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During our conversation on Tuesday night about morality, I began to think about how individual morals can be.  How each person can have slightly different or even drastically different morals.  Maybe sometimes our morals are more similar to one another if we grew up in the same family or same town or same country?  This idea of people having their own individual morals seems to conflict with this idea of universal morality.  It makes me think that maybe there isn't one universal morality to fit all people.  Maybe there are some guiding universal principles & guidelines from which most individuals base their individual morality upon or from which most people agree on.  But, I find it hard to believe that everyone could have one universal system of morality.  

I also found the struggle or dissonance created by reasoning & emotion when thinking about morality to be an interesting one.  Once again, I think morals have to do with some reasoning and some emotion- for some people maybe the scale is more tipped with reasoning and for others maybe more emotion- but I don't think we can make a blanket statement that all morality is emotion-based or is reason-based.  

And, finally as far as morality of animals- I think it may definitely exist- but finding out if it really does I think it a difficult, and maybe impossible challenge at the current time given our current resources.  As I mentioned in class, I think we need to be careful or at least not forget that we are projecting our human words & ways & thoughts of morality onto these animals- the idea of anthropomorphism.  I personally think some animal behavior definitely makes it seem as though animals can be moral beings, but I have to stop myself and think about that is a conclusion I am drawing from their behavior.  I have no idea if the animals even know if they are moral or not- but as for now, with our current resources, projecting our own thoughts and words onto animals behavior is the best we can do- and I understand that.  But I'd like to remind everyone to always remember these are our ways and thinking we project onto them and these are simply our own human inferences- not direct evidence from the animals themselves.  And, since we have such a hard time describing, defining, and thinking about human morality, I think we should first focus on figuring out human morality before we jump to make conclusions about animal morality.