Morality as rules.

Below I'll describe the subject of morals as it is used when speaking common English, without concern for published works on the subject, which often don't correspond to the subject's common usage, and often confuse the subject rather than simplify.

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Morals are a type of rule. To speak of rules in general, there are what I call true rules and false rules.

-An example of a true rule is that if one jumps in the air one will fall.
-An example of a false rule is that if one jumps in the air one will fly.

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Among both true and false rules, there are rules which either have a neutral, positive or negative effect.

A rule with a neutral effect (or we may simply say; a neutral rule) is in the form of: If action x takes place, then positive effect y will follow. Rules of science, when not in a context that one may personalize, are neutral rules.

-A positive rule is in the form of: If action x takes place, then positive effect y will follow.
-A negative rule is in the form of: If action x takes place, then negative effect y will follow.

Here's an example of what is essentially the same rule, but the first in positive form and the second in negative:

-If one spends all his time on the job productively, then he'll continue being employed.
-If one wastes time on the job, then he'll be fired.

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Morals are most often used in the form of a negative rule. For example the line directly below is more commonly used than the other:

-If one lies, then negative effect y will take place.
-If one always tells the truth, then positive effect y will take place.

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-Rules considered laws or codes of conduct are often, but not always, considered morals.
-Rules involving commandments or other religious guidelines are almost always considered morals or something related.
-Morals are often rules that are not clearly written in an established text if at all, whose actions and effects are both very vague.
-Possibly the majority of morals are false, meaning their consequences are unreal such as a magical karma or Hell, or have vague consequences such as potential guilt.
-Social ostracization is a common consequence of breaking morals, but is a consequence that's often very inconsistently applied.

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There's no difference between the term morality and the term morals. For example if one says, "Let's discuss morality", he may as well say, "Let's discuss morals".

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To ask if a particular action is immoral, is usually the same asking if there is a negative rule associated with the type of rules under the category of morals, concerning that action.
For example, if one asks if doing action x is immoral, he usually wishes ask if there's a moral in the form of: If action x takes place, then positive effect y will follow.

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While the terms "moral" and "ethic" (and their equivalent form as adjectives) often have situations where one is more commonly used than the other, but often the terms are essentially interchangeable.
An example of when they're interchangeable would be in the question, "Is it(unethical/immoral) to lie?"
An example of when they wouldn't be entirely interchangeable would be if one used the adjective "moral" rather than "ethical" if one were to ask a doctor something such as if it's ethical to release a patience files. Here, while the terms could be interchangeable at times, at others what one would essentially be only asking is if the doctor could get into trouble with a medical board or the law for releasing the files.

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I'd like to know if others agree or disagree that the above description of the subject of morals is accurate, not pertaining to published works on the subject, but to how the subject is most often spoken of when using common English.

 

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One thing that stands out is the difference between morals and ethics. Most people functionally regard the words as if the difference is a matter of fixed or fluctuating outcome.

For instance, a Christian who relies on the biblical condemation of homosexuals in the Old Testament is asserting a timeless, fixed moral point, that homosexuality is, always has been, and always will be evil.

Meanwhile, I know many Christians who can look around at society, laws, and the living people they encounter in their daily lives who make an ethical decision that whatever God says about homosexuals is best left to God, and in the circumstances of their lives these people choose to treat gay people as actual, real people.

We might say that, morally speaking, stealing is wrong.

Yet, as Lysander Spooner↱ asserted in 1875:

The next greatest crimes [after wars] committed in the world are equally prompted by avarice and ambition; and are committed, not on sudden passion, but by men of calculation, who keep their heads cool and clear, and who have no thought whatever of going to prison for them. They are committed, not so much by men who violate the laws, as by men who, either by themselves or by their instruments, make the laws; by men who have combined to usurp arbitrary power, and to maintain it by force and fraud, and whose purpose in usurping and maintaining it is by unjust and unequal legislation, to secure to themselves such advantages and monopolies as will enable them to control and extort the labor and properties of other men, and thus impoverish them, in order to minister to their own wealth and aggrandizement.​

And we hear contemporary iterations of this such as the "crooks on Wall Street" who get to enrich themselves while destroying the national economy by gambling with other people's money under circumstances that transform the financial sector to a high-risk casino on a massive scale.

But certain of these ill-gotten gains simply aren't theft, because we wrote laws saying it's not theft to acquire people's money this way.

Ethically speaking, where is our society on this particular count in relation to the broader moral assertion that stealing is wrong? Are we really at, "Well, sure, so let's just not call it stealing"?

We have a highly visible societal issue occurring right now in which the question is just how many exceptions we will make for what would otherwise be lawbreaking. One result is that a difference between moral and ethical assertions about lying and killing is on grotesque display for the world to witness.

† † †​

Treating morals as rules can involve a tricky distinction between the function of diverse valences of rules.

There may be a rule that is straightforward about cause and effect, such as we often hear in moral assertions and arguments; again, we can use Christians and their fixation on gay sex as an example.

I mean, I have storybooks that can be said to assert specific moral rules, but the thing is that I treat them as what they are―stories, each with their own history and context―so they don't do that.

For instance, there is a general moral prohibition against killing. But there are circumstantial ethical exceptions. Self-defense, for instance.

But what if we take that rule even farther? Some organizations in history seem to have followed otherwise odd conventions about killing, such as the bit among some groups we call "organized crime", when "honor among thieves" included the rules that "you don't kill him in his home, in front of his family, or in a church". And, you know, the only reason for that is because everyone wants to get laid, everyone loves their children, and everyone wants to be able to get right with God. Or, well, you know, so to speak.

The problem with fixed morals (i.e., "possibly the majority of morals are false") are a result of the moral assertion being so affixed through history.

Some of the rules among the Hebrews, for instance, make functional sense even if they didn't have the science. Maybe in the twenty-first century some of the prohibitions seem rather strange (communal exclusion for body functions including menstruation and defecation) or petty (no tattoos) from our twenty-first century perspective, but if you're wandering around the desert, as the story suggests, for decades in a time without modern technology to help guard against nature, yes, it is easy to see how certain fearful outcomes (sickness and death) would be attached to the mysterium, thus lending them divine weight. That is to say, we know what poor sanitation can do to a community, and there are circumstances that recommend against tattoos for elevated risk of infection.

And it's true, one doesn't need science to figure some things out: Every time I bang my mother or sister, she gets pregnant and the baby is born dead, and doesn't look quite like a baby ....

At some point, it becomes clear that a given behavior is a bad idea, and lacking the scientific explanation, such outcomes are attributed to nature at a time when that is functionally synonymous with divine attribution.

And we can certainly point to the Old Testament and reflect on the elevated risk of, say, anal sex, but that will be even less persuasive these days than using the Old Testament as a counterpoint to the campaign against circumcision.

Circumstances have changed; the ethical guideposts people rely on are different in the twenty-first century than they were in ancient times.

Ethics change, though they cannot be said to evolve any more than clay evolves when you shape it.

Morals tend to remain fixed, with their most significant adjustments being psychosymptomatic.

There really isn't a whole lot to agree or disagree with about your overview; the application will help define any apparent variables.

Then again, I would also note that the interchangeability such as you noted with the question of morals and ethics in lying depends on how one treats the fixed moral. Post-Freudians refer to neurotic conflict; the term "cognitive dissonance" has been popular for the last ten or so years; basically in this case all it means is that nobody actually believes in the moral assertion insofar as they presume there are appropriate times to deliberately communicate false information.

It is hard to separate the inherent and acquired behaviors; parents tend to lie to their children before the children know what lying is. But this breaks the interchangeability of the terms; it might be abstractly immoral to lie, but pretty much everyone has an ethical circumstance in which they feel justified asserting untruth.

The difference, of course, being between a fixed assertion and variable outcomes.

There is probably plenty I missed, but it's a fine overview to start with you've offered.
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Notes:

Spooner, Lysander. Vices Are Not Crimes. 1875. LysanderSpooner.org. 13 January 2015. http://lysanderspooner.org/node/46

 

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Morals aren't rules. We can see why they aren't rules when we look at exceptions to the rules. "Thou shall not kill" for example, might seem like a moral rule, but even when people believe this rule, they still wage war or get abortions, or support capital punishment. So no rule can cover every possible situation. Morals are something besides rules, they involve personal judgement. If it were possible to capture moral behavior in a set of rules, there would be no moral conundrums.

Note, I'm not proselytizing, simply pointing out an instance where people equate morals with rules and why they can't possibly be.

 

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Ok, perhaps that is a key difference.

If the consequence, according to them of being homosexual is evil, meaning "universally evil", then the moral is what I defined in the OP as a false moral, being that the word "evil" cannot be universal but must be applied to something. I can say hitting my head on the wall is evil for me, but to say it's just evil or it's evil before god is unreal, therefore false.

If they still believe in God and the interpretation of the bible you speak of, then they're still affirming the moral (as if it wasn't false), only not adding to it's consequence by persecuting them. - In fact if they would persecute them, then the moral would be a true moral, because it would have actual real consequences.

In 1875 there wasn't to my knowledge any governing group of countries such as the UN, that could make war a crime, therefore, he's already delving into fantasy with that statement. I know he simply means he doesn't like war or that he and others consider it immoral, but I have a higher standard for the accuracy of my use of words than he does.

So he's saying that a great crime is a crime that is not a crime - it neither being written in an authoritative tetx by a ruling power, nor there being an enforceable consequence for breaking it.

So in this context ethics are laws and morals aren't. It sounds reasonable being that laws vary often, like you say ethics do. If you're claiming that war, stealing, or lying is immoral, I don't disagree with you in that I'm aware of many morals covering those situations. But, I have never heard of a true moral covering those situations. For it to be a true moral there must actually be a consequence for those breaking it.

Unless of course if we say in the form: do x and negative effect y will follow, that y is a negative effect not for the one's who did x but for those who had x done to them. In which case it can easily be declared a true negative moral, but it kind of defeats the purpose of the so-called moral crisis, when the ones in control, meaning the one's committing the act, have no negative consequence to consider. Of course you could always say the their consequence would be guilt, and doubtlessly many acts against others have been adverted because of guilt, but then guilt over wronging others is far more rare than some would claim.

Self-defense is a potential, but not guaranteed, legal exception to killing. But, if we have a moral against killing then we must ask what is it's consequence. If it has no consequence that is real, then the idea of exceptions to the rule are only for the diluted people who fail to understand the unreality of the consequence. But, certainly I understand that one would generally feel less guilt for killing in self-defense.

So you explained a situation where true rules became false rules.

Ok, so what your basically saying is that morals quickly tent to become false, or obsolete, while ethics, with their greater flexibility don't.

If it's abstractly immoral to lie then basically all you're saying is there's a moral against lying, whatever the circumstance, because enough people believe that their is such a moral, but being that the moral doesn't have a consequence that is real, the moral, while real, is a false moral, as I described the term.

 

This isn't evident in anything you've written so far.

 

Many morals can't possibly be true morals being that their is so often no consequence, but just because they're false, doesn't mean they aren't rules. Do you disagree that there are and have been many different types of rules, that were well known by many but lacked any real consequence? We could of course say that a rule lacking a consequence is not a rule and so a moral lacking a consequence is not a moral or any other type of rule.

In the past when in similar discussions, I would often tell people that morals don't exists, and they would mention that they clearly exist as they're rules. So I agree now and take this more moderate approach. For example, if there's long been a sign on a stretch of grass in a public park that says "stay off grass", and then one day someone looks into the matter and finds there is absolutely no law or code in any level of government substantiating that sign, they could just take the sign off the grass and say the rule never existed, but I would say the rule did exist so long as people believed in it and/or were avoiding breaking it.

 

Oh boy... another one for the ignore list.
Why does Sci attract the loons?

 

Can you give an example of a moral rule that has no consequence?

 

There's a rule, I assume considered by many to be a moral that says denouncing God leads to Hell.

 

Any consequence that isn't supernatural?

 

If not super natural then it's just a rule considered a moral that presupposes a real consequence that never happens, like of one says that there's a moral that goes, if one steals he must give back twice what his stole, yet being that it's not actually also something such a law or a rule for a institution in society, the consequence is never actually enforce. Generally though, a moral would go, "if one steals, he would be wrong". Not just wrong to the person he stole from, but supposedly wrong in some other non-existent way.

 

Morals are misunderstood. Morals were not designed to maximize the individual. Rather morals were designed to maximize the group or the team. In a team sport, not all players get to play all the time or even play in the capacity or position they choose. Limits are placed on the individuals, by the coach, so the team is maximized. This can be done at the expense of egos. Morality is about the team.

If you place the ten commandments in historical perspective, the ancient times were rough, tough, cruel and unforgiven. For any culture to survive, the population needed to be on the same page; team. You don't need the best players in the league, to have the best team. The best team will have common goals that allows them to sacrifice their ego for the team They see something bigger than themselves. With the championship, each will become larger than life.

We live in a culture based on entertainment, celebrity, and selfies so the big team is an alien concept. Rather most people try to subjectively change morality into something more suited to flash players. \

If you look at the ten commandments, each one maximizes the team, but not the hot dogs. Thou shall not steal, if all the teams follows faithfully, creates trust and sharing due to lack of defensiveness and the need for greed; family. This rule may not optimize all the self centered thieves and criminals.

Not committing adultery means more trust between men and women, men with other men and women with other women. This is good for the team. It may not benefit the lounge lizards and the ho's but they are not team players. They prefer a watered down morality that allows the impulse play that can sent ripples through the team so it dissociates.

One God unites the team. If members of the team have different POV the team will divide. In these forums, for example, religion and atheism constantly battle. There is so much wasted time and energy the forum team suffers in terms of practical result. This may be entertaining, but those who wish to learn are distracted by the insults and the misinformation; more than one god.

In ancient times, our group would never be able to unite and fight off enemies because the internal battle undermines each other. We would be made extinct. Israel was a small place but achieved great status in the ancient world, for a time, due to the team. You don't need the best players in the ancient world if the team is the best team.

 

But the consequences do exist. Stealing reduces the property of someone else, and if it weren't a moral value, society couldn't exist as we know it, there would be no concept of private property. The only exception would be if a community had no private property, and all goods were shared. That way the item that was stole it not truly lost to anyone, just moved around. Supernatural consequences were invented because perfect policing isn't possible, so they put the policeman in your head.

 

Indeed; it's hardly a canonical definition of the difference.

There is also a certain logic to good and evil, but societies tend to have a hard time pinning it down. The underlying idea is that evil is not only bad for the individual committing it, but other people as well.

An interesting take. To the one, though, it's true that I don't see much utility in that construction. To the other, it seems specifically dysfuncitonal to suggest that crimes committed in the name of a moral assertion validate the moral assertion as true.

There are plenty of identifying heterosexuals who simply aren't, and many of them choose to try to maintain the pretense of being straight in order to please God. Theologically, it starts with balbutive, that God deliberately challenges people with temptation and sin, and deliberately visits harm unto them, in order to test their worthiness. But this would be more of an affirmation than, say, tying a queer to a fencepost and beating him to death.

And that higher standard is motivating you to this innovative approach to redefining morals and ethics?

Look, the lack of a UN in 1875 is cheap pedantry. Here, try this comparison: If you force another person to engage in sexual acts against their will, you are committing a crime. However, if we consider this crime in abstract potential, we might wonder at the question about whether you commit that crime against Person A or Person B.

There's your setup.

In 1993, the last state in the Union removed from its books the exception stating that it wasn't rape if a man forced his wife to conduct sexual acts against her will. Twenty-one years later, forcing your wife (Person A) to conduct sexual acts against her will is a lesser crime than committing the same act against a woman one is not married to in thirty-three of our fifty states.

Before 1993, by your argument, no man in North Carolina ever raped his wife.

Which is a bullshit statement. It's still rape, even if you have to except it from the laws prohibiting rape.

My advice is to learn a bit more about how philosophical discourse works.

Consider the point that stealing is wrong.

Consider the idea of making a law that permits what is otherwise considered stealing.

Consider the ugly bit from the financial sector some years ago in which investment brokers were caught on tape laughing about how they were stealing money from retirees. The thing is, what they were doing was legal unders specific laws that made those sorts of things legal. That's why when all the dysfunctional business practices finally blew up the economy, people called for laws to restore the legal standards that would have prevented certain forms of theft and fraud that were made otherwise legal by specific statutes.

So think about this, please: Misrepresenting to you what I will do for you if you trust me with your money, and then misrepresenting to other investors what I have in order to increase my personal wealth. Do you consider this behavior morally right or wrong? Ethically?

When we rely on statute, what this creates is that a certain kind of fraud was morally wrong until Congress passed a law making it morally right. Then after this moral propriety drove a vital societal crisis in which our economic structures failed, Congress passed a law making it morally wrong again. Recently, Congressional Republicans demanded, as a condition of keeping the American government functioning, that these behaviors be declared morally right again.

Which effectively renders the proposition of morals meaningless, thus making your topic post consideration entirely useless.

Would you assert that it was ever morally right to rape someone? How about ethically? Under what conditions is it morally or ethically right to rape someone?

Or swindle them?

Or kill them and lie about why?

Or to lie to people in order to start a war that kills hundreds of thousands of innocents?

These are all chapters in our recent and current American history; are any of them actually right? Proper? Morally correct? Ethically anything?

Well, that's where history becomes useful. Many of these moral assertions are built on the belief that there is a massive, invisible, powerful personality in existence that will punish you after you die. In theory, there's your consequence, regardless of whether you or I believe that such a thing as God exists.

What makes the relationship between Moral X and Effect Y valid or not is whether or not Y actually follows X. For instance, you offered an example about doing one's job. And in many cases I would agree. But then, pretty much anyone can point to elected office, where doing one's job badly often earns a promotion.

Or our American business sector, where doing one's job badly can earn a reward.

I would also point to the paragraph following the one you quoted, about organized crime, which explores circumstantial ethics.

By your definitions, yes, I think so. To wit―

―aye; as I noted, the problem with fixed morals is a result of the moral assertion being so affixed through history. That is to say, they are by the definition I suggest, essentially inflexible. The only real "flexibility" about "morals" is psychopathology.

So it would seem. But I'm also one who considers such traditional moral assertions as obsolete in the first place. That is to say, even something like the wrongness of lying would seem obvious, but to use a stereotype, there is a reason men fear the question about how she looks in these jeans. But trying account for all the factors that go into one of those moments when they happen makes the question of lying a lot more complicated.

And there are parts of our society in which we protect lying. I would suggest that the longstanding moral assertion against lying is and always has been petty. Historically, functionally, that seems to be the indication.

And for me, the truth or falsehood of a moral assertion can be found in two main aspects: Result of adherence, and frequency of deviation.

In the case of homosexuality, we must remember that prohibition was a bit of an innovation. That is to say, once upon a time this moral assertion was the extraordinary assertion. What we find in the contemporary American debate about homosexuality, however, is a lack of faith plaguing Christianity in our society. Not only is Christ absent from the Christian argument against the human rights of homosexuals, the argument specifically defies His instruction.

The way you're applying this argument of true and false morals is interesting insofar as the moral argument itself is largely unfounded. That is to say, as the moral comes to you or me today is a separate question from what it meant millennia ago; the flexibility is a matter of psychopathology. The underlying moral hasn't really changed; its adherents have.

 

I didn't say in the OP that I find the subject of morals itself to lack utility or pragmatic function, but I do. Basically, the reason I bothered to reduce morals to rules, is to show how what may seemingly be a very complex subject is actually a banal one.

If I'm redefining a subject that has common definition that is both widely agreed upon and not full of allusions to fantasy, then please quote it or provide a link.
Also, as far as my claim to having a higher standard than he did; I likely do even in general conversations such as this one, but should it ever come to statements where I would expect a wide audience, I certainly would. For example, my OP is only a second draft, but if it was to be thoroughly read by much more than the expected 10-20 people, then I would have spent more time on it, and likely made it longer.

Maybe it is, but I can forgive myself for it being we're talking about one who assumes it's evident that war in-itself is deplorable, as if there wasn't many past wars worthy of esteem, and as if the act of living with a clear conscience on conquered ground is not an constant affirmation of one's esteem for the past wars that lead to that grounds current state.

According to my argument, the crime wasn't committed then, but of course the act was still committed.
The term crime has a certain paradox to it. In it's usage it can refer to breaking any law, no matter how technical and/or questionable it is, and it can be used as Spooner used it, to refer to something the speaker believes to be deplorable. The paradox is this; if there's a situation where one would consider it deplorable to not break the law, then one could say, based on either of its two respective usages, that whether one breaks that law or not, he's committing a crime.
My assumption is that due to this paradox no honest person would use the term crime to mean deplorable in the same statement (of course excluding those in most casual conversations, but certainly not the type of statement that would last 140 years) for which he actually speaks of actual laws (legislation) in any form whatsoever.

In similar contexts I find the questioner generally means to ask if such behavior is deplorable. But, to answer your question, I believe that there is are common morals (rules considered such) against such behavior; basically the morals which contain various ambiguous consequences against lying (social ostracization, guilt, or various false consequences).

Morals aren't reliant on laws or any other written rule, that is simple one potential form of moral. Not all text describing a law is text describing a moral, in the sense that for something to qualify as a moral a reasonable number of people would have to claim it is such. Most tax laws being one example among many.

That isn't far from accurate.

The OP was meant to deconstruct an near meaningless subject, which I now realize I should have mentioned in the OP.

There are cultures with morals encouraging rape. But, you ask if it's morally right, which leads me to believe that what you're essentially asking is if I personally could think of circumstances in which I wouldn't find it deplorable. If you could have possibly meant that question in any other way, I'd like to know.

Based on my definition of morals, there are common positive as well as negative morals for killing and lying, in general. As for your specifics; to kill and lie, or to lie to start a war, I have no reason to believe there's any specific morals concerning them.

The fact that a false moral exists (meaning is believed in by many) has consequences, but the moral itself does not.

Assuming by Moral X you meant Action X or cause X, then what else could make the relationship valid?

I agree. I made this thread largely as a reaction to the common question of whether any given action is moral or not. The fact is if one needs ask the question at all, then chances are there is a moral concerning it. Then one can move on and ask the question really on their mind; whether or not one would personally advocate it for oneself or others.

 

Edit: I should have said that I find the actual terms "moral", "morality", "ethics", etc. to lack pragmatic function as they're generally used in modern English.

The subject of morals, when understood as something reducible to a part of the general subject of rules, is very pragmatic.

 

Not all virtues can necisarly be laws. You can't let authority force feed you knowledge or your a caged animal.

 

Apologies ahead of time, it's late so I wont have time to delve too deeply into this.

While certainly many people think this way about morality, or make such a claim, I find this intrinsically problematic.

One, it is inaccurate. That is, no one actually thinks or behaves in such a robotic fashion, according to a set of rules by which they can immediately define something
as good or evil. Social interaction, life, is far too complex, the list would have to be nearly infinite to account for all the variations. Though people often claim to live
by a particular set of rules, I don't find that anyone ever entirely lives up to such a claim.

Two, it creates false dichotomies. Things are rarely so black and white that you can set such a standard. Often we are faced with a choice between two bad/evil
options with no good option available, in which case you would need additional rules for each set of comparisons.

Morality instead is about values. This provides the flexibility to navigate real life situations that aren't black and white. It also allows us to consider an option that, while
it may not be good, is not as bad as an alternative option. This also explains where many people who claim to live by moral absolutes typically fail so miserably, they wind
up ignoring one or more of their rules because they are superseded by the values they actually hold.

So, borrowing some of Tiassa's examples, the value a man puts on making a woman feel good about herself (or at least not wanting to make her feel bad) outweighs the
prohibition against lying. Or contrarily, one values the hatred of homosexuals more than Jesus admonition not to judge other peoples sins.

 

The same way, I suppose, that mathematics can be considered banal because it just reduces down to symbols and functions?

I also disagree with your entire perspective... I do not see morals as the function itself but as the result of the subjective function of judgement, of judging actions against values that we hold personally (as opposed to there being some objective value system against which they are judged).

The moral is the output of that function, built up on an individual level through repeated similar judgements going the same way. From that we see an underlying pattern to our judgements and values upon which we can attach the label "moral".

The issue with describing them as rules I find further disagreeable in that "rules" for such judgements suggest some objective reality as applied to the human condition. So I would endeavour to clarify that any such "rules" are not only entirely subjective (although there may well be shared subjectivity within a society) but are, as others have stated/implied, somewhat fuzzy at best. In fact I would go so far as to say the rules are rather chaotic in nature: a slightly different initial input / condition can have a vastly different output despite adhering to the same "rule".

Just a point of advice: probably best not to put yourself on a pedestal, as you have no idea who you are actually discussing with, or the standards they themselves may apply to what they write. Furthermore, some people would require 10 to 20 drafts and still not be as accurate or as eloquent as others might achieve with their first and only effort. And if you're going to mention the "higher standards" then probably best you learn the difference between "there" and "their".

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Also, in your OP, your description of a neutral rule seems to be the same as the positive rule.

I hold that morals are personal, albeit built from the foundation of the society in which you live. One person's morally acceptable activity is another person's unacceptable activity etc. but ultimately we are judged according to the prevalent morals within the society in which we live.

Anyhoo, I'm somewhat struggling to see what you're actually arguing for or against, so maybe you could clarify?

 

Raithere, if you want to equate morals with values then fine. But, just to be clear, have you ever asked the question, "is x moral", not to someone specifically, but to people in general, and if so did, you expect the people to answer either yes or no, or "yes I find it moral" or "no I don't find it moral"?