Right, like laws that either prescribe or proscribe certain behaviors are not generally in sync with what any particular community construes to be the “right thing” or the “wrong thing” to do.
Even traffic laws pertain to behaviors behind the wheel deemed to be either good or bad.
You might not argue that it is immoral to speed, but speeding can result in sets of circumstances where people are injured or killed. If nothing harmful ever happened when people broke the speed limit, would there be speeding laws?
Even laws that revolve around obtaining a driver’s licence are passed based on the assumption that if anyone could drive anytime, anywhere for any reason without the need for all that is embedded in acquiring a license, the consequences would surely be dire.
Obviously, the relationship between the law and morality is jumbled up in a complex relationship that often evolves over time. Laws are basically just statutes that reflect a community consensus derived from customs and traditions and conventions and folkways and mores.
Okay, lets discuss the intersection here between genes and memes as any particular baby born and raised in any particular historical, cultural and experiential context, might come to construe particular behaviors as right or wrong?
What innate moral prescriptions are we all born to embody? Compassion for who in what set of circumstances?
After all, Nazis feel an empathetic tug around other Nazis. Slave owners feel an empathetic tug around other slave owners.
2. The Development and Progress Evolution of Mirror Neurons
In addition, Iacoboni has argued that mirror neurons are the neural basis of the human capacity for emotions such as empathy.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
Same here. What particular behaviors in what particular context?
3. Other Moral Features within the Brain
Here of course some will argue that, in a wholly determined universe, the brain is but more matter embedded in immutable laws.
I suggest you research the above to update your knowledge on the concept of morality & ethics and the independent Legislation, Policing and Judiciary.
And I suggest that you take what you have learned here and situate it out in the world of actual conflicting goods.
I’m more inclined to embrace Richard Rorty’s own “existential contraption” here:
Patrícia Fernandes
“Richard Rorty On Rights”
[b]Firstly, for Rorty, ‘foundationalist’ philosophers like Plato, Aquinas, and Kant tried to find premises about human beings capable of being known to be true independently of our moral intuitions and capable of justifying those moral intuitions. But as we saw, from Rorty’s perspective we cannot find such foundations; rather, our moral community determines what is morally good, and we can’t go beyond our language and our historical conditions to find moral Truth-In-Itself. In that sense,
“the most philosophy can hope to do is to summarize our culturally influenced intuitions about the right thing to do in various situations. The summary is effected by formulating a generalization from which these intuitions can be deduced… That generalization is not supposed to ground our intuitions, but rather to summarize them.” (Philosophical Papers III, p.171).
Secondly we must keep in mind that Rorty is a pragmatist – his main concern is not with proving moral statements to be true, but about finding what works, and in this case about how best to fulfill the utopian vision sketched by the Enlightenment:
“If the activities of those who attempt to achieve this [foundationalist] sort of knowledge seem of little use in actualizing this utopia, that is a reason to think there is no such knowledge. If it seems that most of the work of changing moral intuitions is being done by manipulating our feelings rather than by increasing our knowledge, that is a reason to think there is no knowledge of the sort that philosophers like Plato, Aquinas, and Kant hoped to get.” [p. 172]
Appeals to reason and knowledge have little effect in Rorty’s thought. We have to concentrate on what works, he says, and his conclusion is that “the emergence of the human rights culture seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge, and everything to hearing sad and sentimental stories. [/b]
Point is humanity are already progressing in their Morality and Ethical developments by ignoring the fixed absolute moral laws of religions.
The next stage is how to expedite this inherent moral function and process that are already within the human brain.
So you keep assuring us. But [of course] this progress will almost certainly revolve around what you construe to be right rather than wrong behaviors.
And the last thing an objectivist of your ilk will ever admit to is that these “progressive behaviors” are largely existential contraptions rooted in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein above and elsewhere.
Psychologically, there is now just too much invested in your own particular consolidated “I”, for that to ever sink in.
Unless of course I’m wrong.