[Big Papa Goat]

I just read the thing about Einsteins 3 kinds of moral people, and I just thought; isn't it significant that all people basically have all of these kinds of morality depending on the time and the situation? I mean, we've all abstained from doing something out of fear of punishment before, we've all done something for a reward, and I'm sure we've all done something out of the sincere belief that it was best for all involved, even if it involved a bit of self-sacrifice. All three of these motivations are elements of human morality, and all human beings experience all of them to greater or lesser extents. But like I was saying before, I think it's a bit of a mistake to really identify any one of these sentiments as the 'highest moral light', since the desire to do good for 'everyone' has its own problems largely related to the difficulties in knowing what is good for 'everyone'. I suppose the point would be that what we generally consider 'morality' basically has to do with largely sentimental feelings of empathy; we are concerned with the plight or benefit of human beings around us, so we basically take pleasure in the well-being of the people around us, and we don't like seeing people suffer.
Empathy doesn't work for 'everyone' as well as it does for people we know well though, as Adam Smith said, a thoughtful guy who hears about the horrible deaths of a million Chinese people might think that that's a great tragedy, but he'd lose more sleep over the loss of his own little finger, or for that matter, over say, the painless death of his aged grandmother.
Now, Preechr says that Einstein and his 3rd group aren't exactly atheists, since their morality derives from the adherance to an underlying order to the universe that gives their actions their 'absolute' correctness, rather than merely consequentialist, cost-benefit correctness that Emu didn't like in the first place. But I don't know, like I said, people who believe they know the underlying order of the morality of the universe are being a little bit presumptious, and the assertion that these kinds of moral actors have always had 'positive' impacts seems pretty far from historically true, considering the long list of ideological atrocities from the French Revolution to the twentieth century, to say nothing of Christian and Islamic religious violence or for that matter the ubiquotous and perennial harmful effects of moralistic types that try to put their noses in to other peoples business. Think about the jerks that stole from you Preechr, what do you think motivated them? Assuming you're not talking about burglars or something there.