But the fact remains, coosa, that there are things that can kill us and wipe us out that have nothing to do with our morality. That alone should warn us that trying to view morality through a “survival” filter can lead us astray, or at least has no guarantee to be successful.
Never mind then. Forget I said anything.
My apologies, everyone - I’ve written an entire book trying to reply to posts in this thread, but for some reason 90% when I hit ‘preview’ either my computer or the board freezes up (I’m not sure which) and then eats my post. I’m going to skip ‘preview’ on this one and see what happens.
This is certainly true, erislover, but what guarantee is there that anything will be successful? We can only operate within the framework of things that we can control. If the planet is struck by a huge asteroid next week that wipes out most life on the planet (sorry for conjuring up Sea Sorbust), will that happen because of our moral failure?
But acting ‘morally’ in the way I’m suggesting - by following the evolved rules of behavior that enable the existence of a cooperative society - may result in our ability to devise a way of deflecting or destroying that asteroid, and so ensuring our survival for a little while longer.
We cannot see into the future to judge the ultimate outcome of anything we do. We can only act now in ways that we think will prove favorable to our continued existence.
And honestly, if the species is extinct, aren’t morals a little superfluous? Who will it matter to, unless you intend to apply human morals to the species that survive us? I don’t see any way to view morals - or at least morally correct behavior - except in the context of our survival.
(Crossing my fingers that this will go through!)
Well, my last post seems to have gone through okay, although it took 15 minutes from this end. I know jjimm must be frothing at the mouth 
waiting on my response, so I’ll address him next.
[patronizing voice] Some day you’ll thank me for this, son.[/patronizing voice] Seriously, I’m not so much arguing your points as that I’m trying to point out that your cites don’t support them. Its better to be slow and provide good cites than to quickly offer cites that do anything to support your position. I thought it might be better to point that out to you now than have someone with a short temper Pit you over it in a later debate.
I think one misunderstanding we are having is that we are viewing things in a different context. I don’t think that ritual cannibalism of some sort is very unusual and/or forbidden - in my opinion the Catholic church regularly performs ritual cannibalism, even if it only involves wine and crackers. (BTW, ever read Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlen?)
However, any tribe that regularly slaughters its own members as a source of food is eventually going to run of members, don’t you think? However, tribalism appears to be one of the problems human civilization is facing today, because we tend to consider our own tribe as the only ‘humans’ and other tribes as ‘other’. Some tribes may find it completely acceptable to slaughter members of other tribes as food - I’ve heard it speculated that one reason Neanderthals became extinct was that Cro-Magnon man may have hunted them as food.
Anyway, this is why cannibalism didn’t make it on my list - its more of a relative moral than a fundamental one. Whether or not the act is ‘cannibalism’ might depend on one’s viewpoint, although I do doubt that many groups have thought that it was acceptable to say something like “I’m tired of yams and baked rat - let’s have Grandmother for supper instead.”
I also don’t think incest makes the ‘fundamental’ list, although what I was trying to point out is that even in cases where incest is accepted, it seems to be accepted only in certain circumstances. For example, in the Tongan situation it incest was forbidden for the average person and permissable only among ‘royalty’ as a way to share and conserve their wealth and power. (Which is why I questioned your use of a partial quote.) (There’s also some doubt, as in the Egyptian case, as to whether or not these were literal sibling matings, as I did find a rather unclear reference that they were actually between first cousins, but under Tongan relationship rules they were called brother and sister.)
Anyway, incest is not necessarily ‘bad’ from a survival point of view - it serves to uncover harmful recessive genes AND to ‘fix’ certain desirable traits in a gene pool. (Animal breeders do this all the time.) Large scale incest in a restricted society is likely to prove disastrous in the long run, as even if no one has any harmful genes the group will eventually fall victim to something poorly understood that is called ‘inbreeding depression’. However, the same would be true for any group that doesn’t occasionally incorporate an ‘outcross’, as members of the group are going to become more and more closely related over the generations, until a 3rd cousin-mating may involve the same genes as a brother-sister, mother-son, or father-daughter mating.
Ah, you missed my point: The Tongans have apparently agreed to change their society to follow the rules of one they consider more successful.
Um, not exactly - it’s just well hidden because of society’s disapproval, so that all we usually become aware of are isolated acts. Are you not aware of the ‘slave trade’ involving children kidnapped, bought, and sold to pedophiles? Surely you’ve heard of the child pornography rings? Where does the material come from? Pedophilia is much more widespread than Muti - as a matter of fact, your link also includes stories about the surge in child rapes in SA because of a mistaken belief that sex with a virgin will cure the disease. (Interesting link, BTW) I don’t think you can consider any of these to be ‘cultural acceptable’ unless you are going to say that mental illness is acceptable. I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent, but pedophilia, serial killers, and ritual killings like those connected with modern Muti practices seem to be a product of modern society and its alienation of the individual. Although there were rare cases before him, one reason Jack the Ripper remains so famous is because he was the first real serial killer known; since then they have become increasingly common in all developed countries. But that’s one of my hobbies and I can discuss it all day, so I better stop there!
My point was that the incest wasn’t a ‘widely accepted’ practice; the Egyptian society tolerated it within a small, isolated group that chose to practice it. I wasn’t arguing about the fact of incest so much as that I felt you were misrepresenting the material.
BTW, the link for ‘The Universality of Incest’ gives me a 404 error. 
I’ll have a try at finding it through the website in the beginning of the address, though, because it looks interesting.
Can’t seem to preview so my apologies if I’ve screwed up the coding or something.
Well, darn, I forgot to bring up a point about incest I meant to make, although I think someone else (erislover?) alluded to it earlier.
At what point in history did humans realize that sexual activity had any direct connection with reproduction? Its not like you have sex and the next day a baby pops out.
I did read somewhere recently that incestuous marriages were forbidden in many societies because they prevented power and wealth from being spread around.
Well, as you seem to agree, of course not. But this is why I have a hard time accepting survival as a moral template. Consider: could it ever be moral to commit suicide? What about to assist suicide? What about to die for one’s moral beliefs? The latter is especially important because so much progress in society has been achieved by sacrificing one’s self.
Yeah, I think they are, too. There is much to say for taking a pragmatic outlook on things. I mean, yeah, at some level morality must be (at least loosely) equated with survival, if not more explicitlely with quality of survival (that is, survival is assumed to be more or less amoral, just something that is done, but since it is accepted that we are going to try and survive, what can we do about survival?). For instance, you say, “I don’t see any way to view morals - or at least morally correct behavior - except in the context of our survival.” Right; but that doesn’t need to mean that survival itself is moral. It really could just be the context in which morality operates, and that is how I prefer to look at it. This allows us to make moral decisions which either do not pertain to direct survival, or which directly act against it (self sacrifice, for example).
First off, this comment harvested from a GQ thread on whether any religions exist without a mythology:
I quote this because, from the POV of anyone within those human societies which these beliefs morals are absolute truths. They are our basic assumptions which we accept as true without requiring proof. This is the case for morals based on secular as well as religious systems.
If you exist within the society and fail to acept these assumptions you are considered insane or evil from the POV of the society as a whole. They are absolute by consensus.
Do any correlate with some universal moral truth independent of our believing in it or not? I believe so, and that is the basis for my theism. But, I do not know so.
Well, the Greek word “mythos” just means “story”, without regard to truth or falsehood and usually indicating a heroic or divine story. Although modern usage of “myth” and related words strongly connotes falsehood, anthropologists use it to mean “an important religious or spiritual belief”.