Wiploc

If morality is a created thing, why should we go along with it? I could make a morality; would you be supposed to go along with that too? If there is no reason we ought to go along with an invented morality (even one invented by a god) then it isn't really a morality at all. For a rule to be a moral rule, it has to be a rule that we ought to obey.

crc

long winded fool

If morality is created by the same thing which created the beings subject to it, then these beings ought to go along with it if they are rational.

Why not? Are you defining "objective" as outside the power of God? If so you are begging the question. If there is right and wrong by God's decree then it is objective. Only if there is no right and wrong is morality subjective. Since God made right and wrong, (assuming for the sake of argument,) morality is objective.

Philosoft

No. Moral objectivity is independent of any being's decree.
Except right and wrong are not "made." God said some things are right and said some other things are wrong.

long winded fool

Agreed. It is not independent of the decision of being that created it in the first place. There is a difference in arbitrarily declaring right and wrong when morality is already there to be perceived and creating morality from the absence of morality. There's no reason to assume a god did this, but if God did do it then there is no dilemma.

So if God can ever be wrong, then morality is subjective. Since God cannot be wrong (owing to omniscience) morality is objective. What God decides is right is objectively and irrefutably right and this can never change. As long as the God we are talking about is omniscient, there is no dilemma.

Wiploc

Do you have some reason to believe that? If you create a new species, you get to make them do anything you want? And if the species is rational, it will recognize some meta-ethical rule that says something like, "In any possible world, a being who creates physical beings gets to determine their moral rules?"

What is the appeal of such a meta-rule? Why should we believe it is true? Why would any rational being accept such a rule?

crc

Wiploc

Ignore this duplicate post. It would be cool if a moderator took it away entirely.
crc

Nom

If God created morality where there was none before, then morality is subjective: good and evil are what God said they were when he created morality. If morality was already there to be perceived, then good and evil exist objectively, which rasies questions like, why do we need this God thing anyway, and how do we square omnibenevolence with many of the objectively evil deeds attributed to God?

You haven't solved the Euthyphro dilemma, you've simply reformulated it.

FWIW, I think morality is indeed subjective. Humans have made decisions on what is "good" and evil" for a great many years as part of the attempt to build a stable civilization. Good and evil have changed as we've added and subtracted behaviors as our moral system tries to keep up with our economic and intellectual development. A particular moral prohibition or allowance is successful when it increases the number of people who have a stake in the stability, peacefullness, and success of a society; unsuccessful moral rules cause people to opt out of a society, and often create their own. Just my $0.02.

Philosoft

The question is not whether God can be wrong. The question is whether God could have formulated morality differently.
But there is still a problem about what God's omniscience entails. If God knows some fact that says X is morally wrong, then that external fact is the source of his moral declaration.

Rusting Car Bumper

How so?

There are two questions:
1) Does morality depend on the existence of God?
2) Can one know morality without knowing the divine?

Regarding these, if the answer to 1 is Yes and 2 is Yes, then this really puts us in no different a position. An atheist can still be moral and a theist immoral, vice versa, or any other combination.

Not at all. In fact, the theist still has the problem, as I've just stated, that they have to justify that knowledge or belief in god is needed to then understand what is moral.

In fact arguing that the answer to (1) is Yes generally gets one back into a Euthypro like problem regarding (2). That is, if I show that (1) is true its hard not to do so without demonstrating that the arguer knows what good is apart for God. Thus its hard to argue for (1) being Yes without implying that the answer to (2) is also Yes.

DC

long winded fool

I think subjective to humans is a different concept than subjective to God. I think subjective and objective are the same thing when contemplating a creator omniscience. Basically, what God subjectively decides is also objectively true. Since he won't change his mind, (this would contradict the notion of omniscience,) this makes sense. His opinion is synonymous with fact.

Good and evil can exist objectively while still being dependent upon the structure that God created. Since God is omniscient, what He arbitrarily decides is also objective. Existing in the omniscient creator's mind and according to his bias (which of course he can't have if he's omniscient) can still make morality objective.

The answer is no. The way he formulated it is absolutely true. Anything different from this point of view is absolutely false. From his own point of view, any way he formulates it will be objectively true. Therefore it is not subjective. True is always and only true and false is false. It can never change or be anything else to those it affects.

True. But because the omniscience is applied to the creator of morality, then God knows X is morally wrong because he decided to make it that way. Subjective from his point of view yes, but entirely objective from ours. (Again, subjective and objective break down when trying to apply them to the creator of both. To him, absolutely everything is subjective or else it is absolutely objective. There is no division.) Using this argument for subjective morality, one could say that the laws of physics are also subjective. What we call them and how we interpret them are certainly subjective to individuals, but the phenomena our words describe are objectively there to be interpreted truthfully or erroneously. How does God know how gravity works? He decided to create it to work the way it works. Is gravity now a subjective notion? This also can be applied to morality without a logical dilemma.