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I see your point on the #1 taboo, but either way, neither is desirable. Certainly, if death was coming anyway, we wouldn't see it and attempt to get it over with; after all, we don't know what happens when we die, so we may as well enjoy what we got in case of the worst scenario, being, no afterlife.
If you're a masochist, you want pain; this doesn't mean that you want to inflict pain unto others (unless the other person is a masochist, then it's mutually beneficial.) So this is actually two stances on morality; your right to receive pain if desired (or more broadly, your right to your own body), and your right to inflict pain. It is moral to want for pain, since it would be immoral to deny someone of violence at their own volition (e.g. "I don't want to be denied the pain I desire, thus I do not want to deny others the pain they desire"); it is immoral to inflict pain upon a person who does want it (e.g. "I do not desire pain, ergo I will not inflict others with pain.") The key point here is, if it's involuntary, it's immoral; there is no voluntary sex that is rape, there is no voluntary exchange of goods that is theft, there is no voluntary pain that is abuse, etc.
Of course, I say "It is immoral" with the implication that this is my stance on it; since I don't want pain inflicted on me, I find it immoral, but if someone else wants pain, more power to them.
A less obvious stance of morality would be whether to take one's shoes off before they enter a sacred place. An even less clear stance is whether abortion is moral.
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Hey Loozik; I hate formatting quotes so I'll number the responses in order:
1. Yes, I found the other one
2. Where to apply math may be subjective, but the actual practice of math is not; there is no emotion inside of me which will take two or more numbers and formulate a new number. Likewise, there is no correct or incorrect answer to "Is it okay to kill one person to save three?", because it's an opinion. "I think not" being the good-or-bad subjection, "provably so" being the right-or-wrong objection.
If you're correct about morality not requiring a human being, surely computers are capable of these same distinctions, yet there is no computer (at least not yet) which can give you a correct answer to "Is it okay to kill one person to save three?", because even if it did, you would be incapable of discerning whether it's correct or incorrect--I say this because, though you may say it's correct, and I may say it's incorrect, neither of us can prove this as an undeniable fact, unlike whether 3 + 4 is 7; similarly, however, a computer is absolutely wonderful at the math, because there's no emotion involved with math, for math is unbiased and entirely disconnected from emotion (naturally anyway; I can imagine what an angry mathematician may look like) in its practice, and computers are great with problems that don't require empathy.
3. I don't quite understand; as far as I can tell, the practice of math doesn't need my feelings to work. Now, whether I feel I can use math for this problem or that problem is totally up to me, but once I actually figure out how I'm going to use math, it is purely a game of numbers.
For example, I have a problem where I have one lover whose company I enjoy and another lover who is rich. I can use math in my problem of morality (perhaps I will measure how much the first lover makes me happy vs. how much money makes me happy), but math will never output the statement "seeing two women at once is moral/immoral". Math will only spit out objective, unbiased statements, whilst my own thoughts, or perhaps another's, will determine what is and is not good behavior; there was a point in time where slavery was moral. This is truly frightening if morality is objective, for this means we must either accept that slavery is provably moral (as it was for a lot longer than it wasn't) or admit that we will never know what the true stance on slavery should be, as we got this one wrong for a very, very long time (and some might argue we're still getting it wrong.)
But again, I believe the simplest way to answer this question is to ask, "Do I want to be enslaved?"
If you could, can you give me an objective version of the last question? And how might you answer it without taking your own feelings into consideration?
4. Morality cannot speak--again, this infers to "X said this and X is right for X is all knowing" or something similar; someone, somewhere, had an opinion and wrote it down somewhere, whether it's you or another authority. Morality is something to be discussed and will never perfectly match every human being, else we would all agree on the same morals (though we generally do agree on many of them, we also don't agree on much.) You're setting up a situation in which everyone must be Christianly, or hedonistic, or primitive etc., or else they're "incorrect", and we're faced again with the problem of figuring out which behaviors are correct (as opposed to desirable, a subjective concept) and which behaviors are incorrect (as opposed to undesirable.) Morality did not exist before human beings, and ceases to exist without them (can a planet be moral? Can the universe be moral? Can a computer be moral? Can the dirt be moral?)--ergo, morality is subject to the human experience.
5. & 6. I believe ethics is like a collection of morals, so I don't see them as very different concepts:
ethics
eth·ics [eth-iks]
plural noun
1.
(used with a singular or plural verb) a system of moral principles
But lets assume morality is objective and ethics is subjective; if this is true, we can easily, at this very moment, discern which branch of ethics is correct and which branch is not, since the only correct branch of ethics will contain every moral principle and shun every immoral principle. So who, then, got it right?
