So, nowhere am I saying that this one principle alone is enough by which to 'be moral'; it's not an Ethical framework. Just a little ol' principle. It's only a very, very, very basic principle at that, like one dot on a connect the dot drawing that you and I could then color in after we've ... connected all of the many other dots that need to be connected.
Once again I've taken some time to give this some thought, and my conclusion is that I still don't know what this "
Unwritten Universal Moral Principle" is, other than perhaps that which everyone intuits to be right or wrong.
Is that what it is? I presume not. Because not everyone intuits the same things to be right or wrong. So therein lies my dilemma. Without knowing what this "
Unwritten Universal Moral Principle" is, your argument confuses me.
For example, I could ask whether it's immoral for a fifty year old man to marry and have relations with a ten year old girl. In certain times, and indeed even now in certain cultures, the answer to that question is no, it's not immoral, whereas most people in this day and age would say yes, it is immoral. So we have diverse groups of people intuiting and rationally concluding completely different answers.
Oddly enough, this still doesn't rule out the existence of objective morality, because it may simply be that people just don't understand the nature of morality. Slavery may be perfectly moral in one instance and completely immoral in another. These two things need not be contradictory, nor mutually exclusive.
How can that be?
Well, consider evolution with its own unwritten universal principle of "
Survival of the Fittest". That principle holds true no matter what. It's never, ever violated. Yet that doesn't mean that what survives in one scenario will be the same thing that survives in another scenario. So while the underlying principle is never violated, the effect of that principle can and does change over time depending upon the prevailing conditions.
The question then is, is the same thing true with morality, i.e. its "
Unwritten Universal Moral Principle" as you put it, never changes, but the way that that principle gets expressed in any given place and time can and does change. Hence slavery may be immoral in one instance, but not in another. In both instances the principle remains the same, but the circumstances don't.
I find this to be an interesting concept, but it also leaves me wondering, if evolution has the simple underlying principle of "Survival of the Fittest" then what's the "
Unwritten Universal Moral Principle" behind morality?
So far you haven't explained it to me, and I really, really would like to know.
