originally posted in:Secular Sevens
[quote]I can't prove that murder is wrong. I can point to various patterns of societies, or make hypotheses about how certain behavior is conducive to a thriving society, but fundamentally we don't currently have an objective way to derive morality.[/quote]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism
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Edited by HurtfulTurkey: 8/27/2013 8:59:39 PMYes, I understand that. The point I made is that we cannot use the scientific method to evaluate these moral rules, even if they are supposedly derived logically. To do so I'd imagine you'd need to observe identical human cultures under various moral codes, with a control group. I suppose our current society would be a good control group, since as far as we know we haven't been influenced from an outside society. And even then, what criterion are used for determining which is correct? Longevity? Scientific progress? Wealth? Murder rate? Average lifespan? What about artistic progress, or cultural diversity? I agree that, given sufficient data, you could derive axioms for every imaginable subject. But the world, and the universe is too stochastic for us to accomplish this in any reasonable timeframe.