I learnt that discussions on morality are more about social sciences such as philosophy dealing with subjective viewpoints, rather than about science such as physics or chemistry dealing with objective principles.
Scientifically proven principles such as the law of gravity are universally true regardless of one’s beliefs because these entities exist, whereas God cannot be proven to exist, thus so-called “moral principles” such as whether something is right or wrong depend on one’s cultural or religious influences and cannot be used conclusively or rigidly to justify certain actions, such as abstaining from certain foods, in the name of God or religion.
The presenter also made a good point that ultimately, it boils down to whether an action leads to increased wellbeing – or reduced harm for that matter .
Also, values such as kindness and empathy do not directly correlate with religion or morality because a religious person can be unkind and even use the name of God to justify righteous anger and violence and harm against others, such as waging wars or killing other people in the name of morality attached to God or religion, whereas another person who doesn’t believe in God can be kind and empathetic.
As the Chinese idiom “adding feet to a snake” goes, by not adding feet to a drawing of a snake – or moral feet to life – we can focus on using the science of medicine or philosophy etc to increase wellbeing more directly and with more ease, as compared to highly moralistic approaches that tend to add rigidity and pathologies.
In summary, it is helpful to know that morality isn’t equated to the quality of a person because a person with a certain psychological disorder such as pedophilia that can be treated therapeutically isn’t necessarily an evil person.
Morality also isn’t equated with the quality of a behaviour because certain behaviours such as refusing to be vaccinated aren’t necessarily immoral because it is our human right to decide what to do with our body, which should be more appropriately treated in terms of a legal framework, such as not allowed to attend a mass event, rather than a moral framework.
Hence, morality is simply a form of communication that is often used to legitimise certain actions, whereas in actuality most people are spontaneously amoral and do not want to see other people tortured or suffering, unless they have been manipulated or indoctrinated by certain religious or political propaganda to do otherwise.
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