RE: General question about the possibility of objective moral truth
September 14, 2015 at 2:01 pm
(This post was last modified: September 14, 2015 at 2:14 pm by Mudhammam.)
@ChadW
What's wrong with the following?
If God is the essence of the Good, that excludes the possibility of God doing wrong. That eliminates his freedom of the will, as all his actions would proceed on account of necessity (given his inability to do less than what he might otherwise choose to do) and lack the essential moral quality that the Good as embodied in willful action requires. How do you reconcile God's supposed freedom to act on the one hand, and his lack of freedom to do other than what is - on account of a standard he is both bound to by necessity and owes to fortune (if it is his nature, he cannot credit himself for what he lacked the freedom to attain) - essentially Good? In other words, the Good theoretical free beings attain or bring about is actually qualitatively better than the Good that is represented by such a God or his acts as as you define them.
All of this, of course, ignores the inherent contradiction entailed by an unchanging being acting in the first place.
What's wrong with the following?
If God is the essence of the Good, that excludes the possibility of God doing wrong. That eliminates his freedom of the will, as all his actions would proceed on account of necessity (given his inability to do less than what he might otherwise choose to do) and lack the essential moral quality that the Good as embodied in willful action requires. How do you reconcile God's supposed freedom to act on the one hand, and his lack of freedom to do other than what is - on account of a standard he is both bound to by necessity and owes to fortune (if it is his nature, he cannot credit himself for what he lacked the freedom to attain) - essentially Good? In other words, the Good theoretical free beings attain or bring about is actually qualitatively better than the Good that is represented by such a God or his acts as as you define them.
All of this, of course, ignores the inherent contradiction entailed by an unchanging being acting in the first place.
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza