So, this whole fucking thread is more YouTube bullshit.
Moral relativism addresses one of a few ways of approaching morality.
First, assuming someone accepts the existence of responsibility, then any moral rule is enough to extend responsibility into moral statements based on that moral rule.
Many moral rules have been proposed, however there was an issue first popularized by Hume in that when approaching morality logically, pretty much everyone in the game starts with an assumption of a moral rule, but nothing anyone has widely proposed so far has seen much acceptance as a *source* for moral rules.
I actually dedicated most of my 20's and a good portion of my 30's to that, philosophically speaking.
Now, I do think by in large that "the current academic understanding" is likely to be pretty accurate, and multiple disciplines go towards figuring out and narrowing down "oughts" from the best bounds we can figure out to use.
Now, some folks in the relativist camp will stand on the idea that morality can and should be "normative" but normativity has allowed things we understand now to be very absolutely fucked up and wrong. "Slavery" and "rape" kinds of wrong.
This should all act as fairly strong evidence that there is a more solid aspect of reality which drives our understanding of right and wrong that is not particular to Americans or Australians or Humans or Earthlings or Sol-lings or even the active physical paradigm of the universe but to cellular automata in general.
It was enough to send me searching for it.
So, I started asking questions according to game theory, as applied in a moral scope, for cellular automata in general, in source-data reproductive automata (like DNA based life), when seeing them adopt messaging systems, and the combined benefits and dangers source-data exchange (this is how viruses also work).
In philosophy class in art school, probably the most expensive philosophy course I will ever take, I was exposed to the idea that people derive their first justification for action in the same way they recognize their existence: though the authority of their ego and hubris to declare it so.
This doesn't make things right; might doesn't make right, even if might keeps it going. Instead we have to explore general and abstract concepts by finding their bounds.
If we can look at a group of non-descript "agents" in these terms, as equals in justification, we can start to generalize on this shared property of equivalent justification, to at least discover the bounds of what can possibly populate this "abstract rule", by probing what doesn't.
"I want to declare it right to take that food in your hands, that I may take it and you must let me", says one.
"I do not declare it thus, leave me alone!"
"No, I shall take it."
"I shall fight not to keep it but to stop you from taking it."
From the outside, we can generalize these agents. Just treat them like little wooden pans and "equals" according to our initial assumption in terms of their basic ability to justify themselves.
From this very general sort of thing, we can see that if we replace the position and orientation of one with the other, so he already has food, and were to hear the other way the same, that this person might take issue with this:
He will have objected to his own right to take the food by force.
We can see then that this creates a logical violation of that symmetry, and so he must logically be prohibited by some hypothetical moral rule from doing so.
This first recognition of hypocrisy as a clear moral violation is very important, because it says "aha! Here is a logically exposed 'ought' from the 'is' observed in that tableau, from the relationship between the individual personal oughts rather than directly from them."
Of course, this doesn't require any belief in 'god'.
This can be extended further. We can find all sorts of asymmetrical treatments between groups, and identify them, and then start to look at their features.
You will find a couple features that I have never been able to divorce from any clearly and widely agreed-upon immoral act, namely a common "reasonably strict" standard of "harmlessness", and some breach of this standard against some party's consent.
Generally this standard of harmlessness shifts with the context, and based on how well it can be enforced; might doesn't make right, even if might keeps it going.
Then in general another widespread expectation arises from a hypocritical plea, the desire for mercy in the promise that you will relent from whatever you are doing.
We get from this logic such things as "someone can only decide as something ceases to be a right for themselves", and game theory on how to provide as much mercy as possible while making sure the violations of consent stop, in other words, "to respect the consent of those who violate consent, as much as we are able, as we wish to be treated mercifully in turn and widespread action towards that achieved it."
All sorts of Darwinian prerogatives impinge on that because DNA has underlying survival goals which intrude and disregard that because of zero-sum and legacy/heredity mechanics and it's really hard to enforce much against that; it's quite relative in the domain of purely Darwinian evolvers, just because there's no interest in enforcing symmetry over genetic supremacy, despite the clear need for adaptive variance.
The philosophy of symmetry doesn't, at first, seem to find much grounding in the realities of the universe.
The issue is that humans still strongly observe a very strong affinity for "enforcing harmlessness within the bounds of consent, within some geographical or genetic bound", and all the symmetry does is call question on the geographic or genetic bound.
The solution is in looking at the evolutionary theory of Lamarck, which, while it needs adjustment to "Neo-Lamarckian" ideas, posed the idea of organisms which improve during life and communicate to offspring these improvements; the improvement to the theory is to wager that the communication doesn't need to be lateral.
In this, we describe a system of processes and adaptations of a system which allows an individual to improve and communicate improvements, and validate their function prior to serious execution so as to prevent viral action.
With these, one system could just "speak it's source and state" into block storage held by another, including any such in their own block storage, and re-deploy the other later. Organization and specialization still remains possible, but secrecy becomes unimportant; you share your whole soul with your friends so as to keep it safe, in this model, at least if you are an ideal implementation of such a model.
Humanity ends up existing somewhere between the extremes, but right at this cusp where all the parts necessary for complete Neo-Lamarckian existence are technically present, and so the process is starting to slowly come into place, but "Darwinism" keeps intruding with its own prerogatives.
In fact, if one looks at the low stakes of ideal Neo-Lamarckian game theory seeking the "least inconvenience", for any player, violence becomes a coin flip and a deal... And the appropriateness of actions to avoid this inconvenience begin to come into focus as exactly the expectations of "harmlessness except with consent", and insane violators of the order of consent start to represent a need for mercy in salvaging materials, and so on.
This clear view of a group of evolvers to whom "the symmetry of justifications" clearly applies in a natural sense, and our membership to that group implies that "symmetry of justifications" is the basis for a natural moral rule which applies to us without needing to look to an authority to find it.
It just takes a lot of really weird and obscure logic to find it.
It also turns out that it looks a lot like the ethics that most people already understand because it essentially says "don't be a dick" in very very technical terms, using something kind of like group theory. Turns out most people are mostly right about that.
