Do you see that its rational to seek facts on how to have an optimum morality if you want to be optimally moral and rational to seek facts on how best to promote your own interests if you want to do that? So when discussing morality its the former we make arguments about.
Not quite but closer. Our consistent aim for wellbeing and lack of suffering indicates human fundamental goals and determines the fundamentals of our morality because thjs is what our empathy, compassion & justice (moral intuitions) lead us to moralise over.
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Rewards are about wellbeing whether material or heavenly. Punishments about suffering whether material or hellish. All human societies and some nonhuman promote kindness, caring, honesty etc. We thrived as a species by looking after each other so this is how our morality works
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But we can get things wrong. Love thy neighbour is consistent with this looking after each other. The Golden rule is too. But what if you beat up your neighbour coz he's not the same religion as you and your morality doesn't extend to him because you see him as bad?
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You've allowed something to get in the way of the golden rule and justified it by something which doesn't work by the golden rule of looking after each other. You didn't increase wellbeing and decrease suffering. You got it wrong
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This is intuitive to me as a secular liberal humanist. Care/harm foundation and goodness coming from humanity. No dissonance. You will have the same intuitions but are likely to see them as coming from outside you. Jesus said love thy neighbour. But you feel this.
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You don't rationalise it. You don't have to stop & think whether you should beat me up coz I don't believe what you do and remember what Jesus said. You have no wish to hurt me & would help me if I needed it.
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A fundamentalist (not necessarily religious) could justify beating me up but this is because something is getting in the way of their empathy for their fellow man. They are acting against their innate morality. They are getting it wrong.
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Why. Maybe they think I'm doing harm by saying gender differences exist and society is better off if I'm too scared to do that again. But is society better off? There's a right or wrong answer. It can be established empirically but might be complicated. In other cases more so
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So we end up with a load of factors to measure but they are all 'is' if we have accepted the golden rule is what underlies human morality.
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