There are three possibilities to the moral argument.
1.God exists so that absolute morality exists independent of personal opinion.
In such a case, absolute morality could exist, but its dependent on gods opinion.
And we do find in such a case that morality is relative to the situation, given that murder is considered wrong but not killing.
2.It is almost universal among scholars that there is either a God and so objective moral truths exist or that God does not exist so neither do moral absolute truths. The second option here is that God doe snot exist and I know of a grand total of one person hat supports this and he even admits he assumes it. This is also the worst choice of the three.
I dont care how many people support this or that. Im not interested in hinging the argument on a fallacy.
Sam Harris assumes morality exists because morality exists. The assumption is that because we care about morality that means we care about the well-being of sentient creatures. If morality is anything, it is that. If we didnt care for the well-being of sentient creatures then we wouldnt care all that much about good or bad actions and their results. We are the products of beings that cared about the well-being of their fellow human beings, because the ones who didnt care, died off. And because we all generally value the same things in life, there are certain aspects of morality that can be considered universal and objective.
3.The last choice is what I think you have adopted. That morals are only ethical statements contrived through opinion (and they are pure opinion no matter what technical terminology is used to make it something beyond opinion). It isn't anything beyond opinion and preference.
They are arrived upon via the experiences of social species who care about the well-being of, at the very least, themselves and their kin. It is the accumulation of our knowledge on the subject (as a result of the analysis of actions and consequences) of well-being and survival to this point in time. (Notice how morality changes over time.) We learned a long time ago that as the social species we are, we need to abide by certain rules if we want to live together in a way that is most beneficial to the most amounts of people because it serves to the benefit of our survival. The fact that we have empathy means that we actually care about the well-being of other sentient creatures. As I said above, we all generally value the same things an (we prefer life over death, happiness over sadness, etc.) so we are all going to arrive on at least a few things on which we can all agree are the most optimal and objective (not murdering each other, for example).
I would say that the right or wrong choice to make in a situation is dependent on the situation in most cases. In other words, it isnt all that black and white. There are all kinds of moral dilemmas we could go over and find that people will give different answers, depending on what they think the best choice would be and many times, there is no clear-cut right or wrong action that can be determined. Take the old example of the out-of-control train that is about to hit five people who have been tied to the track. You can push a button and save them all, but if you do the train will continue down another track on which a single man is tied to the rail. What is the right thing to do?
Individuals do have differing opinions on right and wrong. Different cultures differ in the ways they view certain aspects of morality and morality changes over time. This is what we would expect to find if morality comes from US. I find it interesting that if the part of the brain that regulates emotion is damaged, we find that people become incapable of making moral decisions. What does this tell us?
1.In number one the dictate that murder is wrong is an absolute truth.
Unless of course, your god decides that it isnt, and tells his people to go out and kill. And instead of evaluating the situation, these people are supposed to just do as their told without thinking about the consequences of their actions. How on earth can we know what is good or bad if we arent allowed to evaluate a given situation? If anything is arbitrary, this is it. Morality is not being exercised in such a situation.
2.In your number three the statement that murder is wrong can't possibly be known and does not have even a theoretical basis for it ever being actually objectively true. This is at best contrived ethics and not moral truth.
Sure it can.
If you murder a person, do they cease to exist? Is existence important to sentient beings? Is it the most important thing? Can sentient beings do anything if they cease to exist? Does it affect other people in some way, like their family for instance? Does it affect society in some way? These are all things to be considered (and probably more that I couldnt think of).
That is a only a method designed to show why something is true. It is not a method by which the truth of the thing is founded. That explanation is also not capable of making hurting another actually wrong. It only proves that the child would not like the action done to him. But pointing out what the child would not like makes nothing actually immoral. For something to actually be wrong a transcendent standard must exists by which to justify that claim. Pointing out the undesirability of an act is not it.
Yeah, thats what morality is.
In order to determine that something is wrong, we have to determine whether it decreases well-being by analyzing the situation, possible actions and possible outcomes of those actions. We do this, in part, by imagining how we would feel and by extension, how another person would feel. Most people dont want to be hurt, right? So it would be a pretty safe claim to make that hurting someone would have negative consequences and would decrease the well-being of the person being hurt. We all do this to some extent, whether we know it or not (see: mirror neurons). I think its pretty telling that when people dont do this, or are incapable of doing it, we view them as abnormal.
I knew you wqould ask that. The reason it was in caps was to distinguish what is wrong with the theory as created by men from what actually occurs in nature. Evolution I sure happens but not everything in man's theory about it is true.
How does putting it in caps letters do that exactly?
