If you are interested in this, you might want to read some articles by Sam Harris, who is often confronted by dimwit religionists who claim that it takes a god to give us "morals". Because without Yahwe or Allah we could never figure out what is right or wrong.
I am not particularly interested (these days) in the role of religion in morality, said nothing about it in my post you quote (except to compare the normative values on which ethical systems are based to religious imperatives...but I was saying something about the former, not the latter) and have nothing to say about it now. If you want joust with straw men religious moralists, please go ahead, but it has nothing to do with my points about why ethical systems are not even remotely universal.
Nonsense. In fact we can. We don´t even need much more than Kant`s categorial imperative, or the golden rule. Everything else flows from that. Harming others for your own benefit is not ethical in any system.... if it is in any of your high-falluting ethicist friends, they need to start over.
First of all, there ARE *logical* ethical systems in which, for example, violent self-defense is consider proper/acceptable behavior. In what way is that not harming others for one's own benefit? And, there are other *logical* ethical systems in which violent self-defense is improper/unacceptable behavior.
Second and more fundamentally, the reason that Kant's categorical imperative is an insufficient basis for a complete ethical system is that very few ethical issues/distinctions (either in theory or real life) are as simple as something like, "Should I hit this man over the head with something heavy so that I may take his money?" On things that simple, maybe there is close to a universal answer (although there are systems of ethics which would take into account how badly and for what purpose you needed his money and others that would not). Rather, the vast majority of ethical dilemmas are much more complicated. They could be something like, "Should I do A or B or do nothing?" where all three options have some mixture of harmful and beneficial consequences, including different types of harm and benefit, for various people involved in the situation, often but not always including oneself. Sometimes the same people may receive both harm and benefits of different sorts and in different amounts based on which option is selected. If you want some real world examples, you can easily find extensive ethical debates on, say, the testing of drugs and medical procedures on human and non-human subjects or on the use of drones in warfare or on balancing property rights against human rights or on balancing the general public good against individual political or personal liberty...on and on. Or, to get back closer to the matter at hand, on the trade-off between harming one's spouse with lies vs harming her/him with hurtful truths... And then there are issues of what constitutes harm; for example, does euthanasia harm someone or benefit them and in what circumstances?
Anyway and fwiiw, all of this appears to me to be both so blindingly obvious and so extremely tangential to both the purposes of this board and this thread, that I don't propose to pursue the matter further. If you really believe that all of the ethical conundrums of the sort I listed above can be resolved in some universal way with nothing more than the golden rule and a bit of logic, I'll just disagree and pass on to other matters. However, I do think you would be doing humanity a great service by writing a few books (or blogs or whatever) to put an end to all the discord and distress that people experience when confronting difficult ethical choices. If it is also easy and logical in your perspective, please share your wisdom. Surely it is the ethical thing to do!
-Ww
