Quote:
Originally Posted by Sparrow
Maybe we could assess to what extent different societies throughout history have shared the same ethics. 
Of course, ethics may be the result of something other than socialisation or biology - increased knowledge, greater prosperity, perceived threat levels etc. |
So the idea would be that those elements of ethical ways of being that have existed through time are more likely to be "hard wired", whereas those that can be shown to be subject to change are more likely to be socially determined?
Isn't one of the difficulties that whatever hard wiring there is and whatever social determination there is don't act alone, they interact. For example, lets assume that men have a biological drive to dominate women (I'm not suggesting this is the case, but let's pretend for a minute), let's also assume that men dominating women in anything less than a very subtle way is less effective as a mate finding and keeping strategy than it was, (which, presumably, was the biological driver for domination in the first place). Lets also assume that we are a moral male who has learned through socialization that dominating women is oppressive, and also learned that, ethically, oppression of any kind is a no-no. How do we unpick the different and countervailing forces at work here to sort out moral from immoral behaviour?