You can build an ethical system on utilitarianism, or make it purely transactional. Or from fear of the law or disapproval by others.
Does the objective moral system come from natural laws? Can it be observed? We can all observe gravity and come to the same conclusion, but has there ever been a universal objective moral system in the history of humanity?
None of which implies there must be “a lawgiver”.
I was asking about the origin if objective morality if there were no lawgiver. Even if there is a lawgiver, they might be just transmitting objective morality from the universe, not making it up. That’s been mentioned above.
If you believe in objective morality, you need to share with us where it comes from. I’m open to many possibilities.
I think that is more or less correct, one thing I would add is the element of society, but not just nurturing, I think that there is a lot of that intuition that is activated by our genes when there is a good societal environment. It is close to that old saying of “you use it, or lose it”. The genes need to have a good environment to express what they can do, like empathy.
A bad society will try to remove things like empathy from that formative environment.
Can’t imagine a society like that…
A society like the US where some factions of Christianity have declared empathy to be of the devil? Which goes against almost anything that was reported about Jesus in the gospels?
I am believe in dark matter and dark energy and I don’t know where they come from. Or what they are. Or really how they work in any but a very superficial pop science way. You seem to making an inverse god of the gaps argument? My not knowing where something comes from or how it works, my ignorance, does not mean therefore there must be a god in the Biblical sense, nor does its existence require a law giving entity. “Where it comes from?” to me is only as answerable as “where did the universe come from?” For both I can accept I can live with that I at least don’t have an answer without that ignorance meaning I have to accept a conscious entity biblical sort of god as the answer.
Sometimes, to ask the question is to answer it. 
We can point to good reasons to think dark matter and dark energy exist. Got any for objective morality, besides it feeling right to you? And I already said I don’t require a lawgiver, though pretty much all the people I hear arguing for objective morality accept one.
Do you have access to this objective morality? Can you explain exactly when killing is wrong, and when it isn’t? Or stealing?
I’ve heard several advocates of objective morality use as their example “everyone knows killing babies for fun is immoral.” Yeah, that can be explained through evolution, and notice that they have to add “for fun” since the God they believe in has killed lots of babies.
So, at the moment I have no reason to believe that objective morality exists, and, if it does, I have no ability to know what is moral and immoral according to it.
And that is fine. I think you are confusing this for a debate in which I am trying to convince anyone to believe as I do? I was instead answering the question you asked:
I have no proof that morality is more than what Der Trihs believes it is, something that happens to work to get us what we want, no evidence to support that it is more than the evolutionary and cultural processes that are the how our moral codes developed. I can no more prove it exists than I can prove Free Will exists.
I cannot however behave in manner that does not implicitly accept that some things are Right not just right. I accept that at my core I believe that some things are Right and Wrong and are more than just evolutionary and cultural selection winners.
Again that implies to me a something of the universe, perhaps an emergent property of it, that underpins such. Not thinking in any way we would envision such, not doing anything. And that’s why I personally care about it.
I will function the same with or without an explicit belief in that concept, just as I would if I accept the logic of an argument that Free Will does not actually exist. But that concept allows my mind to be self consistent.
I was thinking about the libertarian thing of “it’s not a right if someone else has to pay for it”. Ie if you decide food, shelter, health care etc are human rights, then you have to take away the right of each person to what they earned/produced. But your example is interesting, because I frequently see people trying to have their cake and eat it by denying there is any conflict between these two values (“hate speech is not free speech”). Many people seem to think rights should not conflict.
But I’m more inclined to agree with you than them. In any case, I continue to think there is no agreement on what is or should be a human right, and there’s no evidence there is any objective way to decide.
I do, however, agree with this:
It’s better to live in a country that protects human rights, and not having them conflicts with my moral intuitions, so we should protect them. We still need to agree what they should be, though. 
That’s why I said it was circular. But morality is not entirely arbitrary: our moral sense evolved along with humans, and as such is constrained by what kind of intuitions aid in survival and reproduction in the ancestral environment. (This is often a flaw I notice in science fiction: authors like to imagine very different cultures, or alien species’ with very different anatomy, behaviour etc, without considering how they could have evolved.)
Perhaps it won’t surprise you to learn that I also don’t believe in free will. 
But it makes no practical difference. Free will is just a useful shorthand way to understand how people and animals act, perhaps in a similar way to how we say our genes ‘want’ us to do something. Certainly we wouldn’t say we eg shouldn’t punish criminals because they had no choice, since the prospect of punishment is one of the factors affecting whether they commit a crime or not.
Internal experiences like the pain of a bee sting or the taste off coffee are usually called qualia. They do correspond to real things - the bee venom triggering pain receptors, various chemicals in the coffee triggering taste and smell receptors. But the subjective experience is manufactured by the brain. I’m not sure how similar the feeling of something being right or wrong is. But let’s say they are. Some people experience the taste of coffee as pleasant, and some unpleasant. No one enjoys bee stings, but some people enjoy the pain of eating chili peppers or horseradish, and others hate it. There are commonalities in taste - almost everyone enjoys sweet things and dislikes bitter. Pretty much no one wants to eat rancid meat. This is because our senses of taste and smell evolved to help us find appropriate food and avoid poison or food-born illness. But there is also a lot of disagreement. That doesn’t matter with flavours in food. But the same thing is true of moral beliefs, and it does create real problems there.
Understandable. Avoiding politics except when you can actually do something practical is probably a good idea.
So maybe that’s the real advantage of adopting a formal theory or code of morality: it acts as a spur to live up to your pre-existing moral beliefs?
That’s certainly been the case with me.
I’m not concerned in any way about what you believe, just the method you arrive at those moral beliefs. I can at least understand how the religious come to their moral beliefs.
And no one is expecting you to. That atheists and those who reject objective morality cannot find anything to be wrong is a theist strawman I have heard used dozens of times, at least. The evidence shows that those who reject objective morality are just as moral as those who accept it, if not more so.
I’ll repeat - okay, so you think or feel the universe instantiates an objective moral code. Now let us know how you access it, besides your feelings. Your feelings are clearly an unreliable method of determining what is objectively right, since other people’s feelings lead them to different moral codes. And again, I don’t care what your moral code is, just how you arrived at it.
You state that
How are you assessing their being moral? That are internally consistent to whatever their own internal code no matter what that code is? That is roughly comports to what yours is?
@Spice_Weasel is correct here: the stories and “revealed truths” of religions are mostly not the source of moral understandings; they are post hoc confabulations for them, with cultural memetic overlays. Our chosen myths may help weight one more impulse higher or lower than another, may differently define who is us and who is them, and what counts as what. The ethical constructs that result will come to different conclusions based on those different weights, but the basic moral impulses really are pretty similar across cultures and times, even if the cultural weightings can lead to what I feel are disturbing and aberrant results.
I assess all of reality through my senses leading to internal experiences. Of course senses are sometimes “unreliable”. We experience sensory and even cognitive illusions. Different people experience the same stimuli differently. But in general when we experience some thing, any thing, in a consistent way, and others independently describe experiencing it similarly, we believe that experience represents something real. (And even what is reproducibly measured comes down to that.)
“Feelings”, consistently experienced perceptions, are “unreliable” yes, but they, and the world we create in our minds in response to them, are the only means to form models of reality we have got.
I see no reason to place morality to any other standard than anything else. My sense of something being warmer or cooler is believed by me to be a (limited and possibly flawed) reflection of some objective reality, and so are my strongest moral “feelings.”
Answering a bit more, my own personal rational is also a very geeky one that I highly doubt will resonate with anyone else. It comes out of chaos theory, fractals, and self similarity at different levels of analysis.
We are massively nonlinear chaotic systems embedded within a possibly infinitely more massive nonlinear chaotic system, the universe. Consciousness and a sense of what is just emerges out of how the parts interact, the patterns of interaction, at our scale. I see every reason to expect that there is self similarity to that at other scales of the massively nonlinear chaotic system ours is contained within, beyond our current ability to comprehend. No I wasn’t high when I first thought that! Understand the reason why some might think that though!
But no one need humor me that construct, or think of that as a form of pantheism.
Science can’t even address every thing in the natural world. Its method is limited to studying observable measurable testable phenomena. Some concepts are outside its scope. Science can not investigate phenomena that is fundamentally undetectable or beyond our current technology such as The big bang or the possibility of other dimensions. Also consciousness, chaos theory and the entire brain is not yet fully understood. There are still questions about the nature of the universe such as the fundamental laws of nature, the composition of dark matter and dark energy or antimatter asymmetry.
Science can not be used to addressee issue such as value judgments, the supernatural or certain human experiences such as art, music or love are not quantifiable by science.
If you feel I am wrong then please explain to me how science addresses these things.
God does not need a starship. That was in fact not God in that film. Besides I honestly think God would go for the galaxy class any way.
As Tim Minchin noted years ago:
Life is full of mystery, yeah
But there are answers out there
And they won’t be found by people sitting around looking serious and saying ‘Isn’t life mysterious?’
Let’s sit here and hope.
Let’s call up the fucking Pope.
Let’s go watch Oprah interview Deepak ChopraIf you wanna watch telly, you should watch Scooby Doo
That show was so cool because every time there was a church with a ghoul or a ghost in a school
They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?
The fucking janitor or the dude who ran the waterslide
Because throughout history
Every mystery ever solved
Has turned out to be
Not magic
*Tim Minchin, Storm
Point being that there are more times where ignoring progress and just relying on faith has been a failure, not just for some, but also in general.
Good point. I should have said ethical. I was thinking in terms of crime rate, though. There is an interesting measurement problem. If person A thinks sex before marriage is immoral, and person B thinks it is moral, and they both do it, how do you measure their relative morality? If their feelings about the morality of the act are different, you might say person A is immoral and B moral for doing the same thing. In their opinions, of course.
I didn’t get to the post where she said this so I could agree with it. All morals are subjective, but certain people select certain parts of what they call an objective moral code to justify their subjective choices. Some do this by just following what others do and some derive it from their internal desires.
I think most people who reason about morality in any kind of sophisticated way basically do it the same way you do. The only difference is labeling it as objective in some way. And the only problem is when people who label their subjective moral codes objective try to impose them on other people without some fact based demonstration that they prevent harm.
And let’s not confuse objective reality with objective morality. You can believe in one but not the other.
You are contradicting yourself. You say that science can not investigate the Big Bang, though we know about the Big Bang because it was investigated by science. String theory includes the possibility of other dimensions. We can’t do experiments at the moment, but we can investigate them through math.
The brain not being fully understood does not mean it can’t be investigated - and it is. And we can certainly investigate how love affects our brains and other parts. We can investigate how art and music make us feel, but what makes good art is not quantifiable by either science or criticism.
And while we can’t resolve value judgements - by definition - we can scientifically investigate the consequences of choosing one path or another.
OK.
Scientists do explore things like art, in an effort to understand why, for example, people react to art in a certain way, why certain scales and forms of music cause certain feelings in people, etc.
Things like “value judgments” are a philosophical or moral thing, and are a construct of the human mind and human society, though philosophers and psychologists certainly do study them, and how people make them.
But, belief – whether it’s in a deity, in demons, in ghosts, a flat Earth, whatever – is entirely a matter of faith, in spite of scientific and rational evidence that says otherwise. “My heart and my gut tell me it’s true, and that’s how I choose to interpret things.”
Throughout this thread, people who do place trust in science have shown you non-supernatural explanations for what you have experienced. You come across as not really being interested in those; your replies pretty much come down to, “yeah, but…”
It’s clear that you deeply want to believe that what you’ve experienced is supernatural in origin, but you’ve come to talk about all of this on a message board which is built on a foundation of rationality – part of which is dispelling “woo” and supernatural beliefs. (Take a look at any of the threads here about mainstream religion, and you’ll see the same sorts of reactions; there is an awful lot of skepticism here about any sort of religion, and an awful lot of very strident, scientifically-minded atheists.)
If you are convinced – and you clearly are – that demons talk to you, knock yourself out. But the fact that that’s purely driven by personal belief, and not your continual statement of “ooooh, this just can’t be explained by science!” is why you have a thread with nearly 400 posts, most of which are pushing back on you on that stance.