God & Objective Morals

[Neo-Scholastic]

I said that law - once established - is independent of a person's will or opinion. That is what makes it objective.

If that is true then the commandments in Deuteronomy and Leviticus are, by your definition, objective. In once sense yes, because anyone can read them and know what they are. But not in the sense that is meaningful for determining an objective basis for morality.

Your intelligence represents things way beyond your brain's processing power.

Please elaborate. It sounds like you are suggesting that intelligence requires more than physical properties of the brain.

Like I said, you are wrong and your statement here shows absence on knowledge upon the subject. Check out what a dolorometer does.

Interesting. I took your suggestion since I was not familiar with that particular piece of equipment. It sounds like it still relies on the verbal reports of subjects, which may or may not be representative of the pain sensation itself. What is measures could be a complex mixture involving degrees of sensation, physical receptivity, attention and willpower, depending on the subject. Still you make a good point. It seems reasonable to assume that most humans most likely fall experience within a certain range. Although, how can you objectively know if the dolometer is measuring consistent degrees of actual pain and not various combinations of sensation, sensitivity, willpower, etc.? Or no actual pain at all! Consider this thought problem:

You have before you two black boxes. Each box has a pain scale of 10 lights. Each box also has a dial from 0 to 100 volts. One box is connected to a human being wired to receive electric shocks from the dial. The human subject is instructed to rate the pain using ten switches that match the pain scale lights. The second box is connected to a simple set of electronics that lights up the pain scale proportional to the dial. If you didn’t know which box was which, could you tell the difference between the box that produced actual pain and the one that did not? No. And yet in a sense, every individual is a black box. The inputs and outputs are objective, but what actually goes on inside them could be vastly different. And what you are actually measure could conceivably vary from subject to subject. That is the nature of subjective experience.

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It just occurred to me that before, in your explanation of how this method would work, you were in fact subjectively coming to conclusions (as is always the case) about what the hypothetical data meant; in this case, choosing utilitarianism as a means of concluding what is 'right' and 'wrong'. So it still wouldn't truly be "objective" in the way that we mean it.

Exactly. Meaning and significance are distinct from physical reality and one cannot be reduced to the other.

Could this perfect moral standard have been any other way, such that burning puppies could have been a possible "good moral" to have?

I choose no. It could not have been otherwise.

If no, then something exterior to God made it necessary for God (the perfect moral standard) to be the way he is, in which case it would be appropriate of me to ask what it was. Take your pick!

There cannot be an exterior to God. As I have stated, everything is within God. So the standard of comparison is the fullness of what is.