Is moral relativism the only alternative to God-inspired moral objectivism?

This is where awesome lectures by Sam Harris and Humanism come in. There are other alternatives. But in my opinion, we’re all so different that our reaction to the various cultures is “Screw it.”

Would I like to convince a certain culture that thinks it’s ok to kill daughters that bring shame upon the family that we should not do so because it’s not conducive to alleviating the suffering of conscious humans? Yes, but will this ever happen? Not on a large scale. Only one by one will individual realize that our only real, physical connection, is that of animals that can experience pain and happiness.

It all goes back to the brain.

I would submit that god-inspired morality is also relative. Even the most fundamentalist Christians I’ve known have taken the cafeteria-style approach. It’s inevitable, unless you want to start stoning people to death and so on.

I never knew people conflated atheism with moral relativism. I suppose I’m both but my atheism developed separately from my relativism. I do not believe in human universals but I do agree that all people should have certain rights so I’m kind of Western in my human rights opinions. For example, I get that female genital mutilation is cultural and we should ‘respect all cultures’ and all that but I still think it’s wrong.

First point: no. Utilitarianism, deontology, constructivism, eudaimonism (including virtue ethics), and noncognitivism all remain live options in moral philosophy. Moreover, constructivism and some forms of eudaimonism do not posit any sort of robustly objective basis for ethics, so moral relativism is not even the only option in the moral anti-realism camp. If we’re talking about the philosophical landscape, then, there are several alternatives.

Second point: theism cannot actually support moral realism. All attempts to date have either run up against some version of the Euthyphro dilemma or lapsed into incoherence, and there is no reason to think the situation will change any time soon. The most popular theistic view—divine command theory—is not a form of moral realism by definition. Why theists are so attached to this impossible notion is beyond me. There are better strategies available to them.

Finally, science can only give us a descriptive account of how people in fact reason about moral matters. It cannot tell us how people should reason about moral matters. This is not to say that empirical data is irrelevant to moral philosophy, but only that theses about how things should be are not empirical claims.

I would love a society based upon Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

Though I don’t think that anyone, including myself, could ever live up to it.

In most religions morality is commanded by God, rewarding followers & punishing sinners. The atheist is motivated by neither fear of punishment nor hope for reward. Nonetheless I feel an innate moral framework that boils down to “the golden rule.”

I choose morality because it makes the world a better place to live, especially if most other people think as I do. It’s a psychological / sociological epiphenomenon of human civilization. Young kids, it would seem, internalize most of it with normal parenting—with or without religion. I think the only belief required for moral behavior is that all other people experience the same feelings that you do. That’s absolute, not relative, I suppose.

Interesting question. I never really thought that moral objectivism was necessarily synonymous with theism and moral relativism was synonymous with nontheism. Most people would agree on the absolute basics such as stealing, murder, violence, etc are universal wrongs. I wouldn’t think that those actions would be considered relative to either the theist or nontheist.

Perhaps it is a combination of both but somebody’s pleasure will usually always be another’s pain many times and vice versa. Where should the line be drawn? Obviously duty based theories have a major importance to both most theists and nontheists to some degree. When it comes to consequentialism the majority rules obviously. Perhaps in this sense then (relating to consequentialism) it is a good thing Earth has many different cultures. Can morality ever be a matter of an individual’s opinion? A culture’s opinion? At the same time could there ever be a universal agreement on what is right or what is wrong? I don’t see an alternative here since both objectivism and relativism offer a combination of theories. A mix of the two maybe. Perhaps allowing individuals the option of living where they would feel most comfortable would make conventionalism the best of all of these ideas, I don’t know.

I don’t look at moral relativism or moral objectivism in terms of comparing nontheism and theism but rather political ideologies. To me moral relativism (especially subjectivism) seems to match libertarian ideology and moral objectivism (especially consequentialism) seems to be an ideology in line with communitarianism. What do I know?

@DominicX No, the basic foundation fo morality was articulated far before Christ said it in his GOlden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It was first noted either in the Code of Hammurabi written in ancient Babylon in 1780 BCE, or in the Eqyptian Middle Kingdom story The Eloquent Peasant, which dates from 2040–1650 BCE. It is translated as “Now this is the command: Do to the doer to cause that he do thus to you.” By the late period in 664 BCE – 323 BCE, it had been simplified to “That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another.” The Ancient Greeks further refined the thought, bringing it closer to our familiar Golden Rule.

In China, it is written that the Emperor Zi Gong asked Confucius, “Is there one word that may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?” and the Master replied “Is not RECIPROCITY such a word?” Chinese Mohism, and Taoism also contained this principal of reciprocity, which pop culture translates as “What goes around comes around.”

The Golden Rule of reciprocity is the foundation of all morality, and is understood universally. Sorry to disappoint, but Jesus didn’t invent it. He just articulated what was by then well known.

Since good/bad, right/wrong are artificial constructs and do not exist in any form except as they relate to the individual and that a belief in objectivism would require that these concepts exist independent of the individual, I would say that relativism is the ONLY form of morality that exists regardless of ones theistic views.

I don’t know any people who believe in God who are actually objective to begin with.

Ask Christians about whether genocide is okay. God says it is; he commands it (Deuteronomy 20:16). But that was relative, apparently, to Israelite culture.

I don’t think objective/subjective is a proper way to understand morals to begin with. Morals are behavioral codes. Are certain morals better than others? Well, certain morals are more effective than others at doing certain things… just like certain genes are more effective than others, or certain companies are more effective than others. Nature “selects” societies based on their morals to some extent, which is why murder is so often outlawed in societies. But I don’t think this means morals are objective… they just are what they are. They work while they work, until they don’t.

I think the analysis is over complicated. Humankind’s sentiency causes struggles to understands its place. At the root is co-existing in a society and the brain just adjusts to environmental pressures to eat, propagate, and have maximum overall success. Morality, religion, and atheism are just personal constructs of coping with survival. All the rest is simply window dressing and the brain requiring a settled space to enact its responsibility of the human animal surviving a cruel world.

Religions base their morality on rules written in a book, presumed to be of divine origin. Why can’t we write a book of moral principles without any pretense of divine origin? There might be disagreements as to some of the specifics and there may end up being more than one book, each with its own following. I don’t see anything wrong with that. What we would end up with is several secular spiritualities. At the very least we would end up with a debate on morality without getting into useless arguments over what God wants.

@LostInParadise Almost all cultures in the past four or five thousand years have done exactly that. Our book is called our Civil and Criminal Law Code. But your point is an excellent one. There are many current and many more now dead religions, each with its own God and its own book authored by divine inspiration. Most of these supreme deities claim to be the one and only god. And most of the books they allegedly inspired set forth codes that conflict in some areas with all other codes. So they can’t all be “right” or truly objective. Given the rules they establish, only one could possibly be right. It’s perhaps even more likely none of them are right, and our books of laws, being more fluid than ancient and putted divinely-inspired texts, are closer to the confines of the law of reciprocity than any of the religiously inspired law books.

@ETpro , There are questions of morality that extend beyond legal matters. I think there is a real need to address moral issues apart from law and apart from religion. Genetic engineering, habitat preservation, community responsibilities, corporate power and gay marriage are things that we should be talking about. Religion is in decline and that creates a spiritual vacuum that we should fill from a secular point of view.

@LostInParadise I do not disagree with morality addressing any of those issues you listed. But the law of reciprocity does address them all, and many more. To truly apply the golden rule, you have to be willing to, as the Indians said, walk in the other man’s moccasins. For instance, a straight man might not have any personal interest in gay marriage, and thus would say it’s OK with me if someone tells me aI can’t marry a man. But how would he feel in a gay person’s shoes. How would he feel if laws were passed telling him he could not marry a woman? Because we are beginning to recognize this, we are in the process of changing our legal code to provide equality in marriage without gender bias.

The Golden Rule is a fine guide, but it does not provide the answer to everything. For example, I think that those who oppose gay marriage make a good point when they say that it changes the nature of marriage. It does, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. What is a marriage? What purpose does it serve? Consider, on the other hand, genetic engineering. Is this a good thing? Should we limit it to correcting imperfections? This is not likely to happen. At some point it will be used to enhance people’s abilities. Is this desirable? Do we lose our humanity in the process? These are complex issues. We may never arrive at a consensus on them, but they need to be discussed and traditional religions are not able to address them.

@LostInParadise The difference is that since religious people claim their morals have a divine origin, they claim their morals have grounding in something metaphysical and beyond humanity itself and thus they can claim it’s “objective” since it exists independent of humans; if irreligious people wrote a book of morals, then it would have come from humans and it would be subject to their will.

In other words, they would be taking personal responsibility for their morals. About time, don’t you think?

I worry that we are lacking consistent terminology here on this thread. For one thing, moral objectivism and moral relativism are contraries, but not contradictories (that is, you can’t hold both, but you don’t have to hold one or the other). Perhaps some standardized definitions are in order.

Moral realism is the technical term for what most people call moral objectivism. To be a moral realist, you must assert all three of the following:

(1) Moral statements are the kind of thing that can be true or false.
(2) Some moral statements are true.
(3) True moral statements have their truth value in virtue of the metaphysical status of the actions they describe (that is, something about the metaphysics of the universe makes moral statements true).

Note that these theses are not entirely independent. If you deny (1), you must also deny (2) and (3) on pain of contradiction. If you deny (2), you must also deny (3). Only (3) may be denied without denying either of the remaining theses.

Moral anti-realism is the contradictory of moral realism. To be a moral anti-realist, you must deny one of the three theses of moral realism. Given that the three theses of moral anti-realism are not entirely independent (as noted above), all moral anti-realists deny (3).

Constructivists only deny (3). They hold that there are true moral statements, but that the attitudes of sentient beings are in one way or another essential to the truth of those statements. There are many varieties of constructivism, some of which are very close to moral realism.

The most common, however, are moral subjectivism (which holds that moral statements are assertions about personal attitudes and thus are true when the person asserting them accurately conveys his attitudes) and moral relativism (which holds that moral statements are assertions about group attitudes and thus are true when they actively reflect the attitudes of the group from which the statement is being made).

Another common constructivist view is called ideal observer theory, which holds that the best thing to do is what a perfectly rational and fully informed individual would tell us to do. Divine command theory, which says that we should do whatever God commands, is one version of this view (placing God in the place of the ideal observer). As divine command theory is a form of constructivism, it is also a form of moral anti-realism.

Error theorists deny both (2) and (3), holding that moral statements are failed attempts to refer to moral properties that do not exist. Thus moral statements are the kind of thing that can be true or false, but it turns out that none of them are true because the world lacks anything to make them true. Error theories are always relative to a particular moral discourse. So while one might think that ordinary moral discourse is erroneous, such an error theorist is not committed to the view that all possible moral discourses are erroneous.

Non-cognitivists deny all three theses of moral realism. On this view, moral statements are not assertions at all—despite their syntactic structure—but either commands or effusions of emotion. They do not need anything to make them true because they are not attempts to say anything that is true, informative, or descriptive. Instead, moral statements are solely in the business of getting people to do things with no additional semantic content whatsoever.

This is by no means a complete taxonomy of ethics, but it covers many of the most relevant positions. I have used the terms “moral realism” and “moral anti-realism” to avoid confusion with Ayn Rand’s so-called “Objectivism,” which is not what most people mean when discussing objective ethics. In fact, Rand rejected moral realism and called it not “moral objectivism,” but rather “moral intrinsicism.”

I am not sure how relevant it is to this discussion but I am a non-congnitivist by the definition you give. I see morality as being about values and I do not see truth or falsity in values. I do allow that a set of morals can make one society more successful than another. In that regard I recommend the book SuperCooperators, which talks about how altruistic behavior can evolve by natural selection at the group level.

When I was in high school, I invented my own secular moral code, which goes something like this: It’s always wrong to initiate force or aggression against other people without their consent. (If others commit force or aggression against you, that constitutes consent on their part, i.e. self-defense.) The corollary of that is that you have the right to do anything alone or among consenting adults that is mutually consensual and that doesn’t involve force or aggression against others. I think that’s about as close to an objective moral/ethical code as you can get.

BTW, this sounds a lot like the Libertarian ideology, doesn’t it? Well, I developed this moral code years before I knew there was even such things as Libertarians or anything about their ideology.