Do Morals Exist?

in #philosophy7 years ago (edited)

For right now, the definition of morals will be:
principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior. (Google Definition)

There are three major viewpoints on this issue; objective, subjective, skeptic, nihilist. Those who believe that objective moral values exist believe that moral values are independent and not influenced by the opinion or belief of human beings. A good example would be:

To say that The Holocaust is objectively evil; is to say that it was evil even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was good, and it would still have been evil even if the Nazis had won World War II, and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everyone who disagreed with them so that everybody thought The Holocaust was good.
-William Lane Craig

But to say that moral values exist independent from humans, implies the existence of a creator to set these moral values. Objective moral values could only exist if they are created and upholded by a higher being than ourselves, (a.k.a. God). Objective moral values can only exist if a supreme being, or a god exists.

In subjective morality, moral values are based on a human"s personal feelings or thoughts. Evidence for this is that across the world, different cultures vary in what they believe moral values are. For example; a radical extremist Muslim that blew himself up in a public park killing a dozen people. You may think this is an immoral act to do, you think this because of your cultural, religious and family backgrounds, but to a radical Islamic tribe, this is the most moral thing one could ever strive to do. Why is your opinion right over the guy living in the radical Islamic tribe? There is no objective force judging what is considered right or wrong, so neither of you is right, and neither of you are wrong. This is an unpopular position to hold, because by this belief system, torturing a child for fun is not inherently evil. Yet keep in mind that by this belief value, morals still exist, there just is no standard. Another idea to remember is that without humans there would be no moral values.

The third position I will be discussing is moral nihilism, the belief that moral values do not exist. For this position I will be focusing on the Error Theory, developed by Mackie. It is based upon three premises:

  1. There are no moral features in this world; nothing is right or wrong.
  2. Therefore no moral judgments are true; however,
  3. Our sincere moral judgments try, but always fail, to describe the moral features of things.

When we make moral judgements, we are trying to state truth. But since there is no moral truth, moral facts don"t exist. To put it simpler; knowledge requires truth, there is no moral truth so there is no moral knowledge, therefore moral values are only our imagination.
There are many more to check out, such as moral non-cognitivism, moral realism, moral skepticism, moral expressivism, etc. To start a good discussion I"ll ask three questions:

Which moral ideology do you side with?

Can you debunk Error Theory?

What are some other moral arguments? I'm interested to hear them.

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