Right and Wrong do exist

Why? Because it's not orthodox?

I said moral truths, not truths, and even put the word "truth" in inverted commas to emphasise the difference. A moral truth, to me, is something that is generally accepted in that society and at that time as being morally acceptable.




What has scientific knowledge to do with morality? You seem to be in the wrong thread.

I'm merely asking why the morals which you claim to be objective are focused on the way humans treat each other. You say killing is bad and this an objective claim, but that is, as I said, only due to your subjective opinion which values human life above all other life. This is one of the biggest flaws in this objective morality nonsense, both when it comes from religious folk and non religious folk. It may be that all humans should kill each other so that the rest of the world can prosper, but you don't believe that because you subjectively believe morality prioritises humans.

Again, there is nothing in nature which dictates that killing is objectively bad, why you can't see this I don't know. When a dog mauls a child, no one would say it is a morally evil dog. The concept does not exist outside of a sufficiently developed human intellect, which begs the question of how intelligent an organism needs to be in order for a set of objective moral values to suddenly become relevant. Which is just ridiculous. Scientific claims are testable and experimentally verifiable (to near enough 100% that we regard them as true); in what way can you show me that a certain moral action is right or wrong? You cannot demonstrate using any methodology that there is an external source of morality and that morality is anything but a concept in the mind of an evolved being.

You also failed to demonstrate why subjective morality is bad for society, via your own contradiction. Even if objective morality exists, we have no method of knowing what it is, and thus all our morals are in fact subjective and simply based on our biological intuition as a social species, and later on a collective of reasoned argument and legal/political theory. So unless you claim to know what these objective morals are, and give us a clear list of them, you cannot claim that objective morality is any better than subjective - in fact it would entail there being no morals whatsoever since we simply cannot know them! The obvious betterment of society over time also flies in the face of your claim.

This is the one point I agree with religious people on - there is no objective morality in nature whatsoever, and no one has proved otherwise. I simply go one step further and also say there is also no objective morality in God, thus it simply doesn't exist period.




So your morals are just as subjective as anyone else's? You basically just said "I think murder is bad, and society now has less murder, so that is progression." In what way did you just prove that there are objective morals, or that your morals are in line with them? You literally just stated that you are a moral subjectivist.

Why? Because it's not orthodox?

That's not what moral subjectivism means...

Moral subjectivism - The idea that the truth of moral claims is dependent solely on a) an observers thoughts, b) an agents thoughts, c) the society in which the observer lives, d) the society in which the agent lives or any combination of that or something similar.

Obviously there has to be a value judgment made in the definitions we use for "good" and "bad" but we have to make similar value judgments when we claim that a theory in physics is "better" than another one when they explain phenomena equally well. Same applies in mathematics where we can have different logics serving as a foundation for the maths and reach the same conclusions through different methods - we need to make a value judgment to decide which logic should serve as a base for our maths.

Point is, once you've made your initial value judgment which you do in every single discipline that exists because knowledge is clearly part of the human mind and not external to it, then the only thing that determines the truth of moral claims thereafter are objective facts about the external world.

If you are talking about theories developed by humans, then really they are subjective - just that they are so strongly supported in one direction over another that we regard them, for practical purposes, as fact, or objective. The big bang theory has a wealth of evidence behind it which allows us to judge it to be superior to other theories, but really it is just as subjective as anything else.

Of course there do actually exist objective truths about physics, and some of our subjective assessments might line up perfectly with what is actually true and what actually happened (the theory of gravity is probably, objectively, the way the universe actually works, for example). Even if intelligent life had never come into existence, they would still be applicable. Moral values on the other hand had absolutely no meaning whatsoever until one certain species of primate on one cosmic speck of dust reached a large enough brain capacity that they were capable of understanding concepts relating to suffering, empathy, so on and so forth. There's nothing anywhere to suggest that they have to behave in x or y way to be deemed "moral" by a set of principles which are completely unidentifiable by any method.

You haven't answered any other questions regarding why moral objectivity is for no discernible reason focused on human well being, how intelligent a species needs to be for moral truths to suddenly exist for them, why moral subjectivity is "bad" given the evidence shows the exact opposite, where or how we are supposed to discover these objective morals, etc etc. All of these point out how silly the notion of moral objectivity is. The only people who seriously try and claim that morality is objective are religious scholars who defect it towards God, but that argument is just as silly for several reasons.

We have a very strong intuitive feeling that murder is wrong, which has helped our societies flourish and has made the world a better place to live for sentient beings. An internal feeling, a subsidiary of our evolution, which is highly unlikely to dissipate and leave us killing and raping left and right. That's it.

Objectivity is not a continuum, it's a trichotomy. There's no such thing as "close enough to objectivity". It's not about what humans can know or can't know, it's about the nature of the knowledge itself and what it is that makes claims about it true or false. To say something is probably, objectively, true, illustrates your misunderstanding of the term "objective".

I haven't explained any of my reasons for having the normative theory fo ethics that I do because that is an entirely different debate from what we're having. Before we talk about what axioms we should assume in meta-ethics we need to establish that normative ethics can work in an objective manner. This applies to all disciplines. Before we assume axioms in physics, mathematics or economics we must first appreciate how data about the world can be analysed to come up with objective facts about the world, or about something anyway (one could argue mathematics doesn't talk about the world).

When theists talk about morality requiring God to be objective they are talking about ontological objectivity and it's correct that it requires God, to believe otherwise means one would have to believe in platonic objects which is just absurd. Of course, the problem for the theist is that it is still less likely that God exists than it is that morality is ontologically objectively true. Morality is not ontologically objectively true, that is to say, it doesn't exist as part of the world independent of humans, because morality doesn't exist at all, just like mathematics it's a human convention, not something that exists.

"We have a very strong intuitive feeling that murder is wrong, which has helped our societies flourish and has made the world a better place to live for sentient beings. An internal feeling, a subsidiary of our evolution, which is highly unlikely to dissipate and leave us killing and raping left and right. That's it."

You don't need anymore for an objective morality. You don't even need that.

Operational definitions, morality in my view doesn't exist but is also objective, because the contradiction resolves itself through human pragmatism, namely that since we need ethics we define the terms 'right' and 'wrong' ourselves, and that the most scientific a definiton of possible is the best possible one.