Philosophy has produced many theories on ethics. Some say it's about happiness and other say it's about duty or about virtue.

The point is we haven't got an infallible guide to ethcial living. Perhaps ethics isn't something that can be understood in a purely rational sense.

Why?

A lot of our moral instincts (in the absence of anything solid in philosophy) involve emotion. Yes, emotion is bad for rationality - fallacies breed in feelings - but we also know that a good moral foundation requires empathy. And empathy is emotion.

So, I ask you, do you think we need to invest our hearts and not just our brains in ethics? — TheMadFool

Absolutely we need to invest our hearts. I would like to add that although empathy might be an emotion, "empathy" can also be a very effective tool in understanding another person, not through proof or evidence but much like Aristotle taught us that "It is a mark of an educated mind to entertain the ideas of others, without taking them on for you own."

To me empathy is the highest form of understanding another person and can allow the most natural emotional connection to take place. When you are mirroring another and are empathetic to their position, your field of possibilities of things you had not thought of expands.

Now to the necessity of having the heart in place as well as ethics. We as "thinkers" gravitate towards an ethical balance and in most cases, we can debate what is and isn't ethical but when we put identities in play, hearts and minds attached, it can take on a whole new meaning that you never saw coming. But because you are capable of expressing empathy or listening empathetically and have your ethical compass in place, you can entertain ideas that usually fall out of the norm.

For instance: I am still working through an idea that is already acceptable ethically and implemented in Australia, that is very impressive when it comes to showing empathy to those who might be struggling with something most of us don't encounter but this is one that threw me for a loop. I have been working for two, maybe three years to find my ethical balance on government paying for this but my empathy factor is already convinced.

See what you think of this:
Sex workers

to the Australian and Danish government paying for:
The right to fornication has its own internal logic and social workers in Denmark as well as Australia have followed it industriously to its conclusion in the care of disabled clients.

Can you see how both ethics and heart, love and empathy are all in play?

A lot of our moral instincts (in the absence of anything solid in philosophy) involve emotion. Yes, emotion is bad for rationality - fallacies breed in feelings - but we also know that a good moral foundation requires empathy. And empathy is emotion. — TheMadFool

This is a discussion I've been involved in lots of times. No, emotion is not bad for rationality. Human life is encircled and entwined with emotion. How can any study of humanity not discuss and consider feelings. If rationality is so fragile it can't deal with them, it's worthless. As A. Shopenhauer wrote "Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct...."

Compassion - Sympathetic concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.

Absolutely we need to invest our hearts. I would like to add that although empathy might be an emotion, "empathy" can also be a very effective tool in understanding another person, not through proof or evidence but much like Aristotle taught us that "It is a mark of an educated mind to entertain the ideas of others, without taking them on for you own." — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Agreed. I think intellectual empathy is required for reason. I also think intellectual and emotional empathies come from the same place. They require a certain kind of imagination, intelligence. Some people got it, some don't. I'm sure some of that has to do with experience, but I think a lot of it we're born with.

"It is a mark of an educated mind to entertain the ideas of others, without taking them on for you own."

Maybe, I think Plato would say this is the way of a Sophist. Their relationship must have turned rocky.

The sex worker idea is splendid but I doubt it could fly here in US... Craigslist shut down its personals and the Feds seized Backpage.com web sites last week. .

The new law will force US sex worker back on to the street in most locales, or back to pimps for protection since they can no longer anonymously screen potential customers. This law which basically says that a web site is responsible for third part postings may lead to much more intrusive censoring by the moral police.

Have a series of self indulgent aphorisms.

(1) Passions inspire reasons.

(2) Thus using your morality is also creating it; as removing a shard of glass from skin lets blood. (1)

(3) Compassion dwells in what we decide is such a wound. (2)

(4) Empathy, then, has already split the world in two. (3)

(5) Moral discovery is being surprised to find yourself so predisposed. As pain calls attention. (2)

(6) To decide without risk is to be indifferent to your choices. (5)

(7) An ethics is a constellation of indifferent opinion, involuntarily cast onto the world like we pin their celestial analogues to the sky. Their function is to promote decision as if your decisions were already made for you. Not by you. (5,6)

(8) To live morally is more than to decide ethically, it is to act as skilfully in moral decision as in all things you are able. It is to adjust and adjust to the interplay of emotion and surprise. (1,6,7)

(9) Ethical conduct, then, is self mutilation (2) to tend another's wound (2,3,4,8) with the blood (1).

"Moral police" is a fascinating phrase. Maybe I've just read too much Orwell, but doesn't it seem rather ominous, as though such a group would be (or is) ironically, profoundly immoral?

As such, I accept that having morality enforced by an external source is an anathema. However, this doesn't mean that my personal emotional attitude is morally right either.

For example, the hatred I feel for the **** who stole my girlfriend is, even to me, clearly not morally right. How are we to figure out which emotions are morally right except through the application of reason?

This goes to the question of how things are grounded. I want a rational ground; someone else wants emotion/feeling; a third wants utility; a fourth, care. A fifth shrugs and say it's all relative; a sixth says nothing matters - do what you want.

In a good book, The Hermeneutics of Original Argumentation, P.C. Smith, ISBN-10: 0810116081, the author refers to the law of non-contradiction (significant in the distinction between apodictic reasoning and rhetorical argumentation). What, he asks, makes it work? What grounds it? The answer has stuck with me: The law of non-contradiction works because it had better work!

This "because it had better" is by no means as simple as it sounds. I read it this way: the world is such a place that things are such a way and that they had better be that way. The seeming relative-ness of the phrase is seen then as rooted - in a world.

But what is this world that so grounds this axiom, making it an "had better be"? Of course in reason and science it isn't "had better be" except as irony, a joke (and on occasion a pending - best available at the moment - explanation). In those arenas it's either/or. Either it is, or it is not. Clearly, though, there is more to the world than either/or. Call it the lived world (or any name that seems better). In the lived world the options include either/or, neither/nor, and both!

We move from grounds to worlds, but still remains the question of grounds. What grounds? It's ever been my practice and the practice of those around me (i.e., my explanation and excuse) to seek clarification from the rules. Time out, so to speak, while we check the rule book. I've come to recognize that the rule book - whichever is meant at the moment - is never "in time." It's always a time-out authority, from outside the "within-ness" of the lived world. It works for games.

For the lived world (as I'm calling it) the "had better be" comes from the world itself. Not from rules, not from time-out authority; the best of that is advice and suggestion. What the lived world tells us is what the better is - if we can hear it! Often enough we cannot, or it takes a long time to hear it, or it takes uncommon experience and maturity.

What comes about, then, is the recognition that the right is not something for which there can be an apodictic demonstration or proof, exhibited to the eye for passive contemplation and understanding. Instead it is a call to an action of some kind, the rightness of which exists now even if it might not exist later. It exists in the consideration of the possibilities of both sides of contradictions, resolved in the persuasion of the argument of the moment.

Two examples come to mind: the evolution towards the realization of personal freedom and the rights of persons, and the phrase, "necessity knows no law." The former the movement toward the right that the lived world continually speaks of; the latter the recognition that lived world is lawful when it can be, and not when it cannot.

I don't understand. To me, making moral decisions is pretty simple. I don't often need a lot of deep thought to decide what's right and what's wrong. Sometimes I do. Then we can roll out the engines of reason and start them up.

Usually, if I'm not sure what the right thing to do is and I describe the issue to a friend I trust, the answer I get back is "You know what the right thing to do is, you just don't want to do it." And they're usually right.

Some of the things I was trying to condense.

To me, making moral decisions is pretty simple.

Simple because passions - feelings about stuff - inspire the reasons to fit the decision in the process of making it. The simplicity is something which hides the complex web of feelings because it is equivalent to that web expressing itself. The most basic feeling about something or motivation for a moral decision is actually very complex when put under the microscope.

I don't often need a lot of deep thought to decide what's right and what's wrong

Again, since moral reasoning follows from becoming impassioned. Most moral decisions are not serious ones, and feel obvious. Only obvious because they are largely irreflexive endorsements of the background of your moral decision making in general. This background is a person's ethical code, no matter how nascent. A person's ethical code is an intersection between what opinions and maxims inform their moral decisions and the passions which start deliberation running before, and keep it running while making those decisions. Thus, ethical codes are liminal spaces between inspired, emotive action and retarding thought.

Moral decisions concern agents. You and others. How things about those agents can become relevant during making a moral decision rests on empathy, as empathy facilitates recognising the plights in their/your situation. The degree of empathy co-occurs with the degree of inspired emotion - more feels more I get you man, less feels more indifference.

Hence, simple decisions - in which the intensity of feeling is low - require little effort because they rely more heavily upon the pre-established ethical code you have. Bunch of inherited norms and your own opinions and rules of thumb. These aren't really ethical decisions in my book, they're decided by the usual parameters of the situation.

But to empathise is also, then, to demarcate the situation surrounding a moral decision into things which are relevant for it and things which are not. To care is also to negate. The degree of caring and the intensity of the negation are also concomitant with the degree of inspired passion. 'That's just wrong' and 'That's disgusting' are more applicable to child predators than to people who leave food on the plate. Notice that less people care about the latter waste and this norm is also concomitant with a summary of feelings on the matter.

In the same spirit as the example, a moral decision which is not felt much as one is made for you by the background - since an ethical code is the engagement with this background. When the background dominates (as in bureaucratic or legal decisions), the feelings go.

Conversely, when impassioned, the background recedes and you're left with yourself and your own devices. The background receding is simultaneously a call to what's at stake in the decision. Do I tell my wife I've been unfaithful? Do I tell my boss I leave food on the plate? The ridiculousness of the latter and the seriousness of the former contrast the extremes of transformative and procedural moral decisions.

Thus, a non-procedural moral decision is one you find yourself - or another agent - at stake in. They are empathised with, their particularity is emphasised, their plights are felt, conflict with them is painful. In this sense moral decisions, that is non-procedural moral decisions, leave you at risk. They require you to rethink things from the ground up, change your behaviour in the long term etc.

This finding yourself, or another, at stake is the work of empathy. Disgust, hatred, the inverses of empathy, instead more narrowly circumscribe the agent they are directed towards - their plights, particularities are minimised with passion. With indifference, with which the majority of moral decisions are made, the agents concerned in them are not felt at all.

I tell my wife I've cheated on her - self mutilation, but done for the right reasons (ethical code at play). Telling her; to make amends and repair, to treat her as human herself and not an extension of my interests and beliefs; to treat the wound of cheating with the blood pouring from the decision to tell her, the hopes of working through, the resolution with or without closure. Structurally, things are always gained: more grist for the mill of affect, more stories for the background, more maxims for the code.

Simple because passions - feelings about stuff - inspire the reasons to fit the decision in the process of making it. The simplicity is something which hides the complex web of feelings because it is equivalent to that web expressing itself. The most basic feeling about something or motivation for a moral decision is actually very complex when put under the microscope. — fdrake

I disagree. For me it is truly simple. I make my best judgement and then accept responsibility for the consequences. That's how moral action works.

On issues of science and mathematics, you are one of the people who's judgement and knowledge I trust the most. On this subject, I have a hard time understanding what you are trying to say.

Have you ever been in a situation where you made a decision and it was wrong, but not just that, that the way you make those kind of decisions gave you a self sustaining repetition of the same mistake?

Sometimes when people screw up morally, they were doing what they thought they needed to do to protect themselves. The current president of the US is a prime example. He was taught in childhood that there are killers and losers. Losers die (as his brother did, of suicide).

Moral police" is a fascinating phrase. Maybe I've just read too much Orwell, but doesn't it seem rather ominous, as though such a group would be (or is) ironically, profoundly immoral?

As such, I accept that having morality enforced by an external source is an anathema. However, this doesn't mean that my personal emotional attitude is morally right either.

For example, the hatred I feel for the **** who stole my girlfriend is, even to me, clearly not morally right. How are we to figure out which emotions are morally right except through the application of reason?

I used the term "moral police" because I was afraid the @ArguingWAristotleTiff would spit-up if I said it was due to american Republican's fetish with what goes on in the bedroom.

So is your screen name "Shatter" the result of the hatred you feel towards the one who stole your girl? Did it Shatter you?

I agree with you that the application of reason is needed for morals to make sense. The rah-boo ethics of emotovist are non-cognitive to extent of dumbness and the dry ethics of Kant leaves out the emotional force needed for a pragmatic ethics. I think that without conceptualization there can be no desire, and without desire there can be no action...perhaps ethics involves getting the mix right?

As Hume elegantly stated, "Reason is and ought only to be a slave of the passions"; a sentiment that has been verified by modern cognitive science (pace Damasio). There is no action, and a fortiori, ethical action, sans emotion. Those who insist on dirempting the two while positioning themselves on the exclusively "rational side" are merely engaging in patronizing snobbery.

Have you ever been in a situation where you made a decision and it was wrong, but not just that, that the way you make those kind of decisions gave you a self sustaining repetition of the same mistake? — fdrake

I've certainly made plenty of mistakes, including moral ones. I can't think of any that lead to what you call a "self sustaining repetition." Do you have an example?

For example, the hatred I feel for the **** who stole my girlfriend is, even to me, clearly not morally right. How are we to figure out which emotions are morally right except through the application of reason? — Shatter

Emotions are not morally right or wrong, behavior is. Your hatred for the **** is self-destructive, but it's not wrong. Controlling that hatred is something you do for yourself.

As Hume elegantly stated, "Reason is and ought only to be a slave of the passions"; a sentiment that has been verified by modern cognitive science (pace Damasio). There is no action, and a fortiori, ethical action, sans emotion. Those who insist on dirempting the two while positioning themselves on the exclusively "rational side" are merely engaging in patronizing snobbery. — Maw

Hume notwithstanding, there are a lot of smart and honorable people who believe that, on moral issues, reason comes first. They're not snobs at all.

New word - "dirempting." Thanks for that.

Not sure what it means to say "reason comes first", but I think any explanation offered likely misunderstands my (and Hume's) point.

Those who insist on dirempting the two while positioning themselves on the exclusively "rational side" are merely engaging in patronizing snobbery. — Maw

As opposed to full-time snobs who use words like "dirempt." Better had you used your skills to expand on and make clear what Hume meant. I could guess, but who cares what I think Hume meant. Do you know, and can you say, what he meant?

We are evolved social primates, so our conception of morality is largely based on our evolution, although not determined by it. But, go ahead and do what Plato wanted, have children raised on groups and not by their parents, and see how well that works out? It'll fail, because people have largely evolved to want to take care of their children so they can successfully perpetuate their genes. While moral philosophy is not determined by our biology, it is also true that our morality is confined by our evolved nature.

Moral theories all have giant holes in them because some philosopher tries to generalize from a specific case that they have a gut feeling is morally right. Moral philosophy is basically just a large accumulation of post hoc "explanations" so far.

Amusing, but no. I chose the name Shatter as a deliberately pretentious allusion to my desire to rip the guts out of the vain, ignorant, indolent society of which I find myself a part.

As to effective ethics resulting from a healthy balance between reason and emotion, it does sound good, Aristotalean moderation and so forth, but I can't help feeling that if it was as simple as that someone would have sussed it out by now.

This and so many other theories proposed share the assumption that there IS a morally correct way to behave. I find this problematic.

I submit that morals are not discovered, they are created. They are a consequence of the way we share the experience of social life. All well and good, but we don't, at least in the so called civilised world, belong to a single social group. What is the right thing to do if the demands of your workmates contridict those of your local community? What if legal obligations (which routinely claim to be a manifestation of absolute morality) would involve a betrayal of family?

Is it possible that we fail to grasp morality because we are grasping at air?

Well, that kind of thing usually happens in relationships. You and your partner have a personality conflict where're they're just wrong and you're just wrong, and you repeat the actions that provoke them and vice versa. Something like, a moral or ethical mistake isn't achieved by doing something you think is wrong, it's when you're doing something you know is right.

Another example might be an alcoholic with depression trying to recover, recovery is hard so the alcoholism comes to play as a coping mechanism. I drink because I'm sad, I'm sad because I drink. The drinks do help though.

If you fail to be compromising on the matter - and in cases like this it means working on your personality and behavioural patterns (self mutilation, incredibly painful change) - you'll suffer. So you can choose to suffer transformatively or suffer meaninglessly.

Most moral decisions aren't concerned with transformation, they're procedural and somewhat legalistic. An application of principles. Being principled is being ethical, but not necessarily being moral.

If you want an example of an intellectual debate in which empathy 'splits the world in two', look at the Israel Palestine one. Or prisoners voting. Or sex worker rights. These are excellent examples of where each side has prefigured what reconciliation means and is thus obviously right.

The times when you will be most wrong are when you know you're right.

I would say that being an active member of a Philosophy Forum kinda prohibits you from calling others "snobs" just because they happen to use a particular word, but that's really neither here nor there.

SEP has a good summary here, but a capsule version is that "motives of the will" stem from the passions, not from reason alone, and thus ethical decision-making (and decision-making generally) cannot be smoothly divided between rational and emotional categories. So I agree with the OP that we must "invest our hearts and not just our brains" in ethics, because we simply can't do otherwise. Martha Nussbaum convincingly argues this as well.

SEP has a good summary here, but a capsule version is that "motives of the will" stem from the passions, — Maw

Thank you for the reference (see Maw's post above for the site). Better you had read it a little closer. The term "passion" is correctly rendered as "motivating passion," for Hume a term of art that does not mean what most folks would understand by passion. I would go so far as to say subject to correction that for Hume in this context, "motivating passion" has nothing directly to do with emotion.

It would seem that Hume argues that pure, disinterested reason itself gives no push, no oomph, to act, but that an individual requires something added to act, which Hume calls "impressions of reflection" that in turn give rise to the motivating passion, examples of which being

"desire and aversion, hope and fear, joy and grief, and a few others.., impressions produced by the occurrence in the mind either of a feeling of pleasure or pain, whether physical or psychological, or of a believed idea of pleasure or pain to come (T 2.1.1.4, T 2.3.9.2). These passions, together with the instincts (hunger, lust, and so on), are all the motivating passions that Hume discusses."

Correctly viewed, this has nothing to do with "invest[ing] our hearts and not just our brains" in ethics."

Whether we should invest our "hearts" along with "our brains in ethics" remains an open question. The "should," for example, is a problem. What does it mean? Or "invest"? Hearts and brains sounds good, but thinking in these terms is not far removed from Hallmark Greeting Card sentiment. What's needed is a little more discernment and rigor.

My own view is that ethics concerns a choice of action,whether to do this, that, or nothing, and that it - the choice - depends in part on the circumstances. By circumstances I do not mean that ethics are relativistic, but rather that circumstances circumscribe - establish a horizon - within which the ethical choice may be found. Some people make choices outside of the bounds of the circumstance, in my opinion, this is just error, no matter what anyone calls it.

For example, a soldier in battle has an enemy in his or her sights. The circumstance is that the ethical choice is to shoot. A soldier in battle who chooses not to shoot on "ethical" grounds is him- or herself out of ethical bounds. But it could be - far-fetched - that the enemy in the sights is the child of the soldier: that would be a different circumstance.

@fdrake A portion of your reply has been posted on The Philosophy Forum Facebook page. Congratulations and Thank you for your contribution~

This and so many other theories proposed share the assumption that there IS a morally correct way to behave. I find this problematic.

I submit that morals are not discovered, they are created. They are a consequence of the way we share the experience of social life. All well and good, but we don't, at least in the so called civilised world, belong to a single social group. What is the right thing to do if the demands of your workmates contridict those of your local community? What if legal obligations (which routinely claim to be a manifestation of absolute morality) would involve a betrayal of family?

Is it possible that we fail to grasp morality because we are grasping at air?

Working backwards. I don't think we are grasping at air. If morals are created as a consequence of the "way we share experience of social life" and man is a social creature then perhaps moral theory intersects with social theory at critical points....such as a society without moral practices cannot exist, that all societies require certain minimal normative moral standards (stated or unstated) in order to function.

It is difficult to understand how a society that condones gratuitous murder, thievery or lying could function as a society. If so certain moral prohibitions would form a kind of species trait for humans. Problematic issues such as abortion are socially contested because certain basic rights are being contested, namely the right of the fetus for life vs the autonomy of a women over her body.

So while I think that a moral choice must weight reason with emotion, I think there are certain values that form who we are as humans, that weigh one decision over the other. It is our decision, our desire to be in concert with ourselves that determines the choice we make and that choice may not be at all that easy or simple.

Off in a bit to play poker :grin:

You don't explain why "motivating passions" have "nothing directly to do with emotions". The examples provided by SEP, and quoted by you, e.g. desire, hope, fear, joy, grief seem 'emotionally' rooted to me, and just a few sentences above the portion you quote states, "According to Hume's theory of the mind, the passions (what we today would call emotions, feelings, and desires)..." so it seems to be a difference without a distinction to me, given that they are distinguished from reason, by Hume.

But conversations centered around an 18th century philosopher can only get us 21st century folk so far. As modern cognitive scientists have found, emotions and feeling are the driving motivators for action, and so it behooves us to understand them better, in order to more "rationally" integrate them in ethical theories, rather than treat them as mutually exclusive categories.

And I don't think many people would dispute that circumstances are important when making moral decisions, but it is not directly related to the dichotomy presented in the opening post.

Well most moral arguments in philosophy use thought experiments to try to tease out our intuitions, which is to say, the feelings and thoughts we have about what's right or wrong in any given scenario.

When we do so, we find that there's the usual bell-curve distribution - there's a good deal of agreement, but some disagreement on the fringes. But that's exactly what you'd expect if morality is largely driven in the first instance by our genes, which select first of all for kin altruism, and in a more vague way, for a kind of racial feeling (genetic closeness/distance), and in an even more vague way, for general sociability and like-mindedness (elective affinity, friendship). But there are slight variations in strategy there that our genes throw up too, and then even more "play" at higher, more abstract levels.

Effectively, the situation with morality is that there are a billion and one possible objective moralities. Take anything - a grain of sand, a turd, a person, a robot, the human race, tigers - and the world instantly crystallizes into objectively good and bad possibilities from the point of view of the existence of that thing. So we as human beings, rational animals, have inbuilt a certain point of view - we (on average, as a rule) act from the point of view of first of all, of reproductive fitness, the transmission of our genes, which we act to further willy nilly, because human beings in the past that didn't have that intuition didn't survive to reproduce. And then, built on top of that foundation, we also have certain intuitions at the more meta level of what's good for social groups (families, kin, clans) that have reproducing members, and so on. No two individuals will have exactly the same set of moral intuitions in this way, but there's a good deal of overlap and agreement (if there weren't, the human world wouldn't work at all, communities couldn't form, etc.). And then on top of that we have even more rarified, abstract considerations about social structures (this is where the social constructionist aspect comes in - although our genetics form a tether, we do have some freedom to try out possible social rules).

But separate from this issue, is the fact that you can search in the logical space of possible social rules, for some "tree" of consistent morality that maps onto any one of those billion possible "what's good/bad for x" perspectives.

So effectively, what we are doing in society, and what we are doing in philosophy, is looking for a good, consistent set or structure of moral rules in possible-social-rule-space, that maps onto the largest average consistent set of moral intuitions that most people have. And that logical tree that we're looking for is an objective morality, built around a basket of closely-related desiderata that ultimately fall out from the basic requirements for human existence - reproduction, co-operation, fulfillment, pleasure, etc. (Here we could also think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is closely related to the way that moral goals are built on top of each other, and all ultimately on the foundation of genetic fitness and reproduction.) But that purely logical structure also coincides with our inbuilt feelings and intuitions - it has to, otherwise we'll reject it, it will never "stick."

In this way, our intuitions tend to fit together coherently (but not perfectly), and then we're also constantly trying (especially with the advent of new technologies, which open up new possibilities of things that can be good or bad) to set up a kind of feedback to our intuitions from our logical explorations, trying to make our moral systems ever more clear and coherent - the process works in tandem, back and forth between intuitions/feelings, and objective conditional moral logic (if ... then you should).

Morality is and always has been defined by what is most likely to keep the human species alive and what will not.

Promiscuity- death by std and illegitimate children not given the benefit of learning from two socially responsible adults.

Homosexuality- Was morally wrong when infant mortality was through the roof and everyone needed to throw their seed in the pot so to speak. Now that over population is a pontential issue it's no longer a threat to the survival of the species and certainly not as much of a threat as gay teens literally getting beaten to death as recently as the late 90's and committing suicide due to social alienation. Accepting homosexuality is now best for survival of the species.

Fighting- potentially leads to murder

Stealing- leads to fighting

Adultry- leads to fighting

Honoring more than one god- leads to fighting

Living in filth- unanimously seen as wrong though not illegal nor recognized as a sin in all religions because if everyone was unsanitary disease would spread rapidly via rats and roaches.

Etc.- everything a society has unanimously deemed as a matter of morality was a matter of life and death when the moral was formed.

True story

I can't edit this apparently. First post! In reguards to arguments regarding Nazis and cultural acceptance of slavery as an example of how societies do not form morality based on a need to preserve the species; these instances derived from questioning the definition of "species" and therefore skewed away from what we all hold as morally sound. It can all still be traced back to survival instincts. Also a true story