Sure it is, I'm larger than most other men, and more intelligent than most. Superior, in an atheistic world. Its up to me to defend myself from others trying to eat me.
Ok, here we go. Then I get a whole bunch of guys together who believe as I do, and since it is their best interests according to reason to join with me, we all agree that afterward we will adhere to my standard we go inflict your standard on you and kill you. Afterwards anyone who doesn’t agree to the standard is banished, or if they don’t agree or won’t leave we protect ourselves by jailing, or if necessary killing that person. By eating nothing but cake, I face a 'non-good', poverty and having to be airlifted out of my house by Jerry Springer. This is a reality.
And at this point, I have to ask you how you know this, without having experienced it? The extent of your use of reason to arrive at this conclusion is exactly my point. You use reason to arrive at conclusions when it makes your point, but abandon it when comparing yourself to a zebra. It is this, reason applies here, reason doesn’t apply here - that is what is wrong with the argument. Reason always applies, in every case. On the same lines, lets say the taste of human flesh is 'good'. The 'non-good' side to this; get caught by others, who in modern society, aren't out to eat me, but to imprison me. The 'good' side, the taste of flesh, may out way the risk.
And when did any other system prevent this? Remember Dalmer? That doesn’t invalidate what I was saying, and you have abandoned part of my standard to argue for an isolated element. Let’s only take the third, forth and fifth commandments and forget all the others. Good(ness) and evil are conceptual, being in that side of the mind that can conceive art and music. We as humans are the only creatures who can conceptualise. (There are those that will argue against this with examples of certain birds that sing and apes in captivity who draw and speak, but it's all pavlovian.) Where these concepts come from doesn't matter for my point.
We agree on everything here except your last sentence. It matters very much, this is what you are arguing here, that it matters ‘where’ the concept of good comes from, a logical reasoned construction or from a mystical source. I also object that it doesn’t matter from the point of understanding what the words really mean, it does matter how we arrived at these concepts. It is agreed by all (christian to atheist) that canibalism is conceptually evil in a modern society. But what of the tribes in New Guinea that still are proported to practice it? Is there concept of good faulted? By whose standard?
By the standard that they are still savages. By the standard that they don’t have hospitals to set their broken bones because the doctors don’t want to be eaten. By the standard that it is in their own best interest to give up the practice in order to become civilized and live 60 years instead of 35 and that by refusing to learn to reason and change they condemn themselves to a pain filled, uncomfortable savagery. You suggest that others have a "right not to be eaten", By what standard do you define the concept of a 'right'?
If I take my existence as an axiom and reason as the basis for living as a human being, then the extension of the same rights to all others as a predicate of me guaranteeing them for myself follows.
The natural rights concept by Locke comes very close, who tried to do the same thing I am doing here, arrive at it logically from the fact of existence, and his work, had huge influence on what Jefferson and Madison came up with - a secular definition, as codified in the Bill of Rights. I called them axiomatic, ’self-evident’, same thing. I get them (my concepts) from christianity. It works for me, and modern western society is built upon judeo/christian moralty. So, I think you would agree, it works for you to. In a sense, you would be a christian.
If you want to conflate that last word, yes.(!) I thought you said it didn’t matter where the concepts came from? So why does it matter here? As I said, I’m not saying that we refuse to learn from everything that has gone before. But the idea that it is impossible to come up with standard of morality based upon reason, is wrong. That was what got me started here. Just because it hasn’t been done, doesn’t mean it is impossible, quite the opposite. The closer we have come to it without relying upon a mystical basis, and the Bill of Rights is the best so far, the more ‘moral’ a civilization is. That way, nobody can duck out by saying they don’t buy into the mystical basis, you either agree or you leave.