If you're interested in the interactions between neuroscience and morality you should check out some of the work of Harvard philosopher/psychologist Joshua Greene (you can also find some interesting arguments for relativism in his PhD dissertation that he undertook at Princeton). While neuroscientific data no doubt gives us insight into our moral processes - in fact, this phil of mind/neuroscience cross over is my favourite part of philosophy! - we still have to be realistic about how far it can take us. Moral decision making involves processes as complex as belief formation (e.g. "If I hit Phil I will cause him pain"), representation (e.g. of Phil and his being in pain), logical reasoning (but causing pain is bad, so I should not hit Phil) and decision making in situations of dilemma (but he pissed me off and I want to hit him!). Good cognitive models are certainly feasible, but we are a long way away from being anywhere close to a reduction to the level of neurons and neural networks.Schroedinger said:
I'm pretty skeptical when it comes to the "future enlightenment might show absolutism to be reasonable" 'argument'. Sure, this could be the case , but this doesn't mean much unless it can be shown that we have good reason to think that it is the case. Without this it is just pure speculation, like 'maybe we aren't advanced enough to realise that Nirvana actually does exist'. This kind of argument is more pertinent for something like consciousness for which we do have good arguments to the tune of 'future developments in neuroscience may well show conscious experience to reduce to physical brains states' (where this suggestion is aimed at those who derive a dualist separation between mental and the physical on the basis of some kind of Cartesian intuition).
