Is There Objective Morality?

I ask people around me, is there objective morality? Moreover, what is the importance of this question? In reality, this question may be more important and more involving in your life than someone might realize. Where could morality come from? Perhaps it could be from God; or maybe the arbitrary whims of man. Who knows? The more interesting question of not where it comes from, but rather, can it come from objectivity? That is, free from emotion, from individual thought, and from perception or imagination?

I propose the thought that most morality is subjective, meaning a group of people "think" this way — therefore it is. Take eating pork for example. In many parts of the world, eating pork is a common meat prepared in many meals and many people don't pay it a second mind. However, other cultures completely abstain from it due to the cultural, or subjective, ramifications of consuming such meat.

I was able to find only a few rules in society that are inherently "objective". The criteria requirement of being objective  can be quite high, because my own belief system cannot be the source of the moral idea. So how can morality be objective? Here is a very short list of "objective" morals.

1. Thou shalt not lie.
2. Thou shalt not cheat.
3. Thou shalt not steal.
4. Thou shalt not murder.

The reason why these are objective are because they bridge the distance and boundaries of cultures. You can take these four rules, apply them to any culture (that are alive that is), and the result is the same. All human cultures believe in this. Even at the most primal, our distant cousins the chimpanzees show a primal urge of disgust when you steal food from them or kill a fellow chimpanzee. This would mean that it is not something sociological. It is not up for someone's perspective on right and wrong. Instead, it is up to evolution itself.

In order for a society to survive, namely a tribe, we had to be able to stick to our tribe and have some semblance of consistency. This meant that every individual needed to vow against lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, in order to survive with the pack. Being that this had been practiced for hundreds, or even millions of years with evolution into account, it benefitted us and many other species to abide by such rules. Now, this is not to say that people do not kill, steal, cheat or murder. Genetics are subject to differences as new children are born.

This causes some children to be born with malformed pre-frontal cortexes, the portion of the brain that assesses consequence and empathy towards others to be lessened. This is what creates many serial killers, and people who lack empathy toward their fellow tribe. Yet these people woefully cast themselves off from society, or people eventually see through their ruse which causes that line of the genetic  pool to die off. Over time, we have become more and more empathetic in order for the tribe to survive. This holds the doctrine that there does exist morality that is objective.