The full term I have been using is “absolute objective morality.” Objective means being outside of the self. My argument says that morality is found in God, Who is independent of us. Since God’s nature is unchanging, the morality is unchanging as well. I should have explained this at the beginning. Still, my argument is the same regardless of this confusion of terms.
12Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. ebible.com/bible/NIV/Matthew+5:12
It seems to me that the utilitarian concept of certain pleasures being higher and lower would help figure out the difference between happiness and true happiness. What do you consider higher or lower? Ooops. I believe you gave some examples earlier. Would you mind repeating them or maybe you have added or subtracted some of them.
Can I step in here without getting involved with God concepts? Oreoracle, do you have a dictionary handy? I prefer using the word objective according to the first three definitions. I would write them out, but I need to be out of here…
I agree with you all there; the morality is unchanging once it has been established. To say that the origins of the principles are objective, though, would be fallacious. Asserting the ethic “I should value God’s will” follows from your subjective choice to submit to God’s will–your emotional values that are assigned to God. Reason may have been involved, but emotion serves as the catalyst in decision-making. In a life-or-death situation, we choose life because we value it emotionally. You could say that it is our natural response, and so for that reason we should continue to choose life, but then that would mean that you have to explain why you value nature.
Granny, I hope post #325 makes my meaning clear. If it doesn’t, I’ll try to explain it another way.
Thanks, Oreoracle
Ethics are not created by my decision to follow God, which is my free choice. Ethics exist totally independent of any of us. My decision to follow God does not create any ethics in any way. We discover ethics, in the same way we discover the nature of God. People may disagree about what the ethics of God are, thus lending an appearance of subjectivity, but this does not impact the actual ethics of God. The reason we need God-given objective reason and revelation is to help ensure we are actually following the objective law of God, not our interpretation of the law.
We value life and our human nature because God has created them out of love. Emotions may help us is this goal, but the final choice is an act of the will.
Ethics are not created by man. Rather, we discover them. People often put their own subjective spin on them (such as pro-abort Catholic politicians), but the actual ethics are not subjective. Scientists may put personal bias into research, rendering it subjective, but this does not mean that science as a discipline is subjective.
Sure. I will only touch on one at first. I can explain the rest in the coming days, and I can answer questions if you want.
Mill suggested that one pleasure is higher than another when the majority of people pursue it more often than the other pleasure. Now, the people he considered had to be “good judges.” He said that one may choose a lower pleasure if he considered it more convenient than a higher one (having sex is more convenient than staying in shape, for example, so more people do it). One may also be biased; they’ve lost feeling for other pleasures due to a fixation on a particular pleasure (drug addiction is a nice example). So a “good judge” is one who has the means to pursue all sorts of pleasures with ease and is not biased on any one in particular, due to an addiction over time.
Most of the time, I’d say that exciting things tend to be lower pleasures, but there is another pleasure other than going to the zoo in your example (perhaps two, even). You satisfied the value of pleasuring your family* and the more general value of pleasuring others (the first is instinctive, the second is learned).
Mill suggested that one pleasure is higher than another when the majority of people pursue it more often than the other pleasure. Now, the people he considered had to be “good judges.” He said that one may choose a lower pleasure if he considered it more convenient than a higher one (having sex is more convenient than staying in shape, for example, so more people do it). One may also be biased; they’ve lost feeling for other pleasures due to a fixation on a particular pleasure (drug addiction is a nice example). So a “good judge” is one who has the means to pursue all sorts of pleasures with ease and is not biased on any one in particular, due to an addiction over time.
This means that there’s not a set list of higher and lower pleasures. The majority preference wins out, but usually stays pretty consistent over time.
Most of the time, I’d say that exciting things tend to be lower pleasures, but there is another pleasure other than going to the zoo in your example (perhaps two, even). You satisfied the value of pleasuring your family* and the more general value of pleasuring others (the first is instinctive, the second is learned).
- Someone, somewhere, is going to take that the wrong way.
I’ll have to go back a couple of blocks to a post where I said I was yielding somewhat on the reasoning/emotion thing. Right now, I’m gone. Dinosaurs take precidence–sometime. A real dinosaur – not me.
That is an interesting take on the concept of self-sacrifice. I do sometimes wonder how I would feel if I could not look back upon a given situation and have the satisfaction of knowing I had aquitted myself to the best of my ability. I know there are certainly times where, when life or work seem too hard, the motivation to continue can come from asking onesself, “But how will you feel later if you don’t do this now?” And certainly, if one did not act according to one’s own ethical principles, particularly in a life-or-death situation, I imagine the sense of guilt could be very hard to live with.
But a utilitarian that observed absolute laws.
Yes, Catholics believe that God created reason as a mental ability independent of emotions. However, sin has weakened man to the point where it is difficult for most people to totally separate objective reason from their own personal desires, biases, and insecurities. This is why we need to be extremely careful in placing too much stock in our own intellectual abilities. That being said, the capacity to reason still exists, and we can strive through careful analysis and discussion to come to the truth.
That’s not really what I’m saying. I’m saying that it’s impossible to make a choice without emotion (establishing and acting on an ethic). Simply gathering information is a different story. We don’t say that anyone decides that two plus two equals four, but we would say that someone decides that killing is wrong. A computer, despite computing and reasoning skills superior to humans, could not come to the conclusion that an act is wrong. This is because it is devoid of emotions and values for the emotions to correspond with.
I’m curious: do you have a reason to make those assumptions? Also, when you say that God is good, do you mean that God equals good? Is he the incarnation of goodness?
Certainly. But I want you to know that when I say ethics are subjective, I’m not referring to subjectivism. Rather, I’m saying that God’s word may be objective, but “I should abide by God’s word” is subjective. The values required to come to that conclusion are not concrete.
This is a good point.
We discover ethics indirectly through discovering the logical basis for a religion. For example, I have logically discovered the Catholic faith to be true (partly due to my argument in the other post), and thus I can logically discover the corresponding ethics through direct revelation and the reasoning behind it. Although this is not exactly empirical science, logical analysis is somewhat similar to it. Although some may say that they personally think murder is wrong, I would say that I have discovered (or rather verified) that murder is wrong through approaching the whole philosophical question through logic.