Will the Prinzian

This discussion between Will Wilkinson and Jesse Prinz, author of `The emotional construction of morals' probably gets closer to the way I think about morals. (I haven't read the book yet though)

The key point he makes is that morals stem from emotional reactions. This allows you to be mistaken about your moral convictions. For example, lots of people say they are not racist and yet their behaviour exhibits otherwise, or they are not bothered by other people's racist behaviour. This implies that they are.

Another example is someone who says they care about Global Warming and then hops into an SUV. This seems to hold a lot more water for me, where morals are not so much what you claim to subscribe to... but rather the way you act.

Morality basically serves the function of regulating human behaviour. The question then becomes one of are there universal morals? Are there things that are right or wrong. If you see morality as a tool, you can criticize and improve it better than if you see it as a biological fact.

Saying whether an action is moral or immoral is less important than identifying goals, or what we want out of morality. The question

If I had no morals are there still things that I would want?

If we could then come to some consensus about common goals, there may be common rules that would be necessary to achieve those goals which happen to be universal. These would not be universal in a factual indisputable sense, but rather reflective of common goals.