to support any future general theory of all moral judgments. (See for example Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Wheatley, T. Are moral judgments unified? Philosophical Psychology, 2014.)What would be some criticisms of ethical relativism?It is not mere membership in a group that creates moral authority of the group over the individual. The pressure for convergence in morality, the social genesis of morality no entail that membership creates obligation to standards held by a group. When pacifists are members of a country that has a military recruitment with no right of refusal, it may be true both that the country’s morality is adequate and that pacifists can legitimately reject any purported moral obligation to submit to a military recruitment. One can accept that there can be no resolution of some serious conflicts, no resolution that has moral authority for all parties; such an acceptance is an insightful recognition of the limitations of the capacity of practical reason. It would signal of achievement to accept that there is no final arbiter of our conflicts with each other. Should each agent just do what he believes is right? Whether or not a moral judgment is mistaken is itself a matter for moral theorizing. That no set of moral judgments is mistaken is just another moral judgment and hence one which would be rejected by any moral judge with own moral commitments. “Why be moral?” answer need not prove that all people have the same final reason to comply with a morality in all contexts.Some moralities are known not to be uniformly held, even locally. Large nations with their multicultural heritages, include elements from numerous moral systems. Think, for example, of female genital mutilation, or of slavery. In the contemporary world half the species on the planet have disappeared since 1970 (2014 Living Planet Report). How can moral relativists preserve plausible claims as that dissenters against slavery, subordination of women, environmental destruction even though they thereby opposed the morality of the time and local? Relativism can make moral truth reflect the moral status quo. What was once needed for small communities to survive in competition with other species might not be what is needed to maintain a stable nation state. We do not live in a culturally closed societies with unitary moral systems. Human moral shaping used to be uniform. In environments representative of humanity’s 99% small-band hunter–gatherer societies, one can see the same type of moral personal virtue around the world. Changes in technological capabilities may require an on-going reinvention of morality. The need for mutual accommodation is most obvious in large modern societies that have emerged from a multiplicity of cultures and traditions, there can be serious disagreement inside big societies. But knowledge of moral truth is not knowledge of the practical means for resolving human conflict. If in relativism each disputant would be saying something true of his own culture or point of view, there would be the logical consequence that they would not be disagreeing with each other, rather they would be talking about different things. But if each disputant is disagreeing about what is true, then the disputants cannot be making claims about different things and hence cannot have knowledge of the kind the moral relativist supposes. Why can we suppose moral judgments have truth-value relative to a moral community as opposed to no truth-value at all?IS THERE A TRUE MORALITY? WHY BE MORAL? WHAT IS MORAL OBJECTIVITY?A good criticism of moral relativism needs an answer to moral skepticism. Whether morality is relative or universal, why should we think that under ideal conditions, rational human beings will converge on the same moral principles of universal or relative acceptance? We do not always have decisive reasons to act impartially or it is not always irrational to do what is morally wrong.What is moral truth?We cannot make a confusion between stating a particular rule for the evaluation of a belief as being true, and stating what truth abstractly consists in:The best-known theory of truth is the correspondence theory of truth. On this view, a candidate for moral truth is true if and only if it corresponds to a moral fact. But the notion of a fact is itself only to be explained in terms of truth as being the worldly correlate of a true sentence or proposition, so that the theory is vitiated by circularity. Anything the supposed relation of correspondence might achieve has already been provided for without going beyond the relation which is affirmed with the affirmation of the proposition itself. Correspondence theories of truth are only plausible where objects and properties can be understood as causally responsive to moral judgments. But morality is about objects and properties to which we do not bear causal relations. If someone suggests that “X is good” is true if and only if X deserves approval then this is of little use, since it casts no light on how such verdicts may be established, or why we must be interested in them. Someone can value and endorse things on different grounds than whether they generate happiness. Moral advice rarely holds universally. “Don't kill an innocent” might prevent a little girl needless suffering as a terminally ill patient. Norms involved in logic and epistemology are formally neutral about our desires for its own sake, but moral norms no.The coherence theory of truth is a theory of truth according to which a statement is true if it "coheres" with other statements, and false if it does not. The theory is limited because some statements must be assigned a truth-value independently if others are to be assessed by way of their coherence. The motivation of theory is sometimes owed to the conviction that there may be several sets of cohering statements with equal claim to describe the world correctly.The pragmatic theory of truth, in some versions urges a connection between what is true and what is useful, pointing out, for instance, that one mark of a successful scientific theory is that it enables us to manipulate nature to our advantage. But this conflation of truth with utility can be pernicious because the ethics of belief require us to pursue the truth with honesty even if its consequences should prove detrimental to our material well-being.The deflationary theory of truth is built on the equivalence between asserting a proposition “p” and asserting that “p” is true. The truth-predicate "is true" exists only in order to enable economy of expression, and that what is said with its aid could in principle be said without it. The reference to truth is not so easily removed from sentences like "Everything he says is true", but logicians have shown how to eliminate the words "is true" when predicated of sentences of formalized languages. The truth-predicate plays just enable speakers to express their approval or endorsement. “It is true that" or "It is a fact that", when appended to a sentence, add nothing but emphasis. The abstract concept of truth does not have metaphysics and does not require appeal to such notions as correspondence to reality, coherence, or success.What justifies a true morality?Is there justification of true moral beliefs? The only way which moral beliefs might be justified is by inference from nonmoral beliefs. How could a body of entirely nonmoral beliefs entail a moral belief? Moral judgments seem have pretensions of objective truth. But moral and mathematical judgments are about objects and properties to which we do not bear causal relations. One might wonder how moral properties can be thought to causally explain our moral judgments and beliefs. How can moral properties be seen to be part of a causal explanation for anything other than moral judgments? Doubts can be raised about the origin of human moral beliefs. What is the evidence for the truth of core moral beliefs? It is far from clear what is this evidence if it includes the truthfulness of moral rational intuition or religious faith whose moral truthfulness we are trying to demonstrate, rendering a circular demonstration. Why are the processes that lead to the formation of moral beliefs sensitive to the supposed true moral facts? Why would be morality objectively true, categorical, and mind-independent because of its empirically confirmed genealogical dependence from emotional, evolutionary, historical and cultural context? There can be reasonable moral skepticism if true, objective, mind-independent moral reality properties are necessary to explain many of the observable moral phenomena. Human moral thinking evolving as a biological and psychological adaptation explain the enhancing social cohesion among our ancestors. For example, the hormone oxytocin has a role in social behaviors like maternal behavior and bonding toward individuals with similar characteristics in many mammal species, so it also does in humans. But why would evolutionary forces have made morality objectively true? Evolutive foundation is not indication of objective moral truth. Sexual coercion has been observed in many species, including mammals and humans, birds, insects, and fish. In pornography sites you can find simulations of rape and real spanking. Some people feel sexually stimulated with rape and spankings. People are not morally required to sacrifice themselves for the entire community, but they would have been so required if we had evolved more on the model of social insects. We do not morally judge a man or woman by its reproductive fitness, by how successfully it passes down its genetic code. The problem with human nature as the basis for a universal level of morality is that it lacks a detailed guide to action. What innate moral values should we prioritize? Non-human primates often kill, steal and rape without being punished. A mistake amounts to conceiving evolution by natural selection as morally good. Suppose that preserving the human gene pool is good. Suppose that scientists demonstrate that preserving the human gene pool from the mass extinction of global warming requires reducing the population by 70% in 50 years. While killing part of the population preserves the human gene pool, is it in fact good?One can never validly deduce an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Nothing can be the conclusion of a valid argument which is not already implicit in the premises. No set of premises consisting entirely of nonmoral descriptive statements is sufficient to entail a normative conclusion. Thus entirely descriptive claims cannot entail normativity. A moral evaluation cannot be expressed using only nonmoral terms. The evaluation expressed by someone is relative to an individual's goals, desires for its own sake, preferences. Morality is not categorical, there is not moral truth. We must accept that other people can have opposed preferences, even when we are agreed on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly. If moral judgments are beliefs that motivate, they can only be beliefs about how to get something that we want. Therefore, either they are not objective or they cannot motivate us and therefore are not practical.The possibility of moral thought and judgment does not depend on the provision of a suitable supply of categorical objective moral principles because there is not the possibility of ultimate grounding of morality in morality, and there are no principles linking the nonmoral with morality, the moral practice cannot be grasped from the purely nonmoral perspective. People see the priority of his own moral intuitions at play over objective moral principles: If someone proposes a moral principle, and you raise a telling counterexample, the counterexample prevails, there need be no appeal to moral principles. The supposedly objective moral principles follow our own moral intuitions, they do not generate them.If moral terms were reducible to nonmoral terms, then morality could be the result of causal processes that make morality arbitrary. The conception of moral terms like “goodness” may be regarded as a mysterious fiction because it is unanalyzable or indefinable. Moral definitions only move the mysterious fictitious notion to elsewhere, for example to the unanalyzable term “ought”. It is difficult for moral judgments to correspond to something in the defined sense. Moral judgments end up sounding suspiciously vacuous: Objective moral properties are not necessary to explain any of the observable moral phenomena. People make moral judgments, experience moral sentiments, condemn, admire, and so on, but such phenomena can be explained by reference to psychology, social sciences, local survival environment, evolutionary and cultural historical developments.We can have reasons to act in a certain way only if acting is to our own purposes, goals. Our reasons for action are always sensitive to our varying ends and so they are subjective. But objective morality claims a supposed objective authority that transcends the ends of each of us, whether or not we care to accept it, inescapable, non-subjective and overriding. Moral might be objective if we all happened to have the same needs, interests, desires, goals, purposes, and so on, with respect to characters, choices, actions, and plans. However, we may not be contradicting each other to whatever extent we have different goals, or purposes, priorities. Why would we all desire the same ends if we were fully rational and found ourselves in the same circumstances?Which theory shows a true morality?Why would a subjectively chosen God be an objective moral authority?Since schizophrenia, dementia, and other mental illnesses can induce immoral behavior and severely restrict free will, the simplest and most justifiable belief is that God simply does not exist.God causes or allows through droughts, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes, bacteria, and viruses, people’s indiscriminate suffering, regardless free will. The randomness of suffering implies that we cannot infer that there is divine justice, love, and morality. The simplest and most justifiable belief is not that God cannot make us understand divine morality, justice and love, an unjustifiable belief, but that God simply does not exist. If God cannot prevent evil, how can we trust in divine providence, and that justice will eventually prevail?The premise of the unintelligibility and unknowability of God is adopted regardless of any fact about the world simply to try to save God existence and morality from any contradictions and refutations. It is impossible to see how it can be useful and moral to discuss from a religious, practical, scientific, moral and philosophical point of view the implications of a supposed being that is conveniently assumed to be unknowable and unintelligible regardless of any fact about the world.The counter argument of preferring a supposed God as the true moral authority is that without assuming previous moral values we will have no moral justification to believe in appeals to any supposed moral authority. You will always wonder if there is a moral justification for believing in a supposed moral authority. There is no way to determine impartially what is the morality of the supposed true God.How can a religious faith be an absolute objective foundation of the morality of humanity, if each religious faith is a matter of personal and private choice? There are no objective and absolute criteria for choosing between two rival moralities if morality needs religious faith. If you are saying that you have got hold of religious truth, do you have an impartial explanation of why most people in the world disagree? The fundamentally subjective nature of religious faith makes the aspirations of hegemony of a morality based on religious faith an authoritarian fantasy.What distinguishes science and religious faith is the criteria of objective impartial evidence. A religious faith arrogantly claiming to be right and imposing on others propositions for which no objective impartial evidence is even conceivable is a moral flaw.If a God as a moral being is imposed by definition, why glorify him if what he would prefer arbitrarily otherwise would be equally glorifiable? If we do not have independence in moral judgments, and if we do not have the idea that killing is wrong without divine punishment, not having a God to punish murderers would not be more fearful than not having a God to punish sneezes. Why should we accept that there is no evil God by definition? Why would love, justice, and morality necessarily come from the divine nature? If God's morality is unintelligible, why should we obey? Force is not moral foundation of obedience.Some people use their own moral contemporary intuitions to select some excerpts in sacred scriptures of thousands of years ago, and ignore slavery, genocides, homophobia, rapes and total male domination. At the next moment, they state that we cannot trust our own moral intuitions without their favorite excerpts of sacred scriptures. At present, we forbid slavery, genocides, homophobia, rapes and total male domination for the harm they cause, whether we believe in God or not. Trying to find in the sacred scriptures vestiges of our contemporary moral standards adds nothing to the belief that we must simply act in accordance with contemporary moral standards. Sacred scriptures as moral guides are unnecessary or they regress morality thousands of years. When people openly understand the development of religious morality in history, religious morality collapses as a bad human invention. Faith’s moralities resist free inquiry about their basic premises to accommodate social change, it is an obstacle to moral progress. Belief in God does not inspire people to be good: the leaders of the Inquisition feared God and desired paradise, but brutally tortured their victims. In society, there is a negative correlation between crime and lack of religious belief. (See for example Zuckerman, P. 2009. “Atheism, secularity, and well-being: How the findings of social science counter negative stereotypes and assumptions.” Sociology Compass; and Hofmann, W., Wisneski, D., Brandt, M., & Skitka, L. 2014. “Morality in everyday life.” Science)Morality based on religious faith must be questioned. Christianity of the Inquisition, Calvinists, and Puritans is no different in practice from the Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia, the Taliban, and ISIS. Religions believe that their different conceptions of God are consistent with divine evil, for unintelligible divine purposes. In this case, a God is compatible with the divine evil of allowing men to be deceived by faith in false gods, for unintelligible divine purposes. We classify convictions into degrees of credibility, determining how strongly valid objective unbiased proof exists. If faith ignores degrees of objective, unbiased support for evidence, then decisions based on religious faith can lead to moral disasters, as exemplified abundantly in human history. Religious faith can lead people to kill and die for it, without the need for further justification. It is gullibility with a halo of virtue, the denial of observation so that unearned moral authority can be preserved. Unjustified beliefs threaten lives, livelihood, and social well-being: Bogus medicine kills people, opportunist religious authorities take our money and freedom. Religious faith can make people completely blind to the evidence against their views, making people more vulnerable to oppression, fraud, and abuse. Living with religious faith is morally dangerous because it forces you to believe without impartial evidence justification.Why should we think that ideal moral agents defending deontological ethics or consequentialist ethics converge in the same moral beliefs?What is right is dictated by duties, independent of what promotes the best overall outcome? We can judge that it is morally wrong to kill one patient to make transplants to save five. But how do many need to die before someone does not think it's morally wrong to kill one innocent to save others? How many millions? If violating rights is so bad, why shouldn’t individuals be allowed to minimize rights violations by killing one to save many others from being killed? How can it ever be wrong to minimize evil or to do as much good as possible? When two promises conflict, how do deontologists explain which promise is overriding if for them the reason to keep each promise is simply that it was made, and not the consequences?Is it the deontological principle of humanity that holds that we should never treat persons merely as a means, but as ends in themselves, morally absolute? The position of consequentialists is that using someone merely as a means is not wrong, because the value of persons reduces entirely to their value in the production of welfare, a function of the quality of its experiences and the total amount of welfare. They are thus inevitably used merely as a means. Most people are unwilling to deny the principle outright, since it seems to be the best explanation of many of our ordinary moral views such as that we should not kill someone even if the overall benefit of killing is somewhat greater than the overall benefit of killing. This invites the difficult question of just how bad the consequences of adhering to the principle of humanity need to be before it is right to abandon it. Consider the use of terror bombing by Britain and the United States during World War II. Both the British and later the Americans deliberately bombed German and Japanese cities in order to destroy enemy morale and, in the case of the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in order to persuade Japan to capitulate. It seemed to many that those civilians were being used as merely a means, in contravention to the principle of humanity. The principle of humanity dismisses as irrelevant ends that are, in fact, morally relevant: Would anything, even murder, torture or genocide, not be morally permissible if a greater catastrophic moral horror were to be avoided? The civilian deaths and sufferings that this war would have involved could not have been justified by the doctrine of double effect, the idea that these civilian deaths were not intended as a means to an end, but were simply acceptable “collateral damage,” a foreseen, and proportional, side effect of acceptable military action. Given the scale of systematic civilian deaths, it seems plausible that the deaths were intended as a means to an end.If in consequentialism personal moral duties to any particular people are not important but only best overall outcome, why do we give more partial concern to our families and friends? Wouldn't it be a mistake to discriminate against the black minority under Jim Crow laws in the United States, against universal human rights and respect for people and autonomy, regardless of whether they promoted the consequent happiness of most whites? A more equal situation is the more just and right, even if it is not the overall best in terms of total or average happiness value. Consequentialism cannot adequately accommodate our more egalitarian intuitions about distributive justice, and it is indifferent about the distribution of welfare. Imagine a choice between an outcome where overall welfare is large but distributed unequally and an outcome where overall welfare is smaller but distributed equally. Consequentialism is taken to favor outcomes with greater overall welfare even if it is also less equally distributed. How do we balance non arbitrarily the pressure to do justice in favor of more equitable distribution of material goods with the need to promote productivity through economic incentives for the effort to develop talent and hard work?All of us prioritize deontology and consequentialism probably depending on the type of circumstances in which each of us finds ourselves subjectively. Why should we maintain consistency as a moral reason to do anything just to do not lose of explanatory power resulting from a dismissal of generalizations?Why be moral?There are multiple normative moral and nonmoral standpoints which generate genuine reasons for action, none of which is normatively supreme. The question “Do I have an overriding reason to act as morality requires?” is empty unless it is specified what kind of reason and situation one is asking for, such as a moral reason, a legal reason, or a self-interested reason. Rational ends are defined independently from morality. There is consequently no guarantee that a person who adopts the necessary means to her ends will comply with her moral duties. A criminal may suffer no weakness of will or inconsistency, but nonetheless act in a way we consider morally wrong. Reasons for immoral action could be rationally objective in this way. Morality can be one normative domain among many: actions can be legal or illegal, prudent or imprudent, or as prohibited or required by etiquette, etc. People can have rational ends for which moral compliances are not necessary means. Acquiring a moral character is not always the best bet for achieving our nonmoral ends: There is uncertainty about the degree of a person’s dependence on others and corresponding vulnerability to their sanctions, along with psychological assumptions relating to people’s abilities to identify the character of the persons they interact with, as well as susceptibility to feeling guilty, and so forth. How morality acquires psychological authority is an empirical question. Rationality is simply one standpoint among others. Even if it were granted that good agency requires acting from public reasons, it is unclear why people have reason to avoid becoming a bad agent. Moral behavior is always rationally permissible, it is not always rationally required. Being a good man can be rationally optional. No matter how morality is defined, there is not a normative reason to act morally when morality and nonmoral reasons conflict. The problem of morality lies in reconciling morality’s alleged objectivity with its practical rationality for everybody simultaneously. The most rational thing to do means what most conduces to fulfillment of the agent’s aims. If we don’t have reasons to be moral in cases in which there is nothing we want that we get by acting morally, then there really is no such thing as overriding moral obligation:Consider an agent who would receive great satisfaction from killing another person whom he hates and whom he can kill without cost because the killer will die soon anyway. Suppose a mafia boss in a small city will kill me if I do not murder two innocent people for him. Surely it would be immoral, but would I really be better off dead?Several Nazis on several occasions tossed babies into the air like clay plates and shot them. Historian Helen Ellerbe: “In the Inquisition, girls as young as nine and boys as young as ten were tried for witchcraft. Children much younger were tortured to extract testimony against their parents. Children were then flogged while they watched their parents burn.” The wrongdoer may succeed just by being stronger, cleverer, or more ruthless that others. He does not expect that others will do as he does. Thus, his actions are not likely to be self-defeating, so for him do the evil is rational. It may be reasonable certainty about a person's degree of dependence on others and corresponding vulnerability to their sanctions, along with insusceptibility to feeling guilt.Can a reason justify an action only if someone can justify it to other agents in terms that they can accept? Why should we assume that two agents could not have reasons for pursuing incompatible ends? For example, struggling to secure the last of the food to provide for their own families. Or suppose someone stole a stranger's life raft in order to save one of his children, but the stranger could not save one of his children. The moral skeptic thinks it is rational for the agent to pursue her own interests. There is no rational way to resolve conflicts between the reasons of morality and self-interest. To think that moral conflicts can always be rationally resolved, it is the idea that there is some supreme standpoint from which we can evaluate conflicts between morality and self-interest, but there is not any supreme standpoint. Neither the moral skeptic nor the defenders of morality can provide a rational justification for their view, neither side succeeds in defending that its side is more fundamental than the other. Even if there is no reason to reject morality, the question remains whether only the recognition of moral reasons will motivate a rational agent. It is not necessarily irrational others not to be motivated by our moral reasons. We can have limits to what we are prepared to sacrifice for social goals. When we plead with someone to be reasonable, we are often expecting him to take other people’s interests into account, presupposing an aim of reaching some sort of collective agreement on a course of action.We deny be morally committed to produce the maximum objective impartial good for humanity, rather than for our framework of family, race, religion, cultural heritage of traditions, community and nationality, which provides a secure framework within which someone can live. The gain of happiness if one dedicates oneself to increasing the care of oneself, one's family, one's community, or one's country for a richer life, would be small in comparison to the gain of happiness if one dedicates oneself to increasing the care of sick, oppressed, hungry, homeless strangers.What is moral objectivity?Defenses of objective morality need show that a criterion of objectivity is reliable and confer to objectivity a high likelihood of trust. Wasn't slavery consensus? Why does we need assume that an existing social consensus must be right? Experiments show that seeing an issue as objective correlates with the perception of current consensus on the issue: People tend to vary their estimations of objectivity in accordance with the subject matter of the belief, for example a belief about the morality of abortion is attributed a considerably lesser degree of objectivity than other beliefs such as the wrongness of opening gunfire on a crowd. Those who believe in objective morality can show greater moral commitment and conviction. But they can show greater repugnant antisocial moral commitments too, including those that underlie terrorist acts. The belief in objective morality predicts greater intolerance of another person who disagrees. (See for example Goodwin, G. & Darley, J. 2008. “The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism.” Cognition 106: 1339–1366.)The moral objectivists alleged difference in factual beliefs and life circumstances rarely justify a different morality. Moral objectivists have argued that moral disagreements very often derive from disagreement about nonmoral facts. But if ignorance of nonmoral facts can undermine the existence of a true moral disagreement, it can undermine existence of a true agreement too. To moral objectivists slave owners may have believed that their slaves were intellectually inferior, and Inuits who practiced infanticide may have been forced to do so because of resource scarcity in the tundra. But would the inferiority of one group really justify enslaving them? If so, why don’t we think it’s acceptable to enslave people with low IQs? Would life in the tundra justify infanticide? If so, why don’t we just kill off destitute children around the globe instead of giving donations to Oxfam? Differences in circumstances do not explain why people don't share the same values. When scientific errors are identified, corrections are made. By contrast, there is no evidence for rational value convergence as a result of moral conflicts. Even with our modern understanding of racial equality, there are more slaves in the world today than ever before, although they represent a smaller percentage of the world’s population than in the past. Slavery exists from mega-harems in Dubai to illicit brothels in Bucharest, from slave quarries in India to child markets in Haiti. (See E. Benjamin Skinner, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery)There is no objective reason to prioritize among incommensurable moral values and there is no one moral value that explains all other moral values. Different values call for different responses: Respect, love, awe, admiration, nurturing, and so on. Values, for example such as dignity and autonomy, cannot be objectively traded off with pleasures: Sources of pleasure have a particularly steep rate of diminishing response value. The first donut you eat is very tasty, the second is fine, the third may give no pleasure at all. But this response does not work when we consider values such as dignity, or autonomy. If there is a variety of ethical values, and if they are incommensurable, one would expect irreconcilable disagreement about what morally should prioritize. Objectivists imagine that ethical truth is possible only if there is the possibility of a singular moral guidance. But how should we prioritize the harm caused by one moral transgression with the impurity caused by another?Suppose the Police Chief and Judge prosecute and punish a single innocent scapegoat to prevent rioting that will lead to substantial destruction of property and loss of life. In an experiment of Peng, Doris, Nichols, and Stich, American subjects are significantly more likely to think that the Police Chief and Judge are morally wrong. Chinese subjects are significantly more likely to hold the potential rioters responsible for the scapegoating, they attributed more responsibility at the level of the collective than did the more individualist Americans. (See How to Argue about Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism John M. Doris and Alexandra Plakias in Moral Psychology Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong)Making a concrete moral solution obey an abstract impartial categorical moral rule is only valuable if this is the ultimate goal, but this is exactly what is in dispute about moral objectivity. Is morality grounded in maximize objectively to the society the impersonal, impartial good of the consequences of the actions or rules rather than our own interests? Some forms of moral partiality are morally admirable. Loyalty to one’s family, friends, community or country, for instance, is commonly regarded as a virtue. Parents are thought to be morally obliged to take the best affordable care of their own children and grandparents. Friendship requires us to do certain favors for friends without weighing our friends' welfare impartially against our working for a charity. We are simply less likely to conclude that our friend acted disreputably, partiality is part of what makes good friends. Forms of love can conflict with the requirements of impartiality. There is not a morally neutral decision between impartiality and partiality, so there isn’t an objective neutral position to settle moral disagreement.What is a mind-independence as characterization of moral objectivity?It is not possible morality to be mind-independent to be objective. Consider the suggestion that objective moral facts, like objective scientific facts, are independent of our thoughts, capacities, and sensibilities. Our moral obligations are bound up with us and with who we are. Moral facts are obviously mind-dependent: The relative pleasure or happiness that an action brings about may well determine the action’s moral status. Facts involving moral properties depend essentially on our responses, intentions, beliefs, and feelings, facts involving moral principles cannot be mind-independent: maximize utility, act in accordance with the duty of fidelity, a patient’s informed consent can be what makes permissible an invasive medical procedure.According to classical utilitarianism, one is obligated to act so as to maximize moral goodness, and moral goodness is identical to happiness. Happiness is a mind-dependent phenomenon. According to Kant, one's moral obligations are determined by which maxims can be consistently willed as universal laws; moreover, the only thing that is good in itself is a good will. Willing is mind-dependent.If moral truths are like the axioms of mathematics, and they are out there to be intuited, then we should expect suitably well-informed people and with same discernment to give incompatible accounts of what these moral truths are. Mathematics, if we are modeling the world, is not only deduction, but also in fact intelligible to imagine mathematical truths being different, like Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. In mathematics we don't deduce models of the world from axioms. Rather we try to model the world by introducing axioms, check which theorems follow from the axioms and compare these results in the world against the model. If the results agree we are happy. If the results disagree, we change the axioms. Deduction helps us find consequences from the axioms, but it does not tell us how to gauge the validity of the model, nor how to adjust the axioms. Mathematical objects play a representational role in empirical science, and because of this, they don’t need be mind-independent in order to be applicable. Consider “The average mother has 2.4 children”: there is not an actual object known as the average mother. Models of morality change with contingent concerns and desires, preferences and motivations. The role of axioms in pure mathematics and in physics is different. In pure mathematics one neither "proves" or "disproves" an axiom assumption for a set of theorems. In contrast, in physics a comparison of axioms with experiments always makes sense.Is morality like colors, they are real but mind-dependent? Are virtue and color not qualities of actions or objects, but they are internal responses that only exist in the perceiver's mind? What perceptions represent when they represent colors? Some of the colors we can see don’t have a corresponding wavelength, they are entirely constructed by the brain: white, sky blue, brown, magenta, rose, etc. We're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it reality. Perceptually things seem to be, say red, because those things and their properties causally interact with our perceptual system. But if moral properties lack causal power, then we cannot explain why morality seem to the intellect to be true. Immoral acts comprise a miscellany: lying, stealing, hoarding, hurting, killing, neglecting, harassing, polluting, insulting, molesting, vandalizing, disrespecting, and so forth. What objective properties do these things have in common apart from the fact that we disapprove of them all? If our moral concepts were responses dependent of objective properties, disagreements about their truth would necessarily involve a concept perception error on someone's part. But it seems that a utilitarian and a Kantian may both be conceptually competent while disagreeing about what is wrong. So, for example, in disagreement over the moral permissiveness of eating meat, it is unclear what are the criteria considering which there is a true normativity. Sometimes the ground of a common value would be lacking. Consider disagreements about the taste of coriander. Studies have revealed a genetic variation that leads to coriander having a fresh taste for most, but soapy for some. It simply turns out that the disagreement about this value is based on a false assumption: namely, that there is only one way for coriander to really taste. There is not a true normativity.Moral judgments are like when we evaluate sunsets as beautiful, novels as meritorious, motor vehicles as good or bad ones. These evaluations don't need that our judgments are based by a mind-independent reality, or need consensus with others whose basic desires might be different from our own. We will not need to believe in a transcendent goodness relating to human beings any more than we believe in transcendent automotive value.The objection to choosing an ideal judge as an objective ethic is that we cannot be justified in believing appeals to a moral authority without before assuming moral beliefs.There are no authoritative moral judges or decision procedures for determining God’s will, or of which act will maximize utility or when we must follow deontological morality. The debate will always come down to whether there is some moral reason to believe in moral authorities. Alleged objective moral authorities can make disputes more intransigent if the parties consider their positions to be the only morally correct ones. A moral authority is not like that of a judge whose decisions constitute the law, since morality remains independent of someone beliefs.Why suppose that the ideal judge would use for example a utilitarian calculus, as opposed to another method of making moral judgments, as deontological ethics? There is no fact of the matter about what an ideal moral judge would approve of, any more than there is a fact of the matter about whether the ideal judge prefers vanilla to chocolate ice cream. A thorny problem for objective moral realism is explaining why people with different moral standards are necessarily simply talking about different subjects, while believing that they are talking about the same thing, but not necessarily those who disagree on an ideal vacation.The strongest possible answer to the question of existence of moral objectivity is to show that an individual can flourish without living a moral life: In the United States and South Africa, and elsewhere, gated and walled communities, private schools, the flight of white class to increasingly remote suburbs, gentrification, signify the widespread conviction that one can isolate oneself from the moral problems of society at large. A just world would be one in which one could not succeed in this effort.If there is no adequate calculator to tell us when it would be rationally best to be moral or immoral, then morality as an objective and inescapable true authority is undermined. There is not a normative reason to act morally when morality and nonmoral reasons conflict.WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS IF THERE IS NOT A TRUE MORALITY ?Does the fact that the perspective of a true morality can be rejected without the charge of irrationality make ethics irrelevant? No. Morality is the prevalence of putting oneself in the position of others, this prevalence is evidence that the majority is interested in acting in ways that can be justified impartially in a moral community. However, accepting or rejecting the impartial categorical perspective is not an all-or-nothing thing. It is possible to have a strong, but not overriding or categorical desire to act as required in a moral community.If nothing is morally wrong as moral nihilists claim, then is not it morally wrong to torture babies just for fun?The view that the self-evidence for moral realism in case of conflicts with nihilism trumps in principle, begs the question, as it assumes the claim what nihilism cannot be true. Beg the question to argue against moral nihilism based on common moral beliefs, no matter how obvious those beliefs might seem to us, and no matter how well these common beliefs cohere together. If moral nihilism cannot be ruled out in any way, then moral skepticism follows. Some people are led to moral nihilism by the absence of any defensible theory of morality. Some people might believe moral nihilism for reasons similar to those that led scientists to reject phlogiston. The nihilist theorist knows of no phenomenon whose explanation necessarily requires supposed moral facts; the very features of moral properties like free will seem incoherent. Why don't most people torture babies just for fun? If all our moral beliefs can be explained by social sciences, evolution and psychology without assuming that categorical, absolute, objective, real, mind-independent conception of morality is literally true, then we can reject morality as true as we reject the literalness of metaphors, fictions, make-believes. Knowledge implies truth, but justified belief does not. Thus, if moral beliefs cannot be literally true, they still might be justified in some way that is independent of moral literal truth.The idea that without a supposed absolute, objective, real, mind-independent morality we become immediately antisocial and irresponsible, requires the unsubstantiated premise that absolute, objective, real, mind-independent conception of morality is the only thing that keeps us kind, altruistic, cooperative, and so forth.If moral rationality is sufficient for moral judgment, absence of emotions won't lead to deficits in moral judgment. The crucial case is psychopaths, who seem to be just as rational as the rest of us, but lack emotions. The individuals who are indifferent to the fear, distress, and sadness of others, who are difficult to socialize, show the importance of emotion and affect in moral cognition and behavior. Psychopathy is a neurodevelopmental personality disorder affecting approximately 1% of the general population and 20–30% of prison population. Relative to non-psychopathic criminals, psychopaths are responsible for a disproportionate amount of repetitive crime and violence in society. They lack attachment to others, and difficulties experiencing empathic concern and remorse. They lack fear of punishment, and do not experience insight into the consequences of their harmful actions for others. Structural neuroimaging studies associate psychopathy with a host of morphological brain abnormalities. A study using EEG demonstrated abnormal relative insensitivity to actual pain. Nevertheless, their capacity to understand an agent’s intentionality is not impaired. This uncoupling between affective sharing and cognitive understanding likely contributes to psychopaths’ callous disregard for the rights and feelings of others.However, emotions may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for morality. Empathic concern does not necessarily produce moral behavior. Empathy may lead one to act in a way that violates justice and fairness, when, for instance, allocating resources preferentially to the person for whom empathy was felt. On the other hand, a lack of empathic concern for the well-being of others is a risk factor for amoral behavior, hallmark of individuals with psychopathy. There is a complex nature in the relationships between empathy and morality. Empathic arousal may be necessary to develop some aspects of moral reasoning, such as care morality. But in some situations empathy can be powerless in the face of rationalization. Empathy is relatively more predictive of prosocial behavior when the victim is an individual. In a social context, reasoning can play a more crucial role in guiding a moral decision. (See Why Developmental Neuroscience Is Critical for the Study of Morality - Jean Decety and Jason M. Cowell)Some moral philosophers think they can provide a moral theory capable of convincing a psychopath. Psychopaths don't lack generally reasoning abilities, but lack the capacity to respond with feelings like empathy and guilt. A generally convincing moral theory for psychopaths cannot be provided because a person who is unable to understand emotional motivation and who refuses to accept negative emotions from babies tortured just for fun will usually not be convinced by any rational argument in favor of a moral conviction. Psychopaths don't care about the harmful consequences their actions have for others. Rationality doesn’t enable moral objectivity. It is generally not possible for a belief about a matter of fact to motivate without the presence of emotion. Passions don't represent how things are, so they can’t be true or false or stand in logical relations. Therefore motivating processes don't deserves to be called reasoning.Why has humanity managed to persist in the widespread delusion that there is a true morality? If morality is false, how can it to be useful? Judging an act to be something that must be done whether one likes it or not may strengthen one’s resolve to perform it. It may be motivationally superior to the thought “this action would satisfy my desires” because this judgment seems to invite inner rationalizations that ultimately amount to self-sabotage. By contrast, thinking “I just must do it” works to shut down inner debate. Desires for the benefits of living in a cooperative society are at risk of being overwhelmed by short-sighted selfish temptations. The morality strengths our motivation to act cooperatively by providing false categorical imperatives.Does the belief that morality is false need to be suppressed for moral commitments to be effective in bolstering self-control and cooperation? We can interpret that explanations in moral language are somewhat like a metaphor, a fiction, a make-believe, of the true explanations in social sciences, psychological and evolutionary terms. Like a metaphor, moral language has a literal false meaning, but it can convey real truths of great importance standing behind it. Metaphors and moral language can be emotionally deeply motivating in ways that are of enormous importance. The belief that morality is literally categorical, objective, absolute, is sometimes beneficial and sometimes harmful. It can inflame disagreements and encourage disputants to dig in their heels and refuse to compromise. If one interprets a moral judgment as true in a categorical objective mind-independent sense, this judgment tends to make one less open towards diverging moral views. Judgments which are regarded as subjective expression of desires, by contrast, make one more open towards diverging moral views. We should normally be on the lookout for adverse effects of moralizing, and be prepared to go for a neutral normative language if possible, like scientific and legalistic language. Moral terms are too vague and open to interpretation. There are nonmoral values, norms, and reasons, considerations that lie behind morality as absolute categorical objective normative truth.Is there a kind psychological dissonance if a person believes that promise-keeping is not categorically obligatory while cultivating the emotions and motivations consistent with promise-keeping being figuratively categorical? Metaphors, like moral terms, have vividness and focuses attention in a way that a neutral normative language talk cannot, like scientific and legalistic language. This is the principal general reason why metaphor and moral language has such a central place in our language and thoughts. What justifies avoiding the breakers of promises is the belief that one is untrustworthy, not that morality is literally categorical, objective, absolute.Can moral responsibility be ultimately under control of free will?Can moral responsibility be ultimately under control of free will? Control is possible if someone controls morally himself, but then, does the early self-control a later self, leading to infinite regress in a finite life?An agent acts with moral responsibility only if he has control over the ultimate source of his action. There is no control over the ultimate source of agent’s action if it is caused by natural laws and the past, but also if it has no cause of control. Nothing can be causally prior to itself. Therefore, moral responsibility and free will are impossible.Is it true that because determinism, that of an agent could not avoid acting wrong, and therefore morality and criminal punishment are errors? From the skeptical of responsibility perspective, morality is not about backward-looking assessments of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, rather, morality is forward-looking, functions by invoking recommendation. The denial of moral responsibility is consistent with the principles of moral rationalism. The imposition of sanctions could have purposes other than the punishment of perpetrators: it can also be justified by its role in incapacitating, rehabilitating, and deterring offenders. There are measures for preventing crime more generally, such as providing for adequate education and mental health care, which the moral responsibility skeptic can readily endorse. Juries routinely condemn defendants without empirical evidence that defendants' will is not determined by any antecedent conditions outside them. Even if a criminal is not morally responsible if there is no free will, it may be as legitimate to segregate or control him in defense of others as it is to quarantine or control those who are not responsible for their contagious diseases. We want to prevent the effects of misbehavior just as we want to prevent the effects of disease or hurricanes.If free will is the basis of moral responsibility, why can moral judgment have morally irrelevant reasons of which we are not even aware? Moral psychology experiments show that the moral thought is affected by environmental factors of which we are not even aware that are completely irrelevant to the moral issues. Examples among many: A- Emotion: viewing a humorous video clip can have a substantial impact on participant’s moral intuitions. Hearing different kinds of audio, stand-up comedy or inspirational stories, has divergent effects on moral intuitions. B- The order in which the moral hypotheses are considered. C- Moral judgments can be affected by the smells in our environment: a whiff of fart spray; spraying the questionnaire with a disinfectant spray; people are more unconsciously generous outside a store from which the smell of freshly baked bread emanates, than outside a hardware store. D - Whether we're in a messy room, or in a dark room. E- Whether we've recently washed our hands, even the proximity of a hand sanitizer dispenser, the presence of dirty pizza boxes, have all been reported to influence moral intuitions. (See for example Sinnott-Armstrong, 2006, “Moral Intuitionism Meets Empirical Psychology”, in Terry Horgan editor, Metaethics After Moore; and “Moral dilemmas and moral rules” - S Nichols, R Mallon - Cognition, 2006) Supposed intuitive objective moral self-evident propositions cannot be proved or known by inference from premises. But moral intuitions provide justification only after inferences to check them. At least some of a priori or intuitive moral judgment are highly unreliable because various morally irrelevant factors and biases can affect moral judgments. Supposed “objective” intuitive moral claims aren’t self-evident because non-inferential justification of moral intuitions is unreliable.Would skepticism about moral responsibility undermine attitudes such as moral resentment, indignation, guilt, and gratitude, essential to good personal relationships? Is there a tendency of the moral skeptic to suppress evidence for moral skepticism when witnessing atrocities or when engaging in moral argument and political debate? The understanding of the lack of moral responsibility modifies the rationality of certain emotional reactions. While moral anger, resentment and indignation don’t disappear if we feel that moral responsibility doesn’t exist, there are alternative attitudes available to us, such as moral concern, disappointment, sorrow, and resolve. Instead of moral guilt feelings, an agent can acknowledge that he has acted immorally and he feels deep sorrow for what he has done, and as a result he is motivated to eradicate her disposition to behave in a bad way. One can be thankful to a young child for some kindness without supposing that he is praiseworthy in the basic desert sense. In certain situations, refraining from resentment or moral anger may be beyond our power and, therefore, even the skeptic of moral responsibility may not be able to adopt alternative attitudes. We might expect to be unable to appreciably reduce immediate emotional reactions of moral anger as an immediate reaction upon being deeply hurt in an intimate personal relationship. However, in a non-immediate rational reflection, moral anger can be diminished or even eliminated, and we can reject any force that is supposed to justify a damaging response to evil.If free will is the basis of moral responsibility, why does luck undermine evaluations of moral responsibility?We seem to blame those who have murdered more than we blame those who have merely attempted murder, even if the reason for the lack of success in the second case is that the intended victim unexpectedly tripped and fell to the floor.Imagine that two otherwise conscientious people have forgotten to have their brakes checked recently and experience brake failure, but only one of whom finds a child in the path of his car. Why does the unfortunate driver receive more moral blame and criminal punishment?Gauguin feels some responsibility towards his family and is reasonably happy living with them, but nonetheless abandons them, leaving them in dire straits. Gauguin chooses a life of painting in Tahiti over a life with his family, not knowing whether he will be a great painter. In one scenario, he goes on to become a great painter, and in another, he fails. Thus, how the success turns out, something which might be almost entirely a matter of resultant luck, seems to have a lot to do with the evaluation he'll get.We tend to think that people should be praised or blamed only on based on what they can control, and yet we regularly praise and blame people based on the results of their actions, even if these are beyond the control of the agents.Luck undermines evaluations of moral responsibility. Our genes, caregivers, peers, and other environmental influences all contribute to making us who we are. We lack control over everything: the results of our actions, our circumstances, our constitution, and our causal history. Where can one draw a line of principle between worthy luck and condemnable luck?Does the free will of Compatibilism preserve moral responsibility?Compatibilism claims that we have free will and that we are morally responsible even though all events are causally determined. We can define free will in terms of control in the action necessary for moral responsibility. To the deterministic aspect of Compatibilism, the source of the traits and dispositions of the agent can be traced back to conditions of origin that were completely beyond his control, having them is subject to luck. To the free will aspect of Compatibilism, agents are responsible for their actions if they intentionally modify themselves to have a certain set of traits and dispositions. A compatibilist might say that if an agent takes responsibility for his dispositions and values, in time he will become morally responsible for them. But having the series of dispositions and values by which agents shape and modify their dispositions and values is subject to luck too. Thus, the actions by which agents take responsibility for their dispositions and values are explained by luck.Why does rationality as the defining normative authority impose moral actions to yourself? You are willing an end not necessarily imposes rational actions to yourself. We can act against our better judgement: We can spend on luxuries worth a month's income, we can fight to quit smoking. The normativity of coherence is merely apparent, or may be merely a standard of proper functioning without giving anyone reason to comply with it. The rationality of evaluations doesn’t entail any conclusions about what we really do: One can be irrational without having any intentions based on false beliefs. One could fail to intend the means believed necessary for one’s ends because other motivations, or one devalue the reward that comes later, which don’t necessarily involve any false beliefs. One can also have intentions based on false beliefs without being irrational. There are actions that are morally good to do, but not morally bad to not do: Why is it more praiseworthy if an agent risks his life testifying in court to save someone, to whom the agent has no special duty, from unjust imprisonment, than if the agent only sacrifices his afternoon? If morality is rationality, and the rationality is the same in both cases, why is there more praise in the first case? Moral rationality means that the rational ends are morally defensible, but it is better that the idea of rationality is independent of morality, or there is a circular definition of rationality and morality. Rationality is not intrinsically moral: Recent work in empirical ethics has indicated that even when we are asked to give reasons for our moral intuitions, we are often finding nothing to say in their defense (See Haidt, J., 2001. “The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment,” Psychological Review, 108: 814–34). As we saw in previous section, the supposedly intuitive "objective" moral claims are not self-evident because the non-inferential justification of moral intuitions is unreliable. Even professional philosophers have been found to be prone to such lapses of clear thinking. Moral normativity hasn't both inescapability and authority. Even if all agents manifest a reliable connection between moral judgment and motivation to act morally, it will be false that such a connection is necessary. (See Schwitzgebel, E. and Cushman, F., 2012. “Expertise in moral reasoning? Order effects on moral judgment in professional philosophers and non-philosophers,” Mind and Language, 27: 135–53.)If there is not a true morality, why is it morally wrong to think that something is morally wrong for others, but not for me? There is only one real way to stop oneself distorting things in one’s own favor, to see if really one is so different from others that what would be required of them is not required of oneself. The appeal to supposed objective categorical principles doesn't stop this sort of thing, because appeal to a supposed categorical objectivity can be distorted too. In being driven by supposed objective categorical principles, a principled person can distort the relevance of some features by insisting on filtering them through principles he thought objective. If after you found supposed objective principles, you are going to be incorrigible, you had better always be right; incorrigible error is the worst of all worlds. Reliance on supposed objective moral principles encourages dogmatism and narrow-mindedness. People who have high estimates of their objectivity might be less likely to take verification measures against bias. Kant in "Metaphysics of Morals" argues that masturbation is so immoral that it exceeds even murdering oneself since one uses himself to satisfy an animal impulse. He argues that women should not be allowed the right to vote since her existence is only natural. And bastard children can be freely killed since they are born outside the protection of the law. A confident belief in the reliability of one’s intuition can be tragical.Does thinking rationally require at least that one thinks consistently, and in ethics this just means taking the same feature to be the same reason wherever it occurs? Moral skepticism claims that one cannot extract from one case anything that is guaranteed to make a difference to another. Moral skepticism allows a relevance of experience, what one should not do is to say: “it mattered before and so it must matter after”. There is no need to suppose that the way in which morality works is by the extraction of objective principles from the earlier cases, which we then impose on a new case. When we are thinking of reasons for a general belief, the sort of consistency required of us is merely that we do not adopt beliefs that cannot all be true together. There is not a consistency requirement in a different way when we turn to moral beliefs. If someone can need medical help, and I can be the only person around to summon it, I don’t need supposed general moral objective principles, but simply my human nature.On a moral skepticism account of morality people are left to work out their differences with each other in ways that are very much like the give-and-take of politics. One must make decisions about whether to bargain or compromise partly within and partly outside one’s moral framework. Human beings have strong natural propensities to try to dominate others and to avoid domination by others. The nonexistence of a true morality against human sacrifice and slavery, does not entail that there are no grounds for rational criticism. We can criticize these practices from a point of view that relies on our own values. Moral skeptics can criticize moral systems and they can identify what they consider behavior progress. Skepticism will not understand moral progress as movement toward a single true categorical objective morality. If there’s no moral true justification, there is dogmatic solidarity, making community with the people who are like you, and saying things to each other that you all endorse as a way of feeling community with others. Against whomhow objectionable in itself, can be believe in a single true categorical morality, the moral skepticism argument is that they will have to arbitrarily dogmatize single correct answers to fundamental disagreements without giving plausible and specific explanations for why moral skepticism is in error. Categorical objectivists might propose that fundamental disagreements arise because at least one side has an interest in not acknowledging some moral or nonmoral facts. The moral skeptical could retort that this sort of explanation is quite general. As seen in a previous section, experiments show that seeing an issue as objective correlates with the perception of the current consensus on the issue. Folk morality doesn’t think that there is only one correct answer for all controverse moral claims.There are no moral categorical reasons to obey. For example, an exceptionless moral principle “don't kill an innocent” might prevent a little girl needless suffering as a terminally ill patient that would serve as a reason for killing a little girl. Context at least partly constitute the meaning. A spy might well not be “honest” whereas a platoon leader relentless in training his soldiers who are about to be sent to the battlefields might well be only “cruel”. Depending on contexts, “honesty” and “cruelty” might well change from blamed to praised. An action is not in any way determined by universal moral principles, but by the relevant context. One cannot extract from one moral case anything that is guaranteed to make a difference to another. Any morality is ad hoc. Subjectively, any action, no matter how objectionable, can be morally permissible if it were necessary to prevent a sufficiently greater evil.More Argumentation Details - Does morality have an objective, inescapable authority?Empirical research does not support that moral agreement necessarily arises when contenders are fully rational and fully informed of the relevant nonmoral facts. If even with knowledge of nonmoral facts, persistent moral disagreement does not represent a threat to moral objectivity, how or why would be morality self-evident?Objective nonmoral facts can influence morality, but morality can determine how we use objective nonmoral facts: Our moral-political preferences affect the ability to solve mathematical problems, which should be the cornerstone of rationality and objectivity. An experiment can prove this: First, the capacity to handle numbers and the moral-political inclinations of the 1,111 volunteers is measured. They are then divided into groups that were presented to different versions of the same mathematical problem involving the calculation of proportions. It wasn't an easy question, as 59% of people couldn't solve it. Those who were good at math were able to do it well, but the results changed depending on how the problem was presented. If described in a moral-political neutral way, such as calculating the efficacy of a skin cream, the numerically competent had no difficulty in solving it. But when the same question became about the effectiveness of arms control in combating crime, moral-political preferences spoke louder. In fact, those who were better at math give an answer more related to their previous preferred side than the less math skilled. If there is a good picture to describe our moral rationality, it is less that of a scientist interested in obtaining the truth than that of a lawyer interested in winning an argument. When moral-political relevant facts become identified as symbols of membership in and loyalty to affinity groups, people will be motivated to selectively engage empirical evidence in a manner that more supposedly reliably connects their beliefs to their moral-political groups than to the positions that are best supported by the evidence. (See Misinformation and identity-protective cognition - Dan M. Kahan, Behavioural Public Policy, Vol 1, Issue 1,2017).Moral-political disagreement grows when science literacy and numeracy increase. Ordinary individuals remarkably more well equipped with science’s knowledge select more scientific information that secure their previous moral-political personal interests. Disagreement about scientific facts stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: Between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share moral-political close ties, and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare. (See The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Nature climate change, 2(10), 732, 2012)Americans from Southern States were much more likely to endorse violence of various forms in response to moral transgression than Americans from the North. Because many Southerners are descendants of Scots-Irish immigrants who had to develop a “culture of honor” to survive under harsh, comparatively lawless conditions in Northern Ireland before coming to the United States. (See Nisbett, R.E., and Cohen, D. Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, 1996) The moral judgments of rural Mayan people in the Mexican state of Chiapas do not judge actions causing harms to be worse than omissions which cause identical harms, while nearby urban Mayan people judge actions to be substantially worse than omissions. (See Abarbanell, Linda and Marc D. Hauser, 2010, “Mayan Morality: An Exploration of Permissible Harms”, Cognition, 115(2): 207–224)It is a fallacy assuming that because all instances of moral disagreement that we have ever encountered can be due to a supposed deficiency of true information among interlocutors, providing true information will lead to moral convergence. This is like saying that because a death was caused by a lack of oxygen in the room, death would have been avoided had the room been filled with 100% oxygen. The question of what shared psychological traits and information are sufficient to ensure a convergence in moral agreement is to a large extent an empirical matter, many of the details of which remain unknown. There is a growing body of literature revealing that the things that can influence an individual's morally relevant attitudes can be quite surprising. We might not have supposed, for example, that a person's tendency to act dishonestly can be enhanced by her wearing sunglasses or being placed in a dimly lit room. Nor might we have guessed the effect of handwashing on a person's moral evaluations. We might not have appreciated how easy it is to manipulate someone's moral opinions by placing him in presence of a dirty tissue (see a previous section). Attitudes prompted manipulatively in the setting of a psychology lab often survive the debriefing session. Disgust can remain in situations of full information. Even medical placebos sometimes work in conditions of full information. (See Richard Joyce - The Accidental Error Theorist’ in Oxford Studies in Metaethics vol 6)Is there a true objective categorical morality? The most plausible explanation for persistent disagreement among rational agents, with the same information and same discernment, may be that there are no facts that make objective categorical morality true. Consider case examples:Is human life always better than the pleasure of a good meal? No matter how rational and well informed we are, we are incapable of being motivated to count everyone’s interests. An emergency-room doctor can efficiently spend 20 hours a day saving lives instead of only 16. If he spends only 16 hours at work and chooses to spend precious hours during which she could be saving lives having fine meals instead, he has not measured the values at stake incorrectly because what matters in a lived life is the pursuit of a balance of values. Therefore sometimes the pleasure of getting a good meal is more important than the value of human life.Suppose you and your best friend are in a car. He drives. Suddenly he runs over a pedestrian. He was at a speed above the permitted speed. There are no cameras or witnesses besides you. Your friend's lawyer says that if you testify, making sure he was driving below the speed limit, you will spare him from prison. What should you do?: a) You should really honor the duties of friendship. b) You should not lie in court. This is one of the tests used to differentiate from other countries, countries with at least 4 qualities: Western, industrialized, rich and democratic. In countries such as the USA, Canada and Switzerland, more than 90% of entrepreneurs and managers who passed the test answered "b". In countries such as Venezuela, South Korea, and Japan, the majority opted for "a". It can be said that the test is guided by different ethics equally valid for the prosperity of a society. Countries "b" tend to value an ethic that should occur in a more abstract and impersonal way. The "a" one, on the other hand, usually have an ethic that the type of relationship you have with a person determines your duties towards them. But even the "b" countries do not totally abandon this principle: you have the duty to maintain and educate your children, but not the children of others. (See The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous - Joseph Henrich)For any possible population all with a very high-quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living, because the total sum of quality of life is greater. Therefore, is it possible to make the world an objectively better place by creating more unsatisfied people? Or have we moral objective obligation to make a world where the selfish possibility of a smaller number of human high-quality flourishing is greater? Can it really be objectively better for children in a family to allow existing children’s individual well-being level plummet so long as the parents have managed to offset that individual diminution through the total sum of well-being with production of more unsatisfied children? What is the objectively better choice: Either to bring into existence a genetically impaired child with a life below some normal threshold of quality of life, or no child? Has a fetus not yet conscious of being alive moral objective rights of being brought to suffer a life below some normal threshold of quality of life? Or do parents have objective moral rights to procreative freedom, even though a disabled child may have deleterious effects on the siblings' well-being? Suppose that men choose to deplete natural resources instead to conserve. Far future generations existence can be more restricted under depletion, but it can be just as restricted as now under strict conservation. Conservation or depletion of resources may mean fewer people now or in the future. As conservation of natural resources decreases now the quality and quantity of life, would we have the moral objective duty of maximize the future total sum of quality and quantity of life for unknown number of people and their technology in the far future?Suppose Alison is one of 25 United States government officials on an airplane, each with a briefcase bearing a official seal. Terrorist hijackers announce they will kill one America per hour until their demands are met. Alison switches briefcases with Babette, a french woman, while she is in the bathroom. The terrorists shoot Babette. Suppose now that Allison doesn’t switch briefcase, but surreptitiously covers her briefcase official seal with a Libya Air sticker. The terrorists pass her briefcase and shoot Beatrice, the next American. What is the objective principle that satisfactorily determines the difference between morally avoiding harm in self-defense and immorally sacrificing others in self-defense?Is homosexuality objectively against natural law? Does the fact that something is natural make it good? Earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, floods, mass extinctions are natural. Even if there are, in fact, certain characteristics held in nature by all human beings, like visual impairment in adults, it does not follow that these must be what we want to have. Being unnatural render something bad? Computers, curing diseases with medicines and using artificial sweetener are unnatural. Homosexuality is in fact natural and does occur among animals. The frequency of homosexual-propensity genes in human populations is above the level expected from mutation alone, a sign that the propensity has been favored by natural selection (See Genesis - The Deep Origin of Societies - Edward O. Wilson). The homosexuality level is too high to be explained solely by random changes in genes that affect sexual behavior. Individuals that join professions useful to society but counter to their own reproduction, monastic orders, and homosexuality are examples of social activity that do not favor reproduction. It is logically impossible to derive any normative truth from any non-normative truth. If there aren't normative words in the premises, cannot there be normative words in the conclusion. Knowledge of the natural facts will not take you to morality. Religious natural law point of view puts procreation at the center of marriage as its natural fulfillment. However, if for example they were to place love and mutual support for human flourishing at the center, many same-sex couples would meet this point of view. By placing procreation as the natural fulfillment of marriage, religion denigrates sterile marriages, and grandparents who help raise grandchildren because they are not done for procreation, and surely they are not wrong. Homosexual acts can be humanly appropriate because in performing them partners realize a common good they can realize in no other way. A significant number of those who divorce or who report that their marriages are not what they had hoped cite disappointment in their sexual lives. There aren't causal connections between the recognition of homosexual marriage and the prevalence of attitudes that destabilize families. Slippery slope arguments falsely assume that we will be unable in the future to distinguish the consensual, harmless sexual activity between rational adults, in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships, from incest, and pedophilia. Oral and anal sex acts are never potentially procreative, whether heterosexual or homosexual, but why is this biological distinction morally relevant? Tolerance for gay relationships increases with the cost of child rearing. How can God's good purposes for procreation account for example, that were extinct well over 99% of species that ever lived? If God gave us life and therefore we don't need to understand and we can't blame him for giving us horrible and unintelligible pains and deaths in natural disasters and diseases, why do we blame pregnant mothers who take alcohol and cocaine? About 20% of pregnancies can evolve to natural abortion before 20 weeks, and of these abortions, about 80% are interrupted until the 12th week of pregnancy. Part of the abortions take place without at least the woman knowing she is pregnant. A God who conceives the human reproductive system with such a characteristic does not consider embryos and human life very valuable. Moral facts that do not provide reasons for everyone are not moral facts. We have laws for the imprisonment of people who inflict suffering upon animals. The disvalue of the suffering of animals outweighs the value of the freedom to inflict suffering on animals. Why don't animals have free will, yet they suffer like us? If animals are incapable of undergoing a process of spiritual growth, animal suffering is just pointless. There is no reason to believe that biological evolution is sensitive to God’s moral considerations. If you believe something because you have evidence for it, or because rational argument, that is not faith. So faith is believing something in the absence of evidence or reasons. Religious people think that sacred scriptures give them the moral authority to dictate the rights of others but their children will look back at them like we look at those who told blacks and women that they didn't have the same rights as white men. Citizens’ interest in liberty and pursuit of their own good outweighs any state or religion interest in promoting only procreative relationships.This is a supplement to What are the strongest arguments against religion?

YESWhat's the definition of morality? What would justify a definition as correct? How is a supposed objective or absolute morality justified as true?WHAT IS MORALITY? WHAT IS THE DOMAIN OF MORALITY?To determine whether morality is a trait that evolved and to determine whether the moral domain varies across cultures requires delineating the moral domain. Distinction can be made between a normative sense of morality that refers to the correct guide to follow, and a descriptive sense that refers to guides that people have actually sought to follow and that are not necessarily correct.What does it mean to correct morality? If a psychiatrist sets out to investigate the effectiveness of a new drug against depression, or an astronomer attempts to investigate the properties of black holes, they cannot but make assumptions about what it means to suffer from depression or to be a black hole. Lack of shared assumptions about the meaning of morality means that someone may question any empirical and metaethical view on grounds of their failing to address the true or real moral judgments. There is a mutual interdependence, conceptual questions depend on empirical answers and we must know what counts as a moral judgment to find empirical answers. If moral facts do not figure in our best scientific explanations, thus we are not justified in believing in the existence of moral facts. This argument assumes that the empirical is our only source of knowledge about moral facts, and that there isn't a priori moral knowledge. However, we have good reason to think that the empirical sciences are much better equipped to discover the nature of things than a priori reflection. We want an analysis that helps explain why some things rather than others are morally good. We did not discover that heat means kinetic molecular energy by a priori reflection on what we mean by “heat”, but by empirical investigation. We could not object to the view that heat means kinetic energy on the ground, that this is not what we mean when we think a priori.What distinguishes moral norms from etiquette norms, coordination norms, prudential norms and other norms? Experiments with different religions, Chinese, Westerners, including small-scale societies, show that it isn’t possible to identify a criteria for a moral and nonmoral normative distinction. Most people would judge that showing up naked at your grandmother’s funeral is more serious than stealing a pencil. Perhaps in the future philosophers and psychologists may simply drop the term “moral judgment” and focus instead on normative judgments. There are a number of subclasses of normative judgments that are natural kinds. Normative judgments about purity, reciprocity, authority, and kinship may well be examples of distinct normative natural kinds. But the conviction that there must be a natural way of dividing normative judgments into those that are moral and those that are nonmoral is an illusion. ( See Kelly, D., Stich, S. P., Haley, K. J., Eng, S. J., & Fessler, D. M. T. - Harm, affect, and the moral/conventional distinction Mind and Language 2007;Knobe, J., & Fraser, B. Causal judgment and moral judgment: Two experiments. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology ) As numerous authors have already noted, people’s moral judgments appear to be generated by the very same sort of cognition that one finds at work in generating nonmoral normative judgments. There is no important distinction between moral and nonmoral cognition. No brain area or network is common and peculiar to moral judgments of wrongness. If the moral domain were a fundamental feature of human cognition, we would expect the distinction between moral and nonmoral norms to be lexicalized in every language. But there isn’t a universal moral normative domain at all, and many cultures have not formed such a domain different from nonmoral normative domains.Many moral norms do not aim at cooperation. For example retributivist norms of punishment, such as “eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth violence”, can lead to disharmony. Many people throughout history have believed, and some still believe, that masturbation is immoral, often based on the claim that masturbation is unnatural, they seem to think that masturbators have too much fun. This and other moral norms too do not aim at cooperation, the disgust as a moralizer is another intuitive example. Certain disgusting behaviors are seen by many as immoral notwithstanding the absence of cooperation: consumption of genetically modified food, insects and recycled water. In a survey 46% of respondents said they opposed genetically modified food and would maintain their opposition for any balance of risks and benefits. These participants agreed that genetically modified food should be prohibited no matter how small the risks and how great the benefits. Many norms that aim at cooperation are not moral in nature, as the linguistic rules of syntax, they enable cooperation by enabling communication, but they aren't moral. (See Scott, S., Inbar, Y., & Rozin, P. Evidence for absolute moral opposition to genetically modified food in the United States. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2016).Is morality the normativity that would be universalizable?Universalizability cannot be a definitional feature of morality. A judgment is universalizable if and only if it can, without contradiction, be willed as a universal practical law. But it is not clear just how the universal will of a maxim such as “All human beings will defame or ridicule other human beings whenever this is a safe and effective way of promoting their own self-interest” give rise to any sort of contradiction. To say that the willing of this maxim as a universal law would be imprudent is not to say that doing so is contradictory. Here is the recipe for a possible universalizable moral rationality, but immoral to some religious people: Agree that a rule applies to oneself, even if it means death. It is rational to believe that there are things worse than death, being in terrible pain, for example: “All anencephalic neonates with painful terminal cancer should be euthanized.”An agent may reasonably decide a case in one way without implying that anyone else should decide it similarly. Suppose Sophie and her two children are at a Nazi concentration camp. A guard confronts Sophie and tells her that she must decide one of her children will be allowed to live and one will be killed, informing Sophie that if she chooses neither, then both will be killed. Sophie then has a morally compelling reason to choose one of her children. What should Sophie do? Who feels the force of conflicting moral demands on him and finally decides, it is not logically committed to accepting that anyone else in situations like this ought to do the same. The fact that an individual adopts a moral norm of conduct for his own use does not entail that the person requires it to be adopted by anyone else. An individual may adopt for himself a very demanding moral guide that he thinks may be too difficult for most others to follow. One who judges morally in complex situations finds out something about himself, rather than anything one can speak of as holding universally.Is morality the normativity that overrides all other normativities? Is morality categorical?Being categorical and overridingness cannot be defining characteristics of morality. Moral objectivity view holds that moral propositions are analogous to propositions about chemistry, biology, or history, they are mind independent, in so much as they are true despite what anyone believes, hopes, wishes, or feels. When they fail to describe this mind-independent moral reality, they are false, no matter what anyone believes, hopes, wishes, or feels. A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose. Morality would be a supreme set of categorical norms, their applicability would not depend on our contingent ends or desires. Categorical would be guaranteed to be backed by decisive reasons. But reasons stem only from our objective interests and subjective desires, there is simply no guarantee that a morally required act always is supported by decisive reasons. If all practical reasons have to be able to connect with something that concerns us, then no moral reason is categorical. A distinguishing characteristic of morality cannot be that it applies to people even if they have no desires that would be satisfied by conforming to them. Just plain ought is an incoherent fiction, if the reasons that favor a morally required action are always incommensurable with the reasons of, for example prudence or self-interest, then the totality of relevant reasons will not uniquely favor morality. A person’s reasons for pursuing her own aims are stronger than her reasons to advance someone else aims. It is not necessarily irrational or mistaken for an individual to deliberately decline the demand of moral rationality of a group. Overridingness is the thesis that moral determinations are always supreme whenever they come into conflict with the determinations of distinct normative domains. The overridingness of morality presupposes there is always a rational way to justify the priority of morality over the priority of self-interest, prudence or other nonmoral rational ends defined independently from morality, but there isn’t.To be categorical in itself will not distinguish morality of etiquette, which may also be taken to make demands of individuals independent of what they desire. Empirical evidence doesn't show unequivocally that people universally distinguish between the moral and conventional holds within and across different cultures. This raises the question of whether there is a distinction between morality and the conventional and it is clear that some rules of etiquette are relative only to a society or group.What is the origin of morality?Dolphins are documented as saving humans, beached whales, and dogs from drowning and even from sharks. Dogs have been documented adopting kittens, baby foxes, tiger cubs, fawns, ducklings, lambs and more. This behavior is selflessly altruistic, as the dog couldn't expect any benefit from caring for a member of another species. There are over 70 recorded episodes of humpbacks intervening in killer whale attacks on unrelated species. Just searching Internet “elephant saves” will result in many examples of elephant saving other species. A leopard is documented caring for a baby baboon, and there are documented episodes of apes helping injured animals and even human children who fall into their enclosures. Evolutionary accounts of the origins of our moral capacity do not require any appeal to knowledge of moral truths.Trying to explain why morality resists strict definition may lead to the idea that the concept of morality has a prototype structure rather than a classical definitional structure consisting of necessary and sufficient conditions. A prototype concept of morality consists in features embodying the average or most typical instances of the concept. To define morality in the way a theorist favors will not correspond to the way that some others use the term. Moral scepticism about moral codes holds that we must make our ethical theorization in terms of a good life, or virtues of exemplary men, there aren’t moral codes. What compliance with moral and nonmoral norms allows us to do is to justify our behavior to others in ways that they cannot reasonably reject because it is a matter of equal accountability. But there may be no common universal justification for normativity for all groups.Why is it possible that morality in the normative sense has never been put forward by any particular society, by any group at all, or even by any individual?When persistent moral disagreement is recognized concerning what rules are moral rules, or when it is justified to violate these rules, those who understand that morality has no authoritative judges and no decision procedure that provides a unique guide to action in all situations, admit that how one should act is morally unresolvable. If it is possible to disagree with the value of objectives even agreeing with all non moral facts, or if at principle it is not possible to know with certainty whether a non moral premise of a moral judgment is valid, then the unreliability defeats all claims of a universal a priori or intuitive moral judgments.The general meaning of ought involve a relationship between an action and its effectiveness in advancing interests. In any form of morality the most plausible definitions of moral words include reference to someone’s ends connected with her particular needs, interests, desires, attitudes, goals, purposes, plans. These definitions involve things that can vary from person to person. No amount of reduction of interests to brain processes, biological evolution, or common cultural heritage would reveal goodness as a non-subjective property.What makes ends relevant will be what someone desires. Something’s good-making features may be open to legitimate disagreement. The property of being a good car involves a fit between its objective features and what we want from a car, and that will vary somewhat from person to person. Our ability to explain why we evaluate a particular motor car as a good one gives us no guarantee that there is one objectively best set of specifications for a motor car. There is no prospect that “goodness” can be reduced to a naturalistic property with no subjective component. No amount of scientific investigation and empirical reduction will ever demonstrate that some actions are morally wrong.Is there a metaethics that explain why there are significant differences in values across cultures, but also significant similarities? Is there any general theory of moral judgments as innate or culturally variable, or as based in rationality or intuition?Moral rational deliberation and verdict activate different brain areas, moral judgment includes both rational deliberation and verdict. Only verdict is intuitive. Many people who sincerely claim that they have nothing against, for example, black people or gays, still associate black faces and gay sex with something bad. Their implicit prejudices attitudes conflict with their explicit prejudices beliefs. The psychological and neural processes that constitute implicit moral attitudes are distinct from the processes that constitute explicit belief, what we reflectively endorse and commit ourselves to. The process of deciding how to answer a moral question might require weighing public statements, in which case it might be rationally deliberative in a way that our implicit moral attitudes are not. It seems possible that implicit moral attitudes are innate in ways that explicit beliefs and answers are not. We need to distinguish verdicts from rational deliberation, and explicit answers from implicit attitudes, to support any future general theory of all moral judgments. (See for example Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Wheatley, T. Are moral judgments unified? Philosophical Psychology, 2014.)What would be some criticisms of ethical relativism?It is not mere membership in a group that creates moral authority of the group over the individual. The pressure for convergence in morality, the social genesis of morality does not entail that membership creates obligation to standards held by a group. When pacifists are members of a country that has a military recruitment with no right of refusal, it may be true both that the country’s morality is adequate and that pacifists can legitimately reject any purported moral obligation to submit to a military recruitment. One can accept that there can be no resolution of some serious conflicts, no resolution that has moral authority for all parties; such an acceptance is an insightful recognition of the limitations of the capacity of practical reason. It would be a signal of achievement to accept that there is no final arbiter of our conflicts with each other. Should each agent just do what he believes is right? Whether or not a moral judgment is mistaken is itself a matter for moral theorizing. That no set of moral judgments is mistaken is really just another moral judgment and hence one which would be rejected by any moral judge with their own moral commitments. “Why be moral?” answer needn't prove that all people have the same final reason to comply with morality in all contexts.Some moralities are known not to be uniformly held, even locally. Large nations with their multicultural heritages, include elements from numerous moral systems. Think, for example, of female genital mutilation, or of slavery. In the contemporary world half the species on the planet have disappeared since 1970 (2014 Living Planet Report). How can moral relativists preserve plausible claims as that dissenters against slavery, subordination of women, environmental destruction even though they thereby opposed the morality of the time and local? Relativism can make moral truth reflect the moral status quo. What was once needed for small communities to survive in competition with other species might not be what is needed to maintain a stable nation state. We do not live in culturally closed societies with unitary moral systems. Human moral shaping used to be fairly uniform. In environments representative of humanity’s 99% small-band hunter–gatherer societies, one can see the same type of moral personal virtue around the world. Changes in technological capabilities may require an on-going reinvention of morality. The need for mutual accommodation is most obvious in large modern societies that have emerged from a multiplicity of cultures and traditions, there can be serious disagreement inside big societies. But knowledge of moral truth isn't knowledge of the practical means for resolving human conflict. Conflation of truth with utility can be pernicious, because the ethics of belief require us to pursue the truth with honesty even if its consequences should prove detrimental to our material well-being. If in relativism each disputant would be saying something true of his own culture or point of view, there would be the logical consequence that they would not be disagreeing with each other, rather they would be talking about different things. But if each disputant is disagreeing about what is true, then the disputants cannot be making claims about different things and hence cannot have knowledge of the kind the moral relativist supposes. Why can we suppose moral judgments have truth-value relative to a moral community as opposed to no truth-value at all?IS THERE A TRUE MORALITY? WHY BE MORAL? WHAT IS MORAL OBJECTIVITY?A good criticism of moral relativism needs an answer to moral skepticism. Whether morality is relative or universal, why should we think that under ideal conditions, rational human beings will converge on the same moral principles of universal or relative acceptance? We do not always have decisive reasons to act impartially or it is not always irrational to do what is morally wrong.What is moral truth?The best-known theory of truth is the correspondence theory of truth. On this view, a candidate for moral truth is true if and only if it corresponds to a moral fact. But the notion of a fact is itself only to be explained in terms of truth as being the worldly correlate of a true sentence or proposition, so that the theory is vitiated by circularity. Anything the supposed relation of correspondence might achieve has already been provided for without going beyond the relation which is affirmed with the affirmation of the proposition itself. Correspondence theories of truth are only plausible where objects and properties can be understood as causally responsive to moral judgments. But morality is about objects and properties to which we don’t bear causal relations. If someone suggests that “X is good” is true if and only if X deserves approval then this is of little use, since it casts no light on how such verdicts may be established, or why we must be interested in them. Someone can value and endorse things on different grounds than whether they generate happiness. Moral advice rarely holds universally. “Don't kill an innocent” might prevent a little girl needlessly suffering as a terminally ill patient. Norms involved in logic and epistemology are formally neutral about our desires for its own sake, but moral norms no.The coherence theory of truth is a theory of truth according to which a statement is true if it "coheres" with other statements, and false if it does not. The motivation of theory is sometimes owed to the conviction that there may be several sets of cohering statements with equal claim to describe the moral world correctly.The deflationary theory of truth is built on the equivalence between asserting a proposition “p” and asserting that “p” is true. The truth-predicate "is true" exists only in order to enable economy of expression, and that what is said with its aid could in principle be said without it. The reference to truth is not so easily removed from sentences like "Everything he says is true", but logicians have shown how to eliminate the words "is true" when predicated on sentences of formalized languages. The truth-predicate plays just enable speakers to express their approval or endorsement. “It is true that" or "It is a fact that", when appended to a sentence, add nothing but emphasis.What justifies a true morality?Is there justification of true moral beliefs? The only way which moral beliefs might be justified is by inference from nonmoral beliefs. How could a body of entirely nonmoral beliefs entail a moral belief? Moral judgments seem to have pretensions of objective truth. But moral and mathematical judgments are about objects and properties to which we don’t bear causal relations. One might wonder how moral properties can be thought to causally explain our moral judgments and beliefs. How can moral properties be seen to be part of a causal explanation for anything other than moral judgments? Doubts can be raised about the origin of human moral beliefs. What is the evidence for the truth of core moral beliefs? It is far from clear what is this evidence if it includes the truthfulness of moral rational intuition or religious faith whose moral truthfulness we are trying to demonstrate, rendering a circular demonstration. Why are the processes that lead to the formation of moral beliefs sensitive to the supposed true moral facts? Why would be morality objectively true, categorical, and mind-independent because of its empirically confirmed genealogical dependence from emotional, evolutionary, historical and cultural context? There can be reasonable moral skepticism if true, objective, mind-independent moral reality properties are necessary to explain many of the observable moral phenomena. Human moral thinking evolving as a biological and psychological adaptation explains the enhancing social cohesion among our ancestors. For example, the hormone oxytocin has a role in social behaviors like maternal behavior and bonding toward individuals with similar characteristics in many mammal species, so it also does in humans. But why would evolutionary forces have made morality objectively true? Evolutive foundation is not an indication of objective moral truth. Sexual coercion has been observed in many species, including mammals and humans, birds, insects, and fish. People are not morally required to sacrifice themselves for the entire community, but they would have been so required if we had evolved more on the model of social insects. We don't morally judge a man or woman by its reproductive fitness, by how successfully it passes down its genetic code. The problem with human nature as the basis for a universal level of morality is that it lacks a detailed guide to action. What innate moral values should we prioritize? Non-human primates often kill, steal and rape without being punished. A mistake amounts to conceiving evolution by natural selection as morally good. Suppose that preserving the human gene pool is good. Suppose that scientists demonstrate that preserving the human gene pool from the mass extinction of global warming requires reducing the population by 70% in 50 years. While killing part of the population preserves the human gene pool, is it in fact good?One can never validly deduce an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Nothing can be the conclusion of a valid argument which is not already implicit in the premises. No set of premises consisting entirely of nonmoral descriptive statements is sufficient to entail a normative conclusion. Thus entirely descriptive claims cannot entail normativity. A moral evaluation cannot be expressed using only nonmoral terms. The evaluation expressed by someone is relative to an individual's goals, desires for its own sake, preferences. Morality is not categorical, there isn’t moral truth. We must accept that other people can have opposed preferences, even when we agree on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly. If moral judgments are beliefs that motivate, they can only be beliefs about how to get something that we want. Therefore, either they are not objective or they cannot motivate us and therefore are not practical.The possibility of moral thought and judgment does not depend on the provision of a suitable supply of categorical objective moral principles because there isn't the possibility of ultimate grounding of morality in morality, and there are no principles linking the nonmoral with morality, the moral practice cannot be grasped from the purely nonmoral perspective. People see the priority of his own moral intuitions at play over objective moral principles: If someone proposes a moral principle, and you raise a telling counterexample, the counterexample prevails, there need be no appeal to moral principles. The supposedly objective moral principles follow our own moral intuitions, they do not generate them.If moral terms are reducible to nonmoral terms, then morality can be the result of causal processes that make a true morality arbitrary. The conception of moral terms like “goodness” may be regarded as a mysterious fiction because it is unanalysable or indefinable. Moral definitions really only move the mysterious fictitious notion to elsewhere, for example to the unanalysable term “ought”. It is difficult for moral judgments to correspond to something in the defined sense. Moral judgments end up sounding suspiciously vacuous: Objective moral properties are not necessary to explain any of the observable moral phenomena. People make moral judgments, experience moral sentiments, condemn, admire, and so on, but such phenomena can be explained by reference to psychology, social sciences, local survival environment, evolutionary and cultural historical developments.We can have reasons to act in a certain way only if acting is to our own purposes, goals. Our reasons for action are always sensitive to our varying ends and so they are subjective. But objective morality claims a supposed objective authority that transcends the ends of each of us, whether or not we care to accept it, inescapable, non-subjective and overriding. Moral​ity​ might be objective if we all happened to have the same needs, interests, desires, goals, purposes, and so on, with respect to characters, choices, actions, and plans. However, we may not be contradicting each other to whatever extent we have different goals, or purposes, priorities. Why would we all desire the same ends if we were fully rational and found ourselves in the same circumstances?Which theory shows a true morality?Why would a subjectively chosen God be an objective moral authority?Belief in god makes morality unintelligible. It’s in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) to not take the Lord’s name in vain but rape is not up there, it is allowed in Gen. 30:3; Deut. 20:14, 21: 10–14; Judges 19:24; 2 Sam. 12:11–14; Numbers 31:17-18. 1 John 4:8 assures us that “God is love” but this love mercilessly commanded Israelite soldiers to kill infants and women (1 Samuel 15:2-3; Joshua 10:40).“You must not own another person as property" was missing from the Ten Commandments of a culture that had slaves. Christians believe that God upheld slavery (Titus 2:9-10, 1 Peter 2:18, Ephesians 6:5). 620,000 Christian soldiers on both sides of American Civil War lost their lives to settle slavery. No finite person could literally love God if God is incomprehensible. Without the Law of Moses, would we all be wandering like a little Jehovah, raping and shedding blood in genocides every time our vanity to be the only unconditional and merciful love was offended? Why would a supposed loving God thousands of years ago reveal himself in such an obscure way that we supposedly need a PhD in sacred scriptures studies to supposedly understand him? Why do more than 40 major divisions of Christian denominations claim to believe what the Bible says and yet no two of them agree on what the Bible says or what it means a Christian morality? When we see school buildings collapsing on young children, it is morally completely unbelievable that there is a supposed mandate from God to prevent his supposed good blessing of suffering. Imagine God as a mother letting her young child suffer horribly,letting the child die an excruciating death, alone and frightened, claiming to justify that suffering, because it was an opportunity for another child to learn an unintelligible valuable lesson. The Bible story in which Abraham shows his unquestioning obedience to kill his son, Isaac, and is rewarded by God for it, (Genesis 22:1-19), neatly demonstrates how religious faith suffocates intelligible morality. If believers really took the moral guidance of the Bible, they would be forced to maintain that their contemporary condemnations of genocide, slavery, and rape are not morally absolute and their subjective moral interpretations sometimes need to change at the point of a bayonet as in the case of American slavery and civil war. A faith is immoral when it enforces its morality on others without a basis of sufficient evidence. As when it enforces its morality on a person's decision about his sexuality or about the conditions for the sanctity of his own terminal life, or of a fetus that is unaware of being alive. If believers in a God openly understand the historical ethical development of his doctrine, the belief will collapse as a human invention. Belief in God doesn’t give motivation to be good: Some of the leaders of the Inquisition had fear of God and desire of heaven but they tortured their victims in an intensely cruel way. At the societal level, there is negative correlation between crime and a lack of religiosity. (See for example Zuckerman, P. 2009. “Atheism, secularity, and well-being: How the findings of social science counter negative stereotypes and assumptions.” Sociology Compass; and Hofmann, W., Wisneski, D., Brandt, M., & Skitka, L. 2014. “Morality in everyday life.” Science)Morality must be comprehensible to us to determine what is objectively right and wrong for us. If good and bad are determined by God and are beyond our ken, we could never be justified in believing that any particular action is objectively obligatory or wrong. If God’s morality is unintelligible, why occupy ourselves with it? The suffering that a good God allows could not be worse than the supposed horrific suffering that occur without this supposed necessary suffering. Supposedly sufferings will be comprehensible only when a person reaches the heaven, it is beyond our ken, so God could not command us to show misguided compassion, compelling us to prevent even the worst suffering, because it is supposedly always necessary for a greater good or to prevent some greater evil. Intense suffering would be always a God’s blessing in disguise. However, the existence of the most basic moral obligation to prevent terrible suffering by a child implies the non-existence of a God worthy of worship.Why would love necessarily come from the divine nature? Is God judged good if he is loving or hateful, or is God judged good because we can have the concept of goodness and morality independent of God's existence?Why natural properties, such as the fact that an act involves the deliberate causing of intense physical and emotional suffering, are not sufficient to ground moral reasons? What could God do in virtue of which the action that lacks all moral properties would be morally wrong? If moral properties depend only on God’s will, God’s commands are logically prior to moral properties, there is no particular moral reason why a given action is morally wrong or right. If God does not have moral reasons for his commands, then his commands are morally arbitrary. The existence of God is certainly irrelevant to the existence of moral facts and properties. If God is good by definition, then what cause could one have to praise him for what he does if doing it arbitrarily differently would have done it equally well? If God is good because his goodness can be specified independently of God, then the idea of goodness does not depend upon the existence of God. When something good happens, it is attributed to God. When disasters and diseases happen, God's good is mysterious and it doesn't need to be comprehended. If evil isn't evidence of an evil God, then good isn't evidence of a good God.Why should we think that ideal moral agents defending deontological ethics or consequentialist ethics converge in the same moral beliefs?What is right is dictated by duties, independent of what promotes the best overall outcome? We can judge that it is morally wrong to kill one patient to make transplants to save five. But how do many need to die before someone doesn't think it's morally wrong to kill one innocent to save others? How many millions? If violating rights is so bad, why shouldn’t individuals be allowed to minimize rights violations by killing one to save many others from being killed? How can it ever be wrong to minimize evil or to do as much good as possible? When two promises conflict, how do deontologists explain which promise is overriding if for them the reason to keep each promise is simply that it was made, and not the consequences?Is it the deontological principle of humanity that holds that we should never treat persons merely as a means, but as ends in themselves, morally absolute? The position of consequentialists is that using someone merely as a means is not wrong, because the value of persons reduces entirely to their value in the production of welfare, a function of the quality of its experiences and the total amount of welfare. They are thus inevitably used merely as a means. Most people are unwilling to deny the principle outright, since it seems to be the best explanation of many of our ordinary moral views such as that we should not kill someone even if the overall benefit of killing is somewhat greater than the overall benefit of killing. This invites the difficult question of just how bad the consequences of adhering to the principle of humanity need to be before it is right to abandon it. Consider the use of terror bombing by Britain and the United States during World War II. Both the British and later the Americans deliberately bombed German and Japanese cities in order to destroy enemy morale and, in the case of the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in order to persuade Japan to capitulate. It seemed to many that those civilians were being used as merely a means, in contravention to the principle of humanity. The principle of humanity dismisses as irrelevant ends that are, in fact, morally relevant: Would anything, even murder, torture or genocide, not be morally permissible if a greater catastrophic moral horror were to be avoided? The civilian deaths and sufferings that this war would have involved could not have been justified by the doctrine of double effect, the idea that these civilian deaths were not intended as a means to an end, but were simply acceptable “collateral damage,” a foreseen, and proportional, side effect of acceptable military action. Given the scale of systematic civilian deaths, it seems plausible that the deaths were intended as a means to an end.If in consequentialism personal moral duties to any particular people aren't important but only best overall outcome, why do we give more partial concern to our families and friends? Wouldn't it be a mistake to discriminate against the black minority under Jim Crow laws in the United States, against universal human rights and respect for people and autonomy, regardless of whether they promoted the consequent happiness of the majority of whites? A more equal state of affairs is the more just and right, even if it is not the overall best in terms of total or average happiness value. Consequentialism cannot adequately accommodate our more egalitarian intuitions about distributive justice, and it is indifferent about the distribution of welfare. Imagine a choice between an outcome where overall welfare is large but distributed unequally and an outcome where overall welfare is smaller but distributed equally. Consequentialism is taken to favor outcomes with greater overall welfare even if it is also less equally distributed. How do we balance non arbitrarily the pressure to do justice in favor of more equitable distribution of material goods with the need to promote productivity through economic incentives for the effort to develop talent and hard work?All of us prioritize deontology and consequentialism probably depending on the type of circumstances in which each of us finds ourselves subjectively. Why should we maintain consistency as a moral reason to do anything just to don't lose explanatory power resulting from a dismissal of generalizations?Why be moral?There are multiple normative moral and nonmoral standpoints which generate genuine reasons for action, none of which is normatively supreme. The question “Do I have an overriding reason to act as morality requires?” is empty unless it is specified what kind of reason and situation one is asking for, such as a moral reason, a legal reason, or a self-interested reason. Rational ends are defined independently from morality. There is consequently no guarantee that a person who adopts the necessary means to her ends will comply with her moral duties. A criminal may suffer no weakness of will or inconsistency, but nonetheless act in a way we consider morally wrong. Reasons for immoral action could be rationally objective in this way. Morality can be one normative domain among many: actions can be legal or illegal, prudent or imprudent, or as prohibited or required by etiquette, etc. People can have rational ends for which moral compliances are not necessary means. Acquiring a moral character is not always the best bet for achieving our nonmoral ends: There is uncertainty about the degree of a person’s dependence on others and corresponding vulnerability to their sanctions, along with psychological assumptions relating to people’s abilities to identify the character of the persons they interact with, as well as susceptibility to feeling guilty, and so forth. How morality acquires psychological authority is an empirical question. Rationality is simply one standpoint among others. Even if it were granted that good agency requires acting from public reasons, it is unclear why people have reason to avoid becoming a bad agent. Moral behavior is always rationally permissible, it is not always rationally required. Being a good man can be rationally optional. No matter how morality is defined, there is not a normative reason to act morally when morality and nonmoral reasons conflict. The problem of morality lies in reconciling morality’s alleged objectivity with its practical rationality for everybody simultaneously. The most rational thing to do means what most conduces to fulfillment of the agent’s aims. If we don’t have reasons to be moral in cases in which there is nothing we want that we get by acting morally, then there really is no such thing as overriding moral obligation:Consider an agent who would receive great satisfaction from killing another person whom he hates and whom he can kill without cost because the killer will die soon anyway. Suppose a mafia boss in a small city will kill me if I don’t murder two innocent people for him. Surely it would be immoral, but would I really be better off dead?Several Nazis on several occasions tossed babies into the air like clay plates and shot them. Historian Helen Ellerbe: “In the Inquisition, girls as young as nine and boys as young as ten were tried for witchcraft. Children much younger were tortured to extract testimony against their parents. Children were then flogged while they watched their parents burn.” The wrongdoer may succeed just by being stronger, more clever, or more ruthless than others. He does not expect that others will actually do as he does. Thus, his actions are not likely to be self-defeating, so for him doing evil is rational. It may be reasonable certainty about a person's degree of dependence on others and corresponding vulnerability to their sanctions, along with insusceptibility to feeling guilt.Can a reason justify an action only if someone can justify it to other agents in terms that they can accept? Why should we assume that two agents could not have reasons for pursuing incompatible ends? For example, struggling to secure the last of the food to provide for their own families. Or suppose someone stole a stranger's life raft in order to save one of his children, but the stranger could not save one of his children.The moral skeptic thinks it is rational for the agent to pursue her own interests. There is no rational way to resolve conflicts between the reasons of morality and self-interest. To think that moral conflicts can always be rationally resolved, it is the idea that there is some supreme standpoint from which we can evaluate conflicts between morality and self-interest, but there isn’t any supreme standpoint. Neither the moral skeptic nor the defenders of morality can provide a rational justification for their view, neither side succeeds in defending that its side is more fundamental than the other. Even if there is no reason to reject morality, the question remains whether only the recognition of moral reasons will motivate a rational agent. It isn't necessarily irrational for others not to be motivated by our moral reasons. We can have limits to what we are prepared to sacrifice for social goals. When we plead with someone to be reasonable, we are often expecting him to take other people’s interests into account, presupposing an aim of reaching some sort of collective agreement on a course of action.We deny being morally committed to produce the maximum objective impartial good for humanity, rather than for our framework of family, race, religion, cultural heritage of traditions, community and nationality, which provides a secure framework within which someone can live. The gain of happiness if one dedicates oneself to increasing the care of oneself, one's family, one's community, or one's country for a richer life, would be small in comparison to the gain of happiness if one dedicates oneself to increasing the care of sick, oppressed, hungry, homeless strangers.What is moral objectivity?Defenses of objective morality need show that a criteria of objectivity is reliable and confer to objectivity a high likelihood of trust. Wasn't slavery consensus? Why does we assume that an existing social consensus must be right? Experiments show that seeing an issue as objective correlates with the perception of current consensus on the issue: People tend to vary their estimations of objectivity in accordance with the subject matter of the belief, for example a belief about the morality of abortion is attributed a considerably lesser degree of objectivity than other beliefs such as the wrongness of opening gunfire on a crowd. Those who believe in objective morality can show greater moral commitment and conviction. But they can show greater repugnant antisocial moral commitments too, including those that underlie terrorist acts. The belief in objective morality predicts greater intolerance of another person who disagrees. (See for example Goodwin, G. & Darley, J. 2008. “The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism.” Cognition 106: 1339–1366.)The moral objectivists alleged difference in factual beliefs and life circumstances rarely justify a different morality. Moral objectivists have argued that moral disagreements very often derive from disagreement about nonmoral facts. But if ignorance of nonmoral facts can undermine the existence of a true disagreement, it can undermine the existence of a true agreement too. To moral objectivists slave owners may have believed that their slaves were intellectually inferior, and Inuits who practiced infanticide may have been forced to do so because of resource scarcity in the tundra. But would the inferiority of one group really justify enslaving them? If so, why don’t we think it’s acceptable to enslave people with low IQs? Would life in the tundra justify infanticide? If so, why don’t we just kill off destitute children around the globe instead of giving donations to Oxfam? Differences in circumstances do not explain why people don't share the same values, rather they help to explain why values end up being so different. When scientific errors are identified, corrections are made. By contrast, there is no evidence for rational value convergence as a result of moral conflicts. Even with our modern understanding of racial equality, there are more slaves in the world today than ever before, although they represent a smaller percentage of the world’s population than in the past. Slavery exists from mega-harems in Dubai to illicit brothels in Bucharest, from slave quarries in India to child markets in Haiti. (See E. Benjamin Skinner, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery)There is no objective reason to prioritize among incommensurable moral values and there is no one moral value that explains all other moral values. Different values call for different responses: Respect, love, awe, admiration, nurturing, and so on. Values, for example such as dignity and autonomy, cannot be objectively traded off with pleasures: Sources of pleasure have a particularly steep rate of diminishing response value. The first donut you eat is very tasty, the second is fine, the third may give no pleasure at all. But this response doesn't works when we consider values such as dignity, or autonomy. If there is a variety of ethical values, and if they are incommensurable, one would expect irreconcilable disagreement about what morally should prioritize. Objectivists imagine that ethical truth is possible only if there is the possibility of a singular moral guidance. But how should we prioritize the harm caused by one moral transgression with the impurity caused by another?Suppose the Police Chief and Judge prosecute and punish a single innocent scapegoat to prevent rioting that will lead to substantial destruction of property and loss of life. In an experiment of Peng, Doris, Nichols, and Stich, American subjects are significantly more likely to think that the Police Chief and Judge are morally wrong. Chinese subjects are significantly more likely to hold the potential rioters responsible for the scapegoating, they attributed more responsibility at the level of the collective than did the more individualist Americans. (See How to Argue about Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism John M. Doris and Alexandra Plakias in Moral Psychology Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong)Making a concrete moral solution obey an abstract impartial categorical moral rule is only valuable if this is the ultimate goal, but this is exactly what is in dispute about moral objectivity. Is morality grounded in maximizing objectively to the society the impersonal, impartial good of the consequences of the actions or rules rather than our own interests? Some forms of moral partiality are morally admirable. Loyalty to one’s family, friends, community or country, for instance, is commonly regarded as a virtue. Parents are thought to be morally obliged to take the best affordable care of their own children and grandparents. Friendship requires us to do certain favors for friends without weighing our friends' welfare impartially against our working for a charity. We are simply less likely to conclude that our friend acted disreputably, partiality is part of what makes good friends. Forms of love can conflict with the requirements of impartiality. There isn't a morally neutral decision between impartiality and partiality, so there is in’t an objective neutral position to settle moral disagreement.What is a mind-independence as characterization of moral objectivity?It isn’t possible morality to be mind-independent to be objective. Consider the suggestion that objective moral facts, like objective scientific facts, are independent of our thoughts, capacities, and sensibilities. Our moral obligations are bound up with us and with who we are. Moral facts are obviously mind-dependent: The relative pleasure or happiness that an action brings about may well determine the action’s moral status. Facts involving moral properties depend essentially on our responses, intentions, beliefs, and feelings, facts involving moral principles cannot be mind-independent: maximize utility, act in accordance with the duty of fidelity, a patient’s informed consent can be what makes permissible an invasive medical procedure.According to classical utilitarianism, one is obligated to act so as to maximize moral goodness, and moral goodness is identical to happiness. Happiness is a mind-dependent phenomenon. According to Kant, one's moral obligations are determined by which maxims can be consistently willed as universal laws; moreover, the only thing that is good in itself is a good will. Willing is mind-dependent.If moral truths are like the axioms of mathematics, and they are out there to be intuited, then we should expect suitably well-informed people and with same discernment to give incompatible accounts of what these moral truths are. Mathematics, if we are modeling the world, is not only a deduction, it is in fact intelligible to imagine mathematical truths being different, like Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. In mathematics we don't deduce models of the world from axioms. Rather we try to model the world by introducing axioms, check which theorems follow from the axioms and compare these results in the world against the model. If the results agree we are happy. If the results disagree, we change the axioms. Deduction helps us find consequences from the axioms, but it does not tell us how to gauge the validity of the model, nor how to adjust the axioms. Mathematical objects play a representational role in empirical science, and because of this, they don’t need to be mind-independent in order to be applicable. Consider “The average mother has 2.4 children”: there isn't an actual object known as the average mother. Models of morality change with contingent concerns and desires, preferences and motivations. The role of axioms in pure mathematics and in physics is different. In pure mathematics one neither "proves" or "disproves" axiom assumptions for a set of theorems. In contrast, in physics a comparison of axioms with experiments always makes sense.Is morality like colors, they are real but mind-dependent? Are virtue and colour not qualities of actions or objects, but they are internal responses that only exist in the perceiver's mind? What perceptions represent when they represent colors? Some of the colors we can see don’t have a corresponding wavelength, they are entirely constructed by the brain: white, sky blue, brown, magenta, rose, etc. We're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it reality. Perceptually things seem to be, say red, because those things and their properties causally interact with our perceptual system. But if moral properties lack causal power, then we cannot explain why morality seems to the intellect to be true. Immoral acts comprise a miscellany: lying, stealing, hoarding, hurting, killing, neglecting, harassing, polluting, insulting, molesting, vandalizing, disrespecting, and so forth. What objective properties do these things have in common apart from the fact that we disapprove of them all? If our moral concepts were responses dependent on objective properties, disagreements about their truth would necessarily involve a concept perception error on someone's part. But it seems that a utilitarian and a Kantian may both be conceptually competent while disagreeing about what is wrong. So, for example, in disagreement over the moral permissiveness of eating meat, it is unclear what are the criteria in light of which there is a true normativity. Sometimes the ground of a common value would be lacking. Consider disagreements about the taste of coriander. Studies have revealed a genetic variation that leads to coriander having a fresh taste for most, but soapy for some. It simply turns out that the disagreement about this value is based on a false assumption: namely, that there is only one way for coriander to really taste. There isn’t a true normativity.Moral judgments are like when we evaluate sunsets as beautiful, novels as meritorious, motor vehicles as good or bad ones. These evaluations don't need that our judgments are based by a mind-independent reality, or need consensus with others whose basic desires might be different from our own. We will not need to believe in a transcendent goodness relating to human beings any more than we believe in transcendent automotive value.The objection to a choice of an ideal judge as being objective ethics is that we cannot be justified in believing the premises of appeals to a moral authority without assuming moral beliefs.Why suppose that the ideal judge would use for example a utilitarian calculus, as opposed to another method of making moral judgments, as deontological ethics? There is no fact of the matter about what an ideal moral judge would approve of, any more than there is a fact of the matter about whether the ideal judge prefers vanilla to chocolate ice cream. A thorny problem for realism objectivists is explaining why people with different moral standards are necessarily simply talking about different subjects, while believing that they are talking about the same thing, but not necessarily those who disagree on standards for an ideal holiday.Alleged objective moral authorities can make disputes more intransigent if the parties consider their positions to be the only morally correct ones. There are no authoritative moral judges or decision procedures for determining God’s will, or of which act will maximize utility. The debate will always come down to whether there is some other reason to believe in moral authorities. A moral authority is not like that of a judge whose decisions constitute the law, since morality remains independent of someone's beliefs.The strongest possible answer to the question of existence of moral objectivity is to show that an individual can flourish without living a moral life: In the United States and South Africa, and elsewhere, gated and walled communities, private schools, the flight of white class to increasingly remote suburbs, gentrification, signify the widespread conviction that one can isolate oneself from the moral problems of society at large. A just world would be one in which one could not succeed in this effort.If there is no adequate calculator to tell us when it would be rationally best to be moral or immoral, then morality as an objective and inescapable true authority is undermined. There is not a normative reason to act morally when morality and nonmoral reasons conflict.WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS IF THERE ISN’T A TRUE MORALITY ?Does the fact that the perspective of a true morality can be rejected without the charge of irrationality make ethics irrelevant? No. Morality is the prevalence of putting oneself in the position of others, this prevalence is evidence that the majority is interested in acting in ways that can be justified impartially in a moral community. However, accepting or rejecting the impartial categorical perspective is not an all-or-nothing thing. It is possible to have a strong, but not overriding or categorical desire to act as required in a moral community.If nothing is morally wrong as moral nihilists claim, then isn't it morally wrong to torture babies just for fun?The view that the self-evidence for moral realism in case of conflicts with nihilism trumps in principle, begs the question, as it assumes the claim that nihilism cannot be true. Beg the question to argue against moral nihilism on the basis of common moral beliefs, no matter how obvious those beliefs might seem to us, and no matter how well these common beliefs cohere together. If moral nihilism cannot be ruled out in any way, then moral skepticism follows. Some people are led to moral nihilism by the absence of any defensible theory of morality. Some people might believe moral nihilism for reasons similar to those that led scientists to reject phlogiston. The nihilist theorist knows of no phenomenon whose explanation necessarily requires supposed moral facts; the very features of moral properties like free will seem incoherent. Why don't most people torture babies just for fun? If all of our moral beliefs can be explained by social sciences, evolution and psychology without assuming that categorical, absolute, objective, real, mind-independent conception of morality is literally true, then we can reject morality as true as we reject the literalness of metaphors, fictions, make-believes. Knowledge implies truth, but justified belief does not. Thus, if moral beliefs cannot be literally true, they still might be justified in some way that is independent of moral literal truth.The idea that without a supposed absolute, objective, real, mind-independent morality we become immediately antisocial and irresponsible, requires the unsubstantiated premise that absolute, objective, real, mind-independent conception of morality is the only thing that keeps us kind, altruistic, cooperative, and so forth.If moral rationality is sufficient for moral judgment, absence of emotions won't lead to deficits in moral judgment. The crucial case is psychopaths, who seem to be just as rational as the rest of us, but lack emotions. The individuals who are indifferent to the fear, distress, and sadness of others, who are difficult to socialize, show the importance of emotion and affect in moral cognition and behavior. Psychopathy is a neurodevelopmental personality disorder affecting approximately 1% of the general population and 20–30% of the prison population. Relative to non psychopathic criminals, psychopaths are responsible for a disproportionate amount of repetitive crime and violence in society. They lack attachment to others, and difficulties experiencing empathic concern and remorse. They lack fear of punishment, and do not experience insight into the consequences of their harmful actions for others. Structural neuroimaging studies associate psychopathy with a host of morphological brain abnormalities. A study using EEG demonstrated abnormal relative insensitivity to actual pain. Nevertheless, their capacity to understand an agent’s intentionality is not impaired. This uncoupling between affective sharing and cognitive understanding likely contributes to psychopaths’ callous disregard for the rights and feelings of others.However, emotions may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for morality. Empathic concern does not necessarily produce moral behavior. Empathy may lead one to act in a way that violates justice and fairness, when, for instance, allocating resources preferentially to the person for whom empathy was felt. On the other hand, a lack of empathic concern for the well-being of others is a risk factor for amoral behavior, a hallmark of individuals with psychopathy. There is a complex nature in the relationships between empathy and morality. Empathic arousal may be necessary to develop some aspects of moral reasoning, such as care morality. But in some situations empathy can be powerless in the face of rationalization. Empathy is relatively more predictive of prosocial behavior when the victim is an individual. In a social context, reasoning can play a more crucial role in guiding a moral decision. (See Why Developmental Neuroscience Is Critical for the Study of Morality - Jean Decety and Jason M. Cowell)Some moral philosophers think they can provide a moral theory capable of convincing a psychopath. Psychopaths don't generally lack reasoning abilities, but lack the capacity to respond with feelings like empathy and guilt. A generally convincing moral theory for psychopaths cannot be provided because a person who is unable to understand emotional motivation and who refuses to accept negative emotions from babies tortured just for fun will usually not be convinced by any rational argument in favour of a moral conviction. Psychopaths don't care about the harmful consequences their actions have for others. Rationality doesn’t enable moral objectivity. It is generally not possible for a belief about a matter of fact to motivate without the presence of emotion. Passions don't represent how things are, so they can’t be true or false or stand in logical relations. Therefore motivating processes don't deserve to be called reasoning.Why has humanity managed to persist in the widespread delusion that there is a true morality? If morality is false, how can it to be useful? Judging an act to be something that must be done whether one likes it or not may strengthen one’s resolve to perform it. It may be motivationally superior to the thought “this action would satisfy my desires” because this judgment seems to invite inner rationalizations that ultimately amount to self-sabotage. By contrast, thinking “I just must do it” works to shut down inner debate. Desires for the benefits of living in a cooperative society are at risk of being overwhelmed by short-sighted selfish temptations. The morality strengthens our motivation to act cooperatively by providing false categorical imperatives.Does the belief that morality is false need to be suppressed in order for moral commitments to be effective in bolstering self-control and cooperation? We can interpret that explanations in moral language is somewhat like a metaphor, a fiction, a make-believe, of the true explanations in social sciences, psychological and evolutionary terms. Like a metaphor, moral language has a literal false meaning, but it can convey real truths of great importance standing behind it. Metaphors and moral language can be emotionally deeply motivating in ways that are of enormous importance. The belief that morality is literally categorical, objective, absolute, is sometimes beneficial and sometimes harmful. It can inflame disagreements and encourage disputants to dig in their heels and refuse to compromise. If one interprets a moral judgment as true in an categorical objective mind-independent sense, this judgment tends to make one less open towards diverging moral views. Judgments which are regarded as subjective expressions of desires, by contrast, make one more open towards diverging moral views. We should normally be on the lookout for adverse effects of moralizing, and be prepared to go for a neutral normative language if possible, like scientific and legalistic language. Moral terms are too vague and open to interpretation. There are nonmoral values, norms, and reasons, considerations that lie behind morality as absolute categorical objective normative truth.Is there a kind psychological dissonance if a person believes that promise-keeping isn't categorically obligatory while cultivating the emotions and motivations consistent with promise-keeping being figuratively categorical? Metaphors, like moral terms, have vividness and focus attention in a way that a neutral normative language talk cannot, like scientific and legalistic language. This is the principal general reason why metaphor and moral language has such a central place in our language and thoughts. What justifies avoiding the breakers of promises is the belief that one is untrustworthy, not that morality is literally categorical, objective, absolute.Can moral responsibility be ultimately under control of free will?Can moral responsibility be ultimately under control of free will? Control is possible if someone controls morally himself, but then, does the early self control a later self, leading to infinite regress in a finite life?An agent acts with moral responsibility only if he has control over the ultimate source of his action. There is no control over the ultimate source of an agent's action if it is caused by natural laws and the past, but also if it has no cause. Nothing can be causally prior to itself. Will cannot be causally prior to itself. Will without cause is random. Therefore, moral responsibility and free will are impossible.Is it true that because determinism, that of an agent could not avoid acting wrong, and therefore morality and criminal punishment are errors? From the skeptical of responsibility perspective, morality is not about backward-looking assessments of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, rather, morality is forward-looking, functions by invoking recommendation. The denial of moral responsibility is consistent with the principles of moral rationalism. The imposition of sanctions could have purposes other than the punishment of perpetrators: it can also be justified by its role in incapacitating, rehabilitating, and deterring offenders. There are measures for preventing crime more generally, such as providing for adequate education and mental health care, which the moral responsibility skeptic can readily endorse. Juries routinely condemn defendants without empirical evidence that defendants' will is not determined by any antecedent conditions outside them. Even if a criminal is not morally responsible if there is no free will, it may be as legitimate to segregate or control him in defense of others as it is to quarantine or control those who are not responsible for their contagious diseases. We want to prevent the effects of misbehavior just as we want to prevent the effects of disease or hurricanes.If free will is the basis of moral responsibility, why can moral judgment have morally irrelevant reasons of which we are not even aware? Moral psychology experiments show that the moral thought is affected by environmental factors of which we are not even aware that are completely irrelevant to the moral issues. Examples among many: A- Emotion: viewing a humorous video clip can have a substantial impact on participant’s moral intuitions. Hearing different kinds of audio, stand-up comedy or inspirational stories, has divergent effects on moral intuitions. B- The order in which the moral hypotheses are considered. C- Moral judgments can be affected by the smells in our environment: a whiff of fart spray; spraying the questionnaire with a disinfectant spray; people are more unconsciously generous outside a store from which the smell of freshly baked bread emanates, than outside a hardware store. D - Whether we're in a messy room, or in a dark room. E- Whether we've recently washed our hands, even the proximity of a hand sanitizer dispenser, the presence of dirty pizza boxes, have all been reported to influence moral intuitions. (See for example Sinnott-Armstrong, 2006, “Moral Intuitionism Meets Empirical Psychology”, in Terry Horgan editor, Metaethics After Moore; and “Moral dilemmas and moral rules” - S Nichols, R Mallon - Cognition, 2006) Supposed intuitive objective moral self-evident propositions cannot be proved or known by inference from premises. But in reality, moral intuitions provide justification only after inferences to check them. At least some of a priori or intuitive moral judgments are highly unreliable because various morally irrelevant factors and biases can affect moral judgments. Supposed “objective” intuitive moral claims aren’t self-evident because non-inferential justification of moral intuitions is unreliable.Would skepticism about moral responsibility undermine attitudes such as moral resentment, indignation, guilt, and gratitude, essential to good personal relationships? Is there a tendency of the moral skeptic to suppress evidence for moral skepticism when witnessing atrocities or when engaging in moral argument and political debate? The understanding of the lack of moral responsibility modifies the rationality of certain emotional reactions. While moral anger, resentment and indignation don’t disappear if we feel that moral responsibility doesn’t exist, there are alternative attitudes available to us, such as moral concern, disappointment, sorrow, and resolve. Instead of moral guilt feelings, an agent can acknowledge that he has acted immorally and he feels deep sorrow for what he has done, and as a result he is motivated to eradicate her disposition to behave in a bad way. One can be thankful to a young child for some kindness without supposing that he is praiseworthy in the basic desert sense. In certain situations, refraining from resentment or moral anger may be beyond our power and, therefore, even the skeptic of moral responsibility may not be able to adopt alternative attitudes. We might expect to be unable to appreciably reduce immediate emotional reactions of moral anger as an immediate reaction upon being deeply hurt in an intimate personal relationship. However, in a non-immediate rational reflection, moral anger can be diminished or even eliminated, and we can reject any force that is supposed to justify a damaging response to evil.If free will is the basis of moral responsibility, why does luck undermine evaluations of moral responsibility?We seem to blame those who have murdered more than we blame those who have merely attempted murder, even if the reason for the lack of success in the second case is that the intended victim unexpectedly tripped and fell to the floor.Imagine that two otherwise conscientious people have forgotten to have their brakes checked recently and experience brake failure, but only one of whom finds a child in the path of his car. Why does the unfortunate driver receive more moral blame and criminal punishment?Gauguin feels some responsibility towards his family and is reasonably happy living with them, but nonetheless abandons them, leaving them in dire straits. Gauguin chooses a life of painting in Tahiti over a life with his family, not knowing whether he will be a great painter. In one scenario, he goes on to become a great painter, and in another, he fails. Thus, how the success turns out, something which might be almost entirely a matter of resultant luck, seems to have a lot to do with the evaluation he'll get.We tend to think that people should be praised or blamed only on the basis of what they can control, and yet we regularly praise and blame people on the basis of the results of their actions, even if these are beyond the control of the agents.Luck undermines evaluations of moral responsibility. Our genes, care-givers, peers, and other environmental influences all contribute to making us who we are. We lack control over everything: the results of our actions, our circumstances, our constitution, and our causal history. Where can one draw a line of principle between worthy luck and condemnable luck?Does the free will of Compatibilism preserve moral responsibility?Compatibilism claims that we have free will and that we are morally responsible even though all events are causally determined. We can define free will in terms of control in the action necessary for moral responsibility. To the deterministic aspect of Compatibilism, the source of the traits and dispositions of the agent can be traced back to conditions of origin that were completely beyond his control, having them is subject to luck. To the free will aspect of Compatibilism, agents are responsible for their actions if they intentionally modify themselves to have a certain set of traits and dispositions. A compatibilist might say that as long as an agent takes responsibility for his dispositions and values, in time he will become morally responsible for them. But having the series of dispositions and values by which agents shape and modify their dispositions and values is subject to luck too. Thus, the actions by which agents take responsibility for their dispositions and values are explained by luck.Why does rationality as the defining normative authority impose moral actions to yourself? You willing an end no necessarily imposes rational actions to yourself. We can act against our better judgement: We can spend on luxuries worth a month's income, we can fight to quit smoking. The normativity of coherence is merely apparent, or may be merely a standard of proper functioning without giving anyone reason to comply with it. The rationality of evaluations doesn’t entail any particular conclusions about what we really do: One can be irrational without having any intentions based on false beliefs. One could fail to intend the means believed necessary for one’s ends because of other motivations, or one actually devalues the reward that comes later, which don’t necessarily involve any false beliefs. One can also have intentions based on false beliefs without being irrational. There are actions that are morally good to do, but not morally bad to not do: Why is it more praiseworthy if an agent risks his life testifying in court to save someone, to whom the agent has no special duty, from unjust imprisonment, than if the agent only sacrifices his afternoon? If morality is rationality, and the rationality is the same in both cases, why is there more praise in the first case? Moral rationality means that the rational ends are morally defensible, but it is better that the idea of rationality is independent of morality, or there is a circular definition of rationality and morality. Rationality isn't intrinsically moral: Recent work in empirical ethics has indicated that even when we are asked to give reasons for our moral intuitions, we are often finding nothing to say in their defense (See Haidt, J., 2001. “The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment,” Psychological Review, 108: 814–34). As we saw in the previous section, the supposedly intuitive "objective" moral claims are not self-evident because the non-inferential justification of moral intuitions is unreliable. Even professional philosophers have been found to be prone to such lapses of clear thinking. Moral normativity hasn't both inescapability and authority. Even if all agents manifest a reliable connection between moral judgment and motivation to act morally, it will be false that such a connection is necessary. (See Schwitzgebel, E. and Cushman, F., 2012. “Expertise in moral reasoning? Order effects on moral judgment in professional philosophers and non-philosophers,” Mind and Language, 27: 135–53.)If there isn’t a true morality, why is it morally wrong to think that something is morally wrong for others, but not for me? There is only one real way to stop oneself distorting things in one’s own favor, to see if really one is so different from others that what would be required of them is not required of oneself. The appeal to supposed objective categorical principles doesn't stop this sort of thing, because appeal to a supposed categorical objectivity can be distorted too. In being driven by supposed objective categorical principles, a principled person can distort the relevance of some features by insisting on filtering them through principles he thought objective. If after you found supposed objective principles, you are going to be incorrigible, you had better always be right; incorrigible error is the worst of all worlds. Reliance on supposed objective moral principles encourages dogmatism and narrow-mindedness. People who have high estimates of their objectivity might be less likely to take verification measures against bias. Kant in "Metaphysics of Morals" argues that masturbation is so immoral that it exceeds even murdering oneself since one uses himself as a means to satisfy an animal impulse. He argues that women should not be allowed the right to vote since her existence is only natural. And bastard children can be freely killed since they are born outside the protection of the law. A confident belief in the reliability of one’s intuition can be tragic.Does thinking rationally require at least that one thinks consistently, and in ethics this just means taking the same feature to be the same reason wherever it occurs? Moral skepticism claims that one cannot extract from one case anything that is guaranteed to make a difference to another. Moral skepticism allows a relevance of experience, what one should not do is to say: “it mattered before and so it must matter after”. There is no need to suppose that the way in which morality works is by the extraction of objective principles from the earlier cases, which we then impose on a new case. When we are thinking of reasons for a general belief, the sort of consistency required of us is merely that we do not adopt beliefs that cannot all be true together. There isn’t a consistency requirement in a different way when we turn to moral beliefs. If someone can need medical help, and I can be the only person around to summon it, I don’t need supposed general moral objective principles, but simply my human nature.On a moral skepticism account of morality people are left to work out their differences with each other in ways that are very much like the give-and-take of politics. One must make decisions about whether to bargain or compromise partly within and partly outside one’s moral framework. Human beings have strong natural propensities to try to dominate others and to avoid domination by others. The non existence of a true morality against human sacrifice and slavery, does not entail that there are no grounds for rational criticism. We can criticize these practices from a point of view that relies on our own values. Moral skeptics can criticize moral systems and they can identify what they consider behavior progress. Skepticism will not understand moral progress as movement toward a single true categorical objective morality. If there’s no moral true justification, there is dogmatic solidarity, making community with the people who are like you, and saying things to each other that you all endorse as a way of feeling community with others. Against those who believe in a single true categorical morality, the moral skepticism argument is that they will have to arbitrarily dogmatize single correct answers to fundamental disagreements without giving plausible and specific explanations for why moral skepticism is in error. Categorical objectivists might propose that fundamental disagreements arise because at least one side has an interest in not acknowledging some moral or nonmoral facts. The moral skeptical could retort that this sort of explanation is quite general. As seen in a previous section, experiments show that seeing an issue as objective correlates with the perception of the current consensus on the issue. Folk morality doesn’t think that there is only one correct answer for all controversial moral claims.There are no moral categorical reasons to obey. For example, an exceptionless moral principle “don't kill an innocent” might prevent a little girl needless suffering as a terminally ill patient that would serve as a reason for killing a little girl. Context at least partly constitutes the meaning. A spy might well not be “honest” whereas a platoon leader relentless in training his soldiers who are about to be sent to the battlefields might well be only “cruel”. Depending on contexts, “honesty” and “cruelty” might well change from blamed to praised. An action is not in any way determined by universal moral principles, but by the relevant context. One cannot extract from one moral case anything that is guaranteed to make a difference to another. Any morality is ad hoc. Subjectively, any action, no matter how objectionable in itself, can be morally permissible if it were necessary to prevent a sufficiently greater evil.More Argumentation Details - Does morality have an objective, inescapable authority?Empirical research does not support that moral agreement necessarily arises when contenders are fully rational and fully informed of the relevant nonmoral facts. If even with knowledge of nonmoral facts, persistent moral disagreement does not represent a threat to moral objectivity, how or why would be morality self-evident?Objective nonmoral facts can influence morality, but morality can determine how we use objective nonmoral facts: Our moral-political preferences affect the ability to solve mathematical problems, which should be the cornerstone of rationality and objectivity. An experiment can prove this: First, the capacity to handle numbers and the moral-political inclinations of the 1,111 volunteers is measured. They are then divided into groups that were presented to different versions of the same mathematical problem involving the calculation of proportions. It wasn't an easy question, as 59% of people couldn't solve it. Those who were good at math were able to do it well, but the results changed depending on how the problem was presented. If described in a moral-political neutral way, such as calculating the efficacy of a skin cream, the numerically competent had no difficulty in solving it. But when the same question became about the effectiveness of arms control in combating crime, moral-political preferences spoke louder. In fact, those who were better at math give an answer more related to their previous preferred side than the less math skilled. If there is a good picture to describe our moral rationality, it is less that of a scientist interested in obtaining the truth than that of a lawyer interested in winning an argument. When moral-political relevant facts become identified as symbols of membership in and loyalty to affinity groups, people will be motivated to selectively engage empirical evidence in a manner that more supposedly reliably connects their beliefs to their moral-political particular groups than to the positions that are best supported by the evidence. (See Misinformation and identity-protective cognition - Dan M. Kahan, Behavioural Public Policy, Vol 1, Issue 1,2017).Moral-political disagreement grows when science literacy and numeracy increase. Ordinary individuals remarkably more well equipped with science’s knowledge select more scientific information that secure their previous moral-political personal interests. Disagreement about scientific facts stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: Between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share moral-political close ties, and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare. (See The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Nature climate change, 2(10), 732, 2012)Americans from Southern States were much more likely to endorse violence of various forms in response to moral transgression than Americans from the North. Because many Southerners are descendents of Scots-Irish immigrants who had to develop a “culture of honor” to survive under harsh, comparatively lawless conditions in Northern Ireland before coming to the United States. (See Nisbett, R.E., and Cohen, D. Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, 1996) The moral judgments of rural Mayan people in the Mexican state of Chiapas do not judge actions causing harms to be worse than omissions which cause identical harms, while nearby urban Mayan people judge actions to be substantially worse than omissions. (See Abarbanell, Linda and Marc D. Hauser, 2010, “Mayan Morality: An Exploration of Permissible Harms”, Cognition, 115(2): 207–224)It is a fallacy assuming that because all instances of moral disagreement that we have ever encountered can be due to a supposed deficiency of true information among interlocutors, providing true information will lead to moral convergence. This is like saying that because a death was caused by a lack of oxygen in the room, death would have been avoided had the room been filled with 100% oxygen. The question of what shared psychological traits and information are sufficient to ensure a convergence in moral agreement is to a large extent an empirical matter, many of the details of which remain unknown. There is a growing body of literature revealing that the things that can influence an individual's morally relevant attitudes can be quite surprising. We might not have supposed, for example, that a person's tendency to act dishonestly can be enhanced by her wearing sunglasses or being placed in a dimly lit room. Nor might we have guessed the effect of handwashing on a person's moral evaluations. We might not have appreciated how easy it is to manipulate someone's moral opinions by placing him in the presence of a dirty tissue (see a previous section). Attitudes prompted manipulatively in the setting of a psychology lab often survive the debriefing session. Disgust can remain in situations of full information. Even medical placebos sometimes work in conditions of full information. (See Richard Joyce - The Accidental Error Theorist’ in Oxford Studies in Metaethics vol 6)Is there a true objective categorical morality? The most plausible explanation for persistent disagreement among rational agents, with the same information and same discernment, may be that there are no facts that make objective categorical morality true. Consider case examples:Is human life always better than the pleasure of a good meal? No matter how rational and well informed we are, we are incapable of being motivated to count everyone’s interests. An emergency-room doctor can efficiently spend 20 hours a day saving lives instead of only 16. If he spends only 16 hours at work and chooses to spend precious hours during which she could be saving lives having fine meals instead, he has not measured the values at stake incorrectly because what matters in a lived life is the pursuit of a balance of values. Therefore sometimes the pleasure of getting a good meal is more important than the value of human life.For any possible population all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living, because the total sum of quality of life is greater. Therefore, is it possible to make the world an objectively better place by creating more unsatisfied people? Or have we moral objective obligation to make an world where the selfish possibility of a smaller number of human high quality flourishing is greater? Can it really be objectively better for children in a family to allow existing children’s individual well-being level plummet so long as the parents have managed to offset that individual diminution through the total sum of well-being with production of more unsatisfied children? What is the objectively better choice: Either to bring into existence a genetically impaired child with a life below some normal threshold of quality of life, or no child? Has a fetus not yet conscious of being alive moral objective rights of being brought to suffer a life below some normal threshold of quality of life? Or have parents' moral objective right of procreative liberty despite that an impaired child can have deleterious well-being effects on brothers? Suppose that men choose to deplete natural resources instead to conserve. Far future generations' existence can be more restricted under depletion, but it can be just as restricted as now under strict conservation. Conservation or depletion of resources may mean fewer people now or in the future. As conservation of natural resources decreases now the quality and quantity of life, would we have the moral objective duty of maximizing the future total sum of quality and quantity of life for an unknown number of people and their technology in the far future?Suppose Alison is one of 25 United States government officials on an airplane, each with a briefcase bearing an official seal. Terrorist hijackers announce they will kill one America per hour until their demands are met. Alison switches briefcases with Babette, a french woman, while she is in the bathroom. The terrorists shoot Babette. Suppose now that Allison doesn’t switch briefcase, but surreptitiously covers her briefcase official seal with a Libya Air sticker. The terrorists pass her briefcase and shoot Beatrice, the next American. What is the objective principle that satisfactorily determines the difference between morally avoiding harm in self-defense and immorally sacrificing others in self-defense?Is homosexuality objectively against natural law? Does the fact that something is natural make it good? Earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, floods, mass extinctions are natural. Even if there are, in fact, certain characteristics held in nature by all human beings, like visual impairment in adults, it does not follow that these must be what we want to have. Being unnatural renders something bad? Computers, curing diseases with medicines and using artificial sweetener are unnatural. Homosexuality is in fact natural and does occur among animals. The frequency of homosexual-propensity genes in human populations is above the level expected from mutation alone, a sign that the propensity has been favored by natural selection (See Genesis - The Deep Origin of Societies - Edward O. Wilson). The homosexuality level is too high to be explained solely by random changes in genes that affect sexual behavior. Individuals that join professions useful to society but counter to their own reproduction, monastic orders, and homosexuality are examples of social activity that do not favor reproduction. It is logically impossible to derive any normative truth from any non normative truth. If there aren't normative words in the premises, cannot there be normative words in the conclusion. Knowledge of the natural facts will not take you to morality. Religious natural law point of view puts procreation at the center of marriage as its natural fulfillment. However, if for example they were to place love and mutual support for human flourishing at the center, it is clear that many same-sex couples would meet this point of view. By placing procreation as the natural fulfillment of marriage, religion denigrates sterile marriages, and grandparents help because they are not done for procreation, and surely they are not wrong. Homosexual acts can be humanly appropriate because in performing them partners realize a common good they can realize in no other way. A significant number of those who divorce or who report that their marriages are not what they had hoped cite disappointment in their sexual lives. There aren't causal connections between the recognition of homosexual marriage and the prevalence of attitudes that destabilize families. Slippery slope arguments falsely assume that we will be unable in the future to distinguish the consensual, harmless sexual activity between rational adults, in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships, from incest, and pedophilia. Oral and anal sex acts are never potentially procreative, whether heterosexual or homosexual, but why is this biological distinction morally relevant? Tolerance for gay relationships increases with the cost of child rearing. How can God's good purposes for procreation account for example, that were extinct well over 99% of species that ever lived? Nothing in particular need follow from the ethical status of celibacy and homosexual sex. Moral facts that do not provide reasons for everyone are not moral facts. We have laws for the imprisonment of people who inflict suffering upon animals. The disvalue of the suffering of animals outweighs the value of the freedom to inflict suffering on animals. Why don't animals have free will, yet they suffer like us? If animals are incapable of undergoing a process of spiritual growth, animal suffering is just pointless. There is no reason to believe that biological evolution is sensitive to God’s moral considerations. If you believe something because you have evidence for it, or because rational argument, that is not faith. So faith is believing something in the absence of evidence or reasons. Religious people think that sacred scriptures give them the moral authority to dictate the rights of others but their children will look back at them like we look at those who told blacks and women that they didn't have the same rights as white men. Citizens’ interest in liberty and pursuit of their own good outweighs any state or religion interest in promoting only procreative relationships.