re question for those with popular morality in article fo murdoch acc virginia edu pmy vivaldi acc virginia edu pete yadlowsky writes moral driver distinctions deleted in this case the driver does not evolve but simply is there would probably not be any manifestation in an infant because the moral code has not been learnt yet ie the object upon which the driver acts upon without manifestation though how can the driver be detected for all purposes it seems not to exist until moral coding begins actually i agree with your notion of a driver except that i think it s not moral but pre and super moral it is as i mentioned earlier in this thread a primal sense of connection a pre and post natal umbilical the awareness of which is expressed in a partial fragmented way that accomodates and forms in return the language and customs of a given culture this halting pidgin english expression is i think what we come to call morality compare the driver to an urge such as jealousy where there is an urge and an object the jealousy does not technically exist until the object is apparent however the capacity to be jealous is presumably still there even though it is not detectable your description of the unbilical took me three passes to understand but i get the gist and i have to tentatively agree i think our two definitions can sit side by side without too much trouble though i haven t attempted to define the reason behind the moral driver only hinted through the essence of each moral your definition hints that animals are also capable of a similar morality simians have a similar social order to ourselves and it is easy to anthropomorphize with these animals is this possible or have i misunderstood if my suggestion holds true then this is the area where work must be carried out to prevent a moral deterioration of society what kind of work exactly well here you have asked the big question i have a slight suspicion that you were hoping i would say something really contentious in this reply from your final question no not at all i was just wondering if you subscribed to some particular school of psycho social thought and rehabilitation and if perhaps you had a plan i d have been interested to hear it my p s thoughts falls roughly in line with john stuart mill and his writings on utilitarianism i have no particular plan except to do my bit personal ethics and social work my opinion for what it is worth is that the authority for each moral must be increased somehow and that this will probably take several generations to be effective i don t think that the list of morals has changed for society significantly though the authority element may come from our authority figures and roles models see eric berne and his transactional analysis work mavis klein for references and this is what gives rise to a deterioration of moral standards in the long term i ve had some more thoughts on my definitions i ve was thinking that i should add moral character to the list of definitions in order to get a dynamic version of the moral nature ie the interplay of the moral code and associated authorities a suitable analogy might be a graphic equaliser on a hifi system the moral nature being the set of frequencies and the chosen amplitudes and the moral character being the spectrum over time conscience is a little more difficult because i can t define it as the reasoning of a person between actions in the context of his moral nature because conscience seems to cut in most of the time unbidden and often unwanted i think conscience is manifest when a decision is made at a given time which compromises one s moral nature my conscience fits in more with freud s superego plus the moral driver with the stimulous being the urges or freud s id the reasoning that i mentioned before is freud s ego i suppose if the moral driver is part of the id then the reason why conscience cuts in unbidden is partially explained the question is what provides the stimulous to activate the moral driver i think i need some more time with this one that s about it for now david on religion oh where is the sea the fishes cried as they swam its clearness through
