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Are they actually altered/defined by culture, customs and traditions? Or is it more a matter of education/upbringing regardless of one's traditions/culture that will determine that person's beliefs on what is right/wrong?
Who really defines what is right and what is wrong, if cultural differences present as barriers for these definitions to become universal? (E.g. Based on my personal beliefs influenced by my culture, I will view something as right, whereas someone else with a different cultural background and beliefs might perceive that what I think is right as being completely wrong.)
Has there ever been an attempt to arrive at a consensus worldwide regarding what is right and what is wrong, what is ethically or morally right & wrong? Are there situations/things that are conceived universally as right/wrong by a vast majority? E.g. A war crime is condemned world wide?
I'd appreciate any answers, books, recommendations, or healthy constructive debate. I've recently spiraled down this hole and can't stop thinking about why/how we are altered by our culture and thus our sense of morality, and if this is a cycle that can be 'broken'/improved?
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So - your question is fairly complicated, but I want to zero in on a part of your question, which I think will help you work through the rest of it.
I'm answering this from the perspective of what's called moral realism, which is the position that moral statements have truth value - that means, when I say "it is wrong to do X", I am making a statement of fact, which can be correct or incorrect.
To a moral realist the question of "who defines what is right and wrong" is a bit odd. Who decides that the sun rises every morning? Nobody; that's just how the world works. We know the sun rises every morning because we've observed the world and drawn certain conclusions based on those observations. To a moral realist, ethics are the same way - we observe the world around us and, through reason, determine what are right and what are wrong actions based on what we know.
Your use of the word "perception" in your question is actually very astute of you - our culture alters our perception of ethics and morality, but, if you're a moral realist, it doesn't actually change what is right or wrong. Our perceptions are, sometimes, just wrong.
Some good FAQs on the topic of moral realism
I have no background in philosophy so bear with me. But this conception of moral realism doesn’t make any sense to me.
I agree that there are facts independent of human life, like the sun rising - in other words the sun would rise if no humans existed. But the same cannot be said for say, murder is wrong - murder in the context of humans not existing is nonsensical. It is not independent of human life, so we can’t look at it as dispassionate outside observers like we can the sun. Our assessment of any moral fact has a bias that is inherent, and you can’t use reason to justify it because our reason is tied up in the very same biases.
I think I can illustrate with the following: let’s say humans evolved to be much less of a social species. We did not live in groups. And we did not have prohibitions at any point in evolution against killing non-related humans. There are examples of species with such infra-species violence. Would this other species of human be able to reason into the same moral fact about murder that we do?
I doubt it. I think our reasoning of why it bad to kill other infra-group non-related humans is post-hoc justification to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution where it was bad to kill other infra-group non-related humans. This hypothetical human would have a different evolutionary and social foundation and would therefore have different post-hoc reasoning, and therefore a different assessment of moral fact.
Tldr: Our social nature dictated our morality on the subject of murder quite clearly imo. If we had a different social evolutionary context, it’s highly likely that our morality would accordingly be different. And if that’s true, how can we possible claim that our reasoning can find a universal objective moral fact, or even that a fact exists?
Consider this example - lets take the statement "Trees have roots." We would consider that to be a statement that could be true or false, depending on the nature of Trees, correct? We don't say "I can't say if that statement is true or false, because if Trees didn't exist, or if Trees were somehow different than they are, the answer wouldn't make sense." Trees do exist, and we can talk about them.
What, precisely, makes the statement "murder is wrong" different than the above? Because it wouldn't make sense if humans were different somehow? Sure, but that applies to all facts. The fact that moral facts, like many other facts, are context-dependent on the existence of certain entities is irrelevant. We do exist, in a particular context, and we are able to rationally consider that existence and those contexts.
The fact that we may not be capable of perfectly, rationally understanding what is right and what is wrong in all cases does not logically entail that there are no right or wrong choices, just as the fact that we don't perfectly, rationally understand, say, physics, doesn't entail that atoms aren't real.
But there is a distinction here. You are saying that, if trees were different, then trees would be different. Of course the facts about trees depend on the nature of trees. But u/Mafinde is saying that, if humans were different, morality would be different. So, moral facts depend on the nature of humans. The statement "The facts about X depend on the nature of X" is quite different from the statement "The facts about X depend on the nature of Y".
If moral facts depend on humans, then they aren't objective or independent.
This is not true. The fact that I have 1 liver is objective but still dependent on the nature of my human being. So a moral realist is saying that murder is wrong is the same wrong as saying I have 2 livers. If one then argues that it isnt the same wrong because it depends on the nature of the human, thats just the same as saying well having 1 liver also depends on the nature of the human - objective facts are context dependent and thats no issue for being an objective fact.
The person you responded to is right;
When one argues "the sun emits light", it is not a valid objection to say: "well but thats not an objective fact because if the sun didnt emit light, it wouldnt emit light" (to give an x changes x example) OR saying "well thats not an objective fact because if hydrogen atoms couldnt fuse to form helium at 15 million degrees Celcius, our sun wouldn't emit light" (to give a y changes x example). This objection doesnt 'prove' that this fact is not objective.
Well, the sun does emit light (as observed), thats why stating that it does is a fact. Similarly, murder IS wrong (as observed), thats why stating it is, is a fact.
What you are describing here is sometimes referred to as the "argument from queerness" - that moral facts can't exist because they are somehow special and strange and different than other kinds of facts.
However, it is not necessarily the case that moral facts are substantively different than any other kind of fact about human beings, or about rational actors in the first case.
But you perfectly could, without even changing the things described here.
And since language is an abstraction, there are infinite ways of describing relationships between concepts. On a surface level I could say "trees don't have roots, roots have a tree" or I could question the concepts of "tree", "roots" and whether the relationship that the verb "have" describes really applies here.
I am not clear what the point you're trying to make here is, or what it has to do with the discussion at hand?
This is probably begging the question a bit. You are back to your original premise that morality is cultural or maybe would be different if we were biologically different. To a moral realist, this is not the case, they believe that any rational creatures can come to discover ethical truths based on reasoning.
I see. To me, it is obvious that our social intuitions are derived from our social nature which is derived from our social evolution. Does this make a fundamental disagreement with moral realism or is there thought that reconciles this
It doesn't have to be incompatible with moral realism. Moral realism is the view that there are moral facts and that moral claims are true when those claims get the facts right. What makes something a moral fact or what grounds the moral claim as true is up for debate, so perhaps they are grounded in our social nature and our evolution as social beings or perhaps they are grounded in something else. You could ground moral facts in a social contract or some other form of social agreement, you could ground them in some divine command about what's right or wrong, you could ground them in our evolutionary history, you could ground them in some feature of human reasoning. There are lots of options. You can even be a moral relativist and still be a moral realist by claiming that moral facts exist and that moral claims are truth apt, it's just that what makes something a moral fact is relative to different cultural groups.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/
So, it's important to distinguish the descriptive question about what moral beliefs or attitudes a person or group of people happen to have, from the normative question about what if any facts there are about moral values themselves. For some reason people seem to have a lot of trouble with this distinction when it comes to morality, so it can help to consider topics we're more confident in to grasp the point. Imagine if I said my niece believes that 7x7=77, so we should change the math books to include this. You'd think I was being ridiculous, right? The fact that my niece believes that 7x7=77 doesn't mean that 7x7 actually does =77. There's a difference between the mathematical beliefs a person or group of people happen to have, and whatever facts, if any, there are about math. Well then there you go, you get the difference. Just apply that principle to morality.
Broadly speaking, philosophers are interested in the normative question rather than the descriptive question itself. If what you're interested in is the descriptive question, then you'd probably be better off talking to psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, who tend to have a much better grasp than philosophers do of the facts and principles governing such matters.
And these sorts of questions --
-- all sound like principally descriptive questions to be answered by social scientists.
Now, from the normative point of view, we might say that, for instance, if cultural relativism is true, then there's a sense in which the dominant trends in a given culture determine what is right or wrong within the context of that culture. But from the normative point of view, the main question here is not so much determining what a given culture determines on such matters, nor how that happens, but rather the main question is is cultural relativism correct? And that question isn't being answered by cultural trends.
Well, this is basically what the field of ethics is about. Except that ethicists, like other academics, are less out there on the streets trying to produce a consensus, and more in the academy trying to determine what facts of the matter can be determined on the grounds of reasoned inquiry, which might then -- for that reason -- be the right basis for such a consensus among all reasonable people.
And now here we seem to be back to the descriptive, social science sort of question.
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