What? What are dental ethics?
Not "dental", deontic or deontological. See
here.
I have already claimed ethics can be gained without God. We can define personal evils or good. We can't show they reflect anything objective. By person invariant I think you mean that for every person it would be evil.
Person/subject-invariant means
non-subjective, i.e.
objective. It doesn't mean
popular, it means that it is an objective matter of fact
not contingent upon any persons opinion. I think this is
precisely what you mean.
That is not the standard for objective in this context. Even if Hitler had exterminated everyone that disagreed killing Jews would still not be objectively right. I noticed you said "if" slavery is evil. Do you know of Sam Harris? He is a neuroscientist and the only atheistic debater I have ever seen claim objective morals exist.
Right, but he's far from the only person who has ever claimed that objective morals have nothing to do with God, whether he exists or not. As I've stressed to you, moral realism is the position you're endorsing; that morals are real and objective. There are several varieties of moral realism, one of which is "divine command theory", which is that the moral facts are determined by a deity. Clearly, this is the specific form of moral realism you subscribe to- but there are other forms of moral realism in which there are objective moral truths that are NOT a result of the will of any deity.
I have no interest or need for claims regarding perception, evaluation, or utility. I am discussing actual nature or quality given God and minus God. You can not redefine morality as being equal to happiness.
Doesn't seem to be a redefinition in the first place. Utilitiarianism argues that ALL morality is, at bottom, about maximizing happiness and minimizing pain/suffering. And their argument is at least plausible, and cannot be dismissed by a mere wave of the hand, as you do here.
Ethics can't comment on the nature or quality of moral fact.
Of course it can, that's more or less what ethics
does. You asked how one would judge the morality of a certain situation (involving God), and I said the same way one would judge the morality of ANY action- by a moral or ethical criterion or principle, such as "the will of God", "duty", or "maximal happiness/minimal pain".
That is so easy and so simply it cannot even be obscured by rhetoric. We do not possess even a small percentage of the info he has to determine moral justification for an act. We may only see a baby die in the cradle but God saw a new Hitler lying there. We may kill a life in the womb but God saw the cure for cancer he would invent.
So it is your contention that every infant that dies or suffers does so because that person would eventually be extremely evil? That when a nice old lady gets run over crossing the street it was to prevent some evil she was to commit? (like what, cheating at Bingo night?)
Condemnation requires absolute knowledge. Praise requires personal desire. Even if he is right by default that does not mean my appreciation of him is invalid.
Now we're trying to have our cake and eat it too. If moral condemnation requires absolute knowledge, then it would seem moral praise does as well (otherwise, how could we be sure that we shouldn't actually be
condemning an act, but don't have sufficient information to know this?)
2. I argue that only with him is there grounds for claiming objective moral truth exists.
Right- but so far I haven't seem what your
argument for this claim is; you have more or less simply
asserted this to be the case, without ruling out the competitors (i.e. non-divine command varieties of moral realism) or showing why moral realism has a necessary feature which can be satisfied ONLY by God, for some logical reason.
I knew what the only argument that could be made was but did not think you would think of it so I did not head it off. Let me do so now. What you said about risk is invalid for two reasons. The weapons of today make actual morality the prohibitive not personal risk. Just last night I saw a show claiming humans had not only killed the mega beasts (Mastodon, Moa, Marsupial lion) but had over predated them and killed them of all together. What was the risk 50,000 years ago verses the gain of wiping out an entire food source? Risk is not prohibitive. It seemed to Hitler killing Jews was moral. It seems to modern secularists killing millions of human lives at some politically determined and ever changing point in time before birth is just fine but one second later is murder. We are nuts and for morality I want a second and higher opinion and fortunately I believe we have one.
Of course, none of this is really relevant because what the original function or form of morality happens to be does not imply what it must be like
now- this would be a genetic fallacy to argue as much. Clearly, if we still lived according to our most basic, evolutionarily produced moral sentiments, the world would be a very ugly place. Indeed, the evolution of morality
distinct from the biological evolution of species is one of the more interesting areas in contemporary ethics.
Evolution is your moral source not mine. I think is almost comical to picture lawmakers and SC justices look at bone beds, guessing at behavior gain and loss, and carbon dating data to create law.
Well, if its anyone's source then its everyone's source. It is either the case that morality is a product of evolution- for everyone- or that it is not- for everyone.
And as above, and as I remarked last post, a descriptive account of the original functions of our moral senses does not commit us to any prescriptive morals.
I have one primary claim.
1. Only with God do objective moral truths exist. That is not to say the ethics we invent are not objectively existent.
How simple is that. Look at what you have posted to get out of this simply claim. It looks like a pint shop exploded and interns were sent around looking for the most ambiguous and technical words to use in an attempt to show 1 + 1 = fruit loops.
Trust me, the problem isn't that we don't know what your primary claim is, the problem is taht you have to substantiate it somehow. You can't simply assert it and expect that to count for anything. There is such a thing as a burden of proof; if you claim X is true, then you have a burden to show that X is indeed true (via providing evidence, arguments, etc.)
1. People are your source and that is not objective.
2. Evolution is your source and that is not moral. Unless you redefine morality as whatever someone (just like Hitler did in Eugenics and race superiority) claims evolution suggests.
Well, I don't have to make ANY choice until I see what your argument for your primary claim looks like. And regardless, I don't endorse moral realism in the first place, so this is not a problem for me at all; I don't think there are any such thing as objective moral truths or moral facts.
