You have a difficulty relying on sentiments to discover moral values. In most areas of philosophy, this is a prudent measure to take; however, in ethics, it seems necessary to rely on them. Why? For what moral principle can we establish solely through reason?

Take the Golden Rule for instance. I think we can both agree that the expression, "Treat others as you would have them treat yourself" is a valid moral statement.

But how do we arrive at that conclusion? It is through reason? "Surely," one may say, "for it is in one's best interest to treat another like oneself and it thus is rational to do so."

If you then ask this person "What is in one's best interest?", she will reply "safety, comfort, joy, etc. Anyone would agree that these are in one's best interest and also in the best interest of others, for inside each of us is a natural sympathy for one another; thus when one feels good so too does another, and when the one feels sorrowful, the other likewise.

And hence, one's best interest is based on the best interest of all." These are not rational claims, however, they are based on sentiments: joy, peace, comfort - these are not determined "good" through reason; no, they are based on sentiments acknowledged universally as good and good for all people.

How then can one judge the goodness of a sentiment based on a rule, when the rule itself is based on the sentiments? The reason, therefore, that something is good is not because it conforms to some "rule of the right" or some moral principle established through logic; it is good because it promotes good sentiments. And sentiments regarded universally as good.

Now there are some exceptions. Some people want to molest children, for example, but are we to suppose that this demonstrates moral relativity? Is it not more likely to think that these criminals and mass murderers are in fact wrong? That even cultures in some of their practices - cannibalism, ethnic cleansing - are wrong? Is that so implausible?

Why should we not consider what most people consider right - happiness, friendship, equality, generosity - as in fact right? And what most people consider wrong - egotism, harming the innocent, theft, rape - as in fact wrong? Are we so restricted by logic to refuse this claim that even a 4-year-old would acknowledge as true?

What about drugs and frequent unprotected sex? Surely these promote good sentiments but do you suggest they are right? On the contrary, these are actually not in one's best interest and certainly not in the best interest of others. What eventually happens to drug users and those who engage in such sexual behavior? Depression, paranoia, poverty, disease, etc. What happens to those around them? They are abused, lied to, manipulated, etc. These things therefore promote bad sentiments and are hence wrong.

What then is the role of reason? It is to determine the facts of the situation so that one may have the correct sentiment. For example, when man is killed, we do not immediately feel sympathy for him and hence call his killer wrong. No, we rely on reason to gather all the necessary information in order to make that judgement. Was the killer provoked? Did the victim cause the killer harm in some prior event? Did he threaten the killer in some way? If we answer "no" to these, then we may feel the proper sentiment - in this case sympathy - which then allows us to judge the killer's actions as wrong.

This then is the objective moral principle: an action is right and good if and only if it is useful or agreeable to oneself or to others.

TMB wrote:
I do not have problems using intuition and sentiment to establish moral values. Its just that I cannot then consider these moral values to be objective, however I have no issue living by these, or promoting them. My point is that people do use their intuition to establish their moral values. The key question is if these can be considered objective moral values or not. Observation says that they are not. They are inconsistent except as they serve the individual and the group to which they belong. Otherwise they are not objective or universal moral values applicable to all people, all the time.

It is valid within a social context, but it does not operate with competing groups or non social scenarios.

Much lip service is also paid to this, but often people do not carry this ideal through, they just state that they do. There are social mechanisms to punish non egalitarian behvior, so people attempt to appear virtuous when they are usually less than virtuous.

In socities that strive for and state they are seeking egalitarianims, this is correct. However in the Indian caste based system, your status will dictate that you will not treat others as you treat yourself if they are of different caste. It is certainly reasonable to appear to be equitable in a society that promotes democratic, egalitarian principles. Equally it is rational to ensure that you get what is best for you and your group.

In WW2, these principles were not stated thus, and did not apply. In any conflict situation they are also not stated and do not apply. The attempts to impose Geneva convention treatment on prisoners and of limited effectivenesst work and notably do not deny the right to kill enemy soldiers. ie. we do not want them to live as we live. As the enemy we want them to be defeated and ourselves to be triumphant.

This relies to a large degree on the other person being part of ones social grouping. If they are part of our direct family we do more to achieve this, than if they are unrelated. This arises from selfish genetics. If they are part of an opposing social group we might actually promote exactly the opposite, such as in the case of war.

Even when they are part of the same social group, we pay more lip service and actual to this social moral code, because we might be socially disadvantaged if we do not. Either way, this is not evidence of objective moral values, as we adjust the exact nature to suit the situation.

Once again, these are stated objectives in democratic society. We achieve far less than we state in this case. In non democratic society, even in principle this applies far less (see caste based socities, and those at war with each other). Our moral standards also apply to non humans, and here you see how we are extending this sense of "do unto others" to try and improve conditions for battery chickens, abbatoirs, humane ways to hunt, farm and harvest domestic and wild animals. These values have changed. In my local zoo, all animlas that are fed to other animals must be euthanased before they are fed to another animal, except for the termites that get fed to anteaters. We are not "doing unto the termites", as we are to the mice that are fed to the snakes. We judge their right for equalmmoral behavior to be less. What if snakes only eat live mice? Then we must make moral choices between the animals. on some form of subjective value. Peter Singer considers that we should attach greater value to chmps than to severly retarded human children, based upon their level of consciousness, ability to feel pain, an so on. I am not arguing for or against any of these, just showing how subjective and relative they are, and based upon social dynamics.

As I said, it depends upon our social group and this is changing fast. There is a growing tendency to consider the rights etc of all human beings. Even though this is poorly observed with much lip service there are strong pressures to make this so. Looking back in history it was more acceptable to discriminate against other peoples based upon gender, age, race, sexual orientation, mental capacity, caste status etc. This would make it morally OK to enslave black people but not white people (from a white mans perspective), Morally OK to allow men to vote but not women. Morally OK to send men to war but not women. Morally OK to smack children, and in Roman times for fathers the moral right to take their childrens lives if they chose to. All subjective moral standards. What we are observing is the expansion of moral standards to all humans. We are extending it in part to some animals, some even consider plants to have rights.

If there was mass murder when the CroMaganon man wiped out Neanderthal some 30000 years ago, was that wrong? They were after all a different species to us? What about when we murdered the american bison and the dodo bird. While these were not considered good actions but of far less moral value than human genocide, but it shows how we apply subjective morality.

I see young hooligans driving their cars at speed down my road; endangering all in the road, spraying graffitti; keeping me awake at all hours of the morning; breaking into houses to support drug habits. Are they knowingly doing wrong, or just doing what serves their self interest, and justifying the moral position when required?

If you want to call these wrong or right, you certainly will, just as we all do, and you will do it in a subjective way. Fro some drugs are wrong even if they harm no others or are used to suppress pain. For others they are OK under any circumstances. Drug use in sport is considered wrong by the ruling bodies, but not by the athletes doing all they can to win. And just what drugs are 'wrong'? Caffeine, Gurana, blood replacement? The wrong drugs are just those they can get an idea if they affect performance and can be detected. When we seek to win, alls fair in love and war.

This depends upon when and where. In some countries they still execute many capital offenders, while in others they do not. Surely in objective morality, a murder of a ceratin degree is murder is the same whether its comitted in New York or Shanghai? Apparently not. Surely cold blooded murder in 2000 BC is as wrong as it is in 2000AD? It seems not, people can be lawfully processed for stealing bread and shipped to penal colonies, people were hung drawn and quartered, or burnt at the stake for various crimes. And these were done by the lawful and socialy approved institutions of the day.

You are proposing a western centric view of 2008, and suggesting this is the objective moral view we should al hold. I suggest you are doing this because it is the view that you hold. You express it objective because we have always done this, and it makes sense to do so. What is the value of having a standard they we state could change tomorrow, or once we cross the state border, acknowledging it is an arbitrary standard? It has limited value in this form, so we must argue that it is objective. We have evolved to do this.

The dilemna is getting the Muslims and the Christians to agree on the moral basis of strapping and detonating explosives in civilian contexts, and the Muslim perpertrator seeing it as morally right, the Christian as wrong. There is still limited concensus on what is right and wrong. You see this for yourself, but then offer that when it differs from your view, then they are still objectively wrong. You have madea logical slip with your last comment because this introduces another crteion to assess right and good. It fails logically, and when it does, you will revert to the comment about murderers and child molesters having warped perceptions of morality. Thats the exact point. If they do not meet our standards they must be warped, otherwise we face the thought that our own standards might not be objectively right, and might just exists to promote our self interest. Even our tendency to avoid this evidence is something we have evolved to.

Makarismos wrote:
the culture that got it wrong might be our own.

Since we have only our own feelings to go on, and others have equally strong feelings, we must have something more than feelings to claim certainty.

Hitler thought he had access to such an objective moral basis. So did Stalin.

Johhanes de Silentio wrote:


If they truly thought so it means they had some mental disorder.

If they did not have such a disorder, then it means they did not reach what is universally human in themselves, for if they did, they would have felt sympathy for their victims and hence determined their own actions wrong.

An objective moral basis presupposes that all people are equal and because the actions of Hitler and Stalin reveal that these men did not have that in mind, they demonstrate that they men did not reach a universally human consciousness and thus had no access to an objective morality.

Tisthammerw wrote:
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I mean be aware that objective moral values exist. That is what I meant by If one recognized the existence of objective moral values, then one could use them as evidence for the existence of God.”

What about the law of noncontradiction? Is that not intuitively perceived?

For many people, the existence of objective morality is more or less self-evident (intuitively perceived, as in "I just know"), perhaps somewhere between the level of logic and the general reliability of sensory perceptions.

Problem is, how do you know which criteria to judge a theory by? The only way you can do it is by intuitively perceiving some criteria as rational earmarks of truth.

I would say that these are false dichotomies (at least, some of them are). I don't think objective morality has its basis in God's commands per se. Rather, I think the connection between God and moral goodness is more elemental. It is true that God’s commands of what we ought to do are morally good, but the reason why they are good is because moral goodness is an inextricable part of God’s nature of who and what he is, to the extent that God cannot exist without objective morality. (Hence one could say that objective morality is grounded in the heart of God; the heart of God says how we ought to behave, because the connection between God and moral goodness is that elemental.)

If your definition of Objective Morality is "a sovereign metaphysical entity or binding force of some kind that has the supreme authority to say how we ought to behave" without any further specifications as to what this entity is, why can't this entity be God?

At first blush he seems to be the most obvious candidate. God after all is the sovereign metaphysical entity (if he exists) so it makes sense that if objective morality has supreme authority behind its statements that it is in some way grounded in the heart of God.

What data stacks up against it? The fact that cultures have different moral systems? This neither proves nor disproves MR. It is - as you say - merely a piece of data. Yet it is this argument that you keep bring against MO.

The argument is that moral truths are clear and apparent given the right state of mind.

That may not be inherently logical, but it is certainly evidentiary;

therefore, it can serve as a premise for what we can rationally discuss, namely, whether the existence of MO can serve as a proof for God's existence.

Johhanes wrote:

For the sake of inquiry

let us suppose that an objective mora