Is morality objective or subjective?

[SuperSentient]

I don't see how a supreme creator would make anything more objective.

Because then morality would be something real that was actually created and actually exists in the universe, outside of ourselves and our own opinions. Meaning it's not just a human construct. 

In Catholicism, we call objective morality "Natural Law." With God being the Law Maker.

Four questions:
1. Why can't a human being as opposed to a supernatural being make morality objective? It seems reasonable to assume that if a supernatural being makes morality objective, than also a human being.
2. Could natural law exist independent of God? 
3. If natural law requires a foundation (God being the foundation here), then shouldn't God require a foundation as well? 
4. If God doesn't require a foundation, then why can't natural law be independent of any foundation as well?

[Angrboda]

I don't see how a supreme creator would make anything more objective.

Because then morality would be something real that was actually created and actually exists in the universe, outside of ourselves and our own opinions. Meaning it's not just a human construct. 

In Catholicism, we call objective morality "Natural Law." With God being the Law Maker.

There is nothing objective about the church's version of "Natural Law."  It is a set of value judgements about the human condition and God.  The first clue that these are unnatural laws should be that they are founded upon the existence of a supernatural being.  If God 'made' the law then he can unmake it.  That makes it nothing more than his prerogative and therefore it is subjective.  If you appeal to his nature as "the good" then you've abandoned the natural part of natural law.  It then becomes God's law, not natural law.  Any analysis of natural law will show that it is an invention of minds, not a discovery of a law "written in our hearts."

For example, Aqunias' view on homosexuality.

The most influential formulation of natural law theory was made by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Integrating an Aristotelian approach with Christian theology, Aquinas emphasized the centrality of certain human goods, including marriage and procreation. While Aquinas did not write much about same-sex sexual relations, he did write at length about various sex acts as sins. For Aquinas, sexuality that was within the bounds of marriage and which helped to further what he saw as the distinctive goods of marriage, mainly love, companionship, and legitimate offspring, was permissible, and even good. Aquinas did not argue that procreation was a necessary part of moral or just sex; married couples could enjoy sex without the motive of having children, and sex in marriages where one or both partners is sterile (perhaps because the woman is postmenopausal) is also potentially just (given a motive of expressing love). So far Aquinas' view actually need not rule out homosexual sex. For example, a Thomist could embrace same-sex marriage, and then apply the same reasoning, simply seeing the couple as a reproductively sterile, yet still fully loving and companionate union.

Aquinas, in a significant move, adds a requirement that for any given sex act to be moral it must be of a generative kind. The only way that this can be achieved is via vaginal intercourse. That is, since only the emission of semen in a vagina can result in natural reproduction, only sex acts of that type are generative, even if a given sex act does not lead to reproduction, and even if it is impossible due to infertility. The consequence of this addition is to rule out the possibility, of course, that homosexual sex could ever be moral (even if done within a loving marriage), in addition to forbidding any non-vaginal sex for opposite-sex married couples. What is the justification for this important addition? This question is made all the more pressing in that Aquinas does allow that how broad moral rules apply to individuals may vary considerably, since the nature of persons also varies to some extent. That is, since Aquinas allows that individual natures vary, one could simply argue that one is, by nature, emotionally and physically attracted to persons of one's own gender, and hence to pursue same-sex relationships is ‘natural’ (Sullivan, 1995). Unfortunately, Aquinas does not spell out a justification for this generative requirement.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/homos...ty/#NatLaw

Note that many sex acts in nature are not generative, so Aquinas is arguing whole cloth that in humans it is 'natural' for the sex act to be generative. Not only that, but he argues based on the 'kind' of sex act that it is, not solely whether it is generative or not, as many heterosexual unions are not strictly generative. Indeed, the church sanctions the rhythm method which is a technique for ensuring non-generative sex. In short, the generative component is just a man-made rationale for excluding homosexual sex acts, nothing more.

[Edwardo Piet]

I love how we humans try to reason objective morality when to the date, we are the only ones able to do that such construction.

Most folks don't seem to understand what 'objective morality' means.

It doesn't necessarily mean absolute universal morality. It can be relative and non-universal and still be objective due to there being objective answers in principle to moral questions.

What makes zero sense to me is that the standard that most people expect objective morality to have to live up to is a standard that science doesn't even live up to. By that standard there's no such thing as 'objective science' either. And the objections I see about any definitions of objective morality not being 'truly objective' are objections they could be making about health. People could say "Oh that's not a TRULY objective definition of health. Who are you to say that eating poison every day isn't healthy? We could just as easily define health in a completely different way that is actually what most people consider unhealthy. I don't care if most people think that definition is retarded and the dictionary definitions are different... who are YOU to say that it's the one we should pick? Prove to me that your definition of health is objective. You can't. I can define it differently, it's an entirely subjective and arbitary definiton. We could just as easily use another word to refer to what we normally call health and when we say 'health' we could instead mean something entirely different."

Replace the word "health" with "morality" and the word "healthy" with "moral" and this is the same kind of silly shit people say about morality. Oh that definition isn't TRULY objective.

Newsflash, the definition doesn't have to be objective. No definitions of anything are objective. We make the definitions. We subjectively decide to use the word 'health' to refer to what we decide it to refer to and then AFTER we agree to define it that way THEN there are objective answers to what is and isn't healthy. The same applies to morality.

Going by the argument most people make against morality then no field of science is objective because it's possible for someone else to decide to define things differently.

Objectivity has absolutely nothing to do with universal agreements about definitions. I repeat. Objectivity has absolutely nothing to do with universal agreements about definitions.

People say oh that's not TRULY objective morality. Because people can disagree. But we could say the same about science.

Universal =/= objective. Absolute=/= objective. The fact that people place a completely different standards on 'objective morality' than on objective anything else makes no sense whatsoever.

---

Because then morality would be something real that was actually created and actually exists in the universe, outside of ourselves and our own opinions. Meaning it's not just a human construct. 

I'm not talking about objective values 'existing' though. What would that even mean? What form of 'existence' would these values take and even if they could 'exist' in an ontological sense as opposed to there being merely epistemically objective answers to moral questions -- then why would we even need God? And how exactly would we need God for them to 'exist'?

[henryp]

Because then morality would be something real that was actually created and actually exists in the universe, outside of ourselves and our own opinions. Meaning it's not just a human construct. 

In Catholicism, we call objective morality "Natural Law." With God being the Law Maker.

Four questions:
1. Why can't a human being as opposed to a supernatural being make morality objective? It seems reasonable to assume that if a supernatural being makes morality objective, than also a human being.
2. Could natural law exist independent of God? 
3. If natural law requires a foundation (God being the foundation here), then shouldn't God require a foundation as well? 
4. If God doesn't require a foundation, then why can't natural law be independent of any foundation as well?

That's the beauty of having an undefined being who exists in a reality with undefined rules.  You can't put limitations on them because we only know the rules of our existence, which don't apply.  So trying to use our logic and understanding of our world to try and define a completely different reality, that by existing at all would already be breaking a bunch of rules, doesn't really make sense.

It's sort of like critiquing superhero movie physics.  Hey, if superman caught someone from a fall of 1000 feet, they'd snap their spines!  But we've already got Superman breaking the laws of physics, so using the laws of physics to say what should happen when Superman is involved doesn't make a ton of sense.

The real riddle, is Why would they think that?   Why would someone think this undefined being has made a set of moral laws that exist in a way that can't as we understand reality?  Seems improbable.

[Nanny]

I don't see how anyone can think morality is objective without believing in some sort of supreme creator.

Human beings are social creatures. Human beings also possess the capacity to infer, from past experience, observation, and results of action what other human beings are experiencing. 

Hunter-gatherers had to learn to care for more than just themselves out of necessity. If Bob gets killed by a predator, that affects Bob and his family. If Bob is acting whack-a-doo, that affects the group. Morality is a social contract steeped in trust. My conjecture.

Agriculture allowed for specialization. Morality got complicated. Still, we social beings agreed on basic rules. Do no harm, be kind, think about what others are thinking and adjust your own behavior accordingly. Cooperation is easier than conflict. 

More available information, perspectives, the notion that individuals are somehow special, loads of things confuse the basic morality that our species learns. 

But then by that accounting morality can't be objective. If I teach my children to hate kittens, they will learn to hate kittens. Morality is cultural. Some cultures do it better than others.

That line above is tough for me to accept, though. I'm sure even the poor slobs in North Korea know, intrinsically, that what their culture says is moral is a bit cray-cray. 

If I were smarter, I would explore an evolutionary, objective reason for morality. It just makes sense.

[Nanny]

Thinking some more about this.

Environmental pressures could have played a key role in human morality. The advent of agriculture (cultivation of cereal grains, domestication of wild plants and animals) coincides with the Younger Dryas. Global temperatures plummeted. Humans learned that cooperation provides survival advantages in this changed environment. Villages, towns, and cities developed, creating different environmental pressures that further reinforced cooperation as a survival strategy.

But though I'd really like to think that my own moral stance has a pure evolutionary background, culture plays a very large role in what's considered right and wrong. History is full of examples of cultural morality that we now find repulsive- from King David to Kim Jong Un and hundreds of others in between. Whole nations get caught up in what seem to us as perverse moral codes. Slaughtering those we deem different is a very human behavior. It's one I find morally repugnant. Yet for those pulling triggers or issuing orders they feel just.

I write this from the privileged position of an adult American of Northern European descent with surplus resources and no unmet physical needs. Some slob herding goats in the Hindu Kush may see things very differently.

[Mister Agenda]

It's at least mostly subjective and partly arbitrary. If you accept an axiom, like 'what reduces pointless suffering is good', you can derive something objective from that premise.

[Neo-Scholastic]

[Whateverist]

It is, but a broken agreement is still a broken agreement and disentitles the breaker to the assumption that the relationship's status is unchanged.  Nothing in that depends on the objective status of anything.

[henryp]

But though I'd really like to think that my own moral stance has a pure evolutionary background... 

Why would you like to think it has pure evolutionary background?  Do you not view yourself as an individual?  What makes you think linking your behavior to a species survival is the way to go?