(May 2, 2018 at 8:25 am)robvalue Wrote: @Hammy: I agree, adding "and God" on the end makes the proposition less likely, especially since it has nothing to do with it. Religious people sometimes however define morality just in terms of god's scorecard, see below. In such a case, the scorer is then required. I was pointing out that they're trying to defend something that makes no sense in the first place, so yeah, adding a huge bum splat of a God and all the nonsense that brings along with it just makes it worse.
Yeah so that was all my argument was trying to demonstrate. Namely: Even if we accept one of their crazy premises their crazy premise + God still makes less sense than their crazy premise alone.
Quote:@Whoever: The idea that there are any sort of "moral truths" out there still makes no sense to me. Morality is so utterly poorly defined that not even the goals of it are agreed on. You'd have to first narrow it down to some particular subset of morality, or else saying true things about it is just impossible.
I agree as it sounds like you're talking some sort of platonic existence of objective moral truths where some sort of moral values exist "out there" in the real world, as entities. That makes no sense to me.
To me objective moral truths are more like truths of mathematics: 2+2= 4 because 2 things and 2 things in the real world is the exact same thing as 4 things in the real world. The mathematical truth of 2+2=4 doesn't exist "out there" in the real world (I'm not a mathematical Platonist), but mathematical and logical truths can describe things in the real world, as can objective scientific truths. 2+2=4 means that two objects + another two objects in the real world is identical to four objects in the real world. In the same way "Someone suffering needlessly is objectively wrong" just means "When someone out there is suffering needlessly it's morally important that we alleviate their suffering." You may say that it's a tautology and not objective to define things that way... because what really makes that true. But you could say the same thing about 2+2=4.... the only reason 2+2= 4 is because we literally define 2 as half of 4 and 1 as half of 2. And the only reason that bachelors are unmarried is because we literally define bachelors as unmarried. And the only reason that the word "health" refers to what we think of as healthy is because that we choose to word the mean to refer to that.
So the point, for me, is that you don't need to have some objective reason to choose definitions. For something to be objective their merely has to be an objective correct and incorrect answer after you choose the definition. So, some moves in Chess are objectively better after the rules of Chess are defined. Eating McDonalds every day is objectively unhealthy after the word "healthy" and it's opposite "unhealthy" are defined. 2+2=4 after[/] we come up with the concept of numbers.
Harming someone needlessly is immoral [i]after we define that as immoral.
So I'm saying that I think that is how it should be defined... many people may disagree with me but I think they only do that because they're confused about what they actually care about. They care about their own well-being and the well-being of other people they care about. They care about their possessions because if brings them happiness. And Christians want to please God because they want an eternal bliss of Heaven and very much don't want an eternal hellfire of Hell.
I think it's the best possible definition... but I would never argue that morality is objective before it is defined. I wouldn't argue that anything is objective before it is defined.
Well, like I said, these things would be objectively true even if we didn't exist at all... so perhaps what I should really say is: I would expect you to react as if I'm not making any sense if you think that objective morality requires proving that one definition is better than another.
All definitions are equal besides pragmatics. The question is which definition is most useful.... but whatever label is used that label either points to something in the real world or it doesn't.
Look at the idea of morality being "whatever God wants"... if that's what morality means then that refers to something that doesn't even exist. So it would be pointless to use that definition. But if we refer to morality is " at the very least avoiding harming living beings needlessly" at least that points to something real. And I can't think of a better minimum moral rule than that. Perhaps one day in an enlightened future everyone will realize that's the best possible definition of morality and agree to it. We couldn't objectively prove that it was the right definition.... but as Massimo says... Proving things isn't the point of definitions:
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.co.uk...nt-of.html
(May 2, 2018 at 8:25 am)robvalue Wrote: Yeah, I was thinking along those lines. God could be using it as a system in his scoring card. Then god does stuff to you after you die based on your score. Even then, the rule itself isn't doing anything, and has no impact whatsoever until you die.
And my view the reason why that would be wrong of God to do is because he was causing you to suffer despite being too perfect to suffer himself. So he can't be morally perfect because a morally perfect being wouldn't need to cause others to suffer. In fact, would a perfect being need to do anything at all?!
Quote:Maybe there is an actual law of morality in heaven that physically stops people doing bad things to each other.
If there is I don't know why God didn't just create the world like that in the first place instead of that tree of temptation and talking snake bullshit!
