Is there a universal moral law?

[The Barbarian]

It's a fact that humans in almost every culture, agree on certain rules.   Most notably the Golden Rule.

Romans 2:14 For when the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature those things that are of the law; these having not the law are a law to themselves:

There is natural law, which all normal humans understand.   Those who never heard of Jesus, and had no chance at learning of Him, will be held accountable for that law, as Paul says.

The law is just: it’s holy, spiritual, and good as St Paul tells us elsewhere. So we’ll be rightfully judged by it. But it cannot justify us; it can only show us what our justice, our just state, “looks like” so to speak. Only God can justify us, only as we enter communion with Him, He truly becoming our God again, as per Jer 31:34, receiving His grace, can we become wholly who He created us to be. In this relationship He begins to place His law in our minds and write it on our hearts (Jer 31:33). And this begins with faith.

But the Law is already in us, just dimmed and obscured by the Fall. As St Augustine wrote, speakng of the Decalogue: “God wrote on the tables of the Law what man did not read in his heart.”

IMO Rom 2 is speaking of Gentiles who act upon that law already written in the hearts of all men, even though they haven’t heard the Law, much less the gospel. And we’ll all be judged by that Law because it reflects the righteousness God created man to have. In any person who lives in obedience to the law, unconscious of its existence by any formally revealed means as the law was revealed to Israel through Moses, there is an implicit faith IMO, and grace accordingly as well.

https://forums.catholic.com/t/romans-2-12-16-the-law/350557/3

Edited January 7, 2020 by The Barbarian

[Billiards Ball]

On 6/10/2014 at 12:34 PM, Schouwenaars said:

If i raise a human in complete enclosure, so that has never contact with other humans, he will only live by the rules in himself that he has by nature.

so when he sees a human, he will think it's just an other animal and he will try to kill it to eat it.

he will certainly not think: hey, i may not kill that one.

 

i'll give another little exemple:

if you could go back in time and kill sadam hoesein, would you do that? (not including the time paradox)

you would still kill a person then, and that violates directly one of the 10 commandements.

 

or if you see a person on the ground, who is suffering terribly, and can not be helped anymore, and will die in some hours.

his suffering is enormous, gigantic, he is about to lose his mind.

would you kill him to end the horrific suffering?

because if you don't, you only let him die more slowly but with an incredible pain.

 

 

because of this, i don't think there is an universal moral law.

And if you raised a person with only the Bible:

* They would rejoice in trials and suffering

* They would be greatly moral, whether they were believers or not

* They would understand the human mind and heart

The Bible IS the guide to the universal moral law code, summed as "Love God and other people".

[Uber Genius]

On June 10, 2014 at 11:34 AM, Schouwenaars said:

If i raise a human in complete enclosure, so that has never contact with other humans, he will only live by the rules in himself that he has by nature.

so when he sees a human, he will think it's just an other animal and he will try to kill it to eat it.

he will certainly not think: hey, i may not kill that one.

 

i'll give another little exemple:

if you could go back in time and kill sadam hoesein, would you do that? (not including the time paradox)

you would still kill a person then, and that violates directly one of the 10 commandements.

 

or if you see a person on the ground, who is suffering terribly, and can not be helped anymore, and will die in some hours.

his suffering is enormous, gigantic, he is about to lose his mind.

would you kill him to end the horrific suffering?

because if you don't, you only let him die more slowly but with an incredible pain.

 

 

because of this, i don't think there is an universal moral law.

I had hoped for some research into the topic instead of false dichotomies, and circular arguments. If one goes out to Stanford.plato.edu one can type "the moral argument" and get an approximation of the material available.

Evil is the privation of good. It is like the word "nothing" which means the universal negation of "anything."

Your examples attempt to demonstrate an incoherence between good through ethical dilemmas. But they fail due to the fact, on atheism there is no evil. So eating other people is not a problem. In fact eating other people's or our own baby for the fun of it isn't evil on atheism. 

So when we look at the origin of our moral intuitions, the inference that they are delusions of social engineering runs into our everyday perception that killing and eating babies for fun is wrong and always so. While the theist can ground this intuition in the existence of a creator who is the definition of goodness and who has given all men everywhere a sense of moral truths, the atheist has to collapse and say there intuition is a delusion, a social convention that is merely temporary.

if Adolfo Hiter had won WWII and managed to convert the rest of the world into antiemetic socialists (go Bernie), and they voted that we round up and kill the few million remaining Jews, on your socially constructed subjective morality, they would be virtuous.

The moral arguments for God focuses on our moral experience that there are objective truths such as don't kill innocent people that are not person or societally-relative. Until we have a defeater for those moral intuitions we are justified in believing them!

this is the same way we are justified in believing that there is an external world, there are other people in the world, the past is real. We could alas be a brain stuck in a vat being manipulated to think every thought but why think that? So we justify moral intuition in the same way we justify most of our beleifs, as properly basic. 

[RVKM]

On 6/10/2014 at 9:34 AM, Schouwenaars said:

If i raise a human in complete enclosure, so that has never contact with other humans, he will only live by the rules in himself that he has by nature.

so when he sees a human, he will think it's just an other animal and he will try to kill it to eat it.

he will certainly not think: hey, i may not kill that one.

 

i'll give another little exemple:

if you could go back in time and kill sadam hoesein, would you do that? (not including the time paradox)

you would still kill a person then, and that violates directly one of the 10 commandements.

 

or if you see a person on the ground, who is suffering terribly, and can not be helped anymore, and will die in some hours.

his suffering is enormous, gigantic, he is about to lose his mind.

would you kill him to end the horrific suffering?

because if you don't, you only let him die more slowly but with an incredible pain.

 

 

because of this, i don't think there is an universal moral law.

Morality clearly seems to originate from human interaction and social concern. This changes over time as people negotiate their culture and needs.

[FluffyBunny.]

On 1/16/2020 at 5:05 PM, Billiards Ball said:

And if you raised a person with only the Bible:

* They would rejoice in trials and suffering

* They would be greatly moral, whether they were believers or not

* They would understand the human mind and heart

The Bible IS the guide to the universal moral law code, summed as "Love God and other people".

If you raised a person with only the Bible, then you would have to accept immoral things like slavery.

[Hawkins]

A bit similar to our linguistic ability. It is a given ability to humans. However there's a process of synchronized by interaction. If a person is completely isolated after birth till, say the age of 8, he can no long pick up a complete set of human language. 

 

Our conscience and moral code are originally set up all the same and will be used for our Final Judgment. There's a similar synchronization by interaction. It's more like a pizza with toppings. It comes originally the same piece of bread. We however add toppings differently to make it into a different pizza. We are given the same set of law as our conscience and moral code, that however changes when impacted by our environment which is contributed by our parents, our culture and custom, our society behavior and such. Not only so, it is also subject to Satan's manipulation when we are still in mother's womb. Even we vary but the core is still there for us to accept that killing is not right, stealing is not right etc. as mentioned in the 10 commandments.

[Uber Genius]

Clearly we need to focus on whether objective moral values and duties exist or not. 

As our original poster points out some objections from the idea that the origin of moral actions is exclusively environmental and NOT a function of herretity or a faculty of moral intuition. 

In fact I claim that my moral experience of knowing right from wrong is similar in nature to my knowing that I'm not stuck in the Matrix right now waiting to follow the rabbit. 

My moral experience can be defeated but not by the moral conundrums you have offered in your post. 

My self-existence, existence of a physical world, existence of other people, belief that the universe is not 5 minutes old with the appearance of age, are all similar in nature to my belief in moral experience.

 

in fact atheist Louise Antony suggests that the argument for skepticism of this type of moral experience and intuition, "Rests on premises that are less obvious than the existence of objective moral values and duties themselves."

So we will have a hard time ridding ourselves of this belief. Further naturalistic "evolutionary" accounts of any beliefs has proven dubious. IN fact there is not a credible evolutionary account for moral beliefs offered in the scientific literature. It is the stuff of internet infidel legend. 

[Anne2]

On 6/10/2014 at 9:34 AM, Schouwenaars said:

If i raise a human in complete enclosure, so that has never contact with other humans, he will only live by the rules in himself that he has by nature.

 That human being will be influenced by your example. He/she will live by the rules of your nature, he has in himself.