Refuting Christians with their Own Bible

[SteveII]

As I said, morality concerns the wellbeing of conscious creatures. It's like health - it's hard to define health as one thing, but it's easy to say what health isn't, e.g. Throwing up, getting cancer etc.

In the same way, wellbeing includes health but in this sense I would include things like Freedom. If I own you and can beat you and you are my property, you do not have freedom. You are a prisoner. You are controlled under threat of violence. Therefore it can be argued that my owning you is immoral, because it takes away your freedom and infringes on your wellbeing.

I would contrast this with many so-called moral systems that are systems of controlling human behaviour within society which do not hold human wellbeing as the highest value, such as in India where widows throw themselves on their dead husband's funeral pyres.

So far you have not described anything objective. These are all value judgments and subject to opinion.

If you think of morality in terms of wellbeing vs suffering you have an objective standard for morality. What's that you say? I said morality isn't objective? That's not actually what I said. What I said was, there isn't some standard abstract from conscious creatures. Morality isn't like a cosmological constant. But that doesn't mean it's just whatever we feel like at the time. It's about all of us as a species realising that we all experience life in first person, we can all suffer, and we can all flourish, and that it is in everyone's best interests if we work together and agree to respect each other, that we agree that my freedom to swing my fist ends at your face. It's about valuing each other's wellbeing enough not to infringe upon it for individual gain.

So why is the "well-being of conscious creatures" objectively 'good'? Ontologically speaking, why with evolution do you think we have a moral obligation to maximize well-being of conscious creatures? That is not even addressing the fact who gets to decide what well-being is? What if one person's suffering or denial of 'rights' creates well-being for many?

Our 'evolved' instinctive self-centeredness and selfishness will often undermine human flourishing. So, are we to say that up until this point evolved instincts and traits were beneficial but now are to be subjugated to a greater good mentality? Wouldn't that be the very definition of subjective?