If morality is subjective...

[robvalue]

Accepting an objective moral standard makes you entirely amoral. You are without morals. You blindly do what you are told, ignoring your own observations about the help or hindrance of your actions upon others.

And no theists do this anyway. They cherry pick, the honest ones will admit this. But even if they didn't, the usual books are so filled with contradictions that you can't follow it all consistently, it's impossible. So you end up making choices about how to resolve these problems, hence you're making your own moral judgement.

Proper morality is pretty easy to grasp for anyone who understands what helps someone and what hurts them. There are very few people who could honestly claim they have no idea. To throw all your empathy, reasoning and even gut instincts away to adhere to an arbitrary "rule" that everything about you tells you is wrong, is... wrong. The only reason to behave this way is out of fear. Like someone has a gun to your head, or your loved ones. Of course, this is exactly the case with religion. God holds your soul hostage while you dance to his arbitrary tune. Or rather, what people tell you is his tune. And they can't even remotely agree what that tune is.

Only a sociopath could truly say that they think all subjective "morality" is equally valid. It's a desperate theist rationalization. Secular society has laws, but it doesn't dictate morality down to the letter like religion, so that is another false equivocation that's often made. Also, theists would want the law to be upheld, even against people acting in accordance to the holy book they worship.

[Pyrrho]

Then how do we answer the theist argument - If there are no objective or absolute moral standards then every individual's moral spectrum is equally valid, and therefore practices, actions and habits like murder, sex assault, violence, mutilation, torture...[the list goes on] should be perfectly acceptable and not censored in human societies.

[I'm sorry if the answer is obvious but I don't know how to refute this one]

The conclusion does not follow because it is itself a moral judgement. If morality is subjective, then there is no reason to accept the claim that all actions are perfectly acceptable and should not be censored. That someone accepts that idea does not entail the idea that I should, if morality is subjective.

The idea that every action is acceptable (and should be to everyone) is an absolute moral judgment, which is rejected by the premise.


It is also worth mentioning that the idea that morality is subjective is neither entailed by atheism, nor is it necessarily rejected by theism. A theist may, for example, assert that morality is subjective, but you had better go along with god's ideas or he will do things to you that you would rather not have done.

[answer-is-42]

why do people constantly confuse morality with legality. Morality is the system of what we should and and should not do and it IS subjective to each of us and the born from the society we came from. Of course we Can judge each other's moralities and actions. That's our each individual right.
Legality is what you Must or must not do and comes from the social contract we have with each other in the form of our governance to achieve and maintain our defined society. These laws may or may not be moral. There are plenty of examples of immoral actions that are legal and even of moral actions that are illegal. Even more so since there are varied definitions of morality.
Long story short morality |= legality

[Thumpalumpacus]

Morality is contingent, but not subjective. It depends on things like human nature, and the family and community we learn our morality from. If I grow up in a racist family, there's a good chance I will end up racist, too. That's a contingency; I didn't decide that I would have that influence on my morality, nor do I really have much say in how I react to that environment, whether I rebel or not, it's a matter of contingent factors in my life. Morality is part human nature and part inheritance. If I grew up in a country where racism was accepted, I would develop a different morality than if I grew up in a country that abhorred racism. It's contingent, not subjective.

One can choose one's morality. My mother was raised in Texas in the 50s, and raised to be racist, but she made a conscious decision to not buy into that crap.

I agree that sociocultural norms play a big role, but at the same time, they aren't cast in metal. After all, many of us here were raised -- which is another way to say programmed -- to believe in the god of the Bible, and yet we were able to think our way through that programming.

I think that morality is both subjective, and relative.

---

"What makes you think a morality based on your faith is objective?"

Arguing from the POV of a theist - Since God exists, then moral values commanded by Him are undeniable and absolute - Therefore objective

Given the fact that those values aren't abstractions which can be justified on their own terms, they aren't absolute; they're relative. And because whether or not you should practice them depends on your point of view, they aren't objective.

[DeistPaladin]

Then how do we answer the theist argument - If there are no objective or absolute moral standards then every individual's moral spectrum is equally valid, and therefore practices, actions and habits like murder, sex assault, violence, mutilation, torture...[the list goes on] should be perfectly acceptable and not censored in human societies.

[I'm sorry if the answer is obvious but I don't know how to refute this one]

I've said it many times before.

"Subjective" does not mean "all opinions are equal".

Some subjective evaluations are based on evidence, including objective data, are supported by logical arguments and internally consistent. Other subjective evaluations are based only on the bare assertions of the people making them. Therefore, some subjective evaluations are stronger than others.

If this were not so, every court case would end with a hung jury because, gee whiz, the prosecution says "guilty" and the defense says "not guilty" and who can say who's opinion is right or wrong?

Morality is "subjective" because we can't plug numbers into a spreadsheet and determine what is right or wrong. The fact that we say "moral judgment" and "moral values" tacitly admits morality is a subjective evaluation, since "objective" by definition means "free from personal judgment, values or opinions".

How would "objective" morality even work? Can morality be measured by units of measure like temperature, velocity or mass? No. We debate what is "right" or "wrong" by philosophical arguments, not scientific study.

All this ignores that the whole argument is a fallacious "appeal to consequence". If you believe that without a god, there is no morality, that would not make God real. Just because you don't want something to be true doesn't mean that it isn't. The universe doesn't care what you want to be true.

[bennyboy]

Then how do we answer the theist argument - If there are no objective or absolute moral standards then every individual's moral spectrum is equally valid, and therefore practices, actions and habits like murder, sex assault, violence, mutilation, torture...[the list goes on] should be perfectly acceptable and not censored in human societies.

[I'm sorry if the answer is obvious but I don't know how to refute this one]

Because morals come from what people dislike. We don't like killing, and have no reason to violate others' dislike of dying.