Quote:
Originally Posted by streetwaves
The sense of right and wrong are innate. We don't need ethics to know the difference between the two, and I've never said or thought that. Ethics are a collective definition of right and wrong. You could say the 'reason' behind ethics is that it helps to encourage good behavior and provide validation for it, and discourage bad behavior. Ethical dilemmas would, indeed,only be issues as to how good should be done. People argue all the time over what's right or wrong, but as I explained in the "Morality and the Bible" thread, that has a lot to do with corruption of morality via religion or other cultural factors. This is another thing that ethics can help with: attempting to create a moral common ground between various groups.
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this is going to be my last post in this thread
since moral dilemmas over what is right and wrong are due to cultural and religious corruption, we must all innately know whether abortion is right or wrong and what the proper ethical treatment for animals is. you might think you innately know the answer to both of these questions, which would explain why you can hold such a view, but since i don't know whether it is wrong to abort an unborn fetus or whether it's wrong to hold an animal in close captivity for most of its life so you can eat it, it must be that the ability to know such things is not innate.