Can the government compel you to provide someone a service against your will?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

You see boundaries based on your belief that some higher power has set out morality.

I see morality as out comes of empathy, memory, and other gregarious enhancing abilities that allow creatures to form large groups. All these can be hypothesized, tested and theorized.

Now maybe the higher power is using a transparent ruleset or an opaque one. You can still hypothesis and test. Even if the outcome is one that the system is unpredicatable. If predictions are possible then one can add in theories to.

I have [/i]never[/i] seen an effective Scientific test regarding morality, or anything relating to it. All such "experiments" have been malformed, failing to measure the thing they claim to be measuring.

Good thing that's a factual, not a moral, statement then.

You believe it is not a factual statement?

Atoms have no property called "morality", and you'll never show otherwise.

No, Atoms have no [i]quantifiable[/quote] property called morality. Whether they have a qualitative property, Science has never investigated.

[Montmorency]

You believe it is not a factual statement?

Oh, I see. I was referring to Pape's line, not yours, and unironically.

No, Atoms have no quantifiable property called morality. Whether they have a qualitative property, Science has never investigated.

Of course not.

1. How is [x] to be defined/characterized?

2. How is it to be tested for?

Before it can be enabled to deal with something, science must have these questions answered.

For morality as an atomic or fundamental property, these questions are not to be answered satisfactorily, and so there is not even any point considering whether there is some heretofore-unknown property called "morality". Science should not have truck with phantasms; from there whether you'd like to take an agnostic or an eliminative perspective is up to you - though the former assumes there would be no contradiction with existing knowledge.

Just for kicks:

Atoms have an intrinsic and unmodifiable property called "Criminality". This property correlates with another such called "Badness" 100% of the time.

One hypothesis is that the proportion of atoms with Criminality=Y in an organism will correlate directly with that organism's propensity to commit crimes.

Another hypothesis is that all individuals classified as "Negroid" will be found to be entirely composed of atoms with Criminality=Y.

We believe that a positive conclusion to these hypotheses would explain the ineluctable and prolific law-breaking behavior of the Negro.

I have [/i]never[/i] seen an effective Scientific test regarding morality, or anything relating to it. All such "experiments" have been malformed, failing to measure the thing they claim to be measuring.

It's fairly easy to find tests measuring "moral behavior", which is merely a certain kind of experimentally pre-defined behavior, call it whatever you like. Behavior is not difficult to quantify; what do you have against such tests?

[Papewaio]

I have [/i]never[/i] seen an effective Scientific test regarding morality, or anything relating to it. All such "experiments" have been malformed, failing to measure the thing they claim to .

1) Lets assume first there is morality and it isn't another fable to comfort adults.

2) First you would define what it is and what are its features and sub components. For instance empathy, reciprocity, proportional response, delayed satisfaction, altruism etc. Pick the traits that you believe would make moral members of society and test for those traits.

If it is intrinsic to human genetic coding one would expect to see it a wide variety of societies.

So you could study this via anthropology, psychology, biology or neuroscience.

It could be that some of the traits are instinctual and others socially reinforced.

First though would be defining what is moral and then you could test it. If it is based on an untestable definition then one would need to do a meta study ie does every religion believe morals are from their unique god, pantheon, spaghetti monster. What is the shared beliefs. Are these shared with primitive societies, children raised by animals or animals themselves?

[a completely inoffensive name]

Trying to dismiss morality by using the scientific method is silly.

It's the same as trying to empirically determine human rights. They exist not because of nature, they exist because we (or God if you are religious) wills it ourselves. I don't care what nature has to say about who we are or how we "should" behave. We as humans do posses the ability to alter ourselves, and just as we can say that human rights are a clearly good notion to have, we can say the same with morality in general. Thus we live our lives under the notions of human rights and morality and we are better off believing in these "lies" than trying to take humanity back to the "natural" state of bonobos individual violence and group orgies.

[Papewaio]

One I'm not trying to dismiss it. I'm trying to get a definition for this thread to show which parts may or may not be able to be tested. I believe morality is a outcome of our ability to socialise. If we were all sociopaths with no memory we would not be able to form large societies of individuals. We might be able with pheromones, dictatatorships or other forms of manipulation form large groups.

Anyhow one only needs to look at the large number of laws we have, the need for police and the way our leaders from CEO, Politicians and Priests all exploit their positions of power to wonder how intrinsic morality is.

[a completely inoffensive name]

One I'm not trying to dismiss it. I'm trying to get a definition for this thread to show which parts may or may not be able to be tested. I believe morality is a outcome of our ability to socialise. If we were all sociopaths with no memory we would not be able to form large societies of individuals. We might be able with pheromones, dictatatorships or other forms of manipulation form large groups.

Anyhow one only needs to look at the large number of laws we have, the need for police and the way our leaders from CEO, Politicians and Priests all exploit their positions of power to wonder how intrinsic morality is.

Wasn't trying to respond to you in particular. Was mostly me venting because I have met plenty of people both online and in RL that bring up science where morality is concerned because to them not intrinsic and/or unnatural = lacking in value.

[Papewaio]

I believe that morality is something that is a combination of nature and nuture up there with gender defined role.

I think some of the sub components of it can be studied with current toolsets. Other parts are in the black box category and not yet able to be tested. I do think that some will have structures in the brain that will contribute. There will be a whole host of studies showing removal of parts of the brain causing changes in social patterns. I also think some of it will be learnt and/or redundant or if lost learnt from scratch as the brain will compensate to adapt to its environment.

[Montmorency]

not intrinsic and/or unnatural = lacking in value.

There's the rub, though, the strange sort of special pleading often invoked in defense of morality: if there is no value, then there is still value because , and if there's value my morals are spared.

But if there's no value, there's no need to return (or move) to any which conceivable state: that's the whole point.

Trying to dismiss morality by using the scientific method is silly.

It has nothing to do with science, not ultimately.

There will be a whole host of studies showing removal of parts of the brain causing changes in social patterns.

Interestingly enough, we no longer need to act invasively; we now have the ability to selectively (de)/activate individual circuits or cell-types by introducing mutations that produce sensitivity to target stimuli.

Although either way, it would be widely treated as unethical for scientists to 'lobotomize' people to test this and that. I'm sure we could block long-term memory entirely, or paint the world in hues of one's values, or shut off the self, consciousness as a whole...

It all depends on who's interested in the applications, I suppose.

[Rhyfelwyr]

I'm saying that it is inherent to human beings to have society and engage socially with other humans; it's a truism, really. What I saw you as doing was referring to some sort of pristine 'sub-social' human in your arguments as if it were an actual organism that can and does exist somehow. Even infants behave/engage socially.

I would say we have a 'sub-social' being, in the sense that while social relations are inherent to us and society is an extension of those; as society becomes increasingly removed from its organic origins and instead becomes stratified (eg maintaining the collective spirit as a whole, while subverting the individual to particular roles through inequality), codified (by law and custom, maintaining the social spirit in laws, while destroying the process by which it came to be expressed in society, and replacing a natural system with an arbitrary one), and inorganic (growing less from its roots as an expression of those social relations inherent to us, but rather by replecating itself based on the form it took through the previous stratification/codification), society becomes something of a will unto itself, a driving force in its own right - and wholly divorced from its roots.

It is at this point we can say that while society is natural to humans, the social roles it enforces on people can be anything but natural to the individual.

So let's narrow it down to sexual orientation:

From your perspective, humans are born heterosexual and shift to homosexuality due to specific external influences. There is no gap between attraction and behavior.

From my perspective, sexual orientation is mostly congenital and not so fluid. There is a gap between attraction and behavior, and in either direction for the latter it is due to things like stigma, prestige, power...

I wouldn't say there is no gap between attraction and behaviour - I acknowledged it in my last post. I just don't think that from a historical perspective, there is reason to believe it tells the whole story. Like I said, the problem I have with your position is that "stigma, prestige, power" are at best secondary to a voluntary and attraction-based pursuit of sex in socities where highly artificial conditions seem to make people pursue homosexual relations, in much higher numbers than they do even in free and tolerant societies.

It's the same as trying to empirically determine human rights. They exist not because of nature, they exist because we (or God if you are religious) wills it ourselves. I don't care what nature has to say about who we are or how we "should" behave. We as humans do posses the ability to alter ourselves, and just as we can say that human rights are a clearly good notion to have, we can say the same with morality in general. Thus we live our lives under the notions of human rights and morality and we are better off believing in these "lies" than trying to take humanity back to the "natural" state of bonobos individual violence and group orgies.

The problem then is that your concept of human rights and morality would lack legitimacy, and they would be very difficult to implement without it.

[a completely inoffensive name]

The problem then is that your concept of human rights and morality would lack legitimacy, and they would be very difficult to implement without it.

I acknowledge that. Isn't that the entire reason we have so many ethical systems in the first place? People for millennium have tried to make a justification behind the morality to legitimize it?