Apologetics open challenge

[robvalue]

MK: No one can agree on exactly what "good" and "bad" mean, so yes, they are arbitrary. What is "good" for one person may be "bad" for another, and vice versa. It just so happens that most of humans have a general overlap with these concepts. This evolutionary result is not evidence for objective morality. If you come up with even a general list most people agree on, not everyone will agree with you. Do you just announce they are wrong, by appeal to popularity? If they don't believe in the same goals of morality as you, who gets to say which goal is better? You have to first assume one goal to be better before even making this judgement, hence it's circular.

You said that objective morality is "doing the right thing". People can only do what they think is the right thing. Say I'm a Christian and I truly believe killing non-Christians who won't convert is the right thing to do. That would make it objectively moral by your standards, right? But to most people, this would be considered immoral. So it's not objective at all.

If you insist that what someone considers to be the "right thing" agrees with your own definition, then you're simply holding up your own subjective morality as the correct objective moral standard. That is making yourself the god of morality.

We start off by trying to agree what is "good" and what is "bad". If we agree for example that being alive is generally good, being happy is good, being well is good, being dead is bad, suffering is bad, hurting people is bad.... and so on... we can then build a subjective but relative morality. We can argue that some things are more moral than others, within this framework. But until we agree what things are good and bad, we can't do anything. Just announcing that some things are inherently good or bad doesn't make it so. An action is ultimately just a bunch of particles moving around, and is not objectively "good" or "bad". It only seems that way from the point of view of a sentient being. And this is a judgement, not a measurement.

Back to reality, and this part is important. Because we do generally agree in each society about what is good and what is bad, enough so to have a reasonable majority, then we are generally happy to live by these principles. We don't have any choice, we have to pick some basis of behaviour. "Good" is what society generally agrees is "good", nothing more.

As another example, I'm a vegan. I think killing animals for food, and owning them as property, is wrong. Society, by the vast majority, disagrees. Who is "objectively" right? In the future, it may well be that this changes and animals are no longer treated this way. The society then would look back and think our society was immoral. But most people right now think it is fine. So how is this objective? It's ultimately a matter of opinion. If there is objective morality, eating meat is either moral, immoral or neutral. Which is it, and who gets to say so? The goals of my morality are different from the general goals of society right now, simple as that. Objectively, my goals are no better or worse, because such an objective comparison is meaningless.