[Gulauur]

OK, I'll take a shot at this. To understand where I'm coming from to begin with, I think that morality is nearly universal--that is, it doesn't vary much by which culture or group you belong to--and derives principally from human behavior and biology (so not exactly a "higher power"). I also tend to approach ethical issues from a deontological perspective rather than a consequentialist one. The reason I do that is mostly for practical reasons rather than some idea of deontological ethics being somehow more universally correct... I think that even a weakly skeptical epistemology derives deontological ethics as the most practicable. In layman's terms, it is way easier to tell people what they can or cannot do than it is to expect them to calculate consequences.

Most of us consider Right and Wrong and whole issue of morality to be unquestionably universal values.

I'd be surprised if you found that on this (highly intellectual) forum, unless some of us are conservative theologians. Or did you mean people in general? I think your counterexample to "Thou shalt not kill" is mostly good, although...

The scholars of morality will explain that in case of self defence it is your right to kill the enemy who tries to kill you or your people. It makes sense on first glance, but what if I’m a prisoner on a death raw? According to self defence rights I should be free to kill all the prison guards to save my life in self defence, right? It will be a rightful killing. Off course scholars will object to this and find other explanations to rescue the universal law from this conundrum.

This assumes that there is no such thing as forfeiture of rights, which just about every rights-based ethical system has. After all, if there is no possible forfeiture of rights when breaking the rights of others, what is the use of defining rights to begin with?

There are lots of examples of such dilemmas putting universal law in question. This is why the holly books are very thick, encompassing all possible scenarios of human life. Religious academia argues about these examples for millennia and is more lost than ever in more complicated world of today.

I disagree. I think that the holy books are thick because they try to chronicle so much nonsense, not because they are seriously interested in deriving morality from the human condition. And theologians have so much output because they work within the religious paradigm, trying to make sense of something that has a tremendous amount of ambiguity in it.

One day when I was thinking about social character of human nature, and our strong group oriented ways of life, it dawned on me. Finally eureka moment came about the Good and the Evil. Things settled in right places and understanding of human morality was clear and peaceful. The fundament of universal laws was shattered into smithereens, at the same moment, by a birth of a new idea.

It’s about the group! It’s not about individual you or me, not about god or cosmos. It’s only about the group! For long millions of years humans and our human like ancestors lived in groups. Alone no hominid could survive and it’s offspring. We only managed to survive in groups; smaller or bigger ones but in groups. The social structure of a group was the biggest success of our species. Our lives and our laws were the result of lives of most successful groups of our ancestors.

To make sure I was right I created a premise:
All the major laws are created to make group stronger or protect it from harm. In other words, what we call Right makes group stronger. Wrong, evil is whatever weakens and destroys it.
Let’s see if this hypothesis holds:
You shall not kill. If you killed one of yours, you made your group weaker, you did Evil. But, if you killed enemy of your group, you protected your group, you did Good.
What if a psychopath in your group kills people from your group? Is killing him (only available option to stop him) right or wrong? He’s from your group after all. Judging by the group survival law killing him is good. He was making your group weaker.
I’m pretty sure most people and religious scholars would agree that killing is warranted in this case and it’s a good thing, but they would have a hard time to understand and articulate the causes of their verdict. This is though a very simple decision when one uses the group survival law. No wasted time on guessing and defining morality in this case. The group survival morality law is simple like Occam’s razor.

Is stealing bad or good? I would say that every behavior that introduces quarrels and violence in a group makes it weaker; therefore it’s a wrong thing. Same thing is with adultery, lying or destruction of property. In most cases though, same as with killing, it depends on contexts of these actions.
We don’t need to hold only religious laws to the flame of group morality. Let’s test some things and actions from today’s world. Take smoking cigarettes for example. For many years we weighed pros and cons, and finally judging by the cost of expensive health care, number of premature deaths of this stinky habit, we declared it bad and evil. The freedom of individual to smoke in public is totally trashed. Another decade or two and it might be completely illegal to buy cigarettes.
Similar thing is now happening with overeating, obesity problem. The population is getting fatter every year and it will bring horrible consequences to all society in cost and suffering.
Obesity is an interesting issue. Long time ago when one could only see rich people fat, the plumpness was a thing the millions of skinny plebs dreamed of, and it was called good and beautiful. Now in the rich western civilization everybody can eat as much as one wants, obesity is called evil. Again, Group Survival Morality Law is easy to apply in this case.

You're getting at a very important truth here: that rules governing people are the most obvious way to institute an ethical system among a group, and that fundamental dates back to early human times. Also, in general, these ethical systems would spring up in response to a group need.

But I fail to see how it follows that therefore, right and wrong is wholly dependent on what is best for the group. If that was the case, then we wouldn't be able to think of counterexamples, but the counterexamples are numerous, obviously--genocide etc. So why do we need to draw this out to group-based consequentialism, rather than simply noting it as a fact of the human condition that this is how ethical systems have tended to arise? It really seems to me that you're drawing a universal here, which is what you've said that others shouldn't be doing, and drawing a universal that is obviously not a universal. It seems to me that instead, we should be placing the fact that people tend to derive ethical systems based on group dynamics into our knowledge base that we use to review and revise the rules and rights that we already have in our existing culture(s).

GSML is also very applicable to economic systems too. Feudalism gave way to capitalism (free market) which had lead almost century long competition with communism, planned economy, in last century. Many smart people loved communism and were sure it will win against capitalism. Why wouldn’t it, the equality and fair sharing should win over greed and inequality, right? According to GSML the system that benefits people the most should become the right one, and selected to benefit the group. Well, we know which one won; the imperfect, unequal, greedy, but energetic, productive and the best system we have at the moment.

That seems problematic. What are you measuring to determine what is the best economic system, purely by outcome? Is it measurable?

Keep in mind that depending on a definition of your group same thing might be moral or immoral. For example take Serbia and Bosnia during their war. I’m sure that for Serbs to protect and defend Serbia killing Bosnians was a right and moral thing to do, so it was for Bosnians protecting Bosnia and killing Serbs. Now if you consider yourself a citizen of the world, all people on this planet are included in your group, then whole Balkan conflict, and any conflict for this matter, was simply bad and immoral.
There is no confusion in understanding morality here, because morality is not universal. The definition of a group will define if action or a thing is moral or not.

I agree that this is a consequence of your understanding of ethics, but I can't imagine why you would be advertising it. A more powerful group killing another, "right" in some ethical system? Surely we ought to count that as "wrong" and make a rule against it in the real world...