If human beings are moral and ethical why do they treat each other so inequally and savagely?
I would imagine that if a creature was completely moral or ethical inequality of any kind amongst it’s own behavior and actions would be impossible for it to achieve.
Are human beings just partially moral and ethical? 
Could the skeptics be correct in saying that human nature is competely amoral where we just pretend to be somthing we are not?
To which skeptics are you referring? A lot of skeptics are just denying there are universal (transcendental) moral truths, not that human nature is completely amoral.
Moral skeptics and moral nihilists.
If there are no universal transcendental moral truths morals and ethics just end up as useless metaphysical jibber- jabber much like how religion is through belief without empirical evidence of any kind.
Okay, so if I understand you’re reasoning, human beings imperfection at being moral may mean that we’re not moral beings, and because you can’t find a single set of criteria that makes us all moral, morality is a foolish invention. Did I get that right?
If I did, how wrong you are. Here are a few of points to consider:
If individual human beings generally make mistakes when doing math, does that make us any less a society or people that is capable of math? Morality is an individual phenomenon but it only works or makes sense in a social context, and it does not follow that mistakes at X are a sign of the non-existence of X in human life.
When you say “universal transcendent” truths, transcendent to what? Would the Earth exist if we didn’t? Sure. That’s a transcendent truth. Would human morality exist if human beings weren’t present? Of course not. How can a human phenomenon be said to exist wihout a humanity? So in that sense morality is not transcendant. But doesn’t it also make sense that by the virtue of our humanity, there can be emergent properties that are true for everyone in humanity? Sure. It doesn’t make them any less of a foundation, just one that emerges only as a natural outgrowth of an existence. Is it a “true for everyone” fact that people need food? Absolutely. Does it make sense to make the statement if humans didn’t exist? No. Can someone not eat sufficiently and suffer malnutrition? Sure. Can someone fail to eat the right nutrients and as a result someone eats better than someone else? It happens right now. Does that mean that there is a question as to whether eating is based on something real? To consider an alternative answer would be silly.
Does it make sense to consider that when humans form into social groups, there is something that naturally must happen by virtue of human psychology and the motivations for forming groups? I’d say yes. is there not a whole field of human endeavor that studies the emergent properties of individuals within a social context. Yes. Are there such a thing as social sciences? Yes. Why can’t the foundation of morality lie somewhere in this realm?
If you answer that different societies have different beliefs, that is true. It doesn’t make morality any less substantive, it just means that we all express it in different ways, and yes, some societies are more developed at it than others. But that is another post.
As I’ve indicated in other posts, philosophers are still over-reacting to the fact that they can’t pin the metaphyical tail on ethics and find the core of it all. Their over-reaction is to despair that there is any foundation to morality and it’s just a set of relativistic rules or the expressions of a tyrant’s power.
More or less, yes. 
Don’t forget that humanity’s infinite amount of contradictions on the subject along with double standards only illustrates it’s amorality all the more.
Contradictions has a way of negating any moral or ethical values and beliefs into pure imaginary fictional abstractions and nonexistence. 
( And yes I am a very cynical amoral moral skeptic, nihilist, and relativist. It’s a pleasure meeting you. How do, you do? )
A challenge. I like those.
Math and morals are not the same thing.
There is no comparison. I refuse to be baited into your semantical word games.
( Nice try at bait and switch though.)
Give me evidence for morals and ethics existing independently as intricate parts of existence.
I want cold hard empirical evidence.
Give me cold hard empirical evidence for morals and ethics existing beyond the mere belief in them.
( As a moral skeptic I’m kinda like the skeptical atheist asking for evidence of god beyond people’s belief in god only instead of god being called into question the subjects that are being called into question is morals and ethics.)
Do have any empirical evidence of morals or ethics existing beyond belief?
( Christians have no evidence for their faith in god beyond their beliefs in god where I certainly don’t take anything they have to say seriously.)
( Now why should I take seriously the belief in morals and ethics?)
( Why should I take seriously those who believe in morals and ethics as values but have no evidence of their existence for believing in them?)
When people who believe in morals and ethics say that everybody else must behave in a manner that is considered moral or ethical they make such statements by believing there to be some independent existence that everybody must conform under.
Such as?
Eating relates to physical biological processes where morals or ethics relate to fictional imaginary processes.
There’s a big difference.
What’s right and wrong? What’s good and evil?
Beyond people’s beliefs what says one action or behavior is this and that?
It’s call mutual reciprocity. There is nothing moral or ethical about that in that morals and ethics have nothing to do with mutual reciprocity when it occurs in social interaction.
It also makes sense that in social interaction conflict arrives out of competition where violence ensues somthing of which is for some reason is called “immoral” and is severely penalized by postmodern industrial society.
i think the point is that morality is a uniquely human phenomena and therefor not applicable to other parts of nature while remaining applicable to human behavior. just as every other animal has it’s unique behavioral traits, so humanity has morality. this doesn’t make morality an invention so much as a universal inclination. even the nihilist’s inclination to reject morality arises from a more basic form of moral indignation at the inevitable hypocrises of human life.
morality is a uniquely human phenomenon as hypocrisy is a uniquely moral phenomena - to call someone a “hypocrite” is to speak from atop a moral platform.
’
To call somebody a hypocrite does not need a moral platform.
To call somebody a hypocrite is to call somebody contradicting and nothing more.
everybody contradicts - we contradict as soon as we start to use language - to accuse someone of hypocrisy is more than just accusing someone of contradicting themselves . . .
if i say that all men are women i’m not being a hypocrite but i am being contradictory - see what i mean?
Word semantics. Fine. For this conversation we’ll use the word contradiction instead if it bothers you so much.
The belief in moral and ethical values is just that a belief.
It can be compared to religion where people have the belief in the value of god.
Beyond belief morals and ethics have no material or empirical foundation.
“When stepped on, a worm doubles up. That is clever. In that way he lessens the probability of being stepped on again. In the language of morality: humility. —” Nietzsche
-Imp
That seems to be very black and white position to take. Morals don’t need to be metaphysical jibber-jabber if there are no transcendental moral truths. I’d say in fact that most morals arise out of real-life situations. Religions and philosophers looking for transcendental moral truths, looking to fix morality, seem like the aberation to me.
I’m not saying you should accept morals, but rejecting all morality just because no universal morality exists, is a bit easy and leaves unexamined the whole range of real life mores.
Why does it need to be an all or nothing sort of thing? Can not there be human morality and ethics of a personal or conditional type? Must we claim that if a human idea or belief or value is not UNIVERSAL and PROVEN OBJECTIVELY, that it does not even exist at all?
Individual people have ethics and moral codes. Groups also have codes, defined by the agreements between members of the group on such things. Morality is never unchanging, permanent or able to be “proven” somehow. Morality is a vague shifting swamp of feelings and conditionings and judgments and instincts, any of which might change from one circumstance to another.
No, there is no universal moral law. Ethics is not “in nature”. It is human; it is in us.
This in no way makes it any less real.
Real maybe, but not true. A lot of the problems start with looking at moral statements as having, or needing to have, a kind of truth-value… the moral “skeptic”. Morals are not something that can be verified like any ordinairy statement about the world. Applying that kind of logic to moral statements just seems like a blatant misunderstanding of morals.
And at the same time they don’t originate solely in peoples mind, they are not thought out, out of nothing (metaphysics). It’s a function of people wanting things, together with other people wanting things, and the enviroment. Or it should be something like that.
I would say the absolute most we can aspire to is that we have the potential to act morally.
Even the likes of old Kant sees his formulations as an idea to be realised or maybe a limit we tend towards over billions of years of time
(see his Idea for a universal History or Perpetual peace)
On the contrary the death of these sort of Universals might be a useful first step in developing that innate moral potential we have in us.
Self evidently more people have been slaughtered in “the name of the good” then for any other cause!
A really good point we are formed socially theories that start us off as ravenous in-duh-vid-duals and then try to fit some sort of society on us (Hobbes etc) ignore that we have been socially formed since primitive times. The potential for closed off in duh vid duality is comparatively recent and even at that few people tend to act as the autonomous self interested “actors” that most economics and almost all political philosophy (or what passes for it) seems to believe…Some of the time surely but all the time – I can’t see it!
Again well put!
Bingo!
This constant banging on for grounds, systems, foundations etc is what starts a lot of our problems – we are human. We are formed by our biology and by our social interactions and motivated as Schopenhauer would have it by a mixture of ego, malice and compassion. That’s what we are and thats what we have to work with – forget the systems (unless they can work fruitfully with this!)
The man who a few years ago found 200 euro I left in a bank machine – dialed up the bank and returned it to me – these things happen quiet regularly as do other appalling and horrible ones – they are features of how we are (biologically) and how we got here. Creeds and systems may be one small part on the nurture side but morals (good or bad) are instantiated quite naturally and pre-systematically in ordinary human action.
That sounds like either Kantians or Christians – both a dying breed.
But even they would see such systems only as ideal limits and not the real day to day behaviour of ordinary people – they express how they would like people to behave – the only must there is the law
Whats in a name?
It sounds like you’ve described a moral system.
It sounds like that system arose (emerged) as a by product of normal human interaction.
QED!
Yea Nietzsche has his genealogy and its one that shows that moral categories are built up out of systems of human social interactions. His reverses or re-valuates the normal ordering and whats classed as good and evil – but he comes at it systematically, historically and from a detailed Genealogy of real events not via transcendent theory…
Hats off to you Diekon and last man – I think I’d be singing off your “hymn book” (roughly!)
kp
Hear hear! The thread can be locked, we all agree 
.
(except maybe SavagePostModern)
…and Imp, can’t be to sure about him.
You will unlikely get any agreement out of me considering that I look at morality and ethics as a sort of socio- religious form of thinking.
The values, beliefs, metaphors, concepts, and symbolic imagery of morality or ethics is similiar to that of religion in that they rely on a metaphysical metanarrative form of thinking.
( Morality: People should act, behave, and condone themselves in this specific manner in that existence should be like this to which we believe.)
( Morality: Those that act contrary to what we believe there must be somthing “wrong” or “evil” about them because they don’t act in a manner to which we perceive they should act as in the way we have come to define existence through the values we believe in.)
Like religion beyond belief there is no hardcore material or empirical evidence for believing in morals and ethics other than that it makes those who believe in them feel “good” about themselves and the world around them.
( This is where the belief in god is very similiar to the belief in morals and ethics.)
Also there is no proof to what makes a specific action “right” whereas another “wrong”.
( Action “good” or “evil”.)
( Such judgements are based more upon sentimental and emotional opinion or subjective aesthetics other than anything of actual material substance.)
And? Atheists have a similar argument when it concerns the subject of god.
Just like the argument of atheists for the denial of god it’s the same for moral skeptics,amoralists, and moral nihilists only instead what is skeptically being called under question as to non-existing is morals or ethics when it concerns human social interaction.
Not only do I not believe in morals or ethics I deny their entire existence beyond the superstition of those who irrationally believe in them.
I also despise moral and ethical laws for their pressuring or insistence that people ought to believe in morals and ethics when it concerns social interaction within society since for me it is similar to describing a group of christians who make it law that everybody ought or should worship and follow their god. (I’d like to have the independence of being amoral in being able to reject other people’s morals and ethics outright.)
( I’d like to have the independence in being able to be selfish, hostile, indifferent,intolerant, untolerable,aggressive, and violent.)
( Isn’t that what genuine unbridled independence is all about?)
Yes I’m one of those rare individuals who has a huge disdain for other people’s morals, ethics, laws, and rules.
( Contempt is simply too kind of a word for the sort of animosity that I have towards them.)
Oh really?
What real life situations? Don’t confuse real life situations with real life superstition.
There is no independent moral or ethical universe out there beyond humans to understand and interpret.
Much as god doesn’t exist independent beyond the minds of people it is the same for morals and ethics.
There is nothing to find because beyond the irrational superstitions of people from which a bulk of values come from there is literally nothing to interpret.
I find it pathetic that postmodern humans seek to salvage morals and ethics both left overs from religious metaphysics or theological forms of thinking that weren’t destroyed during the enlightenment period which was supposed to be a naturalistic enlightenment.
( I also find in pathetic that people still believe in morals and ethics considering that I believe they should of died with religion and god at the turn of the nineteenth century.)
To me it would be much wiser to rid ourselves of the subject altogether entirely so that not only would they be exterminated from our thinking but where they would be also exterminated from our entire vocabulary.
( For me there is nothing to salvage with moral or ethical beliefs since for me all they really equal is just a bunch of nonsense that people believe in much like religion and the subject of god.)
SavagePostModern
a rose by any other name 
…would you consider yourself to be a social creature, SPM? You would also appear to be quite devoted, unswerving, and meticulous in your refusal to accept belief in morals and ethics and to banish these ideals from the universe - almost religious-like.
just because you are able to show something that is not moral, is not proof that morality and ethics have no place in the universe. perhaps what needs to happen is for morality and ethics to be redefined - instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
how could you possibly know what the motives of every human being are? True, this may be the case of many, but it is not the case of all.
What do you mean by like religion beyond belief?
i think plain common sense could take care of that, don’t you think? What if someone were about to shoot you dead (wrong) and someone else - and only the universe knows why - would jump in front of you to save your life, and he dies in the act. Aside from the fact that you would probably think the man who saved you was insane, and you couldn’t pay him back somehow…well you could actually through his family, could you see any “good” in his action (his motive, incidentally, is just to save another human being (forget about the altruistic genes). He actually cared about human beings.
So human existence to you is simply about sentimentality and emotions. Nothing work saving about you, from a logical reasonable perspective?
Be very, very careful - i think it was Jung who said that “what we most fight we become” (maybe loosely translated but not by much). would you want to wake up some morning and be not only a religious fanatic but indeed moral and ethical? okay, i will keep that in but it is a contradiction in terms…religious fanatic and one who is moral and ethical…they are two different things in the universe.
:-" 
When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I’m leaving. ~-Steven Wright i can see you doing this.
But there are people who quite rationally believe in them, of course; take Kant.
Rare? If you say so.
I would agree. However, belief in a god is an ontological claim, whereas that’s not necessarily true of a morality: it can be an instrument of attaining ends.
Put another way, the former is about what is, the latter may make claims to what is but need not. It can suffice to make claims of what should be, without reference to hypothetical moral facts. In which case, you have no reason to despise people for putting forward an ethical system, unless you despise people merely for their desires.