Why "mysterious ways" don't matter.

[Jenny A]

So the question is are morals invented, discovered or always known? If invented then they are surely subjective. If they are discovered, as I think you and Esquilax have implied, then that does nothing to undermine the argument that there are objective standards but does not go as far as having them being innate. hmm...

I'm not going to describe Esquilax's opinion, he's more than capable of doing that himself.

Mine is that our sense of morality comes from evolution. Most social animals develop a code of behavior that could be called moral. What we humans have are moral feelings or tendencies which are genetic. They are cooperative and empathetic and tend to be stronger among family and tribe. But they aren't necessarily rational especially in larger groups and they don't always lead to what we think of as moral behavior today. Since as long as there have been people, we've been refining the rules of morality with tradition and reason.

Traditional rules can be wholly irrational taboos which might have made sense in an earlier society, or which are merely superstition.
For example, in a society where a woman would have great difficulty raising a child alone and men were unwilling to help raise a child not their own, laws about adultery, and premarital sex that may have made sense once, but no longer do in the light of birth control and great equality between the sexes.
Laws prohibiting the seething of a calf in it's mother's milk, or not picking up sticks on the Sabbath, fall into the superstitious catagory as do most other religious precepts such as not taking the lord's name in vain.

In order to reason about morality, we set objective standards such as:

1) which rules would result in the most benefit for the most people; or
2) what rules would a rational person think equitable if they had to make the rules before they were born and knew what their position in society would be?

Objective standards are standards we agree on to look at morality. They are objective in that they provide a rule with which to make decisions. However, choosing objective standards is a subjective activity. Objective standards are not something existing independently that we "discover."

Objective standards are often used overturn older traditional morals. Hence changing views over the last 150 years about the death penalty, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, religious freedom, race discrimination and on and on.