How Morality Works
I think morality works essentially in the following way: Firstly, we have certain reactions to phenomena, negative or positive. This is the basis of "good" and "bad". I think the negative responses are more likely to be universal than the positive ones, because we have more evolutionary incentive to avoid bad things than chase particular good things (I could be wrong about that, but it's a guess). Secondly, actions can result in phenomena that we either react positively or negatively towards. Those actions that result in negative phenomena (i.e. we feel negatively towards the result), we feel they are bad. Those actions that result in positive phenomena, we feel they are good. In other words, our basis for moral reasoning/justification is: if the action results in a negative phenomenon, it was bad, and the inverse for good. This sounds simplistic at the moment, but we'll see why morality is fucked up in a minute. We grow to learn what actions result in...