In search of the ABSOLUTE in morality - Hmmm…Where is it? For example, Is it really true that some acts are necessarily moral or immoral?
Okay, “Moral” must be defined first. Let’s see…“The Moral is a good act, the immoral a bad act”. Hmm…Or "The Moral is an act in accordance with [God, Nature, social contract]. Or, "The Immoral is to act against [God, People]. Hmm…
An example: I define INTENTIONAL RANDOM KILLING as Any act where one person intentionally and randomly causes the death of another person. This has a strong possibility of being immoral. But it is first and foremost a physical act in the sense of cause and effect; that is, it is first and foremost an intentional human behaviour having a direct consequence - namely, the death of another person. Nothing moral there.
So, exactly what is its MORAL nature? (forgetting for the moment the question of “absolute”).
Let’s say that MORAL is first of all decided upon by the Group. Start with a society rather than a single person. Thus moral is thus close to Law, or Mores, or any other such socially ordering principle. The moral is that which the group deems “moral”.
Okay, then to continue: If a group deems it not worthy of concern or not necessary to denounce random killing, then to that group an act of intentional random killing is not even a moral question. (Canabalism and human sacrifice come to mind. Indeed, the randomness and intentionality in human sacrifice might be part of the killing’s moral goodness!) But if another group has concluded differently, and has thought it necessary to denounce random killing, then to that group, random killing is immoral. What could possibly make the first or the second group wrong or right: that is, Is one group more or less consistent with some set of absolute morals to conclude that, “One of these groups are not acting morally?”
Even more so - even if all peoples denounce an act as immoral this in itself does not make the act an absolutely immoral act. It is mere consistancy, no? An ABSOLUTE must be based on something other than some accidental COMMONALITY of a moral denunciation, otherwise we would have the problems of reconciling so many variations between cultures as well as the difficulty of judging evolving moral standards.
There must be something more reliable than shared commonality to constitute the label ABSOLUTE. I think it is here: One thing that seems to be absolute and unchanging is that each culture makes for itself some set of moral conclusions: that is, every discrete culture has its own concept of morality. Thus, morality itself is an absolute, like eating, or two-legged. Man is not only a biped; he and she are moral beings. This indicates that being moral is a common factor within each human community, that it must have an origin within each human group, such that this commonality did not rely on communication outside the group, but that in parallel all discrete human groups have come to the same conclusion or evolutionary state: the necessity of having a morality.
But what to make of random intentional killing – is it absolutely immoral? Following the above, it is only within the stadnards and social needs of a particular group that one can discover whether random intentional killing is immoral. That it would shock my conscience to learn of human sacrifice, and that in an increasingly globalized world, it is quite possible to advocate for change in some cultures - this international rights movement does not reveal or rely upon an absolute in terms of content only an absolute that morality is a driving force within human beings - personally and especially social.