RE: Moral Argument for God's Existence
October 22, 2013 at 12:01 pm
(This post was last modified: October 22, 2013 at 12:04 pm by bennyboy.)
You could argue that an individual's goals, or world view, or ideal world, or whatever stem from something objective-- the deterministic variables that have made the person who he is. You could argue that the net result of all the individuals' influence on the memes in a population are objective as well for the same reason. However, there is still a problem-- that subsets of that whole population will often have different goals, instincts, desires, or whatever, and therefore different mores.
I'd argue (as you know) that in a naturalist (read: determinist) perspective, ALL is actually objective, and "subjective" is just another term for the variability in the objective mores of a collection of individuals. There are also systemic variations, for example between women and men, or between young people and their elders. So the "what one is" that defines objective morality is variable across individuals.
What then of archetypal morality, of a Moral Man who represents the whole population? A man by nature usually wishes to mate with many females. Is it moral for him to do this? Is it moral for his wife to prevent him if she can? Is it moral to rape another if he can? Is it moral for a father to avenge the rape of his daughter with murder? Is it moral to commit suicide, when the "what one is" of one's parents, and their desire for happiness that involves the continuing existence of a loved one, is also objective?
How do you go from individual objective moralities to a group objective morality? If we can't do that, we basically have "people are different, and they do stuff that affects others." It may be true, but it leads to a kind of metamoralistic question: is it moral for any subset of a population to establish (still through their deterministic therefore objective processes) a moral code? If the answer to that is "no," then we're in Koolay-land.
I'd argue (as you know) that in a naturalist (read: determinist) perspective, ALL is actually objective, and "subjective" is just another term for the variability in the objective mores of a collection of individuals. There are also systemic variations, for example between women and men, or between young people and their elders. So the "what one is" that defines objective morality is variable across individuals.
What then of archetypal morality, of a Moral Man who represents the whole population? A man by nature usually wishes to mate with many females. Is it moral for him to do this? Is it moral for his wife to prevent him if she can? Is it moral to rape another if he can? Is it moral for a father to avenge the rape of his daughter with murder? Is it moral to commit suicide, when the "what one is" of one's parents, and their desire for happiness that involves the continuing existence of a loved one, is also objective?
How do you go from individual objective moralities to a group objective morality? If we can't do that, we basically have "people are different, and they do stuff that affects others." It may be true, but it leads to a kind of metamoralistic question: is it moral for any subset of a population to establish (still through their deterministic therefore objective processes) a moral code? If the answer to that is "no," then we're in Koolay-land.
