My views on objective morality

[Kiekeben]

There's an angle we haven't talked about yet.  If there is NO God, then what is the real difference between "subjective" and "objective"?  Wouldn't "subjective" morality be a product of determinist chemistry, brain function, DNA, environment, etc. anyway?  In other words, wouldn't the "subjective" sense of it be simply the experience of it, and the "objective" sense of it be the actual mechanism of moral thought and behavior?

It seems to me that the LACK of God makes an objective morality way more likely than the existence of one.  The only problem is that our objective morality, so far as we are concerend, might be completely arbitrary-seeming anyway.

Unfortunately, the words "objective" and "subjective" are used in more than one sense, and I'm not sure you mean the same thing by them here that CL (following the video by Peter Kreeft she referred to) was using. 

In these type of discussions, subjective usually seems to mean "dependent on the attitude or response someone has." So for instance, if I say "ice cream tastes good," my statement is subjective because what I am claiming depends on my response to the ice cream. It is not a statement about the ice cream's properties in themselves so much at it is an expression of my attitude toward those properties. A chemist could examine the make up of the ice cream thoroughly and never find the property of goodness in it. And if you think the ice cream tastes bad, there is nothing the chemist could investigate in the ice cream to determine which one of us is right and which one wrong - there is no fact about who's right and who's wrong.

Something is objective if it does not depend on someone's response to it. That the ice cream measures one pint, for example, is objective. So is the fact that I like the ice cream and you don't (that's an objective fact about us). 

I say morality is subjective because I think that claiming that something is morally good or bad, etc., depends on one's attitude towards that thing. It is not a claim about the properties of the thing itself, independent of what anyone feels about it. So, although I maintain that torturing someone for fun is always wrong, I do not mean by that that there is a fact about the action of torturing someone that makes it wrong - such that one could determine by examining the action itself that it really is wrong, and that anyone who disagrees is making a factual mistake. In saying it is always wrong, I am merely expressing my complete disapproval of it.

Note that saying morality is subjective does not mean one cannot claim that it is absolute in the above sense (where one can maintain that something is always wrong). Nor does it mean one does not take it seriously: I'm every bit as passionate about preventing such torture as someone who believes it is objectively wrong might be.

As to God, I don't see what he has to do with it either way. His existence wouldn't make morality objective, and his nonexistence isn't the reason it's subjective.