Atheists only vote please: Do absolute MORAL truths exist? Is Rape ALWAYS "wrong"?

[wiploc]

Hope this helps.

It confuses me.

You seem to have "subjective morality" confused with "relativistic morality".

...

"Moral Relativism" is the idea that not only is there no objective moral truths

I want to argue this. It seems to me that "objective" is the opposite of "subjective,' not of "relative." I don't see why you couldn't have objective moral rules that were relative, the same way as we have objective-but-relative rules about how fast an astronaut's watch is ticking.

But, I did a little Wikipedia research, and discovered that I know less about this than I thought. So, even though I'm uncomfortable with your claim, I'm in no position to contradict it.

(whatever that even is supposed to mean)

By the end of your post, you seem to be suggesting that objective things are those that can be measured.

but that there are no moral claims that can be made at all, that all ideas of right and wrong are just opinions. This philosophy only makes sense if you also subscribe to "solipsism", the idea that reality itself is up for grabs and that all knowledge is just opinion.

Okay, now I get to disagree with you. Lots of people believe the world really exists (not just inside your head) but that moral claims are not truth-apt.

Moral claims, while subjective in nature, can be supported by logical arguments, judged by internal consistency and validated by objective reality. What damage is done? What are the short term and long term consequences? Is there a victim? Would you want something done to you as it was done to the victim?

So why aren't you calling morality objective?

Morality can't be plugged into a spread sheet. We can't do the "number crunching" to determine what is right and wrong. There are no units of measure for morality as there are for temperature, distance, mass and velocity. Morality is not a substance. It can't be measured like matter or energy. Therefore morality is not objective.

First, I'm going to recommend The Moral Landscape, by Sam Harris. It got me past this notion that we can't measure the effects of moral rules. If you look at the moral landscape thru a wide-angle lens, it becomes obvious that some rules are better than others.

Which is pretty much what you conceded in your previous paragraph: Different moral systems have different effects, and sometimes its obvious which rules cause flourishing instead of suffering. We can tell this objectively.

There's no point in bemoaning the fact that you don't have a spreadsheet number out to six decimal points on the question of whether the Sabbath should start at sunset the day before, when we know for a fact that ripping out clitorises is painful and denies people sexual satisfaction.

Since we do have some objective moral facts, it isn't right to conclude that morality is subjective just because there are other questions that we don't have answers to.

We don't call meteorology subjective just because there are some things weathermen can't plug into their spreadsheets.

Morality involves evaluation. We use words like "moral judgment" which indicate that we understand it is subjective. Subjective, by definition, is not free from an individual's judgment, opinion or evaluation. It is the domain of philosophy, not science. Therefore, morality is subjective.

Eh. By that test, meteorology is subjective.