Moral epistemology and moral ontology

[Weren]

I don't believe in completely objective morality no.

However I don't think something as severe as killing is just a matter of opinion.
I believe our only real(though not exactly objective) moral compass is empathy with the combination of rational thought.
For the large part most of our important moral laws are already based on that(for example killing, raping and other forms of violence).
You'd have hard time finding a person who thinks that killing in its very self is alright, some people think it's OK if you kill for a
good reason(War, execution of mass murderer, self defense), but I'd argue that's for the large part because of suppressed empathy(Because of feelings of revenge,
hate or a forced down dogma among other reasons). Institutions where empathy doesn't serve a purpose can vary from military where feeling empathy for your
enemies is most likely not going to help you win a fight - to prison where showing empathy can be seen as a sign of weakness, which can warrant you a lot of trouble
in that environment. Also some ideologies, religions and cultures can portray some class of people as inferior or evil, and can hammer empathy for that
group of people out of the their members by growing them into the ideology or suppressing rational thought with various forms of propaganda and brainwashing.

So even if you cannot judge people for not doing the "right" thing(Because there is no definitive right and wrong),
you can judge them for not using empathy or suppressing it.
I'd say the more minor and more artifical moral rules though, like sexual age of consent, are more a matter of public opinion.

Does that make sense to anyone? 

[GOBBLINKINGREATLEADER]

wow EU scum took an entire six posts to satisfy godwin

[Xant]

Very good, except Nazis were referenced in the OP. Strong math skills otherwise.

[Huscarlton_Banks]

You might be interested in this book, I took the course and ended up TAing for it twice while earning my bachelor's in biology.

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Distance-Birth-Humane-Universe-ebook/dp/B004X2HRR0/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=

Greater scale of cooperation seems to arise with advents of inexpensive, democratic methods (anyone can afford, use) of suppressing conflicts of interest.

(melee -> throwing -> atlatl -> bow -> cannon -> firearms)

A sense of moral obligation/shame between non-kin humans can be seen as an adaptation that arises in the context of an environment that heavily punishes "cheating". (murder, stealing, disobeying traditions/beliefs etc) The idea of absolute morality seems to just be another social construction, based on the behaviors of animals toward non-kin in situations where conflicts of interest exceed the cost to pursue those interests.

Many social practices that major religions have today arose from ages where power was concentrated in "elite warrior" societies via expensive body armor/intense training needed to use weapons (and thus, generated practices that favor elite warriors) with the most powerful messages being:

Recognize leaders and their descendants as directly being chosen by <x deity here> to rule
Similarly, be humble and be willing to serve/give whatever the leader wants because you'll be rewarded in the afterlife/be punished if you don't
Behave (do not murder, cheat, steal unless in a specific situation that the dogma/leader specifically tells you to do so, generally towards apostates and/or those of another nationality/religion)

This has waned somewhat in modern societies, but theocratic states still exist.

[_schizo321437]

I don't believe in completely objective morality no.

However I don't think something as severe as killing is just a matter of opinion.
I believe our only real(though not exactly objective) moral compass is empathy with the combination of rational thought.
For the large part most of our important moral laws are already based on that(for example killing, raping and other forms of violence).
You'd have hard time finding a person who thinks that killing in its very self is alright, some people think it's OK if you kill for a
good reason(War, execution of mass murderer, self defense), but I'd argue that's for the large part because of suppressed empathy(Because of feelings of revenge,
hate or a forced down dogma among other reasons). Institutions where empathy doesn't serve a purpose can vary from military where feeling empathy for your
enemies is most likely not going to help you win a fight - to prison where showing empathy can be seen as a sign of weakness, which can warrant you a lot of trouble
in that environment. Also some ideologies, religions and cultures can portray some class of people as inferior or evil, and can hammer empathy for that
group of people out of the their members by growing them into the ideology or suppressing rational thought with various forms of propaganda and brainwashing.

So even if you cannot judge people for not doing the "right" thing(Because there is no definitive right and wrong),
you can judge them for not using empathy or suppressing it.
I'd say the more minor and more artifical moral rules though, like sexual age of consent, are more a matter of public opinion.

Does that make sense to anyone? 

"empathy for your enemies is most likely not going to help you win a fight"

You mean sympathy. Not empathy.

"psychopaths are aware of the feelings of others when they hurt someone because their cognitive empathy is intact even if affective empathy is not"

[Weren]

You mean sympathy. Not empathy.

Yeah. 

[_schizo321437]

Okay, Sun-tzu's ghost was getting pissy. 

[Clockworkkiller]

goddamnit man, why cant you make some stupid threads so us stupid people can participate

[Xant]

Can we be good without God? At first the answer to this question may seem so obvious that even to pose it arouses indignation. For while those of us who are Christian theists undoubtedly find in God a source of moral strength and resolve which enables us to live lives that are better than those we should live without Him, nevertheless it would seem arrogant and ignorant to claim that those who do not share a belief in God do not often live good moral lives--indeed, embarrassingly, lives that sometimes put our own to shame.

But wait. It would, indeed, be arrogant and ignorant to claim that people cannot be good without belief in God. But that was not the question. The question was: can we be good without God? When we ask that question, we are posing in a provocative way the meta-ethical question of the objectivity of moral values. Are the values we hold dear and guide our lives by mere social conventions akin to driving on the left versus right side of the road or mere expressions of personal preference akin to having a taste for certain foods or not? Or are they valid independently of our apprehension of them, and if so, what is their foundation? Moreover, if morality is just a human convention, then why should we act morally, especially when it conflicts with self-interest? Or are we in some way held accountable for our moral decisions and actions?

Today I want to argue that if God exists, then the objectivity of moral values, moral duties, and moral accountability is secured, but that in the absence of God, that is, if God does not exist, then morality is just a human convention, that is to say, morality is wholly subjective and non-binding. We might act in precisely the same ways that we do in fact act, but in the absence of God, such actions would no longer count as good (or evil), since if God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. Thus, we cannot truly be good without God. On the other hand, if we do believe that moral values and duties are objective, that provides moral grounds for believing in God.

Consider, then, the hypothesis that God exists. First, if God exists, objective moral values exist. To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. It is to say, for example, that chocolate chip cookie anti-Semitism was morally wrong, even though the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust thought that it was good; and it would still be wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them.

[Taser]

There is no morality at all. It is all emotional. Emotivism.

This also follows from a nihilistic framework.

So can people be "good" without god? Only to the point of what they perceive as good to themselves and to a society. But different people have different perspectives on what "good" is so one person might be considered a hero to many and a villan to others even within the same society or community let alone among different societies, ie chocolate chip cookies and H ilter.

So can people truly be good? No. Neither can they be truly bad. They cannot do anything of any real value either. But that's too depressing for most people and kind of off the topic. Its related when one is a nihilist but only if one goes down that path.

[Huscarlton_Banks]

...

Old argument, it basically boils down to "If god(s) exists, then whatever He/She/They/It says is objective morality, because god", which is a very arbitrary form of morality.

Problems arise with this idea when:

Beliefs blatantly change (new holy books by "inspired" individuals, new prophets with radically different beliefs of an afterlife)

Rules blatantly change (often hand-waved with new covenants, X is not okay/okay back in the old days because God said it was, now it is okay/now it is not okay because he changed his mind)

There are multiple such religions with "objective moral values" that conflict with one another, especially if they are extremely recent religions in the context of how far back behaviorally modern human ancestry goes. (Hundreds of thousands of years of no objective moral values?)

The "true" religion(s) arise exclusively in a notably poor, illiterate society during an age in which there are multiple societies that are much larger, wealthier, and more capable of spreading the religion that coexist with them in the world. (Why not "inspire" someone/send a prophet to every society with the same religion? Why deprive such societies of the "true" faith for at least a few hundred years of its existence?)

Similarly, why do primitive societies exist that have never had contact with any of these "true" religions?

More on this:

Divine Command Theory

The divine command theory (DCT) of ethics holds that an act is either moral or immoral solely because God either commands us to do it or prohibits us from doing it, respectively. On DCT the only thing that makes an act morally wrong is that God prohibits doing it, and all that it means to say that torture is wrong is that God prohibits torture. DCT is wildly implausible for reasons best illustrated by the Euthyphro dilemma, which is based on a discussion of what it means for an act to be holy in Plato's Euthyphro. Substituting "moral wrongness" for "holiness" raises the dilemma: Is torture wrong because God prohibits it, or does God prohibit torture because it is already wrong?

While DCT takes the the first route, Euthyphro takes the last one: If a good God prohibits torture he does so because torture is intrinsicly wrong, not merely because he declares torture to be wrong by fiat. But if torture is intrinsicly wrong, then it is wrong regardless of whether or not God exists. Either certain acts are wrong regardless of anyone's opinions or commands (including God's), or else all that we mean by "torture is wrong" is "God prohibits torture." Rather than grounding the objectivity of ethics, DCT completely undermines it by insisting that God's commands (like those of individuals or societies) do not require justification in terms of any external principles.

DCT is thus a kind of moral relativism: what's right or wrong is what one's God (like one's self or one's society) says is right or wrong--and there are no moral standards apart from this. Yet if God said that 2+2=100, 2+2=100 would nonetheless be false because 2+2=4 is true regardless of what God says. The same point holds for moral propositions like "inflicting unnecessary suffering solely for fun is wrong." If that proposition is true, then it is true regardless of whether God commands or prohibits inflicting such suffering.

If there is no standard of "being morally right" apart from God's commands, then God could literally command us to do anything and it would be right for us to do it by definition. Whatever God commands becomes the standard of moral rightness, and there are no moral values external to God to constrain what he would or would not command. So if God commanded one person to rape another, DCT entails that that rape would be moral because "doing the right thing" is logically equivalent to "doing what God commands." A highly implausible implication is that it is impossible to even imagine God commanding a wrong act. What counts as moral or immoral behavior on DCT is completely subjective--dependent upon God's fiat--and thus arbitrary.

While some retort that goodness flows from God's nature, this merely changes the form of the dilemma: Is compassion good because it is a part of God's nature, or is compassion a part of God's nature because it is already good? The first option produces problems parallel to those for DCT. If malice were a part of God's nature, for instance, it is doubtful that malice would automatically be good. If there are any objective moral standards at all, then a god can be either good or evil, and the assessment of a god's character would depend upon appealing to standards independent of any god's commands, opinions, statements, nature, or character.

We act "morally" with non-kin when it conflicts with self-interest because humans are extremely good at suppressing conflicts of interest via coercive threat. There is nothing stopping you from picking up a weapon and assaulting an unsuspecting bystander to rob them, but you run the risk of being caught and punished. The main idea being, acting as a "criminal" should be so costly towards your own well-being or those closely related to you that doing "honest work" is the best strategy for passing on your genetic material.

Non-human animals are often shown cooperating or getting along with one another when humans raise them in captivity (thereby suppressing their conflicts of interest by providing all food/shelter/guaranteeing that they will pass down their genetics/making them believe they are a familial unit), or in the wild when there is little to no direct competition between them (hence, no motivation to lie) while there is a benefit for cooperation.

[[ptx]]

I believe that morality is a social custom, but disagree, that this would prevent us from condemning those, that deviate from it.

A social custom is what you have to adhere to, if you wish to be part of that society. If you break it, that society has every right to judge and expel or punish you.

[Xant]

Then how would you react if it was an approved social custom to kill ethnic group X, just because they belong to said ethnic group? That wouldn't be wrong, then, since it is a social custom? The strength of every 'moral' we have comes only from the contemporary society that enforces it, a sort of morality-by-majority, whatever the group you belong to decides is moral, is?

[[ptx]]

It is probably not wrong, from their perspective. Although, imo, it wasn't an exactly accepted social custom, more like an enforced ideology.

If you cannot accept the customs of a society, you can try to isolate yourself from that society or seek a different one, if such exists - or you can try to change the society, if you can.

What is "morally acceptable" changes all the time, and not just over the course of a few hundred years. In mainstream "Western" society, taboos have changed radically in just the last 20-30 years. I imagine, in another 20-30 years, we will look back and shudder at how "immoral" we were now.

[Weren]

Some interesting points, I think this is what Christo might have been going after in his post.