The extension of personal ethics to other people ["do unto others as you would have them do unto you"] is just a good starting rule of thumb. The more basic premises are:
(a)"I am alive; My life has inherent value."
(b)"Other people are alive; their lives must also have inherent value.
Why, though does my life have inherent value? Lets assume I spend 60 years in a box, seeing no one, and talking to no one, and then died. Would my life have one iota more value than if I died the day I entered the box?
Furthermore, if my life has inherent value, then does a serial killer's life have inherent value? The life of the person about to stab me while I'm pointing a gun at his face?
We can arrive at a value of life without making an unsupported statement. The value of life is due to the possible further actions you may take during your life. It is the possibility of further actions and positive impacts that makes life worth preserving. We may keep the serial killer alive to help profilers study him, in order to develop ways to catch more serial killers, but once the further value of keeping him alive is less than the negative value of him potentially killing and wounding people if he ever gets out and the value of the resources keeping him alive, killing him is the best option.
It's a rational definition of the value of life, but it doesn't appear very moral to me. In fact, because people have different definitions of future value, they'd likely arrive at different conclusions.
(c)"It is preferable to act in consideration of this value to increase collective benefit".
Now we come up with a further definition of collective. When does it end? My family? My neighborhood? My state? The Human Race? Beyond even that? Moreover, how do we define value increase and measure which ones are more important?
From there one can come up with many differing systems for determining [to varying degrees of success] what maximizes benefit for the self and other equivalent "selves". It is within this realm of equivalents [i.e. empathy] that a social group is formed. Outside of the realm of sentient entities morality has no meaning; there is no morality without subjective experience. While the basis of what is considered "benefit" is a varying subjective experience said subjective experience still has an objective reality to it. Therefore, one can logically and objectively determine how successful a method/system is at maximizing it.
"The good of the many outweighs the good of the one?" Maximizing the good of the social group? This one seems disturbing. I mean by this one, Osama bin Laden can place a moral value on human life, acknowledge and respect it, and still kill thousands of people - we're not in his social group. Similarly the dead Iraqis are merely dead - they were never going to impact our social group, they're just so much chaff. This may be a very practical, and well-practiced morality, with a wealth of history behind it, but I'm not going to label it particularly moral.
Being as how conditions vary and change overtime these systems and methodologies are peripheral and tentative. For instance, a "thou shalt not" of ages past may not provide the same [or any] benefit today as it once did in its original context. Like science and technology, moral and ethical systems must evolve over time, but the philosophical goal at the core of it should remain relatively constant.
But what philosophical goal is at the core of it? Good of the social group? Slavery ROCKED for the social group of slaveowners - they got to sit around and do essentially nothing and get rich. Good of society? We exterminated the Indians for the good of our society. We got tons of land, much of which was already primed for farmland, places to live, good food, lots of space to expand. Good of the human race? Can we really take such an abstract goal and make it concrete?
I disagree with the statement that you don't believe in morality. Clearly your social actions aren't made in an ethical vacuum and I assume that you aren't a sociopath. Judging from your statements so far I think that you merely do not see transcendent/metaphysical basis for morality.
I have some aesthetic desire for my personal actions to not be disagreeable. I also find other people interesting, and do sincerely wish the best for them. But I don't really feel this as a moral code. I look at other situations, and am unable to feel very judgmental about them. Personal situations, I can judge, but things I am not involved in personally, no, I don't feel any real judgment over them. Its sad to say, but I honestly don't care how many people are dying in Iraq. I wish that it would stop, because logically it does seem a horrible waste of life, but I can't feel anything about it.
I would argue that morality does not need one to be valid and that it has very real practical benefit regardless. I would also argue that given the above practical value, and the universality of morality within complex social organisms [with the rule proving exception of sociopaths] morality must also have some biological basis.
But why? Surely rape is immoral, but raping women also helps spread the genome. And, sure enough, as soon as you have people leave their society in war, where there's no societal consequences, they start raping and pillaging. This was pretty much a tradition up until the modern age, when fast communication and photos made the societal consequences real, and Abu Gharib suggests that if we take those away, we end up right back where we started. Will your average man rape a woman? Not if he's constrained by his intellect. Take that away, get the survival instincts flowing and the blood pumping, remove any social effects (in fact institute a form of peer pressure) and most people think what the hell. In studies, most people happily 'killed' someone under researcher's orders. Where was this genetic morality then?
