CMV: People are generally amoral, and just try to avoid social or legal punishment

Morality is the abstraction of biological necessity to the rational construct, and its extrapolation to derivative claims.

For any animal that requires social cooperation to survive in the manner that humans do, certain types of behavior become impermissible among your own cooperating group. Theft, murder, certain types of bodily violation, are moral precepts that are non-optional.

Extrapolations of these starting points can be quite broad, but cannot fundamentally conflict with the underlying mandates. All societies must share these mandates to remain moral, because we cannot create sustainable societies without doing so. While the derived morals may vary, the underlying moral axioms are incredibly constrained in their ability to do so. This does not mean people always obey according to these axioms.

However, it does mean that there are moral critiques which can be meaningfully levied which do not depend whatsoever on cultural contexts. This means that morals are not only defined by whatever is acceptable to a culture: a culture can be simply and intrinsically wrong by adopting biologically unacceptable behavioral patterns.

/r/changemyview Thread Parent