It sounds like you think your brain is structured mislead you about something fundamental to human experience. I don't think your argument makes sense, but thanks for the conversation.
If something doesn't exist, you can hardly sense it. So in the absence of morality, how could you have a moral sense, and why would it be normal to sense that killing is wrong? (Who is horrified at something that _isn't_wrong?) Your very language contradicts your argument.
You're confusing emotional states with perceptions of an external reality. When I'm talking about a moral sense, I'm not talking about a moral perception of external reality. I'm talking about emotional states which have a certain moral feeling to them. I have those emotional states, and I endorse them; they are very important to me. But they're not perceptions of objective reality.
They have that feeling because that's how my brain is structured. They're important to me because they just are. I mean, I can give deeper evolutionary explanations of both of those things. There's a huge body of empirical literature that explains why human brains are structured the way they are, and why typical humans will assign great importance to their moral emotions. But there's no further justification to be offered here.
If there is no such thing as morality, then "moral" commitments are not moral and there is no reason to feel committed to them. You can't have it both ways. Why should the idea of murder fill you with horror and loathing? It's not like you have an aesthetic distaste for it.
There are no objective moral facts that my moral attitudes correspond to, but that doesn't make those attitudes vanish. The idea of murder fills me with horror and loathing because I'm a human with a normal sense of sympathy. I don't have an aesthetic distaste for killing, I have a MORAL distaste for killing. But it is a mere distaste; the universe does not ratify my horror.
It sounds like you think your brain is structured mislead you about something fundamental to human experience. I don't think your argument makes sense, but thanks for the conversation.
If something doesn't exist, you can hardly sense it. So in the absence of morality, how could you have a moral sense, and why would it be normal to sense that killing is wrong? (Who is horrified at something that _isn't_wrong?) Your very language contradicts your argument.
You're confusing emotional states with perceptions of an external reality. When I'm talking about a moral sense, I'm not talking about a moral perception of external reality. I'm talking about emotional states which have a certain moral feeling to them. I have those emotional states, and I endorse them; they are very important to me. But they're not perceptions of objective reality.
Why do they have that feeling and why should they be important to you?
They have that feeling because that's how my brain is structured. They're important to me because they just are. I mean, I can give deeper evolutionary explanations of both of those things. There's a huge body of empirical literature that explains why human brains are structured the way they are, and why typical humans will assign great importance to their moral emotions. But there's no further justification to be offered here.
If there is no such thing as morality, then "moral" commitments are not moral and there is no reason to feel committed to them. You can't have it both ways. Why should the idea of murder fill you with horror and loathing? It's not like you have an aesthetic distaste for it.
There are no objective moral facts that my moral attitudes correspond to, but that doesn't make those attitudes vanish. The idea of murder fills me with horror and loathing because I'm a human with a normal sense of sympathy. I don't have an aesthetic distaste for killing, I have a MORAL distaste for killing. But it is a mere distaste; the universe does not ratify my horror.