I believe that a greater division needs to be made in this discussion between morals and ethics. You have been largely lumping them together, except for in one of skillospher's posts. The difference is that morals are objective while ethics are subjective.
Everyone has differing ethics, codes of conduct that guide that their lives. These ethics are determined largely by culture. People's religious and national heritage guide the ethics that they are taught. The idea is that they will adopt the ethics of their people.
As for morals, by definition they are absolute. Morals refer the to the idea that there is an objective system of right and wrong. Whatever cultural ethics may be in a place, morality is unwavering. The problem of course is that people can't agree on what constitutes morality although certain things are rather consistent. One reoccurring concept of morality is "The Golden Rule." This is the idea that whatever is bad for you is bad to do to another. Most of the Ten Commandments were designed to encapsulate these offenses. The problem of course is that many of these offenses have taken on different meanings over the course of time proving that they are in fact ethics, rather than morals.
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Originally Posted by p3psi
Also, this point of having a lot of instances to recall from is very imporant. if you have 10,000 instances or a million instances to recall form tying your shoe correctly. learing an improper way, or forgetting completely how to tie your shoe is a very difficult task (whats that old saying, "You never forget how to ride a bike"). in order to unlearn and completly forget how to tie your shoes correctly, you must tie your shoes incorrectly the same number, if not more, of time you tied them correctly. This could be a lot, maybe hunderds of thousands of times to completely forget how you tied them correctly.
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The problem with this argument is that in the process of trying to forget tying your shoes you remember that the failures are failures. As such, they do not have equivalence with successes. 100 successes + 100 failures does not equal no knowlege. It means that in addition to knowing how to tie your shoes successfully you also know 100 ways to avoid tying your shoes. In other words, the failures make you a better shoe tyer, not a worse one.