You've put your conclusion by saying that morality is entirely a matter of what promotes human survival, but that, I'd suggest, isn't really the issue. I'm assuming you might be open to the idea that rampant cruelty to animals is wrong, whether or not it harms the chances for human survival. But even if you agreed, that wouldn't get you out of the dilemma you feel you're faced with. The real issue, I think, is that you've become convinced that morality doesn't need religion, and most of the people around you think otherwise. But here's a little secret: even people who think that there's an intimate connection between religion and morality ignore the connection in most of their moral thinking. There are very few people who think that murder would be perfectly acceptable except that God has commanded otherwise. There are very few people who think it would be okay to steal someone's wallet but for the fact that God disapproves. The fact is that aside from a few hot-button issues (abortion and...

This answer may not be quite what you want to hear, but if someone is convinced "for a fact" that nothing they're learning in high school is relevant to anything that matters, then one of two things is likely: (a) this is a very unusual high school, or (b) the person making the judgment isn't really in a very good position to judge. My guess is that most people on this panel thought at some point in their high school careers that everything they were doing was a waste of time. My guess is that most of them also woudl agree that on reflection, this wasn't really so, even if the benefits weren't immediate or obvious. The agenda proposed here sounds awfully ambitious: become a Buddhist monk and study religion, philosophy and science extensively. I'm hard pressed to think of many people who've managed all that. Perhaps someone like Matthieu Ricard would count, but he had the benefit of a PhD before he became a monk -- something he probably wouldn't have gotten if he hadn't finished high school....

A footnote here. The intent behind the act counts. But fantasizing and planning purely in the brainpan doesn't count as criminal. The closest the law comes is conspiring to commit a crime. Nonetheless, conspiracy calls for more than idle thought or even idle talk of the "Boy, wouldn't it be something to ..." sort. We do give moral credit for overcoming serious temptation. But deliberately indulging in wicked fantasies seems to be another matter. One reason is that we worry that people who do this regulalrly are more likely to succumb to the temptations that they induce in themselves. But another is that we value the character trait of being repulsed by the repulsive.

Let me offer what may seem to be an annoying answer. There are two things you might mean. One is what causes people to become cruel? And if that's the question, philosophers have no special basis for answering, since philosophers have no special insight into the causes of human conduct. But there's a related question: what does it mean to be a cruel person? What distinguishes a truly cruel person from someone who may occasionally do cruel things but overall isn't someone we'd count as cruel? Putting the question in more traditional vocabulary, we count cruelty as a vice. But what is this vice? (This isn't just irrelevant to your more likely question, because if what want to know how people become cruel, we need to have an idea of what state of character we have in mind.) Without pretending to offer a full analysis, we can at least say a few things. We generally say that an action is cruel when it's deliberately intended to cause pain, and when the person performing the action takes...

It's hard to give an all-purpose answer. But notice: the way you've posed the problem suggests that if cloning does more harm than good, it would be morally acceptable. People who think right and wrong are a matter of consequences would agree; people with a different way of thinking about right and wrong might not. Someone might argue, for instance, that trying to make copies of people shows a fundamental lack of respect for the humanity of the beings who result -- doesn't treat them as "ends in themselves." I'm not sure that would be a convincing argument, but it's easy to imagine it being made. As to whether cloning people might have net benefits, the answer surely is that it would depend on a lot of other things, which is one reason why it's hard to give a blanket answer to your question.

Why not act immorally? How about because it would be wrong? You seem to be asking for a selfish reason why philosophers (or anyone else) wouldn't act immorally. But it's a mark of the moral that what morality calls for doesn't always suit our selfish purposes. Maybe we need a little more specificity. Suppose I was in a position to steal someone's wallet -- say yours -- without getting caught. Why wouldn't I do it? How about because it would cause you a lot of trouble, I wouldn't want anyone doing something like that to me, and in light of that, I can't think of any reason why it would be okay to do it to you. Why won't that do? The phrase "moral absolutes" means both too much and too little to be a useful analytic tool. And it's really hard to make generalizations aboout "modern philosophy." In any case, moral skepticism isn't as widespread among philosophers as you seem to think. Most philosophers, I'd guess -- like most people -- think that some things are wrong, and they don't need...

What a fun question! Suppose we agree that if X is something we ought to do, then X is also something we can do. Suppose further that X is not something we can do. Then as your blogger points out, it follows that X is not something we ougt to do. But that's perfectly consistent with there being nothing we ought to do. It's perfectly consistent with saying that there's no such thing as moral obligation. Compare: if there is such a thing as a necessary being, then that being can't be an ordinary space-time being. Since my desk is an ordinary space-time thing, it follows that my desk isn't a necessary being. (This is a point that gos back at least to Anselm.) But that's consistent with saying that at the end of the day, the idea of a necessary being is incoherent and that nothing is or even could be a necessary being. Likewise, saying that if there's anything I'm morally obliged to do, it must be something I can do is consistent with saying that on further analysis, the idea...

Although I can imagine cases where comparing the value of lives might be the way to go, it's not obvious that this is one of them. Heading down a path where we value lives by discounting on the basis of the likely number of remaining years (which is all I see at work here) seems a very dubious idea, fraught with all sorts of moral peril. Although there is something particularly poignant about the death of a child, this doesn't simply translate into a case for saying that the best solution to the dilemma you pose is to give the child's life a weight greater than that of the five adults who would otherwise die. All this said, there are some hard issues in the general neighborhood. Deciding how to use resources in end-of-life situations, for example, is a serious problem where some sort of discounting doesn't simply seem out of place. But the issues here are tricky, and it's hard to see how any simple rule will work.

At least one difference between the misogynist of bygone days and his contemporary counterpart: the ancient misogynist probably suffered from a higher degree of non-culpable ignorance. He likely held factual beliefs about men and women that were widely shared, that underwrote his misogyny, but that no tolerably educated person can believe anymore. What a person can be held responsible for is at least partly dependent on what s/he can reasonably be expected to know,

I'd like to suggest a rather different take. Your question makes most sense on the assumption that there can be objective moral truths; if there can't, then no universe "functions" in accord with any moral laws. So let's assume, at least for the moment, that there are such things as objective moral truths. And now let's make a bit of a distinction. Let's agree that as things stand, it's wrong to use taser guns on babies. Could there be a universe where it was perfectly acceptable to taser a baby? If we suppose that babies are wired differently in that universe, the answer could well be yes. Perhaps the nervous systems of babies in this distant universe are set up so that applying the taser provides some sort of painless and beneficial stimulation. And so somthing that's wrong in our circumstances would be right in that far-off world, but only because some background non-moral facts differ. Now it may be that background facts about our social arrangements and our ways of understanding our own...