Objective Morality?

[Captain Scarlet]

Morality without authority is no longer morality because a person cannot make an ought or should statement without any authority behind it (well they can but it is utterly meaningless). I still don’t quite follow what you mean by these objective relationships you keep referring to, what are they?

Then that is your assertion and an argument from incredulity, ie I just do see how….morality can be objective without an authority… When I have already demonstrated it.

Ok, now we are getting somewhere, I am understanding your position a bit better. I do see some logical misteps you have made here though.

Ah no you don't get away with this one so easily by just glossing over it. You have been regurgitating the same line here that you cant get an IS from an OUGHT on naturalistic grounds. I have showed you how, thus you need to concede this point, then we can move on.

SO would the following example also be valid?
DESIRE – To reproduce and pass ones genes on
FACT/IS – Reproducing and passing ones genes on requires sexual intercourse with females of the same species.
OUGHT – This person ought to have sexual intercourse with females of the same species.
OBJECTIVELY - therefore ‘sexual intercourse for reproductive purposes is never wrong even if it is not consensual.
That appears to take the exact same form as the example you gave even though it appears that desirism can therefore condone rape for reproductive purposes.

No invalid. It is a caricature of Desirism, you would need to read up on it for yourself. A coarse grained view of my understanding of it is that we have to maximize desires across the population. It may be the desire of certain individuals to rape (perhaps they were reading the bible at the time?). But unfortunately the relationship between those desires and the part of reality under evaluation, are at a distance from each other, ie lest examine a cartoon population of 100 people to make the maths easy. Person Xs personal desire meter registers a high score on the subject of rape say 99/100. The other 99 people feel rape is abhorrent given their desires to promote the emotional and sexual well being of themselves and those nearest to them. They also feel empathy with those who are not close relations. Thus on the remainder of the population, their personal desire meters on rape are 1/100. If this is the case then (given in reality these things are objectively true for homo sapiens that we do want to preserve our well being, our families well being well being and we do have empathy), then 99 people x 99 metered score = 9801 wins out over, 1 rapist x 99 metered points = 99. Therefore rape is objectively bad, and in all likelihood rape will be condemned and punished, whereas actions that thwart rape would be praised and rewarded. The ways in which this could be overturned is if natural morality is suppressed by some meme that gets injected externally (eg theology), that appears to condone rape and renders excuses to sick individuals who escape punishment and are to some degree rewarded by say some theistic demagogue.

Subjectivism only occurs if the individual is whimsical or prone to error, God is neither so this is a form of objective morality.

Which is something you cannot know and is an appeal to belief. You ascribe these attributes to a god but the very term god does not get off the ground because it is meaningless and lacks a positive definition.

It makes a huge difference. Saying an event will happen is not condoning that event, you have yet to provide a verse that condones anything like rape [snip]

So we’ll have to disagree. You are gonna think from your learned bible readings that the bible doesn’t really say that, and I’m gonna think it does. Your gonna think you have disproved it, and I think your dissembling. But I will not concede you any ground on this, I'm sure you wont either.

I smell Christopher Hitchens! Do you really think he is the best source to use for church history?

Its great that you trust to your senses and empiricism, you are developing. You are right in a narrow respect as I’ve heard Hitchens make several arguments about early xtian groups. Hitchens is rhetorically gifted and well read individual, but an average philosopher, scientist and historian. My source (as is the case here) for most of these matters is the now reformed x-fundie Ehrman.