Copernicus --
And deliberately so. It isn't clear at all what you mean by "worth", because that implies some kind of market metaphor that assigns value to humans. Now, gods judge humans in most religions, so it makes perfect sense to theists that a god might have some private, perhaps ineffable, scale for calculating the worth of humans.
I need not try to quantify how much God values humans. It is enough to say that He ascribes a high degree of worth to a human person. Because humans have God-conferred worth, moral obligations arise.
But that really doesn't seem to be the kind of "worth" you are talking about. I took you to be talking about worth in the eyes of society. To say that people have equal worth in that context is to say that everyone has the same civil rights. The rights accorded by society are the standard by which we judge equality. Hence, respect from others and respect from oneself are measures of worth. And that is what drives our moral instinct--the need to have respect in our own eyes and those of others.
But I am talking about God-conferred worth. God is the ultimate authority. If He thinks humans have worth, then they do. What society thinks in that regard is inconsequential. Of course, society may accurately reflect God's thinking, and thus, you may arrive at roughly the same place with respect to a wide variety of moral judgments.
Understood, but such a concept of morality has no practical consequence for us, because we have no way of calculating such worth.
We don't need to calculate worth. We just need to know that it exists and all human persons have equal worth. From those two observations, we can calculate the morality of acts vis a vis humans. What is more difficult is to calculate morality of human acts vis a vis animals or of God's acts vis a vis us because equality of worth is not present.
In the end, it is up to the individual to decide what he thinks makes him "worthy" of the god that confers value, and, as we know, that decision is purely subjective. So it is just another way of saying "My way or the highway." "My morality is objective. Yours is not the one."
It is not a matter of something making the individual "worthy" of the God that confers value. God confers value regardless. That value gives rise to obligations, and those obligations can be determined solely by reference to the value (worth), the principle of equality, and the derived principle of proportionality.
That is not to say there are no moral prescriptions that flow from culture. A gesture that constitutes a polite greeting in one culture may be an insult in another. That is not really a case of morality being relative, but a case of the culture creating certain background facts that would impact whether certain conduct violated the principles of worth and equality.
In this paragraph, you hedge your objective morality in a tip of the hat to the subjective/relativists. Moral behavior sometimes involves things that matter to all societies. Sometimes it involves behavior that is very culture-specific, e.g. communicative gestures or exposing one's legs in public. Life and death matter in all societies, but moral codes treat matters of life and death differently. Body language is less consequential, because it is just a matter of being friendly or unfriendly towards others. As always, respect is at the center of such matters. Do we respect your privacy? Do we respect your right to continue living? Do we acknowledge your existence in a respectful manner? All of these questions can be prioritized. The answers that bear on personal survival are more important than those that bear on loss of face.
It is still objective. The fact is that an objective framework can be far more flexible than people realize. I have seen atheists argue that the self-defense exception to murder proves that the prohibitions against murder are relative. But that is not the case at all. Rather, the exception is part of the universal morality derived from the objective moral framework. When the background facts change, the calculus under the objective framework will change with it. Cultural expectations can sometimes be background facts. If a certain gesture is considered an insult in a particular culture, then a person who engages in that gesture,
intending the insult (and assuming the insult is unwarranted), violates the objective morality. Without cultural context, however, the gesture may be morally neutral. In law, there is the concept of laws that are
malum prohibitum, where the acts are not bad in and of themselves but "bad" only because the government has chosen to regulate them, versus
malum in se, acts that are bad in an of themselves. So some acts are never morally neutral, while others may be, depending on the cultural context. This is not relativism because the question really centers on the bad intent of the actor. A stranger to the culture, who engages in a gesture he considers to be a polite greeting, not realizing it is an insult to the recipient, has not engaged in any immorality because he lacks the bad intent that makes the conduct immoral. The stranger's intent was in accordance with the principles of worth and equality while the cultural insider's intent would be at variance with those principles.
If you look at respect as a measure of worth, then they are roughly equivalent. It is society that confers value on human life. Gods only reflect the views of a collective morality, not the other way around.
I disagree. Human life is valuable regardless of whether a society exists to recognize that value. If the entire human race were eliminated but for one individual, that individual would be just as inherently valuable.
The judgment of children is not equal to that of adults, and that is why their civil liberties are restricted.
True, which an objective morality can take into account.
Don't tell me that you disagree on the basis of God's standpoint, because you can't know what God wants.
Putting the Bible aside for the moment, I don't have to know what God "wants." I just have to know He ascribes worth to human beings and views the worth of each human equally. That is really a very reasonable position if you believe in a Supreme Being who intentionally brought about our existence.
You just use him, like any other believer would, to endorse your moral point of view.
My "use" though is not arbitrary. It does not depend on any commands God has given. It derives simply from the notion that a God would value his creation and that he would value the members of a particular species equally.
When slavery was legal in the US, people used God and the Bible to defend.
A misconstruction of the Bible in my view. And in any event, it clearly contravenes the objective morality. I have an interesting point to make about this in connection with the Islamist example below.
As for when life begins and ends, that very much depends on how you define and construe "life". There is a lot of diverse opinion out there and no shortage of "objective moralists" who use God to defend their opinions. Arguing over what God wants is just a distraction from the real argument about biological facts and civil rights.
I am not saying there are always easy answers under the objective moral framework. Our understanding of "life" is factually incomplete. What happens is people make educated guesses regarding the factual context. When different people arrive at different factual conclusions, then they arrive at different moral conclusions under the objective framework.
And again, the objective framework I have set forth does not require one to try to figure out what God wants. It accepts that God values human persons. So in the case of "life," we are talking about when something is alive, and if alive, when it is a "person." So the objective framework that I have set out does indeed prompt one to confront what you consider to be "the real issues."
That's a very narcissistic way of putting it, cimics. It is because they are more like us that we incorporate them in our social units. Animals become family members in much the same way that slaves used to in darker times. And we can claim that we value animals because God values them, but we really value them because they are of use to us and we can empathize with beings that are more like us.
Just as God would value creations that are more like Him? The difference is, His valuation is an objective standard. He created everything, so He gets to say what is valuable and how much. Obviously, the how much is impossible for us to determine except that we can say that He values more the species that are at the high end of the mental development scale. An alien race on another planet that was wholly unlike us except for highly develped mentally would presumably also be conferred a high degree of worth, just as with humans.
It was that he goes off the scale when it comes to judging his behavior as "bad", and he goes on the scale when it comes to judging his behavior as "good". It's the same scale. He is either on it or off it, but not both. It is hypocritical to praise God if you do not allow that he can be condemned. And if you are going to do either, on what basis does an "objective moralist" do it? To be consistent, you have to stop praising God. If he defines bad and good, then he can be neither bad nor good.
For God to be "good" simply requires that He treat us consistently with the value He places on us (from His unique perspective, of course). So God can be "good." And we have indications that He is good (good things in the world around us, the sacrifice on the cross, the plan of salvation, etc). What we cannot do is judge whether a particular act of God's was evil because simply won't have enough facts to make that judgment. We do have evidence of the consistency and genuineness of God's concern for us (various convenants, Jesus' sacrifice). Some other arguments can also be made about what a maximal being would be like simply because He is maximal. That gets far afield from the topic, but suffice it to say we do not have to be able to judge God under the objective framework to utilize it with respect to the actions of humans with respect to each other.
From whose perspective? Eating pig meat is considered wrong in Muslim society. Eating other kinds of meat is immoral in Hindu society. Is it wrong for Christians to eat ham on Easter? They would say that in fact it is wrong. Do they have no right to say that? I think so. I simply disagree with them, but future generations might become fully vegetarian. Who knows?
Those are not immoral. Something Christianity rightly recognizes. Unless you want to say, animals have a high enough value in the objective moral framework that killing them for food would be immoral. As I said, the objective moral framework is not so good at resolving issue between unequal parties. But if we're not talking about the rights of the animal (suppose instead we were talking about the morality of eating corn), then the objective moral framework would see the conduct as not immoral.
There aren't many cannibals left, but the practice, according to archaeologists used to be very widespread. We are doubtless all descended from cannibals, if you back far enough in history.
To kill people for food would clearly violate the objective moral framework. My understanding is that cannibalistic societies who did so killed people outside the group. That is, they had an equality problem of not ascribing equal worth to people outside the group as to people in the group.
To eat people who have died for other reasons is a harder issue to evaluate. Dead humans aren't live humans, so if dead humans have "rights," there would still be a lack of equality. The other way to look at it is that a live human eating a dead human is a devaluing of the live human. Certainly it is unhealthy and unnatural. I understand there is a fatal disease associated with that practice.
...If a culture believes that suicide bombing is ok, does that make it ok? The answer is no. Your viewpoint makes it impossible to condemn the suicide bomber so long as his culture approves it. All you can do is express your own personal distaste, which is just your subjective opinion. As an objective moralist, I can see it for the reprehensible conduct it is.
What usually happens in these discussions is that they get down to issues of torturing babies, raping children, or mass murder. We forget that morality extends to less horrible behavior, because objective moralists want to see it always as black and white. So they don't want to discuss the morality of diet or clothing style.
I use the "horrible" examples because the universality of the morality is easy to see -- even for you half-blind relativists :). The non-horrible examples may turn on cultural background facts. Still falling within the objective morality but a little less obvious. Don't forget I did use a non-horrible example. :)
Suicide bombing is a form of martyrdom that usually also involves murder, but Islamists sometimes justify it as compatible with God's will. They are not moral relativists. They are on your side in this debate. They just disagree with you over what God's will is. So they don't see it for the reprehensible conduct that you do.
This points to something interesting. In an objective morality, God's explicit commands could change what would otherwise be immoral into moral behavior. Two reasons for this: (1) God has the right to judge and can decide to make a particular human the instrument by which His judgment is carried out on someone else, (2) God knows something about the situation that we don't (e.g. killing Hitler knowing what he would do in the future if left alive). In a "burning bush" experience, God might, say, appear, and issue a command that would otherwise violate the objective morality. But his issuance of the command would change that because of the two concerns listed above. One would, of course, have to be sure that it was God who was actually talking. As long as you have no burning bush experience, this does not present a problem.
God could also skew an objective morality by issuing a continuing command to do something or a directive to allow something that would otherwise violate the objective morality, but for which God would be justified in issuing the command or directive. My thinking, and what I take to be the basic Christian position, is that there are no such continuing commands or directives in effect at this time. The Islamic suicide bombers, on the other hand, believe in a continuing command or directive out there that warps their objective morality.
I, on the other hand, can argue that such behavior is immoral on a rational basis. Violence, in general, destabilizes social relationships, because it triggers cyclical acts of revenge. Such behavior weakens the chances for individuals to survive and prosper, so it violates moral principle.
This all assumes that it is important for individuals to survive and prosper and for there to be stable social relationships. That would be your subjective preference. Someone else might have a different view, and all you can say at that point is that you personally disagree. But that doesn't make the other person wrong; it just means his tastes differ from yours. Sort of like you liking broccoli when someone else doesn't.
Gods will endorse any behavior that we want them to endorse. It is much more difficult to argue that suicide bombing is socially justifiable behavior.
Again, the objective framework I have set up leaves out God's endorsement of any particular behavior. The morality of a particular behavior is worked out by reference to the basic principles of worth, equality, and proportionality. It is certainly true that people could have so-called objective systems based on arbitrary decrees by a God. But that is not what I am talking about. The objective morality I am describing is not arbitrary.
Well, that is the problem, isn't it? People disagree over what the facts are and what we mean by abstract concepts such as "harm". If you claim that it is immoral to torture people, there will always be those folks who agree with you and claim that waterboarding is the moral equivalent of a fraternity prank, not torture.
Again, I don't deny there are hard questions under the objective framework. Humans do not have perfect knowledge of all the facts in the universe. A different conclusion about what the facts are can result in different moral conclusions under the objective framework. There are easy questions, too, however.
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Topic: Introduction and Objectivity (Read 5813 times)