Objective morality vs subjective morality

The objective vs. subjective morality debate is really the theist vs. atheist debate in disguise since, with God, there is objective morality and, without God, there is no objective morality.

Without getting into that debate, what evidence is there that human beings are bound by an objective morality and not just natural drives? Remember, a relativist would say that widespread moral unity among cultures across time is not enough since, at most, that would only be evidence of a BELIEF in objective morality?

Any takers?

 

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Sleight of Idle Hand?

The boldface part of your proposition is faulty. How is morality based on nothing demonstrable objective?

I always love how people drop completely bullshit lines and then follow up by saying, "Without getting into that debate ...."

No, seriously, you think you can drop such a glaring fallacy into a discussion and then gloss right by it?

Okay, fine. If that's how you want it, sure.

But insofar as we might pursue an objective morality, I would suggest we haven't nearly enough information to establish anything beyond a conditional and relativistic application of an otherwise fixed subjective moral code. Objective morality is theoretically possible, but whether or not human beings can presently fulfill the theoretic prerequisites is, at best, an open question.

 

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What morality mean to you? If you can think and give a definition of morality.
As you described I would interpret that theists have no morality, but they respect certain rules.
These rules are not their own, but borrowed from a book. These rules are imposed or by threat or by reward.

 

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This does not hold for Buddhism, which is, in effect, atheist, but maintains that there is objective morality (there is a regularity of the Dharma).

 

Even with god, there is no objective morality, only the illusion of it. One can easily come up with moral dilemmas that religion cannot deal with.

 

For example?

 

So, everyone who believes in god has the same morals?

 

Stem cells.

 

False dichotomy - those "natural drives" would add up to exactly an "objective morality." Indeed, a better one than whatever God-derived one you might posit, since they're actually concrete and visible - and so, objectively demonstrable.

 

It seems that MindOverMatter doesn't really discuss any of his BS. Out of over 350 posts, he has started 67 threads. He just throws crap against the wall and when the questions run too deep, he runs away and throws more crap at a different wall.

 

What about them?

 

MindOverMatter is here.

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Some people will add 2 and 2 together and get 5, that doesn't change the objective truth, which is that 2 + 2 = 4.
The existence of objective moral values is different from perception of objective moral values.

A tree might exist, but a person not sees it. That doesn't prove that the tree does not exist, since it could just be that the person is blind.

People still commit rape, murder, abuse, etc because they reject morality, but this is not evidence that objective morality does not exist.

 

Religious people are divided on their use, specifically extracting them from fertilized eggs or aborted fetuses. It seems religion is no guide to the correct moral action. Any fixed moral code suffers from this limitation, it cannot anticipate future challenges.

 

From The Catholic Encyclopedia at New Advent:

Morality

It is necessary at the outset of this article to distinguish between morality and ethics, terms not seldom employed synonymously. Morality is antecedent to ethics: it denotes those concrete activities of which ethics is the science. It may be defined as human conduct in so far as it is freely subordinated to the ideal of what is right and fitting.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10559a.htm

Ethics

A distinction must be made between ethics and morals, or morality. Every people, even the most uncivilized and uncultured, has its own morality or sum of prescriptions which govern its moral conduct. Nature had so provided that each man establishes for himself a code of moral concepts and principles which are applicable to the details of practical life, without the necessity of awaiting the conclusions of science. Ethics is the scientific or philosophical treatment of morality. The subject-matter proper of ethics is the deliberate, free actions of man; for these alone are in our power, and concerning these alone can rules be prescribed, not concerning those actions which are performed without deliberation, or through ignorace or coercion. Besides this, the scope of ethics includes whatever has reference to free human acts, whether as principle or cause of action (law, conscience, virtue), or as effect or circumstance of action (merit, punishment, etc.). The particular aspect (formal object) under which ethics considers free acts is that of their moral goodness or the rectitude of order involved in them as human acts. A man may be a good artist or orator and at the same time a morally bad man, or, conversely, a morally good man and a poor artist or technician. Ethics has merely to do with the order which relates to man as man, and which makes of him a good man.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05556a.htm

 

Surely the opinions of individual religious people may differ, but this doesn't mean that each of them respectively is not sure about their own stance - and they are sure about their own stance, even if it may differ from that of another religionist.

 

god and religion aren't the same thing. i'm pretty sure that's the 8,713th time i've said that. would you at least take a minute and try to let that sink into your brain?

please and thank you.

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That's false.

Is it possible to clearly distinguish between objective and subjective morality? Can the moral status of particular actions (or classes of actions) be established independently of our subjective moral feelings and intuitions about rightness or wrongness? How would one go about recognizing the rightness and wrongness of actions apart from how we feel about those actions (or in the case of the utilitarians, the actions' results)? How might somebody be convinced that his/her moral intuition is in fact mistaken (if that makes sense)? What other evidence of rightness and wrongness is there?

Human beings tend to broadly agree on the moralities that they accept. What's more, human groups in distant parts of the world share many moral principles in common. The "golden rule" (the principle of reciprocity) is an obvious example -- it's arisen independently all over the place. But there are some pretty dramatic divergences as well, such as differing views of slavery and of the place of women in the community.

Is there really a difference between objective morality and belief in objective morality?

My own approach to these questions is naturalistic. I tend to derive human morality from human social instincts. As a species, we evolved and are consequently optimized to live in social groups. That probably involves a propensity to favor kinds of behavior that strengthen group solidarity and effectiveness.

But at the same time, human beings are acquisitive self-maximizers, who are simultaneously driven to improve their own personal position, even if it's at the expense of their fellows.

So conflicts are going to arise, both internally/subjectively within individuals (conscience vs desire) and socially within groups (law enforcement). In human social groups, the sometimes self-abnegating social values are probably going to be embodied in real or mythological authority figures who represent the group and its interests -- clan patriarchs, mythical progenitors, totems, gods and kings.

Put another way, I don't think that solitary animals, animals who live alone and don't have to accomodate to others of their kind, have anything closely approximating morality. Social insects like ants on the other hand are probably just about 100% morality (group interest) with very little self-interest. Herd animals, and even more obviously pack hunters like wolves, are probably a lot like us humans, with some non-verbal and un-mythologized analogue of a conscience. They have personal desires but can sense when their individual actions cross the social line, and feel something approximating guilt and shame as a result.

 

Then answer my question. Does everyone who believes in "God" have the same morals?

 

God without religion is silent on morality.

 

So religion was not the objective source of their stance. Point proven.