Atheism and Ethics

[Lucian]

I'm using it as a standard, and it's easily the most common standard on earth.  You think "an objective standard can be applied to it"... I have to ask, what do you think realism is saying if not that?

Ok, we are talking past each other
Harm exists. I agree. 
We can say we ought to minimise harm unnecessarily and that we can apply a standard we can morality against such actions. Wonderful
We can say that this is some sort of binding principle true regardless of what people believe.  Balderdash; no such binding principle exists, indeed there are no universals that have any kind of ethical normative force. 

There is the disagreement in an oversimplified form between a form of moral realism and someone who denies it like I do. Moral realism without that latter part and a discussion of normative force (not normative ethics) just isn’t moral realism as far as I understand it, and perhaps that is just me being ignorant
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[The Grand Nudger]

We pick up and drop moral principles at our convenience no matter what the metaethical reality is. So I don't think that any moral anything is binding in that way, or that there's a "moral force" if that's what you mean. You can report a fact. You can't make people care about facts or even that fact if they otherwise do care about facts. I like to think we're persuadable - but we're also specifically incompetent...so......might be a wash, lol.

Universalism is a heavy lift for me, too. I think you'd have to believe at least one of two things to be a moral universalist. Either that the specific facts of a matter have never or can never change, or that the specific facts of a matter are not the truth making properties. The first seems demonstrably false, and the latter is anti-realist (insomuch as it rejects objectivity as a/the moral making property).

[Disagreeable]

@The Grand Nudger How do you define "wrongness"?

[Lucian]

We pick up and drop moral principles at our convenience no matter what the metaethical reality is.  So I don't think that any moral anything is binding in that way, or that there's a "moral force" if that's what you mean.  You can report a fact.  You can't make people care about facts or even that fact if they otherwise do care about facts.  I like to think we're persuadable - but we're also specifically incompetent...so......might be a wash, lol.  

Ok, so I mean binding in that there is an ought built into it. It isn’t just a fact about harm existing and being able to be put on a scale of most harm to least harm, it means you ought not hurt people. That ought is not something that cares about your opinion on a given act in many instances (although it could be relevant in some). That notion of morality making claims about what you should do is kind of the whole point to me of a moral realist view, it is binding but not in some mechanistic manner. That is what the error theorists or the expressivist denies.

[The Grand Nudger]

Sure about that? Do you deny subjective oughts?

You and I have different ideas about the point of a realist moral view. I think the point is accuracy, not binding oughts. All moral systems of any kind possess normative content. I don't have to go to realism to get that.

[The Grand Nudger]

@The Grand Nudger How do you define "wrongness"?

In a very boring and completely non novel way.

[Lucian]

Sure about that?  Do you deny subjective oughts?

You and I have different ideas about the point of a realist moral view.  I think the point is accuracy, not binding oughts.  All moral systems of any kind possess normative content.  I don't have to go to realism to get that.

Fair enough

[Disagreeable]

@The Grand Nudger How do you define "wrongness"?

In a very boring and completely non novel way.

How would you respond to a Divine Command Theorist who says that God could mass kill a whole bunch of humans and it wouldn't be morally wrong because what's morally right is whatever God wills? How would you argue for your own definition of moral goodness?

[no one]

Morality is what I say is right.

Immorality is what I say is wrong.

[Sheldon]

In a very boring and completely non novel way.

How would you respond to a Divine Command Theorist who says that God could mass kill a whole bunch of humans and it wouldn't be morally wrong because what's morally right is whatever God wills? How would you argue for your own definition of moral goodness?

If the morality of his concept of a deity, falls short of the morality of an evolved ape, why would I care what he claims that deity thinks or wants. That's assuming he could demonstrate in any objective way that this deity exists of course, if he can't then he might as well be describing the moral views of villain from a comic book.