Morality absolutely has a real-world analogue: the experience of desire, as I stated above.
There are, however, many essentialist arguments that genetic propagation is survival, and that civilizations founded on anything less essential are going to be compromised in their survival ability.
Of course, the essentialist defense usually involves proposing to kill the questioner, then his children, then drag his widow off to be impregnated by force. So YMMV. 
Morality cannot be dictated nor legislated no should it be. No, there is no such thing as absolute morality and never will be.
Why do you ask about absolute morality in your OP and then qualify it by mentioning murder? I can think of several instances where murder would be a moral act and where murder of an individual would be beneficial to the common good. In fact, in another of your off-the wall debates, you stated that you personally would murder Hitler if you had whatever it would take to transport you back in time by 100 years. It seems to me you have already answered the question posed in this OP.
“Murder” is low-hanging fruit. Change it “murder of an innocent person for trivial personal gain.”
I don’t see how you can say there is an absolute morality, equivalent to math, when it’s all in a human context. Do you agree that math is correct or provable, or whatever, whether or not there are humans?
Assuming you do, do you agree that morality (in terms of, say, murder) only makes sense in a human context?
I’ve tried to flesh this out before, I think on this board, but my view is that if we had evolved from a non-social species or from an insect species or something other than primates, our sense of morality would be quite different.
For example, if it were necessary for a female to “murder” her mate in order to successfully propagate the species, we would think there’s nothing wrong with that.
Or, if the queen of a society decided to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of sterile drones in order to steal the cows of a rival society – that might be fine if we were descended from ants.
Closer to home, polygamy might not only be accepted, but expected if we were direct descendants of gorillas.
Anyway, my view is that there is no objective morality. It’s possible that there’s an objective human morality (although I doubt it), but not an objective universal morality.
I believe there is a ultimate subjective morality and that is Love.
Love as best as you can and know how to do. Leave the mistakes up to Love to correct as you learn the ways of Love.
As such it’s not, nor can it ever be a hard ruled written moral code, Love knows no rules or bounds as Love is God. Being one with Love means your one with God, and as God as much so as Lord Jesus Himself.
This ‘morality’ is timeless, has always been always will be, and is always personal and subjective.
No. Morals are social constructs.
I mean, sure, we can all agree that slavery is wrong, but people 2,000 years ago clearly didn’t see it that way, so that particular moral is so irrelevant as to be a nullity.
Not exactly. It only makes sense in a context of an entity who is capable of understanding that other entities have desires and is capable of making decisions that take this understanding into account.
I believe an objective morality is something that is discovered, not invented; as such, other nonhuman entities capable of this understanding might discover objective morality just as we have. They might realize the implications of desires held by other entities, and change their behavior accordingly.
They might not–but since objective morality is wholly prescriptive and not descriptive, whether they discovered it is irrelevant.
I think there is an absolute morality.
I’m rather fond of my girlfriend’s morality after she’s had a few of those.
I think your first statement reflects the thoughts of an entity that evolved in a social context, with extremely complex conventions regarding social status, entity interactions, and close-knit groups.
Also, it seems like you only refer to an absolute morality when it comes to murder. What other areas do you think it applies?
Take slavery, for example. I can easily imagine a species where some large proportion of the members of the species would want nothing better than to serve the rest of the species. For example, while dogs are a separate species, and they are not as sapient as humans, they just love to be slaves to humans, they just aim to please. It’s not hard to imagine a situation where members of the same species interact the way humans and dogs do.
Or, for example, I think there is some species of fish where the male is basically absorbed into the female, and spends the rest of its days as a sperm-making machine, basically a reproductive slave.
Now, don’t get me wrong – slavery as practiced by humans was definitely wrong. However, other species, depending on how they evolve, could find it perfectly fine, even if they reach human-level intelligence.
All of this argues, to me, that there is no objective morality. Maybe (just maybe) there is one for humans and other species sufficiently like us.
Would it be fair to say that there is absolute morality if and only if there are absolute values/goods—i.e. if anything is valuable in and of itself, and not just as a means to some other end?
LHOD – I’m about to go on vacation for a week, with little access to the web. So, I may not respond for a while if you decide to reply to my post.
Anyway, this is a subject that interests me, so if all of you could go ahead and resolve it in my absence, I’d really appreciate it. I look forward to this great philosophical question getting figured out in the coming week 
I didn’t realize that evolutionary survival of genes was the standard! I need to go get me a mistress and impregnate her.
I think that pretty much every piece of legislation is someone’s take on morality.
Regarding the OP, I’ve heard theists assert that morality can’t be relative, it has to be based on the ultimate authority of God. However, it seems to me that this argues that morality really is relative - they just place more value on what they think their God’s opinion of the matter would be. The fact that my opinion might be different from their God’s is demonstration that morality is relative.
“God’s opinion”? Isn’t the God that these theists believe in all-wise and all-knowing?
First, I maintain that morality in at best tangentially related toward what comprises a successful evolutionary strategy. Morality sometimes dictates behaviors that impede evolutionary “success.” More often it points toward a direction of success, inasmuch as it encourages cooperation, but that’s not the proper metric for whether something is moral.
As for what areas it applies in, I believe it applies in any situation in which there are conflicting desires. I know I’m being really, really vague here, and that’s because I don’t think we’ve developed a very robust theory of morality yet, one that resolves all difficulties through an elegant mechanism. We haven’t developed that for many different areas of thought, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.
At its heart, morality indicates what course of action one ought to take when confronted by conflicting desires. Do you desire a tasty steak, but the cow desires to live? Morality helps you figure out the answer here (for the record, I come down on your side in many cases). Did you want to stay out and have fun, but your spouse wants you to come home? Morality helps you decide what to do. Do you want medicine to cure your lethal illness, but the store wants to save the medicine for someone who can pay for it? Again, morality will tell you what you ought to do.
Morality doesn’t tell you what you will do. It doesn’t predict the most successful course of action. It has no built-in inherent consequences for not doing what it recommends. All it does is answer the question, “What should I do?”
absolute morality is a human construction, its like saying there should be absolute architecture, absolute comedy or absolute beautifulness. nothing backs this up. it is all based on emotions and of course a well known bronze age book.
Murder is unlawful killing, not immoral killing. Conceivably a case could exist where murder is moral - if the state made a moral killing (such as clear undisputed case of self-defence) illegal.
This is a little pedantic, don’t you think? And also incorrect: the word is used to mean both killing someone unlawfully and killing someone brutally.
Not really, when the proposed example is that murder is always immoral. One can murder in a non-immoral way if the legal structures renders the moral act illegal.
There may or may not be an absolute morality, but if there is, it is a personal morality.
I believe that what the OP is really asking about is universal morality-morality that is the same for every person in every place and at every time. This, of course, is impossible. Try to name a moral imperative that you believe to be universal, and a situation where it would not apply can easily be found.