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If there is a universal goal to life, it is to increase the number of organisms that express genetic traits that are similar to your own, and to increase the number of similar genetic traits that are expressed by those other organisms.

Increase the number of organisms with phenotypes in common to yourself, and increase the number of common phenotypes that coexist within those other organisms.

To this end, many organisms have developed internal systems of reward and punishment that reward them for experiencing perceived conditions that are associated with the increased capacity to fulfill their life's mission to a greater extent, and punish them for experiencing perceived conditions that are associated with the reduction of their ability to fulfill their life's mission to the greater extent.

What motivates all human action are two sets of neurochemicals, reward chemicals that make us feel happiness and pleasure, and punishment chemicals that cause us pain and misery, we are all neurochem addicts chasing the highs and trying to avoid the lows that are given to us by our own brains as a mean of driving us toward what success is on evolutionary terms.

All that we associate with feeling good or bad is merely a proxy for these chemicals that are the actual thing which makes us feel in these ways. We are all monkeys on juice.

The operant conditioning of our joys and sorrows is our desires and fears, these too take many forms, but we are conditioned to pursue some things and avoid other things, the "things" being the perceived existence of certain conditions, usually experiences we are having, have had in the past, or could be having in the future. Some we act to cause, others we act to prevent.

These conditions include the behaviors of others, we feel good or bad in response to what we perceive as being the conduct of other people, and this can motivate us to take actions accordingly to cultivate behaviors on others that make us feel good, but more often we are motivated to take actions to rescue behaviors of others that make us feel bad.

Thus is the essence of our personal moral instinct, what others do makes us feel in certain ways, because of neurochemicals being released in response to perceived environmental stimuli such as the actions of others, because certain environmental condition such as how others are behaving impact our ability to propagate genes similar to our own, particulary our phenotypes.

When we talk about empathy sympathy, conscience, outrage, vengeance, or a sense of justice, all these and more are merely the expressions of evolutionarily programmed releases of neurological chemistry that produces emotion or sensation responses in us, precisely to motivate us to take the actions we've undertaken that help us pursue better conditions for our genetic cause as exists as the standard of the game of life according to evolution.

When we talk about the "objective morality" that conservatives continually refer to, we are actually talking about the moral consensus of our culture and society.

Yes, there are certain primal desires that we have programmed into us from birth, and they are associated with the instinctive needs we have for the survival and procreation of ourselves, our genetic kin, and the potential sources of mates for each.

But what we have in terms of our moral culture, is the interaction of the preferences of many individuals interacting with one another, and finding a common ground where they are complimentary in terms of game theory.

Basically, we are against killing and stealing because we all agreed that we dislike the prospect of being killed or stolen from, basically when humans form a collective, their rules are made to satisfy the negative desires, or fears, of the individual members of that collective.

We place fears above desires when making rules because we perceive our fears as greater, same as we perceive a loss far more intensely than we perceive a gain.
For most of us, life is full of many gains that we feel very faintly, and a few losses which we feel very strongly.

Speaking of which, there are a few primal fears that we get born with, but we have most of our fears as the result of conditioning, we have learned to hate things, same as we have learned to love most of the things that we love. It's part and parcel of living within a society, or any human collective.

Any moral system out there breaks down into egoism when subject to a line of socratic questioning.

It all ultimately reduces down to personal preference, to the value judgement of an individual, typically the one advocating their ethical system or the one who they are proposing it towards.

"What is the nature of morality? What constitutes good or evil?"

And then we ask why they or I should want that, and so on, and at the end it's either "because that's what I want" or "because that's what you would want".

Conservatives hate this, that all that motivates people are subjective experiences relative to their point of observation, that personal feelings are all the things which make us think and act as we do, and that these exist in us because they allow us to increase the number of other being like ourselves, and to increase how much like ourselves such beings would be.

Because conservatives are exactly like the liberals they present themselves in comparison to: they are merely the religious counterpart of their establishment-approved ideological alternative.

Both are a bunch of autistic retards that exist as a clique more than as a group holding any consistent ideological position on anything.

The Bible says nothing about pedophilia and when it speaks of slavery its explicitly encouraged rather than condemned.

Yet the biggest sales campaign of the republicans of today is their opposition to both racism and child abuse. These aren't biblically sound positions to take. Yet they portray this as being due to their religious foundations for morality.

It's not religious, it's peer pressure. These assholes are just like the opposition, for them high school had never ended.