I feel like we're talking past each other. I'm not suggesting that your survival is morally desirable, or 'good', simply that desiring your own survival puts you in a spot where it's not possible to be amoral. Is it really possible to go through a life completely unconcerned about the right or wrong of things? Is not caring what people think and only doing what benefits you, in it's own way a moral system?

So I'm talking about a requirement for moral values that arises from you surviving and attempting to sustain that situation, rather than surviving having a moral value itself. Yes?

So it was voluntary for the penultimate human injected with the chip because I'm not forcing them to have it either.

I'm ambivalent, this could change depending on the circumstances under which it was agreed.

Although it would be voluntary in terms of actual force I'd imagine there would be a pretty significant chance of ostracism if you declined

This just doesn't follow. You can't say that my survival has no moral import and then use my survival as the basis for morality.

Are you talking about how I behave and not a philosophical position? I'm not a sociopath. I have feelings of empathy and justice. It's just that these aren't ultimately justifiable as better or worse than the sociopath.

No. This is still a non sequitur. You can't go from "I want to survive" to "things that aid my survival are good" if survival has no moral content.

I think you might be overlooking emergence. For example it might be in my rational self-interest to not have my fingers smashed with a hammer, but the existence of this rational-self interest does not seem to be random or arbitrary, but rather a result of the world I seemingly inhabit and the traits I seemingly possess.

This would give a plausible reason for a similarity in moral standards across people, and we could also set up fairly hard criteria for "unpleasantness" that would be dangerously close to universal for humans.

Of course once you invoke "ultimately" you get to question that on grounds of not being ultimate, but this criticism must also be extended to your sociopath ethics. Thus this in itself would not be enough to warrant criticism. That would be like offering criticism of a herring as being a potential figment of your imagination, before accepting that a salmon is not.

So if we want to compare them, that is just what we would have to do.

I don't know if I might have confused the issue by talking about survival when what I mean is just being alive, which is a biological imperative and an instinct, and then doing what you need to to stay that way for no other reason than that you want to. In the course of doing that though, I don't see how you can avoid taking moral positions.

If the decision to stay alive is itself a moral issue, then I suppose that's even better for what I'm saying as it shows that you can't be alive and be amoral, right?

I feel like I'm being flippant here, but to me it just looks like you're trying to shoehorn in moral value. Why call this moral and not just survival? All animals attempt to survive but calling lower level creatures "'moral" is very trivial. Maybe my answer to TD will help.

I did think about emergent properties before that last post but kind of ignored it because it didn't help my position...

I suppose you could argue that morality is an emergent property of civilisation or human psychology or something like that, and then im not familiar with the arguments.

The sense of "ultimate" I think goes back to my first analogy of economics. I don't think that economics is entirely without value. It certainly is necessary for the kind of interactions that enough of us want to maintain. Decisions can be better or worse within that system of behaviours, however I can't think of a way to say that our current system is necessary or better than other potential systems. It just happens to be one that fits our preferences.

Where my problem lies is that when it comes to economics I'm fairly satisfied with it being simple preferential behaviour. When it comes to morality I don't feel satisfied by this. I want to say that actions that I feel are good really are. It's wholly unsatisfying to me to imagine some form of ethical egoism in which the sociopath (never burdened with a concern for others) is the most moral of all.

I used to consider myself amoral - that moral value didn't exist. I'm less sure of myself now, but I still associate myself with that label as I don't associate myself with any other form of ethics. It's always easy to be dismissive, so what I'd like is a more compelling reason to follow a particular system further than "this is logically consistent and satisfies my wants". Satisfying my desires/preferences is cool, just not "good".

I don't think emergence resolves your main contention which (if i may be so bold) I would translate into stating "we have no way of discerning if a specific action is morally superior". I mean, if we tried to use emergent moral as proof for something like that, then your sociopathy objection would still pose a problem, because it's not like we could classify it as "non-emergent".

However, we do get a basis where we can start. We could for example note that no human can come to age without care. This doesn't necessarily mean care is rubberstamped into the fabric of the universe as "always good", but it means that as far as humans are concerned the ability to give care is rather important.

I wouldn't object to that framing of my argument in this thread.

If I agree that care is important to us as humans (which I think I would) then we may have identified something that is important for our advancement as simply a species or even more as an advanced civilisation. It still seems as though we're muddying the waters when we introduce moral language though. To reach an extension of "care is good" has added little.

Well, it depends. If you view this moral language as just that, language, then it becomes merely symbolic tools

For example they become descriptive in the same sense that "blue" is a descriptive symbolic tool in the sentence "that building is blue".

Of course it also needs a direction. But this is also very useful. As humans we are generally either drawn to, repulsed by or indifferent towards phenomena. Our language again reflects this, so it could be an aesthetic symbolic tool ala "beautiful" in "that building is beautiful".

Lastly such symbolic tools can convey norms. Not only does the symbolic tools speak to us about how something is, how we see it but also about how it fits into how we think the world should be. Then we have a normative symbolic tool ala "better" in "that building is better".

So when we say "he is a good man" we are describing how a man is, to an extent if we like how that man is and also how that man fits into how we think men should be. Which is useful.

Useful, perhaps, until we disagree. It's certainly useful in language to say something like "John Cage's music is good" and convey that I think it has aesthetic and intellectual value. It doesn't, however, convey anything more than my (or a number of peoeple's) preferences insofar as we can't objectively define what makes a piece of music better or worse than another.

Perhaps this analogy goes quite well when we consider the vast wealth of music theory with scales, chords, melody, dissonance, and all. For all complexity of study, we still live in a world in which to say that Mozart is objectively better than Bieber is painfully unjustified.