Is it true that there is no absolute morality?

[bennyboy]

We're not using "arbitrary" in the same way.  Would you describe your moral choices as involving total whim.  I don't think that is even what we could call moral experience.

I don't describe "arbitrary" as involving total whim, but I think I'm going to have to step back from the etymology in recognition of the fact that everyone else means it that way.  Carry on.

[Whateverist]

Just had a thought about why we wouldn't consider morality arbitrary but much of what has been said since my last visit gets at the same idea.

I wonder if the OP would consider the tendency of prey animals to be vigilant arbitrary? In a sense evolution has stacked the deck in favor of remaining alert and ready to take quick action where needed. As a social species evolution has similarly stacked our deck in favor of prosocial behavior. Deer probably don't reflect on their own behavior or that of their fellows a whole lot, but if they did we might find they hold vigilance as a very high value.

[Aoi Magi]

Well a child's eye in martini doesn't taste that great, Lucifer is currently giving a discount on them over at hell's seventh circle (or amazon, if you prefer).

Aside from that, morality is a social construct, and though it is subjective, it is also a collective term as in society decides on it as a whole, enforces it as a whole, and tries to act on it as a whole.

It is not arbitrary because our social morality is guided by our collective instincts of survival. For example, killing a child would provide less meat compared to an adult, so it is a waste and not moral. Killing adults would ruin chances of procuring free dinners, or getting laid, so that's a bad idea too.

Similarly in religion, boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk would ruin both the meat and the milk, thus it is not moral. Working on the Sabbath means lower weed sales, which means loss of jobs, which in turn means more dead adults, so it is not moral.

Every moral law can be traced to collective survival instincts albeit defined and restricted by the knowledge and thoughts of the time they were made in.

[chimp3]

Call it arbitrary if you wish but I can pick and choose from any "objective" religious moral lesson. I think the fable of the Good Samaritan is a good moral tale. Rise above the bigotry of your culture and help a human being who is in trouble. I think human sacrifice and killing your own son for the bad behavior of others is sick. My moral landscape has been shaped by more than iron age tales of brutality.

[WisdomOfTheTrees]

Call it arbitrary if you wish but I can pick and choose from any "objective" religious moral lesson. I think the fable of the Good Samaritan is a good moral tale. Rise above the bigotry of your culture and help a human being who is in trouble. I think human sacrifice and killing your own son for the bad behavior of others is sick. My moral landscape has been shaped by more than iron age tales of brutality.

If one defined morality, then there would be nothing of which to disagree on, there would be nothing to deviate from. Since there is no defined morality, that means whatever one chooses to believe is morality is arbitrary.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Even if it were possible, and its a big if, to link a narrow set of instincts to fitness in the distant past that does not entail any current or future obligations to privilege those instincts. Just because cooperation (itself an rather flexible notion) was an advantage back then doesn't mean it will be in the future.

[Mister Agenda]

For what it's worth:

ar·bi·trar·y


/ˈärbəˌtrerē/

adjective

adjective: arbitrary

based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.
"his mealtimes were entirely arbitrary"

synonyms: capricious, whimsical, random, chance, unpredictable;

[CapnAwesome]

I've seen people say a lot that there is an absolute morality, but it seems to me that there is not. For example, some people say that killing is ultimately wrong, but there can be no reason why one thinks killing is wrong, other than personal desire. Personal desire is not quantifiable, therefor it's an arbitrary measurement of a person's feelings. 

It would seem were it not for this problem, there wouldn't be religion, which tries to solve this problem through dogma, and the imposition of an imaginary creator of whom punishment is inescapable. It would seem to me, that all morality is nothing more than dogmas, whether it be social norms or enforced laws. 

How does one cope with knowing that all morality is arbitrary, and say that one respects morality beyond being blinded by dogmas, or simply appreciating the geometry of such arbitrary systems? on a purely intellectual level. The alternative is, of course, "psychopathy", where the dogmas and appreciation of arbitrary systems is absent.

By cope, I mean cope with the fact that the systems in place are arbitrary, so there's no one system which can ultimately bring about the best of humanity. Without an objective morality, of which one could appeal to every person through reason, there is basically only wars and dogmas that struggle for dominance.

When followed to it's logical conclusion, atheism seems to result in a depressing philosophy - nihilism. I'm going with the God-is-not-dead theme and ground my reality in something objective. 

Most of the famous Atheist philosophers haven't been nihilists. In fact, I don't know that any of them were.

[The Grand Nudger]

To your average christer, anyone who doesn't believe in god's holy purpose and plan is a nihilist.  

[Neo-Scholastic]

Someone can be a tacit nihilist without explicitly recognizing one's self as one. It's like being a nominal Christian but not really believing any of it in any practical sense.

That's what happened to me. I can remember riding on the train one day and thinking to myself about how I could still consider myself a Christian even though I did not believe in the efficacy of prayer or miracles and that God was all but absent from my thinking. At that moment I admitted to myself that in reality I was an atheist. I felt liberated.

And for 10 to 15 years, I maintained an uneasy peace with the absurdity of existence. Nevertheless, based on the intensity and earnestness of my searching for meaning within that paradigm I feel fairly confident saying that atheism leads inexorably towards nihilism, a self-defeating philosophy that can be maintained only by willfully ignoring its own irrationality. I know others disagree but I truly believe that many many atheists simply have not fully examined their own beliefs and what they necessarily entail. They are like I was, only in reverse, clinging to the idea that I was a Christian while denying everything it implied.

Of course that is just an opinion based on my own experience. I'm open to the idea that there might be godless solutions to ultimate issues. Maybe there is some way to reconcile the absence of God with rationality and significance, but I haven't seen it. Four years on AF haven't done much to persuade me otherwise. Personally, I don't think it is stubbornness on my part, since I was at one time willing to embrace atheism and am still waffling over various Christian doctrines. But really, no matter how much atheists assert that their lives have meaning and such, they really don't seem to have done the heavy lifting necessary to justify those beliefs.