You CAN establish worth without God. Yes, it is arbitrary.  That's the nature of morality.  I placed more worth on the threatened life-quality of the mother than EB did. He places more worth on the fetus, and I'm just guessing here, that he has never faced a Doctor whom said to him "Yes we can save them both, but your wife will most likely be paralysed from the waist down and lose kidney function requiring dialysis 3x's a week. If we abort the pregnancy your wife will be fine and healthy.", so he most likely made this determination of worth arbitrarily.

Nope, as all human beings are self-evidently equal. Thus the unborn child's life isn't worth less than the mothers. And as the mother's life isn't in danger, just her lifestyle, then killing an innocent life is unjust in such a situation.

Which leads me to wonder;
If one is with his wife and mother-to-be at the doctors and Doc announces; "Healthy baby. Will do fine, but mother's gonna die." do you think God is ok with you making that decision of who's gonna live and who's gonna die? Do you think God wants you to?

Absolutely. He made us moral agents and thus able to make moral decesions.

If it did, I missed it. When it comes to the exceptions and the bibles says nada about it, any stance on the morality of the exception is subjective. AND it is my contention it should be.

Yeah, it's this attitude of stating it's subjective while appealing to an objective standard where you fail.

Killing in self defence?  Subjective.  There are those who would argue even that is immoral because the decision of whether you live or die is not in the hands of you or the one who may hurt you.

And they would be wrong. See how easy that was.

Yes, the identity of the fetus as a person has worth and determining that worth needs not an objective framework. Determining that worth is a morally subjective matter for those that carry fetuses. Not you, not I.

What? Are you saying it's wrong for other's to determine that worth when they aren't the pregnant woman involved? Thus appealing to an objective moral framework while at the same time denying one exists? Again that self-defeating attitude.

Slavery, Nazis and killing a human is justified in self defence.................

Never has a point been so completely missed, by one who needed it so badly. Well...other than Cop and that whole Obama supporting infanticide issue.

I said the exception is a subjective matter. I never denied the act of murder is wrong. It is the exceptions we are discussing.

Actually the exception can only be an exception under an objective system.

  And how did you come to this determ........ Oh wait, I'm responding to EB. 
 Never mind.

Simple. If a belief hold's that the decision doesn't belong to either the one attacking or the one being attacked, then they have to hold choice, decision making, and free will in it's entirety doesn't exist. And it's self-defeating to hold an arguement that no choice exist's to try to convince people to choose to believe such a thing. And as any action no matter how small require's some concious effort, it's even more silly to assert one doesn't have control of making an effort or not.

Does this forum have a Ignore button?

Trust me, I'll grow on you.

No need Cop, I found the Ignore button. 

Danny --

i'm not sure whether you're making an empirical claim or a knowledge claim when you say that human worth is contingent on the existence of God.  For example, we can separate the knowledge of God from God's actual existence, and human worth could be contingent on either one of them.  It's confusing because theists often trumpet the moral advantages of their particular system of ethics and criticise the values of the less religiously-minded, suggesting that knowledge of God is what conveys the truth about human worth.  However, as has been addressed many times on this forum, the behaviour of theists (or any sub-group you care to mention) does not obviously stand out as being more 'moral' than that of non-theists.  Human worth contingent upon the knowledge of God (any god) does not seem to hold water.

If I am understanding your categories correctly, I would be making an "empirical" claim.

So, probably what you're saying is that humans have worth because they were created by god and that this is completely independent of our understanding or lack thereof of that worth.

Right.

That, to me, is no kind of explanation.  If you believe that something is good simply because God flipped an empirical switch and 'made it so', then i want to know what method god used to decide that.

He values us.  As creator, God can value His creations.  And He can create things that are "in His own image" and thus valued highly.

You critique subjective morality as being arbitrary while defending an unverifiable source of morality whose objectivity you have no proof of.  Was god's decision arbitrary?  How do you know?

Valuing His creations is not an arbitrary act.  If they weren't to be valued, He wouldn't have created them, and if they weren't to be valued highly, He wouldn't have created them in His own image. 


Copernicus --

Perhaps, but humans differ markedly on what they think is in the mind of God, so the implementation of your god-based morality is still just as subjective as anyone else's.

Many people willfully blind themselves to the facts.

But even when that's not the case, humans are finite and do not know all the facts.  Where the facts are uncertain, different people make different inferential guesses based on what facts we do know.  For most situations, this is not a problem, but some situations (e.g. the unborn) run up against the limits of human knowledge.

Obviously, I do think that we can adequately establish worth without God.

You have not shown me any method of establishing worth independent of God that is not wholly arbitrary. 

What I truly doubt is that it buys us anything at all to try to establish it with God.  Claims of divine backing strike me as nothing more than people using God as a personal megaphone for their own opinions.  Clearly, God isn't going to suddenly show up and set the record straight.  For whatever reason, he keeps a very low profile in our reality.  If he were to be more intrusive, then your claim of divine origin for your morality would make more sense to me.  In the end, there can be no rational basis for such a morality, because it ultimately depends on who has the worldly power to win the upper hand against competing claims of divine origin.

God doesn't have to show up.  That He values us is enough from which to derive the objective moral framework.  Even without religious writings.


Dotard --
 

You CAN establish worth without God. Yes, it is arbitrary.

Then it's meaningless.

That's the nature of morality.

No, it's really the evisceration of morality.  As EB would say, you turn morality into a choice of preference for ice cream flavors.

I placed more worth on the threatened life-quality of the mother than EB did. He places more worth on the fetus, and I'm just guessing here, that he has never faced a Doctor whom said to him "Yes we can save them both, but your wife will most likely be paralysed from the waist down and lose kidney function requiring dialysis 3x's a week. If we abort the pregnancy your wife will be fine and healthy.", so he most likely made this determination of worth arbitrarily.

You are ascribing a great deal of knowledge where I suspect such is lacking.  If the fetus poses so much of a threat to the mother's health, how can we know that her life is not in danger?  If we can't, then the mother has the right to defend herself.  Plus, if the mother dies, then there is the very real possibility that they both die.   

Which leads me to wonder;
If one is with his wife and mother-to-be at the doctors and Doc announces; "Healthy baby. Will do fine, but mother's gonna die." do you think God is ok with you making that decision of who's gonna live and who's gonna die? Do you think God wants you to?

If your life is in danger and you have the ability to save it only by taking someone else's life, then you are forced to decide who lives and who dies.

That also would answer Dotard's question about how we determine what the exceptions are to any given general moral principle.

If it did, I missed it.

Did you click the link and read my post on the objective framework with the three guiding principles of worth, equality, and proportionality?

When it comes to the exceptions and the bibles says nada about it, any stance on the morality of the exception is subjective. AND it is my contention it should be.

I am not even talking about the Bible at this point, except to the extent it establishes humans as having worth to God.  The three principles in the objective framework are used to determine what the exceptions are.  Killing another person without justification is a violation of the principles of worth and equality.  Killing in self defense does not violate those principles.
 

Killing in self defence?  Subjective.  There are those who would argue even that is immoral because the decision of whether you live or die is not in the hands of you or the one who may hurt you.

And they would be wrong. 

Yes, the identity of the fetus as a person has worth and determining that worth needs not an objective framework. Determining that worth is a morally subjective matter for those that carry fetuses. Not you, not I.

Here I must disagree.  God either ascribes worth to the fetus as a human being (person) or He does not.  Whether we can ever definitively determine that is another question.