Several atheists have already provided accounts of how morality may be objective without deities.
The only people who I have seen here who are atheists who affirm the existence of objective moral values are you and Mark.
Others have provided various epistemological theories of how we come to
know what is moral which is simply irrelevant and these denied that objective moral values and duties even existed.
I may have missed these posts you refer to.
So why have you restricted the options to these two? You began this thread ostensibly for the purpose of learning exactly that, but now you're pretending as though no one has addressed it, or that the only options they've offered you are those two.
Beyond attempting to ground objective moral values in God, I know of only four other explanations espoused by philosophers.
1. Some sort of atheistic moral platonism.
2. Maintaining that moral truths are necessarily true and thus exist inexplicably.
3. Maintaining that moral properties necessarily supervene on certain natural states
4. Maintaining that whatever contributes to human flourishing is good and whatever detracts from it is bad and make that their explanatory stopping point.
2. and 3. upon even a cursory examination are found to be virtually incoherent, thus leaving us really with only two options. The fact that most atheistic philosophers seek to espouse some sort of "whatever maximizes conscious creatures well being is good" a la Sam Harris framework is indicative of the explanatory effeteness of the other possibilities.
Your comment doesn't address my concern. Why does morality being evolved mean that it must be completely subjective and/or illusory?
That is not what I said.
I said that if one assumes metaphysical naturalism and eliminates the two possible moral ontologies, that when examined, are found to be virtually incoherent, one has only two left and they are the two that are the most widely defended by atheistic philosophers.
The key phrase here is "if one assumes naturalism". That is, if there is no transcendent moral law giver who has the authority to prescribe and lay upon humanity, moral obligations, and if there is no paradigm of Goodness from which our concept of morality is derived that exists independently of humanity, then all we have is matter in motion. Once the handful of naturalistic accounts of the grounding of objective moral values and duties is examined, one is left with, as the most superior of the few, the view that man, as Michael Ruse has stated, has evolved a sense of morality as merely an aid to survival and that there is nothing about this adaptation that would make its grounds objective, for it finds its point of origin within the chemical reactions of the brain of evolved primates.
Once again, Ruse explains it well:
"The position of the modern evolutionist … is that humans have an awareness of morality … because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. … Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says, 'Love thy neighbor as thyself,' they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. … Nevertheless, … such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, … and any deeper meaning is illusory."
And I will let Dr. Craig sum it up:
" If we were to rewind the film of human evolution back to the beginning and start anew, people with a very different set of moral values might well have evolved. As Darwin himself wrote in The Descent of Man, "If … men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering."
Natural science tells us only what is, not what ought to be, the case. As philosopher Jerry Fodor has written, "Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it wouldn't tell us what is wrong with how we are."17 In particular it cannot tell us that we have a moral obligation to take actions that are conducive to human flourishing.
So if there is no God, what foundation remains for objective moral duties? On the naturalistic view, human beings are just animals, and animals have no moral obligations to one another. When a lion kills a zebra, it kills the zebra, but it does not murder the zebra. When a great white shark forcibly copulates with a female, it forcibly copulates with her but it does not rape her — for there is no moral dimension to these actions. They are neither prohibited nor obligatory.
So if God does not exist, why think we have any moral obligations to do anything? Who or what imposes these moral duties on us? Where do they come from? It is hard to see why they would be anything more than a subjective impression ingrained into us by societal and parental conditioning.
On the atheistic view, certain actions such as incest and rape may not be biologically and socially advantageous, and so in the course of human development have become taboo, that is, socially unacceptable behavior. But that does absolutely nothing to show that rape or incest is really wrong. Such behavior goes on all the time in the animal kingdom. On the atheistic view the rapist who flouts the herd morality is doing nothing more serious than acting unfashionably, the moral equivalent of Lady Gaga. If there is no moral lawgiver, then there is no objective moral law; and if there is no objective moral law, then we have no objective moral duties.
Harris is impatient about such questions: "How much time should we spend worrying about such a transcendent source of value?" he sniffs. "I think the time I will take typing this sentence is already too much."18 He makes a half-hearted stab at showing that the divide between facts and values is illusory in three ways:19
1. Facts about maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures must translate into facts about brains. Perhaps; but this point is irrelevant, since the question remains, why think that on atheism we have a moral obligation to maximize the well-being of conscious creatures (or that so doing is objectively good in the first place)?
2. Objective knowledge already has values built into it, since we must value logical consistency, reliance on evidence, etc. Here again we see Harris' equivocal use of value terminology. This means that objective knowledge requires logical consistency, reliance on evidence, etc. as necessary conditions of knowledge. It has nothing to do with moralvalue.
3. Beliefs about facts and beliefs about values arise from similar brain processes. So what? Does Harris think this implies that they are the same belief? This confuses the origin of a belief with the content of the belief. Just because two different beliefs arise from similar brain processes does not imply they have the same meaning or information content. Whatever their origin, beliefs about what is the case, and beliefs about what ought (orought not) to be the case are not the same belief. One belief could be true and the other false. Harris' view thus lacks any source for objective moral duty.
Second: "ought" implies "can." A person is not morally responsible for an action he is unable to avoid. For example, if somebody shoves you into another person, you are not to blame for bumping into this person. You had no choice. But Harris believes that all of our actions are causally determined and that there is no free will.20 Harris rejects not only libertarian accounts of freedom but also compatibilistic accounts of freedom. But if there is no free will, no one is morally responsible for anything. In the end, Harris admits this, though it's tucked away in his endnotes. Moral responsibility, he says, "is a social construct," not an objective reality: "in neuroscientific terms no person is more or less responsible than any other" for the actions they perform.21 His thoroughgoing determinism spells the end of any hope or possibility of objective moral duties on his worldview because we have no control over what we do.
Harris recognizes that "determinism really does threaten free will and responsibility as we intuitively understand them."22 But not to worry! "The illusion of free will is itself an illusion."23 The point, I take it, is that we do not really have the illusion of free will. Not only is such a claim patently false phenomenologically, as any of us can attest, but it is also irrelevant. The fact remains that whether we experience the illusion of free will or not, on Harris' view we are thoroughly determined in all that we think and do and can therefore have no moral responsibilities.
Conclusion
On Harris' view there is both no source of objective moral duties and no possibility of objective moral duty. Therefore, on his view, despite his protestations to the contrary, there is no objective right or wrong.
Thus, Sam Harris' naturalistic view fails to provide a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties. If God does not exist, we are trapped in a morally valueless world in which nothing is prohibited. Harris' atheism thus sits very ill with his ethical objectivism.
What the theist offers Sam Harris is not a new set of moral values — by and large we share a wide range of positions of applied ethics — rather what we can offer is a sound foundation for the moral values and duties that we both hold dear."
Read more:
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/navigating-sam-harris-the-moral-landscape#ixzz3MVgJbJjS
