[alancalverd]

But not wrong or bad.

So you use different definition of morality. How can someone else follow your reasoning? What's good things can be expected to come from your morality then?

I have defined a moral action as one that passes my two tests. The good that comes from moral actions is peace, harmony and a lack of harm to others. Circumstances occasionally require us to act in an immoral way.

You can extend Maimonides' view on lying to encompass other immoral actions that may be taken to avert a greater wrong.

Which one is it?

[/Jewish tradition states that in his commentary on the Mishnah (tractate Sanhedrin, chapter 10), Maimonides formulates his "13 principles of faith"; and that these principles summarized what he viewed as the required beliefs of Judaism:
1.The existence of God.
2.God's unity and indivisibility into elements.
3.God's spirituality and incorporeality.
4.God's eternity.
5.God alone should be the object of worship.
6.Revelation through God's prophets.
7.The preeminence of Moses among the prophets.
8.That the entire Torah (both the Written and Oral law) are of Divine origin and were dictated to Moses by God on Mt. Sinai.
9.The Torah given by Moses is permanent and will not be replaced or changed.
10.God's awareness of all human actions and thoughts.
11.Reward of righteousness and punishment of evil.
12.The coming of the Jewish Messiah.
13.The resurrection of the dead.
quote]

I have nothing but contempt for faith, but the practical guidance summarised in post #868 is pragmatic and honorable.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I have defined a moral action as one that passes my two tests. The good that comes from moral actions is peace, harmony and a lack of harm to others. Circumstances occasionally require us to act in an immoral way.

So in a situation where the only options is between moral action with bad consequences and immoral action with good consequences, you will take immoral action with good consequences?

[alancalverd]

Absolutely!

The most obvious immoral action is killing another human. If attacked, I have no hesitation in responding with whatever force is necessary to protect myself and those I choose to protect. See reply # 906 above.

Would I like it if you beat me senseless? No. Would I beat my family members senseless? No.

Would I bet the crap out of a mugger? Every time.  Would I kill him? Deliberately, if necessary. If by accident, I wouldn't get too upset. 

[charles1948]

Suppose the Covid-19 viruses had a "moral standard".

Wouldn't it be this - infect as many humans as possible.  But don't kill too many of them. We need them as hosts.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Suppose the Covid-19 viruses had a "moral standard".

Wouldn't it be this - infect as many humans as possible.  But don't kill too many of them. We need them as hosts.

To have moral standard, the agents must have understanding of causality. They must be able to relate their actions to what's expected to be the consequences.
I don't think that those viruses qualify as moral agents.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Absolutely!

The most obvious immoral action is killing another human. If attacked, I have no hesitation in responding with whatever force is necessary to protect myself and those I choose to protect. See reply # 906 above.

Would I like it if you beat me senseless? No. Would I beat my family members senseless? No.

Would I bet the crap out of a mugger? Every time.  Would I kill him? Deliberately, if necessary. If by accident, I wouldn't get too upset. 

It means that your moral standards  are merely ceremonial. They have no practical value. They are consistently defeated by your other values, which you don't call as morality.

[alancalverd]

Consistently, yes. Frequently? no. I'm not often mugged, so I don't often have to set morality aside, but would have no hesitation doing so when the circumstances demand it.

But I don't go around mugging others (because that would fail tests 1 and 2)  so there's considerable societal value in my tests.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Consistently, yes. Frequently? no. I'm not often mugged, so I don't often have to set morality aside, but would have no hesitation doing so when the circumstances demand it.

But I don't go around mugging others (because that would fail tests 1 and 2)  so there's considerable societal value in my tests.

What standard do you use to distinguish between good and bad? You said it was different than your moral standard.

[alancalverd]

Good makes people happy, healthy and prosperous. Bad does the opposite.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Good makes people happy, healthy and prosperous. Bad does the opposite.

How do you prioritize them?
There are something that make us happy are unhealthy, and vice versa. So does with prosperity.

[alancalverd]

Rarely any need for complex prioritisation. Adult humans are good at deferred gratification and the best of us don't get too upset  by the occasional suboptimal choice or compromise. Those who don't grow up become deranged presidents.

The general rule is that pleasurable things that will shorten your life should be treated with caution, because there may be a greater pleasure tomorrow, but when the end is clear and inevitable, go for pleasure. My wife spent  her last week as high as a kite on morphine washed down with strawberries and champagne.

I've never known prosperity to be harmful.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Is human survival taken into consideration?
Is human extinction good or bad?
Is it inevitable?

[alancalverd]

Humans have been an unmitigated disaster for life on this planet but are of no cosmic significance. History suggests that every complex species apart from sharks and crocodiles has a fairly short life expectancy in geological terms, though tardigrades and cyanobacteria seem to survive most geological events, and whatever species evolved into the chicken now outnumbers all other warmblooded creatures with the possible exception of bats, who have adopted biological defences against humans.

In the short term, however, the health, happiness and prosperity of small groups of homo sapiens seem to be optimised by moral behavior within the group.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Humans have been an unmitigated disaster for life on this planet but are of no cosmic significance. History suggests that every complex species apart from sharks and crocodiles has a fairly short life expectancy in geological terms, though tardigrades and cyanobacteria seem to survive most geological events, and whatever species evolved into the chicken now outnumbers all other warmblooded creatures with the possible exception of bats, who have adopted biological defences against humans.

In the short term, however, the health, happiness and prosperity of small groups of homo sapiens seem to be optimised by moral behavior within the group.

Do you think that human extinction is neither good nor bad in the long run?

In this thread I want to find a universal moral standard which has real consequences in deciding what should be done in various situation, given the available information at hand. I'm not interested with ceremonial labelling with no real decisive value.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Meanwhile, I'd like to share a video about "How NOT To Use Logical Fallacies (With Examples)"
I hope this can be helpful in the course of our discussion here.

[alancalverd]

Good and bad require a subject - good for....., bad for...... Human extinction would have negligible impact on the universe and be good for almost every other species on this planet.

So, faced with any decision, I look at the options and ask whether I'd be happy if someone did it to me, or if I did it to my family. Anyone can apply the same tests and the results seem adequately consistent given that we live in a limited environment within which we have to compete for resources. In general, actions that most people consider pass the tests., tend to be good for humans.

That said, what is good for humans in the short term (say, clearing forests to feed cattle, or hoovering up all the fish in the North Sea) may not be good in the long term, simply because we do live in a finite environment, so there is unlikely to be a universal and unlimited good. Nor, as I have pointed out, is the short term moral action (love thy neighbor) necessarily good in the medium term (neighbor is a serial killer).

[charles1948]

In his OP of 14.11.2018, Yusuf expressed the hope that a "satisfactory answer" to his question could be produced.

There've been 47 pages of replies to the question.  I've read some, though not all, of them. Many of them contain very interesting and valuable insights. Which ought to be remembered, and used by us in the future.

But, it seems, none of them have come up with an answer that is fully satisfactory to everyone.
Perhaps this is because - there really isn't a final and definitive answer.

That doesn't mean that discussing the question is a waste of time.  I don't hold the absurdly simplistic "Logical Positivist" view that questions like this are "meaningless". 

They do have "meaning".  Even if they don't have conclusive answers.

[alancalverd]

That's science for you. When a painter signs his name, or a musician stops blowing or scraping, the job is done. In science your first answer often becomes the second question.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Good and bad require a subject - good for....., bad for...... Human extinction would have negligible impact on the universe and be good for almost every other species on this planet.

In this thread, I'm interested to discuss about universal consciousness as I described in my other thread titled Universal Utopia discussing about universal terminal goal. It's not about individual conscious agents, although it's often useful as instrumental goal.

The extinction of human ancestors is surely bad for us, since it prevents us from existing for the first place. Human extinction would be bad for human descendants, or more generally, successors.

What do you expect if humans go extinct today? Other species on earth would have to evolve intelligence to at least a human level to gain independence from earthbound resources. It would take a long time, and perhaps it would not even happen until the earth is completely destroyed or engulfed by the sun. That's why many thinkers worry about The Great Filter.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I found that a lot of disagreements people have when discussing morality stems from unwillingness to revise our common conception about individuality. We are so accustomed to use average specimens of homo sapiens as standard role model for conscious agents.

When talking about conscious beings, many people take for granted that those beings are somewhat similar to human individuals in current states, since they are the most familiar form of them. The research below tries to answer the question of individuality in biology by utilizing information theory.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-an-individual-biology-seeks-clues-in-information-theory-20200716/

The task of distinguishing individuals can be difficult — and not just for scientists aiming to make sense of a fragmented fossil record. Researchers searching for life on other planets or moons are bound to face the same problem. Even on Earth today, it’s clear that nature has a sloppy disregard for boundaries: Viruses rely on host cells to make copies of themselves. Bacteria share and swap genes, while higher-order species hybridize. Thousands of slime mold amoebas cooperatively assemble into towers to spread their spores. Worker ants and bees can be nonreproductive members of social-colony “superorganisms.” Lichens are symbiotic composites of fungi and algae or cyanobacteria. Even humans contain at least as many bacterial cells as “self” cells, the microbes in our gut inextricably linked with our development, physiology and survival.

Krakauer and Flack, in collaboration with colleagues such as Nihat Ay of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, realized that they’d need to turn to information theory to formalize their principle of the individual “as kind of a verb.” To them, an individual was an aggregate that “preserved a measure of temporal integrity,” propagating a close-to-maximal amount of information forward in time.

Their formalism, which they published in Theory in Biosciences in March, is based on three axioms. One is that individuality can exist at any level of biological organization, from the subcellular to the social. A second is that individuality can be nested — one individual can exist inside another. The most novel (and perhaps most counterintuitive) axiom, though, is that individuality exists on a continuum, and entities can have quantifiable degrees of it.

“This isn’t some binary function that suddenly has a jump,” said Chris Kempes, a physical biologist at the Santa Fe Institute who was not involved in the work. To him as a physicist, that’s part of the appeal of the Santa Fe team’s theory. The emphasis on quantifying over categorizing is something biology could use more of, he thinks — in part because it gets around tricky definitional problems about, say, whether a virus is alive, and whether it’s an individual. “The question really is: How living is a virus?” he said. “How much individuality does a virus have?”

Their result is similar to my posts which discuss about consciousness.

This individuality is included as 2020's Biggest Breakthroughs in Biology. This video shows this from 3:12 time stamp.

In 2020, the study of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was undoubtedly the most urgent priority. But there were also some major breakthroughs in other areas. We'd like to take a moment to recognize them.

1. This year, we learned that we had severely underestimated the human brain's computing power. Researchers are coming to understand that even the dendritic arms of neurons seem capable of processing information, which means that every neuron might be more like a small computer by itself.

2. The new Information Theory of Individuality completely reimagines the way biologists have traditionally thought about individuality. Armed with information theory, the researchers found objective criteria for defining degrees of individuality in organisms.

3. Deprived of sleep, we and other animals die within weeks. More than a century of scrutiny failed to explain why lack of sleep is so deadly. This year, an answer was finally found — not inside the brain, as expected, but inside the gut.

Morality of a system is intended to protect the system from harm caused by conscious agents happen to be its members. The maximum harm is which causes the system's death or disappearance.
An individual morality protects from suicidal behavior of the individual itself, which is its sole agent. Tribal morality protects the tribal system from harmful behaviors of its members. This can be generalized for larger systems such as religious,  national, international systems.
It just happen that protecting it's members tend to improve the survival rate of the system itself.  That's why we get human rights as  a member of humanist system.

A universal moral standard can't be based on arbitrary rules out of thin air, or evolutionary accidents such as genetic make-ups. They can only be instrumental goals with limited usefulness in both space and time.