In Defense of a Non-Natural Moral Order

[downbeatplumb]

Hello Acrobat,

I actually signed up to answer your question.  My answer is informed by Objectivist principles so it will probably be very different from other answers you've gotten in the past.  Good and bad or good and evil are value judgments and as such, I don't think they exist outside the mind-reality relationship or the subject-object relationship. The subject is the conscious knower and the object is the thing that the knower is aware of. 

The concept "value" presupposes the answer to two questions:  of value to whom and for what? The who is a living being, the what is the life of that being.  Morality in my view is a code of values and principles to guide one's actions and choices for the purpose of living.  Every living being faces the alternative of life vs. death and every living thing must act in order to live.  Every living thing has a specific identity and specific conditions must be met in order for it to not take a dirt nap.  Some things and actions are bad, harm its life, and other things are good, further its life.  If it takes no action or the wrong action it dies.  If it takes the right action it lives.  So right there you can see that good and bad are inextricably tied to life.  It's only to a living thing that things can be good or bad.  A rock has no values, a fox does.  Man is no different.  To live he must have values.  The values he needs are determined by his nature.  To say that values exist outside of nature is wrong.  Values are a type of fact.  They are facts judged in relation to man's nature and the project of living. That is the standard of moral judgment:  your life and its requirements or to put it more abstractly, man's life and its requirements.  You can't get more objective than that.  Surely you agree that we all have needs and values that we share that are not a matter of opinion?

That is what an objective moral value identifies;  Not your personal preference, but what your nature as a Human being requires.  

Man's most basic need is the need to think and he needs to be free to think and to act on his judgment, i.e., he needs to be free of coercion by force.  As Yaron Brook often says, if someone puts a gun to your head and says that 2+2=5, and if you say it equals 4 he'll pull the trigger, could you think?  Could you balance your checkbook, build a bridge, invent a printing press or launch a satellite into space?

Force and reason are opposites.  Force or the threat of force destroys man's ability to think and to act on his thinking.  Therefore force is evil.  That is, the initiation of force is evil, always. The only moral use of force is in defense.  

So let's look at the Holocaust and judge whether it was good or bad?  Did it involve the initiation of force?  Certainly.  Was it bad? Certainly, regardless of whether the Germans thought it was good or the whole of the people on Earth, i.e., it was objectively bad.  Did the allies have the moral right to use force against the Nazi's? Certainly.  Now apply the same principle to rape, murder, theft, lying, cheating, fraud, etc.?

Those are my thoughts.

The Nazis saw the Jews as a greater evil so in their twisted morality getting rid of the jews was the moral thing.

Many of them didn't like doing it (some did and enjoyed it) but they did it for the "greater good".

You can see the same sort of thing happening in the US today with the demonization of immigrants, democrats and Muslims by the president ,where people feel that killing those people or putting them in concentration camps is in some way good.

What I am saying is that morality is quite flexible and is prone to change from outside influences.

Homosexuality was considered immoral but is now accepted (and so it should be)  slavery is now seen as wrong where for most of human history it was ok.

So morality IS subjective but is subjective to society at large not one individual. Richard Dawkins called this the zeitgeist.