Secular basis for morality?

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Well yeah, I mean if someone lets say, killed a family member of mine or someone close to me, I might wanna kill that person back. I understand this sort of thing, that sometimes the victim isn't innocent. But when I said "victim", I meant the original victim, the innocent one.
If someone has a mental illness telling them to kill people, they need to be locked away in a mental asylum.

Well, that is what I meant. If you were to equate good/evil with useful/not useful, it would only apply to your view (and maybe a few others) of what is good/evil. But to other people, they believe good/evil to mean something else. But the morality of secularists need not be the same basis either, just as most atheists don't believe in God for similar reasons, but not everyone needs to believe God doesn't exist for the exact same reasons. So perhaps many secularists view the good/evil part of morality as useful/not useful, but not all of them need to.

Then you admit that your position is based on emotion and not in logic.

What "original victim" what are you talking about?

No I'm not talking about that, I mean what if somebody had a valid reason for killing somebody, what if an Aspie lost his/her temper and murdered somebody because that person was treating that person that horribly? Don't say "That would never happen", just imagine if somebody had a good reason for killing someone and they got locked away, where's the justice in that? How will people feel knowing that somebody could manipulate them into killing another person and the manipulator would get away with it? What if a murderer got away with murder and then a family member of the victim went out and murdered that person and got a sentence? What if the wrong person was convicted and was executed when they had the only evidence that could prove who the real killer was?

I noticed that you ignored the fact that a lot of executions don't do anything, wonder what that's about?

Well if the person had a legitimate reason to kill someone, then they were the original victim. So you just answered your question yourself there. Unless they've got rock solid indisputable evidence that they've got the right person then they shouldn't send them to death. But if they do got rock solid evidence, then by all means the killer deserves to die. Unless they had a damn good reason to kill whomever they've killed.
As much as we may feel tempted to kill someone if they've killed a family member (in that situation I know I would feel very tempted), still revenge killings aren't good for our systems of checks and balances. These laws should be enforced by the government, and people should not be allowed to take this law into their own hands. I can understand why it is that way. Though I do believe the people should vote upon our own laws, and should have the right to object to unfair laws. I see things like this as a necessary relationship between government and people.... Where the people set the laws and the government enforces them with our approval. But taking laws into our own hands can have consequences..... At the same time letting a known and proven murderer continue to walk can also have consequences.

I've already made the point that there is no such thing as rock solid evidence. And yet you advocate what is essentialy revenge killing filed through the Law.

No, all you have to do is send them to rehab, if you can assilimate them back into society they wont have any reason to go back to what they used to do and probably wont, but if for whatever reason they can't change, for example they aren't given the chance, then they wont. What you're talking about is the quick and easy solution, and in the end not a solution at all. It's like having a rapist raped then sending them off, what's the point? It wont deter them and it wont change anything, it will just make people feel unrealistically safe. Capital Punishment should only be used when it has been decided there is no hope of changing the criminal.

Right and wrong and good and evil really have very few differences. The only distinction made is in terminology and the connection of good and evil to the spiritual. Really though, to call something wrong is in effect to call it evil.

By that argument I'd say that we should slice away the notion of morality and be done with it. I mean, why call anything moral? The entire notion of "ought"-ness is a metaphysical idea that is only necessary for human action not for existence itself. To follow Occam's razor we should do away with it because who even says that human needs, wants, and goals are meaningful? The only need, want, or goal that I can even take as meaningful would probably have to be my own anyway and if I act purely based upon my own desires then why should I even bother thinking of morality or of ethics?

But there is an issue. When people interact in a friendly manner, they have to act with common goals and interests on some level, especially the more intimate the interaction. If we have varying people with different interests interacting under the same system then who sets up this system? Can we be unbiased when mediating between morals? If we have societies based upon different moral understandings then we have conflict, and the more starkly different the moral ideas are, the stronger this conflict is. In order to have a peaceful society, we effectively need the hegemony of one idea and this is seen in all societies which often try to institute the single secular basis of democracy's legitimacy or even of rule of law and often the 2 combined. No society can truly be pluralistic in moral ideas though, there must be one dominant core, or the society will be forced to split.

a**hole is subjective and ethics are either related to an absolute that is unknowable, or nonsense. Really, why not be an a**hole though? I mean, society labels people as immature and as sociopaths, so why does an artificial label have any importance?

I would argue that both are subjective. They both relate to utility and why should what reduces utility be considered any less subjective than what creates it? We can argue some crap about the human brain but both are fundamental to the human experience. There is some subjectivity in the goodness of pain and the badness of pleasure. Why should society do ANY of that? I would argue that your entire notion of society as an organism is based upon a subjective notion. I see individuals and I see individual interactions, but neither of which seem to indicate that the organism of society is a useful or moral entity for action. Self-actualization is also crap too, who says what it truly means or if it is important. I mean, heck, when I first heard about Maslow's pyramid I could not help but wonder why he chose what he did to represent self-actualization.

I consider utilitarian ethics to be the same "Ye Utilitarians--ye, too, love the UTILE only as a VEHICLE for your inclinations,--ye, too, really find the noise of its wheels insupportable!"-Nietzsche

The principles of all morality are nonsense if one just looks at it. They all suppose some sense of ought that is unknown and unknowable. Just look at Hume's is-ought problem. Morality is an ought, we cannot derive oughts from what is. Therefore any statement of ought is not logically derived but either from divinity or subjectivity and given your disbelief in divinity, that means that morality is only an idea from subjectivity with no basis. All that exists is what we have, and thus the unseeable, unknowable morality is something you support without good regard for its foundations as it does not have to exist. This leaves us with either oblivion as man has no ought to act upon, or with something closer to the philosophy of Ayn Rand or perhaps more truthfully, of Marquis de Sade, where the only good is self-interest and its pursuit... of course, there is no reason why this must be as anti-social as those 2 thinkers as even charity can be an act for self-interest, but... yes.

On a side note, I do wonder if some who claim to be deontologists are merely rule utilitarians.

Unfortunately, I did not insinuate that we must live together as one big family in the world--the fact that different societiies exist and operate separately from each other is clearly evidence that we aren't capable of living together or agreeing to having the same morals. This is true in history as well. It is better to accept that we may never be able to reconcile each and everybody's morals because you can't force them to believe or do things they don't wish to do if they do not want to conform, and go our separate ways. Just because different societies exist and we live under different standards doesn't mean we're completely isolated though; you are you, and I am myself. That's simply all. As for living in society, you either pick the society you would prefer to associate yourself with or deal with the laws that society imposes on you in the best way that you can. Don't think that everyone will simply agree with what society says just because it says so.

Now, that is a moral claim in and of itself that ends up not necessarily being logically justifiable.... but that is being nitpicky. We can force them to believe or do things they don't wish to, or force their children to do so and drive them under. The real question falls down to our own morals.

Well obviously not, we still breathe the same air and terrorists still attack people miles away from them.

And given the presence and power of the missionary moralities, this can be very difficult. Most societies operate under a form of moral absolutism and because of this they promote the "good" no matter what and monopolize all the territories that are even liveable. Some moralities will inevitably be oppressed by government and society.

Morality doesnt need religion. It has evolved over thousands of years of group selection - humanity for most of its existence has lived in small groups. Groups composed of mainly selfish individuals would have died out, whereas those full of altruists would survive. Of course we are not all altruists - this would allow a mutation creating selfishness to spread throughout the population as the selfish people would take advantage. So we have ended up being reciprical altruists - the most successful moral solution according to computer algorithms. No religion required. Of course the real question is whether we have to obey these morals - but we have a built in mechanism that makes us feel bad when we dont. How about psychopaths - presumably missing the genes for morality. Do such people have to follow the morals of the rest of us - after all its not their fault that they are like that? For the greater good of humanity I think yes. Punishment has to follow crime, for the many people who would take advantage if there was no punishment to do what they wanted.

I know psychopaths can't help theyr psychopaths, but they are dangerous, and the need to be locked up and kept out of society. Our entire system is ran by psychopaths, do you understand this? Everything about our worldly system here on earth is ran in a psychopathic system BY psychopaths. And look how much blood the human race has on it's hands. It is important for more people to understand psychopathy.

Anybody who truly is a psychopath will not ever stop being a psychopath, so keeping them around is just a waste of money.

You don't actually mean a literal psychopath right? You're using the loose definition instead of the medical one which has very specific symptoms.

No, I mean the medical definition of psychopaths.

Why would you think that the Government is Psychopathic, what evidence could you possibly have to show for that?

Is some really more moral for doing good out of fear of divine punishment alone?

Also, think of this: Without God, is it okay to torture babies for fun? The obvious answer would be no. Atheists and agnostics generally do not believe that a God exists. Therefore, there can be morals without religion.

And I'd like to see this question debated: "Does religion predispose people to doing the right/moral thing?"

Sometimes it predisposes them to do immoral things in the name of "higher morality" merely because they stuck a religion in front of their actions. I've sort of reached an epiphane, I think there actually may be a god now, but it's not the god of one particular religion.... I believe religion is man-made. And while there may be bits of truth within any major religion, I think most of the followers have it all backwards. The church/mosque/synagogue is the house of man, not god. They are corrupt institutions.