They're up to horses now

[jonmartensen]

However, who sets those ethical standards?

A deity?

Or is a person or group of people truly allowed to decide YOUR ethical code?

It's not like "ethics" is something decided by a commitee of politicians smoking in the back room of some unknown government building. Our sense of ethics is the cognitive recognition of deeper, hardwired, feelings that have devoloped through the natural selection of the beings with the "emotions" (One feels it is wrong to senslessly kill other, to kill self, to abandon others, and that it is good to help others) that most benefeited their genes and their not to distant relatives.

To recognize universal ethics is to give meaning or word to hardwired lower brain functions (emotions, and being such, that is the first {immediate} thing one acts upon and which, given more time, they can later ponder) that are in all people due to a common human ancestry.

[El Banana]

That is true on a general sense, however, each person's ethical code varies slightly, more on some individuals than others. And then there's the people with aberrant behaviours that see nothing wrong in killing small, soft puppies and kittens with heavy-duty boots.

Although everyone has more or less the same "general ethics", each person has slightly different views on what's right and wrong.

[Kracus]

I think that's what I was going for. The difference is in the similarities. People believe killing people are wrong, but why it is wrong may differ. And as for puppies and stuff, that goes along with culture. So the origins of why may be different. Like not everyone things killing people is wrong, otherwise we wouldn't have the word cannibal.

but I'm gonna stop typing now cause I'm getting light headed from hunger.