BM] Fair point - sorry I missed that. I still feel that I side with teh school of thought that says we are not morally obliged to do anything really. Especially not simply obey laws because they are laws. I generally do and will obey laws, I hasten to add.

[St D] So if we are not morally obliged to do anything, would you say that if, for example, you found yourself on a desert island with an extremely annoying companion, and if (by hypothesis) there were no way for your actions ever to be discovered or punished, there would be no moral reason for you not to murder him and make kebabs? I should probably add that I'm inclined to agree that there is no such thing, really, as objective moral obligation, so when I talk about the obligation to obey laws I'm really just speaking for myself. But I'd be interested to see how you answer this one.

[BM] I don't agree with you when you say moral values are not beliefs. When they state what you should do, that's just another way of saying they state how you believe you should act. It's a matter of semantics, and at any rate I do agree that it's probably not enormously relevant. Incidentally, are you claiming that beliefs express fact? That's patently false. The difference between a belief and a fact is that, whereas a person may hold both to be true, the former need not be objectively true. Person A believes there is a god. Person B believes there is no god. How can both their beliefs equal objective fact at the same time?

(BreadM) The moral force behind not murdering your extremely irritating (but presumably unthreatening) companion is that you yourself would not like to be kebabbed. That is an absolute but the example you give is easy to evaluate. Not everything is quite so straightforward.

BM] No I wouldn't say that at all. What I (think I am) saying is that there is not really, in my view, a moral imperative to obey a law simply because it is a law. I wouldn't kill someone by who was annoying for kebabs, even if I would never be found out, purely because of I suppose, the "moral reason" that you shouldn't kill people. As it so happens, there is no "practical" reason not to kill the annoying person [assuming that you aren't worried about being lonely or whatever], as the fact that there is to be no come back on it at all has removed the practical reason to not kill someone - because it is against the law and you may end up in the nick. What I think is that the moral obligations that a person feels rest pretty much the same irrespective of what laws exist or are being prepared or are being updated.
If a new law is brought in saying "You can't smoke in pubs" for example, I would not smoke in pubs because I was being asked not to by the Landlord, not because it was against the law. If I was in a pub where the landlord and all the customers were smoking, then I would smoke too. This actually happened in California a year or so ago - having slowly got used to not smoking in bars, I was in Lone Pine (nr Death Valley) and was about to light up at the bar. I stopped myself and said "Forgot I was ion California, sorry" and the barmaid laughed, pulled out an ashtray and said "This is Lone Pine, Honey".