(October 21, 2013 at 9:54 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Fair enough. We all agree that morality is a guidline for how people should act. But "should" implies some kind of goal, and since people have different goals, there can be no consensus about what constitutes actual moral behavior (though there are some very common goals, like the mutual aversion to death and pain).
Given that we are mostly in agreement here, the only thing remaining for me is to show that an objective moral system is possible for humans. If I can establish that there could be something regarded as an "objective" goal or purpose to morality, then, atleast the possibility of objective morality without god can be established. But remember, my failure to do so would not prove that objective morality requires a god. However, if I go there, this thread would become a discussion about objective morality and not about the moral argument for god. But that argument is a piece of turd anyway, so let's flush it away.
We agree that morality is a guideline about how people should act. But this statement is not made in a philosophical vacuum. Before this idea of morality applies, certain pre-conditions have to be met, such as whether the person could act according to conceptual principles (this is the big difference between human and animal morality). For morality to even apply to an entity, it must be capable of having thoughts, setting goals, acting with reference to his desires - the qualities of what we call a moral agent. Whether he does so or not, he should be capable of it.
This gives us a little idea about the goals of morality - if morality is to be rational (a condition required for it to be objective) then those goals cannot be contradictory to those pre-conditions. But that doesn't say much about those goals apart from telling us which those goals could or could not be.
Which brings me to my final point. In order for morality, as a whole, to be objective, the goals it is supposed to achieve should be objective as well. Which means, the goals should be determined not by the particular philosopher's ideas or opinions but by the moral agent's - meaning, the human being's nature itself. For example, here you talk about having common goals - avoiding death and pain - but is that the result of a lot of people having similar subjective desires or are those desires themselves the result of being a human?
To elaborate: suppose you set out to create your hypothetical moral man. You create a sentient being, with all the principles of logic and rationality pre-programed in its brain, but without any emotional baggage or desires. Before this moral man asks himself the question "what should I do?", he'd need to ask "what do I want?". Now, given that you haven't factored in any prior motivations to affect this answer, the reply here would represent a properly basic desire. Maybe that desire is programmed into his genetic structure. Or maybe it is the result of being a thinking, feeling entity. Either way, it does not depend upon "what he thinks or believes", it depends on "what he is" - therefore objective, instead of subjective. Now, suppose that basic desire is "I want to live and I want to be happy and fulfilled" - then the other that would give him a list of other things he needs to achieve in order to fulfill that. So, as a result of that basic objective desire, you have a whole list of other objective desires which would serve as a goal for morality and that morality can be properly regarded as objective.
Now, I'm not saying that the motivation I've presented here is a fact or that any such motivation would necessarily exist. But studies into human psychology do suggest something like that. So, morality developed by taking the basic facts of human nature into consideration would be objective without any need for a god.
