We should take the Moral Highground

[DeistPaladin]

We can and do deem things as moral or immoral. The question lies in who or what serves as the ultimate standard or arbiter for determining which is which.

I've mentioned the social contract before as you do later in this post.

In the absence of an ultimate standard or arbiter, each person is left on their own. The individual then becomes their own ultimate authority, each with equal claim for what is right and wrong, rational or irrational. While I could appeal to ideals like human dignity and ‘the golden rule’, another could deny both, and there would be no common thing to which either of us could point to prove the other wrong.

Anyone who denies the social contract is committing hypocrisy. How can you condone the treatment of another that you would not tolerate on you? Being unrepentantly evil toward our fellow sentients is logically inconsistent.

The alternative is to assert the existence of some transcendent authority, principle or standard that applies to all individuals.

Actually, appealing to or asserting the existence of God does nothing to elucidate either our understanding of what is moral or what morality is. All it does is move the problem back a step and provide a needless factor in the problem.

In sum: GodWillsIt is just as unsatisfying to our need to understand ethical dilemmas as GodDidIt is unsatisfying to our need to unravel scientific mysteries.

If God decides on morality, as a celestial lawgiver, this is still arbitrary and subjective morality by definition. Appeals to God's authority in such matters is the essence of might-makes-right that you are trying to avoid. No matter how wise, powerful or trusted God may be, if God decides what is or isn't moral, this is not an objective standard by definition.

If God determines what is moral, as a celestial arbiter, then morality exists outside of God and can be discovered by our own inquiries. That which is right and wrong would continue to remain so even if God went away, changed Its mind or turned out never to have existed in the first place.

Christians, aware of this dilemma, are known to babble about how it's both and neither one. The babble usually goes something along the lines of "the essence of goodness is grounded in the very nature of God and so God neither decides what is moral nor discovers it but simply is." If I'm not quite representing the attempted escape clause correctly, please forgive me but I think that's the jist. The problems with this apologetic drivel are legion:

1. WTF does it even mean? "Essence of goodness"? Is it a substance in the body of a deity? Are there goodness molecules? This bare assertion borders on the incoherent.
2. It's a bare assertion.
3. It's prone to circular pitfalls. How do we know Yahweh is good? Because Yahweh is good. And that's how we know that Yahweh's will is good because goodness is Yahweh's will. Yahweh wills what he wills and so his will is always good because goodness is bound into his will.
4. It's a contrived definition to arrive at the desired conclusion.
5. It only moves the dilemma one step back. Does Yahweh decide what his nature is? If so, it's arbitrary. If not, goodness exists as a standard outside of Yahweh.

Absent that true morality does not exist. No one has the ‘right’ to demand others behave in a particular way, because right do not exist. This leaves power as the only ultimate authority. I call that nihilism.

I call that the false dilemma fallacy.