– he could, but he clearly doesn’t, so I think this argument is a non-starter.  What’s more, whatever God does is “good” anyway, so it doesn’t matter if it’s un…[Read more]

@mcc1789 – “I understand for them it’s the same thing, but as I’ve explained, I’m not in agreement on that. ”

– but the point is precisely to understand what religious people believe.  Neither…[Read more]

– OK, JJ and God differ in that Judge Judy is not “goodness”, while God is.  For a religious person, God and moral reality are one and the same thing.  And if something is a moral reality, it must be objective, like any other kin…[Read more]

‘Murder’ is a word that already embodies negative judgement. A non-judgmental version would be ’Killing is wrong…”

It’s like saying “cruelty is wrong, without exception”. Obviously that’s true, because the word ‘cruelty’ carries the wrongness as part of its definition.

– I’d say that this idea, which I consider preposterous, has grown up because of the psychological effects of the kind of moral objectivity I have described.  In times gone by, i.e. before the late 20th century, it felt to people that their morality was a natural part of the fabric of the universe.  Even now, most p…[Read more]

But when religious people do their moral reasoning, it’s based on the fact of things being recorded in the Bible or Qu’ran, or the fact of what their priest of imam has said.  There is nothing else for them to go on: whatever they go…[Read more]

– but this kind of morality is still based on facts (i.e. the fact that something is written in the Bible, Qu’ran etc.).

The most convincing explanation of objective morality that I have come across is that “objective” means the opposite of “subjective” – i.e. it doesn’t depend on the point of view of…[Read more]

@tom sarbeck – ““dead” is metaphor. What say you to the hypothesis that every word in a language is metaphor?”

– I don’t think that words and metaphors are the same.  A metaphor is when one…[Read more]

“Objective, as in based on facts”

“So it’s objective, you agree, though not morality? I don’t see how complexity negates this.”

– moral complexity means that there are conflicting versions of right and wrong.  Facts cannot be simultaneously one thing and another.  So moral complexity confounds a fact-based conception of moral objec…[Read more]

I agree that the value of “flourishing” fulfills every criterion of “objectivity” that I can think of.  There are two broad ways to achieve this within a social situation: cooperation (i.e. morality) and competition.

However, your argument that “flourishing” is an…[Read more]