God & Objective Morals

[Neo-Scholastic]

… We know, for a fact, that pain is generally bad, and so we opt to define acts that produce pain as immoral ones. We recognize that we're social animals that depend on one another, and so we feel an impulse instilled in us by natural selection to cooperate and not to inflict painful acts on others, too.

For reasons I have posted about rather extensively elsewhere, I do not believe moral systems based on evolutionary psychology satisfy the requirements a moral system should have. Primarily because certain behaviors generally accepted as immoral, like rape, may in fact assist the survival of genetic material for some low-status individuals. Using pain and pleasure as an index of morality, like Utilitarianism, involves a highly arbitrary assessment of what degree of pleasure offsets what degree of pain (or loss) and to what degree these are spread among individuals.

You're my favourite member.

Well gee thanks.

…does..morality [need] to be a "physical" thing? Does that mean that we can literally see the good in certain actions, we can actually point to a physical thing and say "look, that's 'goodness' right there

To some extent yes. What I mean by physical reduction is this. You can translate everyday descriptions about abstract terms, like goodness, directly into the language of physics. You can say something like this action is fair because it satisfies certain criteria, perhaps a utilitarian one: For example you could define fair as the measurable difference between the neural states of the benefiting subjects and compare them with the neural states of the losing subjects multiplied by the index of genetic information preservation. So, you can indeed point to the output of the equation as say, “The results are in and we have detected goodness.”

This may seem silly and I think it is. But that is only because I do not identify the mind completely in terms of brain-states. But that is exactly what physicalist explanations of the mind-body problem entail: that every mental process can be described in terms of physical processes without any consideration of the qualitative content of consciousness. In contrast, I believe mental processes have features that prevent them from being reduced entirely to the brain’s observable physical processes. Hence all my quibbling on threads about consciousness.

Either way, I think for morality to be objective, it means that we can come to know of it a priori since we don't require anything physical or a posteriori to reasonably know if something is right or wrong.

If that a priori knowledge is not based entirely on a physical system, like the brain and its physical context, then you cannot truly call it objective since it cannot be empirically observed. That knowledge would be purely deductive, i.e. a categorical imperative. That keeps it in the subjective realm of qualitative mental properties.

If morality is ultimately arbitrary, then what does it mean for something to be "fair", "just" or even "good"? Our moral compass doesn't do us any good if morality is arbitrary.

But it need not be arbitrary if, oh say…there was an infinitely wise and just God, who evaluates the love found in our behavior against Himself, the standard of perfect love. At this point you wonder which god would exemplify this type of perfect love. I already know Exi's and Godchild's answers. As for me I'll hold off on opening that can of worms.