(October 1, 2018 at 6:08 pm)possibletarian Wrote: Personally since I became athiest I've never understood the need of people to have objective moral values, when it seems clear to me that they never existed other than as tribal or national laws, and being enforceable and failure to comply meant punishment they took on the semblance of objective.
I take issue with the use of the term, "the need." It is a matter of fact whether morality is objective or not. If it isn't objective, then, you are correct. If it is, then I'm correct.
Our "needs" have nothing to do with it. If I was dangling from a cliff, I might need the law of gravity to not be a real objective thing, at least until I got to safety. But my needs would be irrelevant, wouldn't they? Same goes for moral reality. If something is objective, it exists independently of opinions, wants, or needs.
"Since I've become a simple potato farmer, I've never understood the need of people to understand the laws of physics," would be an analogue to the bolded portion of your quote. Just because you don't see how something fits into your worldview, doesn't mean it isn't a real thing. To me, morality is a real objective thing in the same way justice is real objective thing... in the same way numbers are real objective things. You might see no need to ever do geometry, but that doesn't render geometry fictitious.
You could say, "numbers aren't real," but then you'd have to say "physics isn't real"... (at least, those parts of physics which are expressed by mathematics).
You can certainly argue that morality isn't real. I may very well be wrong about it being real. But let's be clear: It either does objectively exist or it doesn't, regardless of what people may want or need.
