God & Objective Morals

[FallentoReason]

…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.”

Hmm interesting. I can think of a certain type of case where this wouldn't work though: Nazis killing Jews. We can look at the neural state of the dead Jew and say "well, there is no neural state, so the net value is zero" then we can look at the Nazi and say "there is a positive neural state" and come to the conclusion that killing Jews is 100% in favour of goodness. In fact, we can change Nazis for 'x' and Jews for 'y' and justify any act of group x mass killing group y under this working definition of "objective morals".

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.

Are you a dualist?

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.

Ah, I see what you're saying. As in, if its "location" is not grounded in something physical, then essentially its "location" is planted in mid-air i.e. it becomes subjective?

Is this why your project necessarily has to search in the physical world, because without anything physical to latch on to, morality is basically by definition subjective?

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.

I believe my OP addresses the problems with a divine entity being the source of morals. If it was *necessary* for this infinitely wise being to make morality in such a way, then what dictated this necessity such that no other world was possible? Whatever the answer, it means there's something external controlling what God Almighty's nature had to be like and on we go knocking down the whole concept of "objective morals come from God"...

p.s. if you think it's possible for a divine being and objective morals to exist, then maybe try finding one of the premises that is false, and we can discuss that? Here's my syllogism for the OP:

1) It is in God's nature to give these commands as being objectively right
2) These objective morals satisfy condition x
3) If 1 & 2 are true, then God's nature couldn't have been any other way than this way
4) If 4 is true, then it is necessary for God to be this way
5) If 5 is true, then something external to God must have been the condition that made it necessary for God's nature to be this way (i.e. premise 2)
6) If 1-5 is true, then objective morals exist independently of God
7) Objective morals do not exist a priori
C) Since it is in God's nature to reflect objective morals, God doesn't exist.