Materialism of the Gaps sub-discussion: the morality debate

[Laird]

I very much doubt it... 'everything' is relative at this level (morality of the death sentence)...

Does my follow-up post to Kam replacing "absolute versus relative" with "objective versus subjective" change your view at all?

Totally fair call: yes, "absolute versus relative" was a poor framing; I think I'd resolved in the past when discussing morality to go instead with the "objective versus subjective" distinction. "Absolute" could imply "without exception", whereas the meaning I was intending to convey was instead "[true] independent of anybody's opinion", in the same sense that logical truths are true: objectively, independently of anybody's (subjective) opinion.

Could you more easily accept a spectrum of moral principles from "(more or most) objective" to "(more or most) subjective" than one that allows for a moral principle to be "(more or most) absolute"?

P.S. Agreed on what a more morally enlightened society would do.

OK - now I see where you are coming from. I don't know that I can answer with any authority but I'll say this: I am inclined to accept the ancient teachings that love is fundamental. I think of love in a similar way to how I think of light - that darkness cannot extinguish light but light will always illuminate darkness. You can put on a light when it is dark but you can't put on a dark when it is light.

In that sense, love is fundamentally true and true morality comes from love. Again, morality does not come from recrimination, revenge, retribution or judgement - these are human inventions and are basically attempts to bring order to the seeming lawlessness of human nature. So I'll go back to what I said in an earlier post: there are also aspects of human nature that appear to arise from love itself: kindness, compassion, empathy and generosity are not, in my opinion, forms of disguised self-interest: they are expressions of love. 

I mentioned ancient teachings and I remain convinced that there is a core to all the major religions which is based on those teachings. It is the misinterpretation and misapplication of those teachings which have resulted in the evil associated with much of what we now recognise as organised religion. Thus I am not willing to accept religious orthodoxy as my moral compass and prefer to try to make sense of it all myself. Religion, as practised today, does not speak to me or for me.