General question about the possibility of objective moral truth

[Wyrd of Gawd]

Hello to everyone

I have a general question about moral: The discussion between religious people and atheists often turns around the question if someone needs to be believer in order to follow moral rules.
In my opinion an atheist can be as much a person of high moral standards as a religious person (and some atheists can even have a higher moral standard than some religious people). Just to say that right at the beginning.

Now I would like to ask: Is from an atheistic point of view a moral conviction like "killing of people is morally wrong" an objective fact? Or is it a social convention, which means it is a subjective view?

Thanks for any answers!

As long as you are the one doing the killing and not the dying you're good to go.  Cops get away with murder everyday when they kill someone for some silly reason.  The system loves them.  So it must not be wrong for them to do that even in States that don't have the death penalty for crimes.

[Chad32]

Hello to everyone

I have a general question about moral: The discussion between religious people and atheists often turns around the question if someone needs to be believer in order to follow moral rules.
In my opinion an atheist can be as much a person of high moral standards as a religious person (and some atheists can even have a higher moral standard than some religious people). Just to say that right at the beginning.

Now I would like to ask: Is from an atheistic point of view a moral conviction like "killing of people is morally wrong" an objective fact? Or is it a social convention, which means it is a subjective view?

Thanks for any answers!

Didn't read anyone elses answers but...............

There is no atheistic point of view about moral convictions, "killing of people" isn't an objective fact  and it's very rare for it to be socially conventional, it is subjective though.

 Additionally I doubt that Christians believe killing people is morally wrong because that would make the God of the bible one of the most morally wrong beings to ever exist.

There is an irony in the fact that a christian pastor, believing he is morally superior, will call for the deaths of all homosexuals, because the idea of concenting adults having same sex relations repulses him. Though he also buys into the propaganda that AIDS is caused by gays.

[brewer]

From my point of view there is no possibility. Subjective.

[Whateverist]

Frankly I'm not sufficiently moved to work very hard on an answer here without more interaction with the OP.

[Michael Wald]

Welcome to the forum.

Social convention.  I'm reading "Touching a Nerve" by Patricia Churchland right now, and she talks a lot about how humans are blank slates when it comes to morality.  We pick up what is right and wrong from social cues and our parents.  Churchland often cites(she's actually citing another author) the Inuit people, which have drastly different morals in certain areas.  In that culture, if you eat the flesh of another human being, even if you did to keep from starving, you are to be killed.  There was a case mentioned in the book where a woman ate her husband that had died and fed some to her child, and an elder from the tribe strangled them both.  What he did was considered a moral action to their people.

If you grew up in a society where killing people was acceptable, you would also most likely believe that killing people was acceptable.  I think, however, the reason we like to think of not killing someone as objective is due to many people's strong belief in inalienable rights, and taking a life is an extreme violation of those rights.  We can see, though, from studying isolated cultures that morals vary greatly.

Thank you for your answer!
About different moral ideas in different cultures: I don't think that we can say that there are such big differences. Your example of the Inuit illustrates that: They kill people who eat human meat. That's really not that far from our thinking. Of course we are not as wild anymore as the Inuit. We don't kill someone who eats human meat. But we send him to prison for sure. Because also in our culture it is seen as a really terrible thing to eat human beings.
And the same you can see in cultures of the past. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never
amounted to anything like a total difference. If you compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, you will see how very like they are to each other and to our own.
Men have differed as regards what people you are supposed to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you are supposed not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining "It's not fair". A nation may say treaties do not matter, but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and
shown that, whatever they say, they really know about the truth of this rules just like anyone else?

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Thank you for your answer!
About different moral ideas in different cultures: I don't think that we can say that there are such big differences. Your example of the Inuit illustrates that: They kill people who eat human meat. That's really not that far from our thinking. Of course we are not as wild anymore as the Inuit. We don't kill someone who eats human meat. But we send him to prison for sure. Because also in our culture it is seen as a really terrible thing to eat human beings.
And the same you can see in cultures of the past. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never
amounted to anything like a total difference. If you compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, you will see how very like they are to each other and to our own.
Men have differed as regards what people you are supposed to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you are supposed not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining "It's not fair". A nation may say treaties do not matter, but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and
shown that, whatever they say, they really know about the truth of this rules just like anyone else?

No one says he "does not believe in a real Right and Wrong", but a moral relativist says that different cultures have different ideas about what those rights and wrongs are, making it clear that morality is subjective, rather than objective. You said as much in your reply.

However, because we are a social animal, we have evolved a general sense of empathy for our fellow human beings because this is the only way for social groups to succeed, which manifests itself as a series of "common themes" among the various forms of morality we see in different cultures. Generally, what harms our fellow humans will also harm us if allowed to go on, so we make rules about it.

If you're going to discuss the moral concepts atheists hold with us, we'd ask that you at least try to understand what they are, instead of making up versions that help your argument but which aren't real.

[Michael Wald]

Before we talk about the question of making moral judgements of good or bad we need to first establish what morality is. The question takes it for granted that morality is understood by all, and I don't think that's right. So what is morality? It is a determination as to how things fit into certain value sets. Let's say I value human life. As such a moral action would be one that would promote that value of human life. If I don't value human life, then I have no reason not to kill people. As such I would not find it immoral to kill someone. You might disagree with me, and there we have a conflict.

Is either party OBJECTIVELY right? Well, in the sense of "does some external force give a damn" then the answer is no. Neither party has a more valid set of values in this particular situation. However we as humans have evolved as a cooperative social species. Those of us who don't value life don't generally live to tell about it. Those of us that don't value positive social structures generally don't survive to reproduce. As such you could say that we share a similar set of values that lead us to generally similar moral judgements.

I'm not so sure if we can say that people who don't value positive social structures don't survive. Actually my impression is that we have plenty of people of this kind in this world.
At the end my whole question comes up to find an argumentation not for those who keep social rules, but for those who don't. It's very frustrating if you have a real criminal in front of you and you try to explain him that (and why) his behavior is really wrong, while he just denies that there is an objective way to proof that. Of course we can still punish him. But I also want to show him that he himself knows that his behavior is wrong.

---

Just try not to fall into the trap of thinking something has no value just because it isn't the end-all answer to everything. There was a time where the supposed author of morality was apparently more concerned with what people ate, wore, and who they had sex with, than to really solve the problems of Humans being treated like chattel. I was in a discussion with another user named Rekeisha, where he just kept reapeating that because morality isn't absolute, there must be no value to it. It got so irritating that I just gave up on the discussion.

In general the value of something is set from outside. And it is usually set by comparing things. Also in the case of moral. What is bad in our eyes we define through comparing it with what we think is good.
Of course, the moment we say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, we are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. We are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.
The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said "New York" each meant merely "The town I am imagining in my own head," how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all. In the same way, if morality meant simply "whatever each nation happens to approve," there would be no sense
in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other. Or let me say it this way: If the behavior of Mother Theresa can be better and that of Adolf Hitler less good, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be good about.

[Chad32]

If there's a standard for what is and isn't moral, it would be something that benefits more than it harms people as a whole. Minorities are commonly held down by majorities, and the poor are commonly held down by the rich, but we know it's wrong because the only difference between the two groups is one has the power, and one doesn't. A christian is typically going to be happier in a community with other christians, but that doesn't mean that right and wrong shift depending on which side of the ocean you're on.

[Michael Wald]

Thank you for your answer!
About different moral ideas in different cultures: I don't think that we can say that there are such big differences. Your example of the Inuit illustrates that: They kill people who eat human meat. That's really not that far from our thinking. Of course we are not as wild anymore as the Inuit. We don't kill someone who eats human meat. But we send him to prison for sure. Because also in our culture it is seen as a really terrible thing to eat human beings.
And the same you can see in cultures of the past. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never
amounted to anything like a total difference. If you compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, you will see how very like they are to each other and to our own.
Men have differed as regards what people you are supposed to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you are supposed not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining "It's not fair". A nation may say treaties do not matter, but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and
shown that, whatever they say, they really know about the truth of this rules just like anyone else?

No one says he "does not believe in a real Right and Wrong", but a moral relativist says that different cultures have different ideas about what those rights and wrongs are, making it clear that morality is subjective, rather than objective. You said as much in your reply.

However, because we are a social animal, we have evolved a general sense of empathy for our fellow human beings because this is the only way for social groups to succeed, which manifests itself as a series of "common themes" among the various forms of morality we see in different cultures. Generally, what harms our fellow humans will also harm us if allowed to go on, so we make rules about it.

If you're going to discuss the moral concepts atheists hold with us, we'd ask that you at least try to understand what they are, instead of making up versions that help your argument but which aren't real.

In my understanding, to say that morality is subjective is the same as saying that there is no real Right and Wrong. Because "real" means that it is really existing. But when I think that morality is just a subjective feeling that human beings have - then we have to state that our feeling of the truth of morality, of moral rules is just a useful ilusion which our brain generates for us. (Because the long term survival chances of a society are higher if there are moral rules.)

[abaris]

That may sound a bit unfriendly, but could any of your theist newbs actually use the search function of this board? It seems quite mandatory for any theist coming here to ask the morality question.

I'm getting pretty tired of that, actually. It has already been answered ad nauseam.