Just because there are objective morals and everyone knows them doesn’t mean people choose to acknowledge and folow them. People do have free will. People do ignore their conscience and deny the truth.
That makes about as much sense as claiming you can go out on a bright sunny day and really believe that the sky is purple with green polka dots.
I think I may have mentioned this to you before.
God doesn’t dictate moral laws like governments. He isn’t separate from the moral law. He is the moral law and we know of these moral laws because we are made in His image. We have a God like nature and we also have an evil side. God’s creation and morality are intertwined. So like the laws of nature moral laws are inherent in God’s creation and are like natural laws.
I don't think that's enough to claim that morality is objective. If God has a certain morality, then it doesn't follow that such a morality is objective just because we are made in his image. My daughter was made in my image, yet she and I hold very different viewpoints in some things. I can't declare that my ideas must objectively apply to her.
You're now, no doubt, going to say it's different when it comes to God, in which case I will say you are committing the fallacy of special pleading.
this is the evolutionary explanation for morality which actually cannot ground morality. Evolution is descriptive and not prescriptive. Evolution describes what does survive not what ought to survive. It tells us how we come to know morals and not why we ought to follow those morals.
So? How does this contradict what I said?
Who says that we should not kill or steal? So if evolution cannot ground morals and is only about survival then it doesn’t really matter what behaviour is used to help allow people to survive. Someone can make a case in the future that killing and stealing is good because there is not enough resources to go around for everyone to survive. There is no way to measure anything as far as being ultimately good so anything can go when it comes to evolution and survival.
We have already seen this with dictators like Starlin and Hitler. But also with how people scrambled to wipe out supermarket shelves and denying others so they could survive during the Covid 19 epidemic.
Which is what we'd expect to see with subjective, not objective, morality.
The reason evolution can't give us genuine morality is because it doesn't follow that because things are some way that they therefore ought to be that way. Evolution can only make things be some way. Evolution can't make it to where things ought to be some way.
Now, it's true that if we don't behave in certain ways, that will be detrimental to us and our species. But evolution doesn't care about whether our species survives or not. In fact, natural selection is one of the twin pillars of evolution, and that entails that many things die off so that those that are suitably adapted to their environment can survive and reproduce. So the fact that we die if we don't behave in a certain way doesn't mean that it's right or moral for us to behave in that way, and evolution can't make it morally right for us to behave in such a way as to ensure our survival.
How Do Moral Absolutes Prove That God Exists?
I can't see how you think this supports the case for objective morality.
Not their personal views but objective morals have to come from beyond the person. By C. S. Lewis using the argument against God that the universe was cruel and unjust this caused him to wonder where he got the morals of just and unjust from in the first place.
For those morals to have any weight to use against God they must come from beyond his own personal views because subjective moral are just opinions. That made him realized that these morals were objective and independent of himself and that there had to be a moral lawgiver to ground morality.
Yes, I agree. If there is an objective morality, it must come from beyond any conscious entity. It must be an inherent property of the universe.
Unfortunately, you haven't shown that morality comes from anything more than ourselves.
Look at the opposite of Honesty. Purposely lying and misrepresenting others is a moral issue. So honesty is a virtue as they say that prevents people from lying. Yes but that doesn’t change honesty being an objective moral and moral guide. In your scenario you still referred to the value of honesty to determine not to use it.
But there are cases where that isn't true. If I meet with a friend and tell her her make up looks like she was standing in front of an exploding can of paint, that may be the truth, but it's still something I would say is immoral, since I would be hurting her by saying that. Yet a small white lie, being dishonest, could be the moral thing to do.
As I mentioned objective morality doesn’t mean that we have to rigidly stick to being honest in every situation. That is more like absolute morality. Objective morality means that in any situation there will be an objectively right or wrong thing to do that is beyond human opinion.
If it's objectively true, then it MUST apply in every situation. You can't say that being honest is not always the correct thing to do when you have been pushing the ideas that there is always something that is objectively right to do and that honesty is objectively morally right.
So in your scenario the objectively right thing to do was to not be honest because a greater moral wrong would have been committed in hurting your friend. This is the same for example where it is objectively right to kill a crazed gunman with a gun to a child’s head.
Yet you have been pushing the "Honesty is objectively morally right" position for a while now, and yet now you claim that it isn't always.
So being honest or not killing is not necessarily a strict rule we have to stick to in every situation under objective morality. Sometimes it’s morally right not to be honest or to kill. But this doesn’t make dishonesty or killing a moral good or a subjective moral. This is a common misunderstanding.
Exactly. A person in the situation must weigh up the value of each and choose the outcome with the highest value.
Let's say there is a gunman about to shoot and kill a child. You can stop him, but only by killing him.
So, let's say you conclude that by killing the gunman you lose 50 morality points. But by saving the child, you gain 100 morality points. Thus, you would conclude that killing the gunman and saving the child gives a net gain of 50 morality points, so that or the moral thing to do.
But someone else could conclude that killing the gunman loses them 50 morality points, forcing the child to watch someone killed in front of their eyes and live with that for the rest of their life costs another 20 morality points, but saving the child gains them only 50 morality points, because a life is a life, and no person has more right than another to live. Thus, killing the gunman costs negative 20 morality points, so it is more moral for this person to do nothing and try to find another solution, maybe negotiation.
Yet this is subjective morality, not objective, since it is different for each person.
Why not, if you look up honesty it will tell you it’s a moral quality. It’s associated with integrity, trust, truth, fairness, moral character etc. It is actually a foundational moral that other moral values stem from. Honesty is closely linked to truth and truth is one the greatest moral values.
Honesty is a moral value though. If someone is dishonest then they are untrustworthy, as opposed to having integrity, being sincere and trustworthy. That seems to speak about moral values. This is how significant Honesty is as a moral value
Honesty or truthfulness is a facet of moral character that connotes positive and virtuous attributes such as integrity, truthfulness, straightforwardness, including straightforwardness of conduct, along with the absence of lying, cheating, theft, etc. Honesty also involves being trustworthy, loyal, fair, and sincere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty#:~:text=Honesty%20or%20truthfulness%20is%20a,loyal%2C%20fair%2C%20and%20sincere.
But as you have said, there are cases where honest can be immoral. We can't conclude that honest is automatically the moral option to take.