Objective Morality.

In order to get a handle on this like anything else we need to get a working definition of morality. In fact, I think the reason there is so much confusion is that people are genuinely confused about what morality actually is. I think I can prove to your satisfaction that of the two options I present below, one is definitely close to the truth of what we mean by morality, and the other is not.

Lets consider two possible definitions of morality.
One: Morality is the code of conduct that arises between intelligent organisms that minimizes the unnecessary exploitation, mental and physical suffering of any individual while leaving them to live their lives as they would wish.

In this definition of morality there are no moral absolutes. The rules change on the situation and they are generated by the very individuals who are participating in the moral choices. What makes a choice right or wrong is the test of whether it minimizes unnecessary exploitation, or mental and physical suffering of any individual, and that is always the case for deciding what is right and what is wrong. Killing people in this moral code is wrong because of the killing of people. It is the experiences of the participant consciousnesses that define good and bad. This is a version of Harris’ Moral Landscape, but with an emphasis on the fact that morality is about the interaction of people.

Two: Morality is dictated by a supernatural God whose choices of what is good and bad are the defining factor that makes things good or bad. Being moral is then a matter of ascertaining God’s will on an issue and following his preferences about it. Killing of people in this moral code is bad because God doesn’t want you to kill people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_command_theory

It is thought that God’s involvement in this moral code enables moral certitude. It isn’t up to people to decide what is good or bad. There are rules that exist independent of humanity and they can’t be changed by anybody, including powerful people who wish to lead a group of others into evil behavior. They are still wrong, regardless of how many people they can convince because God said so.

I argue that the first option, that morality is actually about the experiences of the intelligent organisms it effects. It’s about how people interact with one another. It is about our choices in how to deal with one another. When morality is dictated by God it isn’t about people anymore at all. It’s about how closely you follow God’s will. And there are a lot of problems with that.

First, morality being tied to God’s will does not make it permanent. It makes it more arbitrary.

Think of the story of Abraham. One morning Abraham woke up and it was wrong to kill his son, because God didn’t want him to. Then God commanded him to sacrifice his son. The only morally just thing to do, if God is the arbiter of morality, is to obey God and kill his son. Then God relents and tells him (through an angel) not to kill his son. In the space of one morning it was wrong, then right, then wrong again for Abraham to kill his son.

God can and has changed his mind about what is moral and for who many times. God can and has demanded the slaughters of who populations at a whim, and if he’s dictating what is moral then it becomes inherently good.

If you feel it would be wrong to kill your son at God’s command, or you imagine that God was never REALLY going to make Abraham kill his son because it is immoral, then you already agree that morality is tied to something other than God’s command.

Or perhaps, you believe in a different God altogether. You could go to the ancient Aztecs and tell them that ritual human sacrifice to their God is immoral because YOUR God said so and believe you’ve got the moral high ground. But according to those Aztecs, you’re the one with the wrong god. This truly becomes a matter of opinion and will stale mate, with both of you being completely convinced of the moral high ground and no progress can be made to an objective moral truth, unless one of you can prove that your God actually exists.

Of course, no God has ever been proven to exist despite our long history of trying. So you are left in a dead-lock with the pagans.

Or perhaps you believe in the same God, but the people who tell you about that God tell you something different than the people in the next town over? You can go to the radical members of ISIS or the Taliban and tell them that God said it was wrong for them to kill civilians and wage holy war on eachother. They will of course tell you that you’ve got your religious knowledge all twisted around and it is THEY who have more accurately divined the will of God. Again you are in a stale-mate with no referee to determine who is right and who is wrong. Only conflicting rhetoric from two groups of people who both claim to have heard the word of God more clearly than the other. A God that nobody has been able to prove is really there in the first place.

And then perhaps you’ve never read any holy book at all, nor consulted any priest, but are instead depending entirely on what other people have said to you about what God does and doesn’t approve of? Maybe you are depending on the currents of the culture to tell you what it is God loves and hates? How does God feel about genetic modification, immigration or inoculation?

But there are other dictates in the bible. One is to kill people who work on Saturday. So, why aren’t you out there killing people on Saturdays? You already know that this is immoral. And you knew that in spite of what the bible says.

So what benefit is there in thinking of morality as being about what happens between people, and the experience of conscious entities? How do we gain an independent reference which can be used to indicate who is objectively right and who is objectively wrong?

What about those Aztecs? If I go back to them and say what you are doing is wrong, of course they can turn to me and say, “that’s just your opinion. Our opinion is that what we are doing is right.” If morality is about what happens between people, about minimizing the unnecessary exploitation, mental and physical suffering of any individual, then I can reply that he is just plain wrong. In the same way that someone is objectively wrong when they claim water is made of chlorine and oxygen.

In both cases, that won’t change anybody’s mind. He will still go on thinking he’s right, just as the person who is wrong about chemistry might go on thinking they are right, but we can all use the objective baseline of the experiences of the conscious entities involved that he is wrong.

What can I point to to say he’s wrong?

He’s destroying a life, unnecessarily and causing mental anguish to everyone who cared for that person. We are a ways away from being able to really quantify mental anguish, or even physical pain. People’s experiences do differ from one individual to the next. How much they say it hurts is indeed subjective. But the fact of their pain is entirely objective. The fact that one sensation is reported by that person as more painful than another is objective. The fact of the destruction of that sacrificial person is objective. The fact that they didn’t need to die, that their death was the result of someone else’s choice is objective.

Think of this.

It can be difficult to navigate between choices that seem more or less equivalent. In such cases there will really be a better choice and a worse choice, but the difference between them may be negligible and not worth the effort to ferret out. However, in every choice in life you can definitely come up with a choice that is obviously wrong.
Should I help this old lady cross the street, or hold the door open for the guy in crutches?
Or, should I kick him in his cast and let the door close on him?

The third choice is the obvious bad choice and it is that based on the experiences of the conscious entities involved. The fact that one choice is definitely the wrong choice, means that other choices are definitely right in comparison. And in every instance the criteria for deciding what is right and what is wrong can be reduced to the statement of what morality is.

Minimizing the exploitation, mental and physical suffering of any individual so that they can live their lives as they would.

And in every choice we face with this system there are objective results we can look at. What makes the choice objectively good or bad is the impact on those around us.

The Nazis would have said their behavior was good because the jews were a problem for them. This could be considered in purely objective terms and we would come to the conclusion that rounding up the jews and exterminating them was more harmful to the jews than whatever they were accused of causing by the Nazis. How can we say that? Because morality is about the interaction of people and the experiences of the conscious entities involved.

This principle is all encompassing, but that does not mean that understanding the basis of this morality means every decision becomes an easy calculation to lead us to the best moral life. There are shades of grey and enormous numbers of variables involved in our choices. And we are lucky enough to live in societies where we rarely have to face a choice where one of our only viable options will lead to really disastrous consequences. These are still choices so far removed from immediate moral impact that it would not necessarily pay to think of them in moral terms. Like whether we prefer strawberries or cherries…

Well stated. But like Sam Harris's book, although you acknowledge the gray area, I think maybe you're overestimating how easy it is to apply the rule -- if you want to call it that -- of "Minimizing the exploitation, mental and physical suffering of any individual so that they can live their lives as they would."

However, in every choice in life you can definitely come up with a choice that is obviously wrong.
Should I help this old lady cross the street, or hold the door open for the guy in crutches?
Or, should I kick him in his cast and let the door close on him?

These are easy cases I think, as are things like murder and torture when nearly everyone can agree there is not any reasonable extenuating circumstance. But some people might defend torture in some cases (I think that burden of proof needs to be extremely high). Some people might defend dropping a bomb on a country because it is preventing a reasonable chance of an even greater evil (again, you better have a damn good reason, a standard that is rarely met in my opinion).

Another example --I think it is clearly immoral for the government, or anyone else, to use force to prevent someone from using drugs. Other people clearly disagree with this. And I think force is unjustified to do a lot of things that the government does, so now you're getting into morality and political philosophy.

The point of this is to understand why we make moral decisions and come to common terminology in that regard.

It doesn't necessarily make any choice easier. Hard moral choices will be as difficult with this understanding as with any other belief of where morality originates.

Instead this is about trying to understand what it is we are counting when we make our moral calculations, and on the fly guess work.

Once we can intrinsically pair moral decisions to the effect it has on conscious entities, rather than whether it aligns with the dictates of this or that god, or organization, then we can begin to handle morality in objective terms. This is of course all within the construct of human convenience. I say that it couldn't be anything else, since morality is a human construct. And simply because it is a human construct without a bedrock foundation in the underpinnings of reality as some kind of all encompassing ethical boson which doesn't change regardless of our desires, doesn't mean there can be no sure choices.

I point out some easy examples of moral choices to demonstrate that the conclusions you arrive at have a foundation in the experiences of conscious entitites. This way i don't have to argue with people about what is the proper moral choice in my example. it isn't about that. The proper moral choice is a given. What i am trying to illustrate is the reason for that choice.

This will be of no applicable use when deciding whether it is ok to murder. Just about all belief systems will say the same thing, it is not ok to murder. Each will give different reasons, including this moral landscape version where the reason it is bad to murder is because of the murdering. where this begins to bear fruit is in instances where one belief system says its ok to do a thing and another belief system says it is not.

Aron Ra speaking on the ten commandments.

The argument I have heard ad nauseum from the people who know the Lord is that we unbelievers have no basis for our morality, it's all arbitrary with us because we don't know and follow the ways of the Lord.

if it wasn't for the Lord we'd all be fornicating in the streets, or worse

So much for the people of the Lord. It seems the Lord has rotted their brains

For the record, I see nothing wrong with fornicating in the streets.

indeed... Also, one cute thing... http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavi ... -misbehave

lol prez, maybe someone can do a new version of "dancin' in the streets"

and maybe "ain't misbehavin'" can get a rework to

lehelvandor, after reading that fascinating article maybe "muskrat love" as well.

oh absolutely!

johnson gives us a prescriptive definition of morality that I happen to agree with. I think most people who come to this forum also would say that morality is mostly a matter of showing care for, and avoiding harm to, others, along with not restricting the autonomy of others. That may be why we have difficulty understanding the moral perspective of a story such as Abraham in the Bible, which comes out of a culture that featured in its morality sanctity, purity, and authority. It would be impossible for modern Western educated people to create a similar moral tale, but in the ancient culture of the Bible, and still today in a lot of the world, being moral is more than avoiding harm to others, and autonomy is often way down on the list of moral qualities. Whether it's God, the gods, or just the divine presence in general, something designates a way of life that is accepted as moral. That morality diffuses through life in a much less restricted way than occurs in the West.

So today we have a battle over whose morality is going to win out. If the morality of the religions, God- or gods-based, doesn't succeed as well as secular morality in protecting the lives of individuals, as johnson argues, that might be due to individual lives not being central to the cultures' moral vision. They would say there is a more important context to consider.

You can also view disbelief in evolution through this lens. Deniers are strongly influenced by notions of authority, sanctity, and even purity. They therefore override reason in order to maintain their values.

I borrowed from Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory in putting down these thoughts.