Reading this made my nipples go hard.,

Can I just throw a hypothetical sitution into the mix. I know it's not valid whatsoever and I might look at it later and think 'why the fuck did I write that' but what the hell here goes.

Say you just landed on a desert island and there was no way of getting off. You were gonna have to spend the rest of your days there, simple as.

Now lets say you bumped into a bunch of peeps, kinda like shipwrecked style situation (no I DO NOT watch this programme) and they had a nice little set up, and they said you could live there with them.

Now lets say that there were.... 10 guys and 10 girls, and they were all in relationships together, and there is literally no one else on the island. So thats it, your not gonna get laid for the rest of your life, unless you take up zoophilia. Do these powerful moral beliefs still stand. Ok it's an unrealistic situation, but put yourself there and answer this question.,

For me this scenario sums up the reason I starting all this self-improvement lark, i.e. I thought my options were limited to the girls I knew.

Anyway, to confront your scenario, I guess you would be back to the old caveman tribe mentality. You would be competing for the best girls available to carry your future generations forward, as would she.

K, whilst ethical dilemmas always prove convoluted it doesn't detract from the fact that they do in fact play out like that. Eg, you should not kill another person, but its ok in self defence etc.

Your argument isn't complete. To say "if you think something is wrong don't do it, don't associate with people who do it and don't assist anyone to do it" is underpinned by thinking something is wrong.

How do we arrive at thinking something is wrong? It is not through the experience of having that wrong done against us? Eg, I've been lied to andit wasn't nice. So it is doing unto others as we would have done unto ourselves but with all the caveats and drawn out explanations that go with this basic principle.

I think we are saying the same things actually. No?

And SJ, in that example, no you would not get any pussy so avoid desert islands!!

Yeah, but would you feel bad about taking someone else's girl? Probably not. Maybe with the values that you have right now, but not after being on a desert island for a few years.

I'm posting off my mobile can you quote the point I didn't address. x

Cool as K. Didn't want to short change you that's all. x

You guys are getting me all misty eyed.

I didn't get this at all but now I do.

Hmmm. So what does this make morality? Well I did a bit of reading. I've got a pretty cool book that I took out at the library about a year ago (the philosopher at the end of the universe - Mark Rowland) and didn't take it back (Kant would not be pleased K ). Theres some fairly simple interpretations in there including a chapter entitled "Why be moral", which is where I got this question from.

Ok, soooooooo according to Mark Rowland, the question of 'why be moral' is to look at the two reasons that we have as humans for doing things. One reason is that we want to do something. So if someone decides to shag someone else's bird, he did it cos he thought it was in his own interest. The other reason is that we believe that it is the right thing to do. Not necessarily right for us, but morally right, which does not always coincide with what we want. And then to look at why we allow these moral reasons to out weigh these prudential ones.

So why SHOULD we act morally. Well in this case there's 3 meanings on the word SHOULD, apparently. The first comes from a philosopher in the 15th century Thomas Hobbes, who saw all people as essentially egoists. He preached that we are all out to get what we can get, and we want as much of it as possible, and we'll do pretty much whatever it takes to get it (remember this was the 15th century) Problem with this though is everyone is gonna get pissed with each other, and as Hobbes said, a life situation would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'. So this helped to form something called a social contract theory of morallity, in which the idea is everyone agrees on nnot fucking each other over, in return for not being fucked over themselves, ie I won't try to kill you if you don't try to kill me. The problem here though is that morality is associated with punishment, which is not really what morality is about. Rowland compares it to believing in God (in the hardcore sense), and acting morally because you don't want to go downstairs for an eternal bumming session You are acting for your own self interest, rather than for anyone else's, which is a sociopathical way of thinking.

The second SHOULD is the moral one, which was supported by David Hume, who was against the social contract theory. He claimed that we are moral because there are actually a good number of peeps that are genuinly nice, and quite fond of each other, causing us to empathise with one another.

And the third SHOULD is the logical one. Immanuel Kant claimed that a moral wrongness is logical inconsistency. If, for example, everyone went around breaking promises, then nobody would trust one another, and therefore a 'promise' would cease to exist, leaving none to be broken. So he's basically saying if you are not moral, then you are not consistent, which looking at the picture as a whole, would obviously be detrimental to society. This doesn't answer the question however as to why WE as individuals should be moral, it just looks at why WE as society should act morally.

And pretty annoyingley, he ends the chapter basically saying that the question of 'why be moral' doesn't really have an answer. I'll quote the last bit which I think sums it up

"There may be no ultimate reason for being or becoming one sort of person rather than another. It is something we just do. It is our action, rather than our reasons, that lies at the bottom of the self definition game. The beginning of morality is the question 'why be moral?' And in the beginning lies the deed."

Yeah I totally admit to cutting it super short and taking only a few of the concepts out of what I read. I am very much interested in the subject (not enough to stop washing and socialising mind) and fully intend to get my head into it, i've just got a shit load of other work that I am doing at the moment for college, with exams coming up and blah blah blah.

I totally understand that from a philosophers point of view, this kind of stuff is sacrilege, but just as my book intended, I think to someone that is not educated in philosophy but is interested in the concepts this post is mildly informative.