Thoughts on Right and Wrong Behaviors

   Elsewhere it was said that "there can be on objective morality." Actually the police represent one. If you have police, you have an objective morality.

   In these random access discussion boards one might find all sorts of shades of meaning, perhaps it meant the police shouldn't pretend theirs is an objective morality.

   Setting that aside and going to the top of the page, there are individuals whose interests are sometimes found to conflict. Morality can be described as the means to resolve at least some of those conflicts.

   In that sense morality can be inherently objective, something beyond those interests found to conflict. It might make more sense to say there can be no subjective morality.

   Not to complain about any atheists on this board in particular, it can be "characteristic" of atheists generally that they are extremely simple folk. Perhaps that was always the case or perhaps decades of blind faith in science has "rotted their brains" (lost skills through disuse).

   Differences in interests happen so frequently that most people have given at least some forethought how to deal with them should they occur. Some plans are deemed valuable to rather large numbers of people.

   One plan is to avoid traffic with people whose interests differ. The famous Wiccan Rede holds that " ... it harm none, do what ye will." It allows traffic where one's own interests are not challenged (when in Rome, do as the Romans).

   Another plan hopes to establish a consensus as far as possible that will achieve "the greatest good for the greatest number" (also known as Jeremy Bentham's "Utilitarianism"). It is much like basic "democracy" but with more respect for the minority.

   Another formulation often found at the base of systems of morality is the necessity of any rules to apply the same to oneself and others, the "Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

   While a very significant majority of people accept all those basic ideas, considerable differences can arise in their implementation.

   A question that often arises is how much any well developed strategies of cooperation owe to "religion" and whether strategies of comparable value might be developed without religion.

   In a moment of special clarity someone here reminded us that "science is descriptive, not prescriptive." Political differences are usually differences of opinion not fact. Science can sometimes find the fact. Science is useless in the world of differing opinions.

   That means the better developed strategies of cooperation require art, not science. Whether you call it "religion" or something else, it is an art, not a science.

   When a disagreement occurs over some moral question, it is often a "time tested" moral question. People born into families with few traditions often fail to accept the time tested solution. The problem in the United States today is in part that the Democrats have so few traditions.  The Republicans, for the other part, cannot help them because Republicans blindly accepted their own traditions and do not fully understand them themselves.