People were "moral" before those words existed. Morals are simply emergent normative behavior.

Science is a human endeavor, and thus is affected by understood norms, like any other human endeavor.

Perhaps.

If a morality fails in the forest and nobody has language to describe it… is morality the equivalent of “sound is a pressure wave”, or the equivalent of “sounds is an auditory experience”?

Moral codes have changed wildly over the years (and by place in any year). Slavery was “fine”, until it wasn’t. The death penalty is a thing in some places today, but seen as repugnant in others. Shellfish were forbidden, until someone had a vision of god berating them for turning it down. Bestiality was legal in half of Europe twenty years ago, but not today. Weed and gay marriage were unbelievable twenty years ago, but are increasingly acceptable today.

I’m vegetarian (trying to be vegan) just in case animals have that hard to describe thing commonly called consciousness or self-awareness or personhood, but I don’t have enough certainty to condemn anyone who thinks I’m being silly by worrying about that. Heck, I don’t even have a concrete definition of the thing I worry animals might have in order to test against.

What is morality? Really?

Assuming no supernatural things, all thinking a human does happens in their brain. Therefore, a very reductive approach: morality is our high-level generalization of what makes us feel bad or good. Things like:

- murder is wrong, because any given human wants to live (self-preservation drive), and also usually wants people they care about to live (them dying causes feelings of hurt)

- theft is wrong, because if you take something from me that I need, or feel connection to, I feel hurt

- etc.

Our social drive ensures that if you generalize things like these into more abstract code and enforce it, less of those bad things happen.

This - both dislike for things that tend to be a part of pretty much all moral codes, and the tendency to create those codes - seems to be built into our brain's firmware. Under this reductive view, the only actual claim morality has to universality is that all of us have pretty much the same hardware/firmware, and thus share the same basic moral principles. That is, hypothetical sentient aliens from outer space would likely have a different moral code due to the different process through which their brain-equivalent appeared.

Mm.

Counter point: Different people mean different things by the word “murder”. Does abortion count? I’d say no, but plenty of people disagree with me, violently. Does the death penalty count? I’d say yes, but again, plenty disagree violently. Does it count if you kill foreigners after invading their land? Does it count if you kill a chimp? If you euthanise a dog? A hamster? If you kill a prawn for dinner? People disagree on all of these.

Or “theft”: is taxation theft? Or is avoiding taxation theft?

There are differences, but that is too be expected if one views morality as just another human abstraction. There are different human cultures, and people are raised with different influences in varying environments.

I find changes in morality as somewhat analogous to changes in language. They are both messy, ambiguous, chaotic, emergent processes that don't result in a single output.

>Moral codes have changed wildly over the years (and by place in any year). Slavery was “fine”, until it wasn’t. The death penalty is a thing in some places today, but seen as repugnant in other

Cultures have had varying definitions of all kinds of things, above and beyond morality. Energy, death, malaise, sun, blood, calx, gravity, atom, motion, heat, mind, vacuum, malaria. But we tend to say it makes more sense that those are real things, and they are not just the cultural beliefs about those things, or that the varying cultural beliefs prove that there is no underlying real thing.

There's a common and unfortunate conflation between (a) whatever societies happen to believe and (b) what morality actually is (if anything), in a normative sense. Sometimes it's referred to as the normative/descriptive divide. Saying "well gee, societies had different beliefs about right and wrong" doesn't necessarily establish anything about morality itself, it's just a descriptive approach to morality, which is one thing. It may just be that morality is normative, and our investigation of morality, our understanding of the natural world, and our societal willingness to face up to certain moral challenges (such as treating races equally or caring about animals) is something that changes over time, while morality stays the same.

Poorly-defined turtles all the way down.

(This is a more serious answer than it reads.)

Generally to discuss morals one needs some irrefutable core tenets. In science nothing is irrefutable. Science is not great for all things concerning man, because we don't have a proper logically solid formulation for many things. I would prefer we have some moral core tenets that don't need solid logical proof. Like, "It's bad to kill".

But to start from some irrefutable core tenets, generally creates only poor or no science. The main requirement of science is that in face of evidence, one must be ready to accept facts as they are.

So, one can and should have a moral discussion on what research is to be done, but should not say "That's not science! It's immoral!".

For example, if I was fervent believer that god had created nature heterosexual I might fervently deny the observed results that lesbian bonobo chimpanzees or gay mallards exist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals because that would be an "immoral" discovery.

Klasiaster's point is that just because you have that knife, doesn't mean you should stab people (or monkeys) with it.

Yeah. Still, it's not stabbing people at random, it's stabbing a few monkeys so the science gets done, for the people who are still alive.

For certain monkeys, those "few monkeys" are family. Just like your family. You wouldn't want your family stabbed to advance a species you couldn't care less about.

philosophy only