Objective morality

[Guest shiloh357]

1 hour ago, Thallasa said:

This is absolutely true ,and it is this rigid rule of 'objective morality ',which creates problems with rule minded christians .

 

Objective morality is only a problem for those who reject God's objective moral system and reject Him as our moral law-give.  Rules are not a bad thing, and there are rules that govern every relationship.   Relationships degenerate into chaos when rules are broken and boundaries are crossed that should not have been crossed, hence we end up with  things like adultery, divorce, premarital sex, unwanted pregnancies, abortion, etc.   Rules and boundaries in an objective morality protect us from heartache and misery and unwanted consequences that will affect our lives for ever.

[LuftWaffle]

4 hours ago, Thallasa said:

This is absolutely true ,and it is this rigid rule of 'objective morality ',which creates problems with rule minded christians . God designed Creation and us, after His Way ;that is  Creation in it's perfection, is a Mirror of God .

So the rule is, "If you don't want problems, done be rule minded"?

[siegi91]

On 04/01/2017 at 6:13 AM, Seanc said:

I'm sure this has been discussed many times but the few active discussions I saw went off topic with evolution and such so I decided to start a new thread. 

I have been reading different apologetic books and pondering an answer from an atheist perspective(which I am not).

To start off I believe that C.S lewis explains best in that objective morality is not instinctual. His example goes like this: You see a man drowning, he's a stranger. Two instincts come up. The first being the "herd instinct" to save the man. The second is the "survival instinct" to keep yourself safe/alive. The second instinct is the stronger of the two but morality pushes you toward the weaker one. It tells you that you ought to save the man because it is "right".

The other point he makes is that its more than just a "social convention" that its more than just what is taught to you and that if you can judge two different peoples morals and say one is better and the other lesser then you are implying there is a Real morality or a Real right independent of what people think. 

So my question is and I'm basing this off a question I was posed with is would we only lean closer to what "you" were taught? Does it surpass my understanding and learning? Is it objective? 

Before I submit this I want to say that I believe in an objective morality but I need help to further understand it before i even try to explain it to someone else. Anyone got an answer?

 

Morality is a fascinating subject, like all subjects that occupied philosophers for millenia and it is still, to my knowledge, unresolved.

I personally cannot make sense of the objectivity of morality. But that is not because I am an atheist. Many atheists are moral realists and I tend to have more heated debates with them than with religious people, also on account of not knowing many religious people in person, unfortunately.

I would call myself a moral constructivist, if there were such a label. If we cannot construct a cold and emotionless, generally accepted objective proof that moral claim X is right or wrong, then it is meaningless to attribute any of such values to that claim.

Because of my constructivism, I also tend to reject the law of the excluded middle to moral claims. If we cannot construct a generally accepted proof of a claim being right or wrong, then it is not even the case that the claim is right or wrong. It could be that it is neither of them, or the question is meaningless. Not sure you can make sense of this. I try myself to, with mixed results, lol. I feel deep inside that there are things that are really wrong, like murdering innocents, but I have no other proof than asking "would you not agree with me?".

Another problem with objective morality is, in my opinion, its real usefulness. Let's suppose morality is objective, now what? Who decides what is right or what is wrong?

Honestly, not many would debate the claim "killing kids for fun is wrong", we accept it by default,  but there are a lof of claims that are highly controversial. For instance, is the death penalty right or wrong? Most Europeans would say it is wrong, others might disagree. The assumption that morality is objective does not help us at all to resolve such issues.

We could say morality is objective because it emanates from God. But which God? Hindus might believe that separating humanity in casts emanates from god, Christians would say this is nonsense, since God made all humans alike. And as long as we do not have independent objective evidence of the existence of those Gods, we are back on square one.

For sure, saying that God exists because morality is objective, and morality can only be objective by emanating from God, is circular reasoning that leads nowhere.

So, it is a tricky subject, I am afraid. 

 sieglinde

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest Thallasa]

7 hours ago, shiloh357 said:

Objective morality is only a problem for those who reject God's objective moral system and reject Him as our moral law-give.  Rules are not a bad thing, and there are rules that govern every relationship.   Relationships degenerate into chaos when rules are broken and boundaries are crossed that should not have been crossed, hence we end up with  things like adultery, divorce, premarital sex, unwanted pregnancies, abortion, etc.   Rules and boundaries in an objective morality protect us from heartache and misery and unwanted consequences that will affect our lives for ever.

There is a difference between those who are 'rule minded' ,and those who 'guide 'to the Truth . It is evident that if you are on a plane and start to dance in the isle, the rules of safety will mean you are prevented from doing so , but if you are in the 'park ' and start to dance , you  might annoy some people , but it is not catastrophic .

Some people do not understand the reasoning behind the laws, and so  become 'destructive' to God and people, because of their limited ability to know when to apply strictly, and when to be more lenient .  

If what you say about 'forever ' ,then you deny why Jesus came ,and the purpose of His sacrifice . 

As for rules being broken ,the Pharisees  kept the Rules for the wrong reasons :to try to curry favour with God . Instead ,  finally God is about love and when we break the 'objective morality' of kindness and goodness ,we  destroy ourselves and others ,whether we keep the rules or not .

 

[Guest Thallasa]

4 hours ago, LuftWaffle said:

So the rule is, "If you don't want problems, done be rule minded"?

 

4 hours ago, LuftWaffle said:

So the rule is, "If you don't want problems, done be rule minded"?

NO !! 

[Guest shiloh357]

2 minutes ago, Thallasa said:

There is a difference between those who are 'rule minded' ,and those who 'guide 'to the Truth . It is evident that if you are on a plane and start to dance in the isle, the rules of safety will mean you are prevented from doing so , but if you are in the 'park ' and start to dance , you  might annoy some people , but it is not catastrophic .

Some people do not understand the reasoning behind the laws, and so  become 'destructive' to God and people, because of their limited ability to know when to apply strictly, and when to be more lenient .  If

 

God gave us an objective standard of morality so that we could live harmoniously with each other and so that we could enjoy fellowship with Him.  God's rules don't change based on circumstance or situations.   Sin is always sin. Wrong is always wrong.   Right is always right.

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If what you say about 'forever ' ,then you deny why Jesus came ,and the purpose of His sacrifice . 

No, I don't deny his sacrifice at all.   Jesus came to deliver from sin, but not the consequences of self-destructive decisions.   You can go to prison and still become a Christian in prison.  It doesn't mean that you won't have to pay your debt to society in full.  It doesn't mean that you get out of prison.   If a woman gets pregnant out of wedlock.  She is a mother. That will never change.  She will forever be a mother.   Many times, our choices have results that will never go away.  That's real life.  Jesus never promised that we would never have to face the consequences of our decisions.

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As for rules being broken ,the Pharisees  kept the Rules for the wrong reasons :to try to curry favour with God .

The Pharisees were hypocrites who kept their own rules and lived for themselves not to curry favor with God.  They didn't care about God's favor, according to Jesus.  They sought the honor and favor of men, not the honor that comes from God.

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Instead ,  finally God is about love and when we break the 'objective morality' of kindness and goodness ,we  destroy ourselves and others ,whether we keep the rules or not .

God is, more than love.  In fact, God's primary attribute isn't love.   God's primary attribute is holiness.  Objective morality for the Christian is about being holy as HE is holy.  You can't love others properly when you're living a life outside God's prescription for holiness.

[Guest Teditis]

I think that God has put the knowledge of Himself in each one of us... all people know that God exists. (Rom. 1)

Along with this He has placed a basic understanding of good and evil, right and wrong... these could be considered

as "Objective Morals". Still, we need to pursue and follow up on this Natural Revelation and take the time to learn

of God and His Will for humankind. So read the Bible to get the inside information!

[Guest shiloh357]

3 hours ago, siegi91 said:

 

Morality is a fascinating subject, like all subjects that occupied philosophers for millenia and it is still, to my knowledge, unresolved.

I personally cannot make sense of the objectivity of morality.

I bet if someone came into your home and beat you and robbed you and set your car on fire, you could make sense of it.  I can imagine you would feel you had been wronged.   And I can imagine that if the perpetrator who committed the crime tried  to make a subjective moral argument as to why his moral code for why he beat you, robbed and set your car on fire outweighs your right to justice, it would not convince you.  I can imagine that you would view the fact that you had been wronged quite objectively. 

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Another problem with objective morality is, in my opinion, its real usefulness. Let's suppose morality is objective, now what? Who decides what is right or what is wrong?

Is it wrong to murder?   Is it wrong to steal? Is it wrong rape?  Is it wrong to molest  a child?     It appears you're trying to manufacture a problem the rest of us don't really think exists.

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Honestly, not many would debate the claim "killing kids for fun is wrong", we accept it by default,  but there are a lof of claims that are highly controversial. For instance, is the death penalty right or wrong? Most Europeans would say it is wrong, others might disagree. The assumption that morality is objective does not help us at all to resolve such issues.

As Luftwaffle pointed out to someone else on this thread, you're confusing objective morality with thinking objectively about morality.

[LuftWaffle]

15 hours ago, siegi91 said:

 

Morality is a fascinating subject, like all subjects that occupied philosophers for millenia and it is still, to my knowledge, unresolved. sieglinde

 

Hi Siegi,

The fact that an issue is unresolved does not mean that it's not worth thinking about. After all in science there still isn't a unifying model between Newtonian physics and Quantum physics, but that doesn't mean that science is meaningless or wishy-washy. Also, sometimes people refuse to accept what is obvious, because they don't like what it entails, and I suspect many moral relativists aren't so by choice but because of their worldview that cannot accommodate non-physical realities such as morality, God, souls etc.

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I would call myself a moral constructivist, if there were such a label. If we cannot construct a cold and emotionless, generally accepted objective proof that moral claim X is right or wrong, then it is meaningless to attribute any of such values to that claim.

This is reminiscent of an idea called Logical Positivism which was popular in Germany and Scandinavia half a century ago. Here's a link to a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism

Basically the idea is that something should be considered meaningless unless it can be empirically verified or logically deduced. Unfortunately Logical Positivism itself cannot be empirically verified nor logically deduced, so idea committed suicide shortly after its inception. The reason I think it remains popular is because it allows people to dismiss issues they don't want to talk about, by describing them as meaningless based on this arbitrary rule for meaning, without really dealing with the claims. In other words Logical Positivism is a lazy cop-out. As you can probably tell, I don't think much of this view

The other thing is that meaning is actually very straightforward, so the claim is rather silly. In order for something to be meaningful all it needs is a definition. So it's possible to have meaningful conversations by simply defining what one is talking about. This is how philosophers have been able to have meaningful conversations about ethics and morality for millenia as you rightly pointed out.

 

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Because of my constructivism, I also tend to reject the law of the excluded middle to moral claims. If we cannot construct a generally accepted proof of a claim being right or wrong, then it is not even the case that the claim is right or wrong.

Without a generally accepted proof of "constructivism" being a right or wrong claim it's not even the case that "constructivism" is right or wrong. See the problem?

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  Let's suppose morality is objective, now what? Who decides what is right or what is wrong?

If morality is objective, it means that it's not a matter of deciding what is right or wrong. That's the whole point!
Moral obligations aren't down to mere preference and no person gets to pick what they want morality to be, just like the shape of the earth is an objective fact and not a decision.

So your question of who gets to decide what is right or wrong doesn't apply to objective moral values. This is only a problem for relativists.

Now, what you might be referring to are moral dilemmas where the lesser evil or greater good isn't immediately obvious. In the case of objective morals there is still a right answer, the answer just may require careful consideration of all the influences. That's why moral dilemmas don't disprove objective morals, in fact moral dilemmas are at home in moral objectivism. If morals are subjective, then flipping a coin is no less random than the evolutionary happenstance that brought about our illusory moral preferences, isn't it?

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Honestly, not many would debate the claim "killing kids for fun is wrong", we accept it by default,  but there are a lof of claims that are highly controversial. For instance, is the death penalty right or wrong? Most Europeans would say it is wrong, others might disagree. The assumption that morality is objective does not help us at all to resolve such issues.

The controversy around the death penalty isn't tricky because morals are subjective but because the issue is complex.

Let me illustrate what I mean this way:

Suppose you fill a balloon with helium and you tie a number of objects to the string, will it go up or down? It depends, right?
How much volume does the balloon have, what do the objects weigh, how pure is the helium, what's the air pressure, what planet are you on and so on?

If we tie a feather to a standard party balloon we have a clear case, and we know the balloon will go up.
If we tie a Grand piano, an anvil and a tombstone to the string we also have a clear case. The balloon will not go up.

But what about a slight wet, empty box of matches? Now we have a difficult one, right? So are we now to conclude that gravity is subjective because we have a hard time figuring this one out? Of course not. This is a knowledge (epistemology) problem and has nothing to do with the essence (ontology) of gravity.

Likewise some moral questions are complex because some moral values pull the scale one way and others pull the scale another way, such as the death-penalty which have pros and cons.

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We could say morality is objective because it emanates from God. But which God? Hindus might believe that separating humanity in casts emanates from god, Christians would say this is nonsense, since God made all humans alike. And as long as we do not have independent objective evidence of the existence of those Gods, we are back on square one.

The moral argument is a theistic argument, not an argument for the doctrines of Christianity. Asking which God is therefore irrelevant, because it's not what the argument is attempting to show.

The moral argument forms part of a cumulative case for God and cumulative cases are a perfectly valid way to reason. In fact most court cases are based on cumulative reasoning. Does the fingerprint at a crime scene prove a murder? No, it proves that a particular person was at the scene there. Should fingerprint evidence therefore be dismissed because it doesn't prove everything you want it to prove, of course not.

So why should the moral argument be dismissed because it doesn't lead all the way to what you want it to lead?

[siegi91]

23 hours ago, LuftWaffle said:

Hi Siegi,

The fact that an issue is unresolved does not mean that it's not worth thinking about. After all in science there still isn't a unifying model between Newtonian physics and Quantum physics, but that doesn't mean that science is meaningless or wishy-washy. Also, sometimes people refuse to accept what is obvious, because they don't like what it entails, and I suspect many moral relativists aren't so by choice but because of their worldview that cannot accommodate non-physical realities such as morality, God, souls etc.

[/quote]

This is reminiscent of an idea called Logical Positivism which was popular in Germany and Scandinavia half a century ago. Here's a link to a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism

Basically the idea is that something should be considered meaningless unless it can be empirically verified or logically deduced. Unfortunately Logical Positivism itself cannot be empirically verified nor logically deduced, so idea committed suicide shortly after its inception. The reason I think it remains popular is because it allows people to dismiss issues they don't want to talk about, by describing them as meaningless based on this arbitrary rule for meaning, without really dealing with the claims. In other words Logical Positivism is a lazy cop-out. As you can probably tell, I don't think much of this view

The other thing is that meaning is actually very straightforward, so the claim is rather silly. In order for something to be meaningful all it needs is a definition. So it's possible to have meaningful conversations by simply defining what one is talking about. This is how philosophers have been able to have meaningful conversations about ethics and morality for millenia as you rightly pointed out.

 

Without a generally accepted proof of "constructivism" being a right or wrong claim it's not even the case that "constructivism" is right or wrong. See the problem?

If morality is objective, it means that it's not a matter of deciding what is right or wrong. That's the whole point!
Moral obligations aren't down to mere preference and no person gets to pick what they want morality to be, just like the shape of the earth is an objective fact and not a decision.

So your question of who gets to decide what is right or wrong doesn't apply to objective moral values. This is only a problem for relativists.

Now, what you might be referring to are moral dilemmas where the lesser evil or greater good isn't immediately obvious. In the case of objective morals there is still a right answer, the answer just may require careful consideration of all the influences. That's why moral dilemmas don't disprove objective morals, in fact moral dilemmas are at home in moral objectivism. If morals are subjective, then flipping a coin is no less random than the evolutionary happenstance that brought about our illusory moral preferences, isn't it?

The controversy around the death penalty isn't tricky because morals are subjective but because the issue is complex.

Let me illustrate what I mean this way:

Suppose you fill a balloon with helium and you tie a number of objects to the string, will it go up or down? It depends, right?
How much volume does the balloon have, what do the objects weigh, how pure is the helium, what's the air pressure, what planet are you on and so on?

If we tie a feather to a standard party balloon we have a clear case, and we know the balloon will go up.
If we tie a Grand piano, an anvil and a tombstone to the string we also have a clear case. The balloon will not go up.

But what about a slight wet, empty box of matches? Now we have a difficult one, right? So are we now to conclude that gravity is subjective because we have a hard time figuring this one out? Of course not. This is a knowledge (epistemology) problem and has nothing to do with the essence (ontology) of gravity.

Likewise some moral questions are complex because some moral values pull the scale one way and others pull the scale another way, such as the death-penalty which have pros and cons.

The moral argument is a theistic argument, not an argument for the doctrines of Christianity. Asking which God is therefore irrelevant, because it's not what the argument is attempting to show.

The moral argument forms part of a cumulative case for God and cumulative cases are a perfectly valid way to reason. In fact most court cases are based on cumulative reasoning. Does the fingerprint at a crime scene prove a murder? No, it proves that a particular person was at the scene there. Should fingerprint evidence therefore be dismissed because it doesn't prove everything you want it to prove, of course not.

So why should the moral argument be dismissed because it doesn't lead all the way to what you want it to lead?

Hi Luftwaffe,
Oh Mann, I have no idea how to use the quoting feature on my tablet. I hate Big Bang posts ....:)  let's try, nevertheless.

I never said that unresolved issues are not worth thinking about. I actually believe the contrary. I spend most of my time thinking about unresolved issues. I would be a pretty poor physicist if I did not do that. 

What I had in mind, when I mentioned constructivism, was actually based on mathematical (or logical) constructivism. Take for instance the claim

1) Every even natural number greater than two is the sum of two prime numbers

We have no idea whether this is true or not. All the numbers our computers are crunching seem to confirm the claim. Alas, we do not have access to all possible numbers, which are infinite.

A constructivist would deny that 1) is either true or false as long as no 
counterexample or proof is constructed from the basic axioms.
For what concerns logical claims of this sort, I do not hold this view. For me either is 1) true or false. However, I would not know how to prove that I am right and that they are wrong. 

The same with my claim. You are right that I cannot prove that my moral constructivism is true, without getting circular,  probably, but you cannnot probably prove that it is false or that it makes no sense, either. Therefore, it should be considered as a live option, pending additional evidence.

The funny thing is that if we think about this for a second, this sort of constructivism links ontology to epistemology. It seems you cannot make sense of one without the other. I believe it is true, for moral predicates, but I cannot prove it. Remember, I also hold beliefs without proof ;). However, I think that debunking it by saying that it does not keep into account the difference between ontology and epistemology is unconvincing. And it is unconvincing because that it is exactly what it claims: no knowledge nor paradigm to acquire it, then maybe no ontology. It would be like saying that it is false because it is false.

Now, I would like to address your comment that if morality is subjective, then it is not superior than flipping a coin, presumably because of evolution being driven by random mutations (among other non random things). I make the assumption I understood that correctly.

If that is the case, then I am not sure how that can be used to prove objective morality. It sounds like: if morality is an emergent naturalistic (blind and possibily random) property of some beings, then it is not (objective) morality to start with. But again, I believe that this is slightly circular. Also the fact that you use the term "illusion" seems to assume that there is the real thing and the evolutionary process just gave us an illusion thereof. Like a mirage is the illusion of something assumed to exist (water). We first need to ascertain that there is this real thing and that it is independent from our evolutionary past, and biology. We are not there yet, I think, because if we were, then we could stop right away: objective morality would be true.

As concerns the cumulative case for God, I think that this would be material for 10 threads. My point was that the claim

1) The existence of  objective morality is evidence of the existence of God  

Leads necessarily to circular reasoning.

For, if the objective character of morality is independent from God, like atheistic moral realists believe, then claim 1) is a non sequitur

If, on the other hand, this objectivity depends on the existence of God or is defined in terms of God's will and nature, and cannot exist without Him, then 1) is circular.

Even if we assume that objective morality does, indeed, exist. And this is why I dismiss it. Where it would lead, if it were convincing, is not so relevant to me. I am quite emotionless about the possibile evidence of God's existence. Especially when provided by such  arguments, which do not say anything about what that God might think of people like me

sieglinde

Edited January 11, 2017 by siegi91