Reply #256: Clarifications

[USArmyBJJ]

1) You asked whether an objective moral standard can exist outside of theism or platonism (thank you for explaining platonism to me, btw). To be honest - I don't see any. I'm not even certain how any atheistic platonism would get us to objective moral values either. I'm certainly open to the possibility and I would need to see what the arguments are, but it seems to me that theism provides the most reasonable explanation of objective moral values. Otherwise, we might just be left with the conclusion that moral values are not objective. Do you have an alternative?

2) To your response to to my points 4 and 5. This is where I'd like clarification because I think there's some complexity here that I am missing. It seems that you're saying either 1) That we can test the morality of an action after the moral truth has already been determined ("...once someone decides on an acceptable basis for morality, he can test whether or not specific actions are in line with that system"), or 2) That testability helps us buttress the other types of evidence that we already use to determine moral truths (i.e. - that we can test to help us determine whether our personal moral experience is true across some sort of group). Either way, it seems that we're left where we started - with the conclusion that testability alone is not a sufficient mechanism of determining moral value. We either can use it only after we've determined moral truth (in the first case), or we can only use it as support for other types of evidence (e.g. - to measure our collective moral experience, in the second case). But, I might be missing the point. Can you clarify?

3) I'm not certain that evolution can really bring us to a moral truth, at least if we assume non-theism. Evolution may make us primarily concerned with human survival. But, that seems arbitrary to me. There's no reason, on a purely naturalistic basis, that I should think that human survival is any more valuable than the survival of ants or mice. It seems that with theism you could get around this by saying that God wanted us to have fundamentally correct moral beliefs and so He guided the evolutionary process in some ways. Even if we're arguing for situational ethics, I'm not sure how we can even get to the idea that the situation matters unless we first determine why it matters and that means we have to attach some sort of morality to human survival. But I don't see why we should attach that morality to it. I think it's implausible to believe that there is any moral property that automatically attaches to us because of evolution.