According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, here is the first meaning of the word « objective »
1) expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations
objective art
an objective history of the war
an objective judgment
If a judgment can be objective, why on earth a statement couldn’t ?
What’s your point? The entry you quote is poorly phrased at best, and incorrect at worst. Merriam-Webster is a general American English dictionary. It reflects how people speak and write colloquially, with no regard to technical accuracy in any particular field, and with frankly embarassing regard for its own precision even at that, as clearly evidenced in the cited entry.
I am sure I am not the only one to notice that, as always, when the substance of your position has been shown to be nonsense, you now want to engage in pointless arguments over definitions — all to defend the asinine view that if there is no god, genocide isn’t wrong.
Would it not be better to just admit the obvious: that you thoughtlessly repeated an absurd anti-atheist trope, showing a complete failure of both reasoning and moral judgment?
I happily admit my view that without God, the basis for human morality loses its foundation, leaving no universal standard to distinguish right from wrong. Note that this view has been developed by great thinkers and writers such as Thomas Aquinas, Dostoevsky, CS Lewis, Alvin Plantinga etc… Would you presume to assert that these guys showed a complete failure of both reasoning and moral judgment ?
Now, how do you ground moral judgment if, as Dawkins said about the universe « there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference »?
And an auxiliary question: do you believe in free will and if yes, how do you reconcile free will with naturalism ?
Yaaaawn.
Yes. To the extend that they thought that without God there can be no foundation for morality, yes it’s a complete failure of reason. Utterly and completely, and an embarassment to the philosophy of ethics.
First I highlight the two key words: at bottom. At the level of quarks and leptons there is, of course, no such thing as purpose, good, evil, or anything of the sort. There is no reason to think that at the lowest levels of explanation in physics we find ideas of the mind. Minds and the ideas minds conceive of are found at much higher levels of explanation. Presumably even theists can agree that morality and ethics are ideas of the mind (even if you think the mind is immaterial), not something we find at bottom in the natural world.
As for how we do ground morality, we simply do what theists do: define what is to be “the standard”.
Theists act subjectively by defining God’s nature, or commanments, to be the standard against which human behavior is to be measured.
So how do non-theists ground morality? By defining something other than God to be the standard against which human behavior is to be measured. It’s the same thing, just pick some other entity than God’s nature or commandments.
Typically, non-theistic moral systems define something like a measure of human flourishing to be a standard. We say that we ought to behave in ways that lead to more flourishing and happiness and less suffering for human beings. For example.
That’s it. Mystery solved. The God solution is no better: It’s still just a subjective act of definition.
The way theists define free will, which is typically a form of libertarian free will, is logically incoherent. It says choices are not determined by anything, they are just sort of brute facts and anyone anywhere could potentially have chosen to do otherwise. But that would imply there is no such thing as human nature, or personality, influencing what choices you make. Maybe you’re the sort of person who would tell a joke in a particular way. That is to say you have a certain nature, a certain personality, and this is reflected in your behavior through anything you do or say. But if you have a nature and a personality, your choices and behavior can’t be truly undetermined, they must be determined by your nature and your personality at the very least.
Of course we know both logically and experience that your choices are determined by both your nature and your surroundings(immediate circumstance you find yourself in, and your past history of experiences have taught you certain behaviors). Notice how at this very moment you’re reading this post. You’re not out on the street walking in random directions with your arms flailing and spasming around wildly. The words you read are causing behaviors in your mind. Literally reading my post is causing thoughts to appear in your head through no choice of your own. They just do. In so far as you begin reading this post thoughts will occur to you, and so the contents of my post is partly determining your behavior. Just like reading yours caused me to write this response. I didn’t really “choose” this, I was compelled by my nature and my past experiences, combined with the contents of your post. Notice how I’m not describing a recipe for baking a case, but writing words that I believe consitute a meaningful response to yours.
With what in reality, then, do God’s statements about morality align?
If any of these old white guys actually did claim that “without God, the basis for human morality loses it’s foundation,” then yes absolutely they showed a complete failure of both reasoning and moral judgment. That was easy.
I think that this approach of yours is very, very funny. I’ve been watching it for a long while. You argue yourself into a hole, and then assert, while at the bottom of the hole, that some selection of clever people agree with you. Unable to defend the substance, you suggest that while you can’t, people once lived who could.
The difficulties with this are obvious, aren’t they?
First, it’s usually far from clear that the ancient thinkers in question would actually agree with you on the particular point you’ve been arguing. You may have the impression they would, and you may love the idea that someone will chase down a rabbit hole with you and get into a big tiff over whether Dostoevsky’s views are compatible with yours. But you are frequently very badly mistaken.
Take, for example, the way you tried very hard to defend Douglas Axe’s claim that evolutionary biologists think evolution has stopped. You brought in Pierre-Paul Grasse, stressed his eminence, and stood on the ground that PPG believed that what Axe said was true. It became clear, however, that he believed no such thing, and a good bit of time was wasted hunting down archaic quotes rather than addressing the core fact: that Axe lied.
It is amusing to watch you slander ancient personalities by implying that they’d agree with you. But it contributes nothing to save the sheer rottenness of your position. Yes, if they believed what you do, then yes, they showed a complete failure of reasoning and moral judgment in so believing. But nobody cares. They’re not here having this argument; you are.
As Rumraket points out, the key words there are “at bottom.” Since morality is a human experiential/cognitive phenomenon, it’s hardly surprising that the universe, which is not a human, has no moral values at all. Moral judgment is grounded in human experience; there can be no other ground for it.
This depends very much on what is meant by “free will,” but I consider the question of free will in any sense quite irrelevant. Even if the world were shown to be fully deterministic, the human experience is grounded in a here-and-now cognition that lacks sufficient data to work out what the future is destined to be, and which experiences the phenomenon of making conscious choices. Whether those conscious choices could, in some sense or other, have been different does not really matter unless one is omniscient.
Of course, the list of those who think otherwise is at least as illustrious: Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau, Hobbes, Hume, Singer, etc. So, unfortunately, if one wants to understand this issue it is not enough to just drop a number of names of people who agree with you. You still have to do the hard work of actually understanding the issues involved.
It’s interesting that you ask that, because in current philosophical discourse the issue of whether free will is usually framed in terms of moral responsibility. That is, free will is defined as the ability to exercise control over one’s actions in way that would make them morally responsible for those actions.
There are a number of ways people try reconcile physicalism with free will. They can simply argue that the physical world is not deterministic. For instance, quantum indeterminancy refutes strict determinism. They might also take the position that one is free so long as one’s actions are not coerced.
Yet others will argue that one need not have the freedom to do other than what one does in order to be considered free. The crucial issue, rather, is that the person is the source of one’s actions. For instance, suppose someone decided to murder someone with a gun. Unbeknownst to the would-be murderer, however, the gun was loaded with blank bullets. As a result, even though he pointed the gun at the intended victim and pulled the trigger, it was not possible for him to commit the murder. Even so, many would argue that he should be held morally responsible for his actions because he, as an agent, had formed the intention to commit a murder. The same logic could be applied if someone’s freedom to act is similarly restricted by physical factors such as the actions of the molecules in his brain.
There are other ways people can reconcile “naturalism” with free will.
You should be aware that it is no less difficult to reconcile free will with most forms of theism. For instance, if we are all created by an omniscient, omnipotent god, then he must know every action we will take, and could have created the universe differently so that we would take different actions, instead. In that case, are we really responsible and free with regards to our own actions? Or is the resonsibility and freedom all God’s?
Not that I see this mattering much here, but I would very much caution those considering this line of argumentation from taking it. As much as this sentiment is casually repeated, it can be shown with very moderate scrutiny to be somewhat of a misunderstanding, possibly of classical physics, but surely of quantum physics, and of the difference between the two.
Long story short: If each of Newtonian and quantum mechanics is taken at face value and seriously all the way, it is the latter that is actually entirely deterministic, while the former, much as that may clash with those classical billards table or clockwork similes for it, is not.
There are of course ways to dismiss both facts on the grounds of practical relevancy, but if we are going to do that, then what was the point of even bringing them up in the first place.
Not only would many people argue that, but the law would hold him responsible for it. Attempted murder is attempted murder, even if, unknown to the murderer, it cannot succeed.
There have been interesting cases on that where the limits of “entrapment” are explored: if the FBI finds a guy who says he wants to blow up a federal facility with a truck bomb, and an undercover agent provides him a fake bomb and a detonation device, is he guilty of a crime when he attempts the detonation? Generally the answer is yes, subject only to the doctrine of entrapment.
I’m WAY behind of this discussion, so replying to a lot of things …
No objection there, or to the idea that moral codes are generally a good thing. But I don’t think there can be anything new for you in this discussion: Theists accept accept objective morality (at least in principle), and atheists reject it.
The choice of which parts of scripture are literal and which are allegorical, appears to be entirely subjective. For example, some people claim the Earth is “literally” only ~6000 years old in the face of massive objective evidence to the contrary. But I digress.
Which is why the best Biblical scholars make use of Poetry Appreciation chairs. 
Even if we accept that is true, the perception of objective reality is filtered through subjective human interpretation. It’s fine as an ideal, but it will always turn into an argument about which view of reality is less subjective. [Rumy already wrote the same] God might be perfect, but a human understanding is necessarily flawed (according to scripture).
That history starts about 5 minutes ago.
That too is an answer.
Tell that to the chickens! 
Subjective statements can also align with reality. For example, load the giraffe onto a cargo jet and fly it over the savannah. Worse, even objective observations are relative to the observer. We can avoid those difficulties by agreeing on the circumstance of the observation beforehand, how the measurements will be made, how “faster” should be decided, … and whatdoyaknow … this is starting to sound like the scientific method. But I digress.
The point is, if we really want to be objective about things, starting with a scriptural interpretation that can only be subjective is going to have a hard time competing with actually being objective about things.
That doesn’t mean scripture cannot inform our understanding of morality, I think these is some wisdom there. I disagree that is the only source of morality, or even a completely dependable guide.
IMO, we might worry less about morality and instead consider ethics.
Sure, but then you don’t need to reference “God being the source of reality / all that exist” to support that conclusion. I don’t see how you went from this original premise to the conclusion.
But then you also have to justify this premise too. How do you know God always speaks the truth, or is this an assumption on your part?
Wait… “God’s pronouncements” are not contingent on God? Are they contingent on “reality”?
I don’t think you want to imply this.
Again, this goes back to the first issue. The argument in the last sentence does not follow. How does someone being the creator of something mean that they are the “most capable” of stating objective truths about said thing. If I created a pizza, and I find the pizza delicious, does that mean my statement was objective… or “MORE” objective… than any statement anyone else can make?
Furthermore, this is what I meant when I say that theists tend to play fast and loose with the concept of “subjective” and “objective”. I define “subjective” to mean “mind dependent”. The fact that my pizza has mass is mind independent, so that is an quality inherent to the object. However, the fact that I find the pizza delicious, that is subjective since it depends on my subjective experience of the object. Likewise, if morality is depending on a mind (e.g. God) then it is subjective. It’s contingent on a subject.
But you seem to define “objective” as if “truth” orients around it, such that the more truthful a statement is the more objective it is. This is a rather odd definition. If we assume that I am being completely honest and truthful when I say “my pizza is delicious”, then YOUR definition would imply that my statement is objective. But I don’t think you want to go there.
So, the best thing for you to do now is be very clear by what you mean by “objective” and “subjective”. That seems to be the main issue here.
There also is an underlying presumption that, if moral values are “subjective”, then this is bad, bad, bad. It means there is nothing preventing us from deciding the best thing for us if we can all go around raping, stealing and murdering with impunity.
It is never, to my knowledge, explained why this necessarily follows.
Well, yeah. And I am baffled by the idea that, unleashed from an “objective” morality the contents of which are inaccessible, I suddenly should be expected to turn into a serial rapist. Why should that be? Is it at all conceivable to these people that some of us actually would never do such things, because we would find the infliction of suffering on others horrible, rather than pleasurable? It seems to me that they show their own moral depravity by suggesting that this is how they would behave, if they learned there was no god to discourage them.
And even if it follows, I believe this would be a mistake on their part since this implies that God is actually not needed. Think about this argument. The claim is that a society where we can all go around raping, stealing, and murdering would be bad, and they cite this as a reason to believe and adhere to absolute morality grounded in God’s nature as a means to avoid that worst case scenario. However, if that suffices as a reason to believe and adhere to God’s absolute morality, then why is it not a sufficient reason to just not commit said acts and to create a society that discourages and punishes said acts? Aren’t they accidentally admitting that certain acts are bad in and of themselves, no standard needed?
In other words, they propose this line of thinking.
But why can’t we skip some steps and simply do this?
Why does the first work, while the second doesn’t. That’s something I would like to understand.
Brilliant. Exactly right.
Of course. And not only some of you but nearly all of you. This is because even those that deny the existence of an objective moral law are under it’s influence.
Claims 2, 3 and 4 are wrong.
Well, the second works perfectly. The issue is why does it work. I think the best explanation is that an objective standard for morality exists that is grounded on the existence of a benevolent God who made us in his image.
I think it works when it works, and sometimes doesn’t. And when it works it works because we raise and teach our children to follow those rules, making sure both to be good rolemodels for them and to proportionately discipline or correct them when they fail.
It’s actually not that different from training and taming animals. They can be taught and trained to follow the rules, which is much easier and will be more effective when they are young and more capable of learning. And there are better and worse ways of training them that will have higher or lower odds of ensuring the rules stick with them for the rest of their lives. Both positive and negative reinforcement. Like with animals, human beings also have genetic predispositions that affect how well or how likely they are to respond in desirable ways to this training/tutoring.
This idea that we need some immaterial or supernatural entity to “ground” this phenomenon, otherwise it wouldn’t work, is just wrong.