Seasons

One might draw that conclusion, yes. But that's not what I was trying to say. Let me put it this way: If I say that something is morally wrong and you say that it is morally right, which one of us is correct?

Emmmmm.... maybe we have to get a consensus then.

Or maybe morality isn't about what people say it is moral, but is something self-evident or deducible from basic principles.

Far from requiring something "outside mankind", I'd suggest that morality springs from the fundamentally human characteristic of empathy.

zx20 - As far as a consensus goes, to quote the old saying 'If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.'

Eugene - Fair point on the religious hypocrits.

Crab - I think you are right about this idea of morality being derived from empathy. Funnilt enough though it kind of fits that whole Christian ideal of Do unto others.

As for the colonisation of Mars. I think it has to happen. I think we've outgrown our little rock and we either need to find another one. By 2050 it is projected there will be 12 billon people on the planet. We either need to get better organised in how we manage and maintain our resources and people, or we need to open up some new frontiers. First step is the moon, and from there Mars.

Why the moon?

Ah, but that "do unto others as you would have done unto you" can be a tricky one too if taken too literally... or would you not agree that a better notion when doing unto others would be to do what *they* would have done unto them?

Interestingly, the earlier, Jewish "do-unto" is reputed to have been phrased in the negative: "do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you". But I'd say any of these, while deriving from empathy, is too limited in scope. Notions of good and bad, right action, proper behavior, who is included in your "tribe" and who is not... these can be easily confused when they are "inherited" rather than discovered.

Yeah but how are we supposed to "discover" morality when for most ppl today, life consists mostly of sex, money, drugs, and other such stupidity? People want what they want, when they want it, regardless of how it affects anyone else, and if they don't get it they'll whine & bitch & insult everyone & their brother. (Not to say this is how everyone is, I've just been spending too much time trying to put up with games with a lot of 13 year old players. ) A lot of ppl don't care about morality or have any empathy whatsoever, and I really wonder how they're gonna make it in a world where no one else cares about them either. The vast majority of teenagers are pretty much pathetic, and sooner or later they're gonna be the ones running this country. I think a lot of this has to do with how they've been babied over the years...you can't spank them, you can't give them bad grades even if they cheated on a test, they're supposed to grow up with nothing bad ever happening to them and you know what? It still doesn't make them happy. This is one of the effects of "one or the other" reasoning I think I was talking about earlier. Either you fiendishly abuse your kids or you let them ride roughshod over you. It's like the ppl who make the laws can't realize there's a middle ground somewhere, that just maybe you can discipline your kid without making him black & blue for a week & psychologically damaging him for the rest of his life. They've tried treating kids like glass figurines and I think the kids are more psychologically damaged from that than from anything else. Somewhere in there it became ok to rob a 7-11 because you're bored. I'm not sure how it happened, I never had the slightest urge to do so when I was a kid, regardless of how bored I got. I never treated everyone I met like shit either, and I don't remember ever being spanked except when I was really little. So maybe it's just something weird about these kids that has nothing to do with discipline, I dunno. It's sure as hell scary though.

Ok I'm not sure where that rant came from, but it probably had something to do with sleep deprivation.

I agree a bit with the whole treating kids like glass figurines thing only making matters worse. It gives kids a complex where they start to believe that they are in fact far more fragile than they are. There is also the common occurrence where kids who are sickly and weak get that way because of parental paranoia that doesn't let them play in the dirt, go outside when it's cold or wet or whatever. I mean that's how we develop an immune system.

Oh, and Crab, the reason to go to the moon first (apart from the fact that it's closer) is that it makes it far more cost effective to expand from there. A ship leaving the moon's gravity has to expend far less fuel getting out of the moon's gravity well than the earth's.

So what's wrong with sex, money, and drugs?

Nothing, if they're not the be all and end all of existence. I've known a damn lot of stoners who didn't remember what it was like to be sober, and I think it's really stupid to get so wrapped up in drugs that you never think about anything else. Don't get me wrong, I got stoned and I would again if given the opportunity, but for me it just gets boring after a while. I dunno why most ppl don't seem to realize that it's more fun in moderation anyway.

The problem is when you get so obsessed with money and sex and drugs that other people aren't people, they're just things you can use to get money or sex or drugs. This is the era of the Shrine of Me. I can't have empathy for you if I don't even believe you're a person just the same as I am. It's like everyone thinks other ppl are just their dreams or something, without feelings or needs of their own. It makes it really hard to be a caring individual in a world of ppl who don't give a damn. But something these ppl don't seem to realize, and the main reason they'll never be happy, is that you're the only person you'll hafta live with for the rest of your life, so you might as well try to be the best person you can. And that doesn't mean amassing the largest collection of money and sex and drugs.

Eugene - It's not that simple. Ideally, the two people would give a hopefully valid argument to which morality is right. If not, well, that, my friends, is an idiot.

Onyx - Your comments about teen are vastly hyperbolized. In some cases, it may be like that, but most of the parents in america know at least slightly better than that. I'm sure there's plenty of that to a smaller degree, but not too much like you said.

As for sex, money, and drugs: You're going off on a completely unrelated point; You're talking about addiction.
Also, related to that, Denis Leary once made a good point: "Happiness comes in small doses." I'm not into drugs, but as for sex and money, I'm all for that. Sure, they can lead some people into some bad situations, but that's the person's fault, and it's stupid to call sex and money evil because of that.

I'm not saying they're evil. I'm not even saying the people who abuse them are evil. Misguided perhaps...I can't really think of an appropriate word. And yeah I know ALL teens aren't like that, I know there's SOME ppl regardless of their age who have morals, but it's not nearly as widespread as it used to be. What I'm talking about are the people who come in an IRC channel about AD&D or wicca and insult everyone in there for lack of anything better to do, and the ppl on games like Runescape who sit around swearing at everyone for no particular reason I can figure out. The only reason I can see for most of these ppl to act this way is that they don't give a shit about anything. I repeat, not everyone is like this, but play Runescape for a little while and you'll see what I'm saying about the ones who are.

And therefore your original lament which goes roughly: "it's clearly superior to be a moral agent, but I don't believe people in general will be, and so I wish they would at least get religion or something so as not to be so awful". Was that it?