If you keep on insisting that morality is personal opinion, then you can’t defend the wrongness of child rape. It will just be your opinion.
If it were my opinion and mine alone, it would not be a community value. If it were not a community value, human communities would probably not last, in practical terms.
Values can be anything you like. Companies have a value system. Individuals have a value system. Mine includes strong black coffee with two sugars.
So far, we are on the same page about values - preferences that affect your behaviour.
Once you begin talking about morality, you are actually talking about the formation of commonly shared values. A majority of people share the idea that life is sacred. It is a shared value. However, some character down the road says he doesn’t share that value and he says he will kill anyone who walks on his lawn. So, the majority enact a ‘law’, based on a shared value system. Once that law is enacted, the opinion of the fellow down the road doesn’t count any more. If he shoots anyone he gets shot in return. The enacting of the law has objectified the common assertion that life is sacred.
Then it is the law that is objective, written down where it can be examined independently of anyone’s opinion on the matter. But laws change according to the ebb and flow of community values. You seem to think that morality is something fixed and unchangeable, when it depends entirely on the existence of subjective beings like ourselves.
The rules are based on values which have been objectified. Otherwise, you have no rules but those decided upon by individuals according to their subjective whims and desires.
Commonality does not make values or morals objective, but intersubjective.
According to you, even flowers have no ‘end purpose’. Even the most godless evolutionary geneticist would laugh you down on that one! The fact that certain parts of the human body work in certain ways is proof that they are supposed to work that way. After all, didn’t evolution ‘design’ them that way?
Evolution and natural selection don’t consciously ‘design’ anything. But at least you haven’t suggested that the ultimate purpose of flowers is to be exchanged between humans as a romantic gesture…
Humans, unfortunately, seem to be very inventive at ways of abusing their bodies for wrong ends. In evolutionary terms, adaptation is supposed to increase the viability and survivability of the species.
And as I’ve already explained, the existence of homosexually inclined individuals within a community of humans can increase the survival prospects of the group. Evolution isn’t just an individual exercise, you know.
That “someone” who “intended” could very well be mother nature herself. You know, as in evolution and pure chance, all without God being involved. If what you wrote held true, then you would even have to deny the role of genetic evolution, because genetic evolution has certainly given things an ‘end purpose’ and a proper way to achieve it.
Nature isn’t some
one. Nature doesn’t care one way or the other whether I survive to breed or not. If I don’t, others will, and it will be all the same to ‘Mother’ nature. You’re ascribing subjective feelings and opinions and conscious intentions to that which in all likelihood does not have them.
Out of curiosity, why did you choose sugar, instead of, say, heroin?
I suspect there are far more people here who can relate to the former than to the latter, and whilst the former has a seemingly innocent appeal to most people, the latter is almost always harmful.
You might say homosexual behaviour has a place in human sexuality, but that means nothing more than it exists.
Now you begin to understand!
What its final end is, other than an extuingushing of certain genetic traits, or of spreading disease, or the causing of physical harm, no-one can say.
As I’ve said, it doesn’t need a ‘final’ end - you’re still supposing there was intentional design behind it, rather than just fortuitous occurrence. Here’s a possible scenario: let’s say a human pair within a tribe or community have three sons. If all three sons are competing for mates and resources, that will lessen the chances of survival for all their offspring. If one of the sons has homosexual tendencies, then it just may be that more of the offspring of the other two will survive to reproduce. The genes don’t
care - they just go with what works in the long run, because that’s all they can do.
That article you linked to is not only poorly written, it is illogical! The basic terms he has used for his little essay are wrong. He defines morality as “…opinions on what is good and bad…” If that is the case, then gravity is just an opinion.
Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, you are confusing facts with opinions. Morality, when it comes down to brass tacks,
is people’s opinions on what is right and wrong, what is good and bad - doesn’t matter how many people share the opinion - it’s still an opinion, and will only ever be relevant while there are people to hold opinions. Gravity will exist whether we, as subjective beings, do or not. Morality won’t. If I jump out of a 10th floor window with no safety apparatus, I’ll fall to my death whether I think so or not. You have yet to demonstrate an example of an
objective moral fact that exists independently of any subjective beings who have an interest in maintaining or extinguishing certain behaviours.
