Is morality objective or subjective?

[bennyboy]

That's right.  And this is the essential question-- does the existence of mind add anything to moral decisions, or is mind intrinsic to certain kinds of physical systems or functions?  Does our physiology (including that of the brain) DETERMINE our ideas and behaviors, or merely influence them?

I don't know the answer.  I'm a little on the theist side of this-- I think that perhaps mind means the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and so examining the function of the parts can't give a complete picture.

Damn....that's a really honest thing to say here. Sorry if any take offence to my surprise.

It wasn't long ago that most uhm....sceptics denied objective morality just because of supposed or presupposed implications.

It's good to see things change over time.

That was a good post.

I'm one of the few here who don't formally declare as atheist, so it shouldn't be that surprising. Don't start doing your victory lap yet!

It seems to me that even IF God were discovered to be real, or we had souls, then so long as there was anything predictable about their nature, they might be incorporated into science, and into definitions of material. We'd find a way to measure the presence of God in various people's mitochondrial DNA or something.

More likely, though, is that the truth of reality is so immeasurably incomprehensible that we could never know if there were a God or not-- it would be something we couldn't measure, and truth statements about God would come down to what physical correlates fit this or that person's semantics for evidence. Does the existence of mind in material constitute evidence, for example? I'd argue that since subjective experience fits none of the physical rules we've established, and in fact is not even determinable without making serious philosophical assumptions, that it might be. Most here would argue that if you shoot someone in the head, their mind will be gone, and so it's very obvious that whatever mind is, it's purely material.