Good article. Regarding Prof. Taurek, I think he’s full of shit with that theory numbers don’t count. What a dummy!

Personally I don’t think morality can ever be qualified in strict binary (this or that) terms across the board. Certainly there is a central section where moral response would be near universal in agreement.

A lot of it has to do with circumstances being defined in narratives and narratives are less objective. Or when sticking to facts; facts not accounting for nuance.

It’s not easy being human 🤷‍♂️

I think a heart genuinely centered in love and compassion will come as close to proper moral response as one can.

Thank you for reading the essay! Kudos to 'It's not easy being human'. Lots of living, we gotta do--on everyday basis.

Yea my pleasure. Very nicely written. I’d never heard of professor Taurek before. I can’t believe he even shared his theory out loud! What difference do numbers make he says????

Uh.. only that pain, or suffering, or violence is multiplied that many times! What a blind spot in his thinking.

What about religion?

I think there’s a pretty wide diversity of religion; ranging from quite fundamental, toleration, abusive, ignorant, and violent sects, to very helpful, community oriented sects.

In that regard, I think a person who seeks a religion, either seeks one which matches their own heart (alignment to compassion/love; or one with mis-alignment to compassion/love) or otherwise are simply born into it and are consumed in the fundamental ideology and for lack of a better term “programmed” to see only that version of reality.

I don’t think religion it’s self is a compass for moral rightness; but that people with moral rightness (people having the innate sense of moral rightness from genuine compassion/love) is the compass.

A mother holding her new-born, an elderly man tending to his sick beloved dog; share universal attributes in that love; compassion, empathetic sensitivity, innate desire to serve the other, an automatic valuing of the others innate worth; and from these qualities come a wisdom of right moral action.

And of course anyone who has developed a visceral state of alignment to that particular state of consciousness.

The positively religiously oriented may attribute that love to Jesus (or fill in the blank) and I pick no bones about that; though love is not an abstraction, or a 2000 year old story, or a “belief”; it’s a here and now available state of consciousness to develop alignment with.

Any religion without that of course has no moral compass regardless.

So you believe that the religion that someone chooses to identify with is one that already closely aligns to the moral compass that they already have inside of them? Kinda like putting a label on your morals and beliefs?

Yea I think so. Well to the extent that one seeks a religion after childhood, you know after the stage we are indoctrinated by everything around us in early years.

As obviously there is the dynamic that kids will adopt predominant cultural beliefs as their own; which is why 99.9 percent of middle eastern children identify as Islam in adulthood (as example).

Though if one was neutral or ambivalent on the subject until adulthood and began looking for a “higher power”- I’m pretty sure they will seek a sect which allows them to be who they already are. Someone geared toward hateful thinking, vengeful punitive thinking would no doubt align to the more negative barbaric religions with a “cause”. I’m remembering all the westerners who subscribed to sharia law and negative forms of Islam through the past age of “terrorism”.

They found a “higher power” that gave them authority to be who they already were. Likewise a person largely compassionate/forgiving by nature would never accept such a “higher power”.