Wise Sage wrote:
No, morals are not universal. A wife of a spider eats the husband: Do you find that right? Even if you do I don't agree.

Wise Sage wrote:
Strategy? Is that what it is about? A female may eat the spider, but to say she eats him without feeling wrong is a bold claim with no evidence in itself. Perhaps animals do things out of natural instinct and not out of moral. But that is to say even more that moral can exist in them.

Wolfman wrote:


The last part of your quote is the same line of reasoning that Adler uses in his naturalistic justification for morality. If you have a desire to drink water, you ought to drink. If you are hungry, you ought to eat. It’s rational, after all, right? But...

The skeptic would say: OK, you can show that if I’m thirsty, I ought to drink. What’s so moral about that though? This isn’t a moral ought. The oughtness of this statement merely follows from rationality. Rationality is very expansive though. Say for example that you are poor and hungry. You want a loaf of bread but you can’t afford it. You are left alone near a bread cart and you are almost certain that no one will catch you stealing. You’re hungry and you want to eat. Is it rational for you to steal? Sure. Rationality can justify a lot of things. So it’s not enough that you say "an ought can be derived, through reason, from an is." I agree with what Adler is trying to say, but he is deducing these ought statements in a rather round-a-bout way, which only gives me a rational ought, but not necessarily a moral ought.

A similar criticism from a different critic: We can accept all of the scientific facts that you put forward about humans, but we may come to different normative conclusions. The descriptive facts alone do not imply one specific ought, rather they could imply several, which may very well conflict. Simply agreeing on all of the objective facts is not enough, and reason alone can not adjudicate. Suppose one side holds that euthanasia is right, the other that it is wrong. Both sides may completely agree about the facts of the case. They both agree, for instance, that a patient is in a coma and has virtually no chance of recovering (let’s say a 5% chance). The patient has no relatives and his wishes are unknown. Is it morally permissible to pull the plug or not? One person might say that doing so is wrong. You are ending a life that is not yours to take. He has a 5% chance of recovering, and you did not know his wishes. So we should play it on the safe side and keep him alive. It may turn out that he recovers. The other person would say that the person pretty much has no chances of recovery and if he were in the man’s position, he would probably not want to continue on in that state. Furthermore, he’s taking up resources that could be used for a patient with better odds of surviving. So we should pull the plug. Both sides have conflicting views, but both views follow from reason. To say that reason can determine a moral ought from an is would be to commit the same mistake that Kant made when he pulled the categorical imperative out of abstraction.

In this respect, I think Hume is spot on when he says, "abstract or demonstrative reasoning, therefore, never influences any of our actions, but only directs our judgment concerning causes and effects..." This quote is a conclusion of his argument in A Treatise of Human Nature. The general consensus among ethicists is that his argument is right, and has to be accounted for in order to have a justifiable system of morality. Alasdair MacIntyre proposed an Aristotelian ethic based on functionality too, but his argument is more convincing than Adler’s (even though I don’t agree entirely with his either).

Wolfman wrote:

My point is that, if I enjoy killing and the risk of getting caught is low, it could be rational for me to kill someone’s innocent grandmother in her sleep. So you saying that moral oughts can be derived from rationality doesn’t say much. A LOT of things can be derived from rationality.

You’re missing the point. Two people can have entirely different value systems. You say lying is always immoral because it undermines our obligations. Another person can say that lying is only sometimes immoral because it only sometimes undermines our obligations. Fundamentally, when we dig down deep enough, you are ultimately appealing to your own values, not rationality. The problem with your account of morality is that you are assuming certain objective facts (which is perfectly fine), but asserting that there is only one way of deriving some moral procedure from those facts. This is not true. Like I said, someone can look at those exact same facts and forward an argument that says lying is only sometimes immoral because it only sometimes undermines our obligations (not always like you said).

You should Book II, Section III and Book III, Section I of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. It's a quintessential piece of moral literature for the skeptic. If you are unaware of his argument, it would do you good to acquaint yourself with it. Modern and contemporary normative ethicists have had to come to grips with the is-ought problem in some form or another. Williams, Anscombe, Foot, Kant, Bentham, Mill, Singer, Frankena, Hare, Korsgaard, MacIntyre, Sidgwick, and Moore (and more) have written volumes in response to this point. I'm not sure how you are trying to dismiss it with a wave of the hand.

You learn this stuff in lower-division Intro to Ethics courses.