Quote from: 4v4l0n42 on September 06, 2011, 12:01:46 AM

Quote from: mobodick on September 05, 2011, 09:50:25 PM

Aah, but in all that you wrote here you didn't use the word 'better', which was what i was talking about.
Better is an opinion and is not based on hard data.
Better is always from some(ones) point of view.

And i agree with most of the rest of your post, hard facts are hard facts.

Then it's just playing with semantics, and I'm not interested in that.

Now, what's relevant? Hard data suggests some things that we need and some things that we ought to avoid. That's enough to start a scientific discourse about well being.

If you want to put any meaning into what you say you need to take semantics seriously.
Hard data does not suggest anything, but an observer of that data can.
Unfortunately suggestion is not hard at all.

There are things we need, but not everyone needs the same thing and not everyone wants what they need.
Do you want to force me, for instance, to eat more vitamins because you (or society or whoever) think it is 'better' for me?
Or will you let me eat my bad foods because i'm happy that way (which is also 'better', but this time from my perspective)?

There is no hard distinction between 'good' and 'evil'.
One person could describe something as good, while another person sees it as evil.
Thinking that you do know what is good or evil would make you pretensious.

But of course no morals at all would lead to a chaos and so we have to settle on some set of values that we all more or less agree with. And that is what our forrest of moral systems is, a collection of sets of agreed upon values.

Things are just not as simple as your need them to be.
There are many many different people with different looks on life.
I bet the Taliban have different morals than people from the USA.
And i bet your neighbor has different morals from you.

Part of being human is having a slight randomness to the genes.
What you would need is perfect clones, raised in identical environments, fed identical information so they would have identical moral values, if such a thing is even possible.
But real people are not like that.
Moral values are mostly a grey area and it's more of a moving average than anything objective.
If you look throughout history then you will find that morals are just a consensus of rules that help a population stabilize.
But these same morals can lead to oppression and revolution.
There are no universal morals.
There are, however, rules that help an animal prevail in a given environment and we have some of that stuff built in as a pointer for our own morals.
But these are not very specific and always put a tension between the individual and the group (or species or environment).
It's the field between egoism and alturism, a battle between spending energy for your own purposes or for the purposes of your community (which may or may not be serving yourself).
Since the mechanics of society change so do our morals.
If you can predict how society will function in the future you may be able to get a general feel of how morals will change.
But nothing hard or definitive.