zacharius:
as for true qualitative absolutes the only recourse for that is the infinite. true unconditional love in the sense of cosmic eros is an absolute.

What a cool paradox: the only true absolute is the infinte!

It reminds me of vector mechanics. Every point can be related to any other point by choosing some datum and building a vector matrix from the datum to each of them. The datum (and susequently the two original points) can then be related to another datum but the math just gets incredibly tedious. Our little brains can’t manage it all so we simplify. We need the datum because infinity is waaay beyond our comprehension. Nevertheless, we are where we are, whether we can do the math or not.

when you were little you didn’t have the capacity for certain kinds of thinking. you could look at two glasses, one talller and slimmer, but both with the same amount of water. when asked, children below a certain age will always say the taller glass has more water. that’s neurological, not socially imposed.

another is the third person perspective: not everyone develops this abilty, even in our culture, to see a situation from the perspective of someone who is not yourself, or the other. that is more developed capacity than a lower level of cognition.

you can measure the awareness in all kinds of ways. people unfold these capacities in one direction and seldom fall back short of serious injuries to the brain. there’s nothing moral about it, but in functional terms certain capacities are built on earlier ones and encompass a wider scope of ability.

using these thing as criteria for value judgements is a fallacy but just because some people use them that way doesn’t make it untrue.

are we more sophisticated than animals? hard to say. depends on the animal. are we more sophisticated than bacteria? yeah i thinks so. are bacteria more complex than rocks?

as for true qualitative absolutes the only recourse for that is the infinite. true unconditional love in the sense of cosmic eros is an absolute. truth itself is an absolute. the reality of the godhead is an absolute. you can debate it if you’ve never glimpsed it, but you see what i’m saying…

But the other move you can make is to just observe that you can’t get the ought from the is, and then stop. This is moral relativism, which is another way of saying there really is no such thing as morality, it is all just personal preference and psychology with an illegitimate imprimatur tacked on. This is what so-called conservatives, especially of the religious variety, are accusing liberal-minded folk of doing… but it seems pretty clear this is a false charge, a straw man, that (with perhaps a few radical postmodernist nihilist exceptions), most who call for a less absolutist approach understand that the selection of the general principles that form the foundations of any moral system cannot be separated from the observational perspectives of those who are making the selections, and ideas about what crops are best to harvest from the garden of potential ethical delights are bound to differ by culture, peer group, disposition, etc.

For the concept of morality to have any meaningful objective grounding, it has to be understood ahead of time that priorities must be chosen up front, they don’t just thrust themselves upon you and compel you to obey. Everything from then on is indeed relative, but this kind of relativity is the glue that holds an ethical system together. As long as you understand this, the idea of relativity in morality is redeemable.