Morality implies avoiding or minimizing harm. This is by definition. No matter how elaborate the philosophical arguments become, moral decisions in the daily world still boil down to assessing the value of things like water and arsenic—natural things—and their effects on other natural things, such as our bodies. “Value” is a concept of relative worth. And since concepts, as far as we know, exist only in brains, which are material things, it is meaningless, even dangerous, to talk of cosmic moral absolutes. The assessment of value requires the use of reason. In other words, morality comes from
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