Christians and Their Homework!

[chimp3]

Grounding morality on human happiness
I don't see how morality can be objectively grounded on human happiness or the prevention of pain. In order for something to be objective, it must remain true regardless of whether anyone agrees with it. Even if every human being on earth agreed that happiness was equivalent to the good, that wouldn't make it any more true than if every human being agreed that 2+2=5. And it seems like it's often the case that people do disagree with whether everyone's happiness matters equally (eg. Hitler), so I find it especially implausible for objective moral values to be grounded in something as fickle and arbitrary as the majority's conception of human happiness. The problem with grounding objective morality in happiness rears its ugly head in the plethora of unintuitive consequences that arise from utilitarianism as a moral theory (eg. condoning sadism and sacrificing some for the benefit of others). Now, if the argument is that morality is subjective and that's ok, then it would seem to me that because there's no objective standard with which to compare moral actions, morality itself would be illusory. Under moral relativism, the Holocaust will share the same moral status as aiding the poor; one action cannot be said to be more right than the other and morality is reduced to mere human taste and preference. If you share my intuition that there's something horribly wrong with this view, then I think you'd agree with me that there are such things as objective moral values.

God as the source of objective morality
So, if objective moral values do exist, then I think in virtue of being the maximally great being, God is the perfect candidate for being the objective source of morality. This doesn't mean that people who don't believe in God can't know or do good, nor does it mean that we don't have a responsibility to think hard about what is right or wrong. Positing God as the source of objective morality is an ontological statement, not an epistemic one. The Bible and God's revelations are certainly ways in which we can discover what these objective moral values are, but they definitely don't preclude reason, emotion, and intuition as tools of discernment.

All morality is human morality, even the moral teachings attributed to gods imagined by humans. Gods never have knowledge beyond their human creators and never have more ethical integrity.That is why they need humans to make excuses for them.