Anders Sandberg reared back and wrote,
>Actually, this is where we could improve our memetic artillery. Many
>people want to hear moral arguments for or against doing something,
>and we should be able to give them. As long as the concept of morality
>usually falls into the purvey of conservatives, the debate will be
>biased. Somebody says: "but what about ethics?!", there is an
>embarrassed silence as most people cannot come up with anything to say
>since they do not know how to make good ethical arguments, and then a
>conservative (of any color - red, blue, green, brown, whatever) rushes
>the stage, spruting his or her standard line, filling the silnce. But
>if we ourselves argue for the ethics of our actions, then we can
>acually use this interest in ethics to make people more open to it.
>
>
Have you considered the possibility of the biological basis of morality?
--J. R.
-------------------------------------------------
"Do we invent our moral absolutes in order to make society workable? Or are
these enduring principles expressed to us by some transcendent or Godlike
authority? Efforts to resolve this conundrum have perplexed, sometimes inflamed,
our best minds for centuries, but the natural sciences are telling us more and
more about the choices we make and our reasons for making them>"
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98apr/biomoral.htm
A Scientific Approach to Moral Reasoning
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98apr/bio2.htm
"Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science,
for its part, will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition
and in time uncover the bedrock of moral and religious sentiments."
--E. O. Wilson
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