RE: Is it true that there is no absolute morality?
February 23, 2017 at 5:58 am
(This post was last modified: February 23, 2017 at 6:02 am by Odoital77.)
(February 20, 2017 at 10:28 pm)mh.brewer Wrote:I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The moral law doesn't necessarily refer to a specific list of do's and don'ts in the way you suggest. They can certainly be delineated in that fashion in very general terms, but the specifics of any particular moral circumstance are dependent upon the situation faced. For example, it is wrong to take the life of another human beings without proper justification. But whether or not the life of any particular or specific human being can be taken in a justified manner is dependent upon the specific circumstances. So the only way a person can talk about the moral law is in general terms, until you reason from the general to the specific, given relevant facts in a moral circumstance.(February 20, 2017 at 9:44 pm)Odoital77 Wrote: The fact that they are mere societal constructs doesn't nothing to lessen their arbitrary or subjective nature. If morality is merely a construct, then it is the same as choosing between chocolate and vanilla no matter how much law, police, or societal disapproval you put on the other side. It remains just as arbitrary.
That is why I say "yes" to the proposition that an objective moral law exists. I don't see how it could reasonably be otherwise and still be describing anything that corresponds to reality.
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Can you tell us what you believe these objective moral law(s) are? In specific, not general.
I think our recognition of the moral law is a properly basic belief, similar to other things we are rational to believe but cannot be proven by something like science. For example, the existence of the external world, the existence of other minds, the reliability and reality of memory, the reality of the past, or the idea that universe wasn't created 5 minutes ago with an appearance of age, etc... I think the same is true of our moral intuitions at a very basic level. Now our ability to rightly apply the moral law we recognize to specific situations is a different matter having to do with the extent of our moral understanding. And I certainly think that our ability to recognize morality and reason well to the specifics can be greatly affected by our parents, our society, education, etc... But in this, we're talking about refining our skills of recognition and reason, thereby changing how one generation who had a weaker understanding of "how to apply the moral law" might be seen as having applied the moral law relative to a later generation with a superior understanding. And we can see this in the moral improvement that can be documented to have occurred throughout history.
And maybe part of this has to do with the idea that moral facts are different from the ordinary facts of life. Put simply, moral facts needn't necessarily be instantiated for us to know or be aware that they are true, which is specifically not true of non-moral facts. So I could say to you that my dog, Soldier, sometimes likes to eat grass. What would have to be the case for that fact to be a true fact? Well, I'd have to have had a dog named Soldier, and that dog would have had to have eaten grass on occasion. But if I said, it is wrong to torture handicap babies for fun, does that even need to have occurred for me to know that it's wrong? No.
Our moral recognition capacity exists and our moral intuitions are real, but asking for a detailed list is to misunderstand the nature of what we're talking about. There is a lot that we know about morality and the things that are wrong or right. I don't need to provide you a list of that. If you want a greater understanding of the area, then you need to look into ethics and epistemology in philosophy. The moral law is something discovered rather than invented, rather like the laws of logic. We all use and presuppose the laws of logic everyday and all human beings have since the beginning. Long before Aristotle ever described any of them, they were there and being used. The same is true of objective morality. Anyway, I hope that makes sense?
In His Grip,
Odoital77
~ "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen; not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." - C. S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?
Odoital77
~ "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen; not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." - C. S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?