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When one says, like your friend does, that morality exists to serve some puepose rather than just that "morality is," you are assigning conditions which will skew what is considered moral or not in the immediate future.On morality being skewed by greater purpose: We have examples of this actually happening. E.g humans in most/all societies used to think that marriage and child bearing at 14 was okay - or even good - but this was influenced by the fact that lifespans were shorter and child mortality higher.
I personally don't believe that morality is a human invention (if it was, then why follow it?). It's something that innately feels good to most people, because there exists innate "force" of goodness. C.S Lewis has the best argument for this in "Mere Christianity," and you can probably find the full relevant prose online for free easily. It's quite convincing.
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Problem with this framing - morality is so much more than decisions in a teamwork context. Sometimes the moral choice would be something completely counter to the goals of your group, e.g don't rob or attack that person.Okay, so you did say the group in question is the wider human race. But that's focusing on utlitarian tribal ethics rather than morality. Morality includes questions of how we effect the world around us, outside of humans; to declare otherwise would be an immoral decision.
I'd dare say that Morality is also questions like "do i go for a walk or do i bedrot today?" It is both decisions good for others and good for yourself, but it has to be decisions good for the universe.
Now, we don't decide what's good for the unuverse. When we did merely decide, we engaged in deforeststion and unheakthy farming practices. Nowadays we discover what's good for the world around us; humans didn't decide it. Humans also didn't decide how human beings will respond to actions or stimuli, and it is from that (among other things), from our reactions to actions, that we determine what is right to do to another human or not. "Do to others as you would do to yourself."
Oh and animals have some sort of morality as well. I've seen a video of a lion/cheetah refuse to eat a newborn something after trying to eat its mother. Animals care for each others young and share food when possible.
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Overwrite would mean that the individual comes well as long as the group is well, which isn't usually the case. The phrasing you want is "benefits to the group take precedence over benefits to the individual."And yeah, I feel it's true and is the moral thing to believe - it's also the basis for a great deal of law and is called Utilitarianism, philosophically speaking.
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It would be dishonest framing in their part if they said "we're doing it for the greater good, utilitarian-speaking" because the only person "made happy" from each unhappy woman is the person they're married off to; wider public who support the ruling wouldn't actually be deriving any pleasure from the marriage. It's kind of a happiness from within themselves, that they're releasing due to believing they got their own way. Or, if it's a happiness about people being unhappy, then they could achieve that from many other sources so it's invalid in the calculus/sum-up of "was this the most utilitarian choice"You have to trust yourself. And if you don't trust yourself... go to church (or similar. It's a metaphor.)
Yeah it is quite convincing. Thank you for pointing it out :)
Also your way of writing feels very harmonic and round to me.
You have to keep in mind that it is a republican core belief that more children = better for the group. So they say that if women could choose, they wouldn't make children. So that's the argument there. Note that i don't agree with this, for multiple reasons, one being that in fact, more children are not always better to the group (can also be opposite and today largely is), and that it seems off that women wouldn't choose to have children. It just seems like one should investigate why they don't want to, instead of assuming that it's "simply the wrong way of thinking". And then there's the whole Calvinist (everybody must think/decide for themselves) thing that i won't go into because it'd get too long.