Of course the “we agree” part is very subjective, this is part of my argument against Craig.

However as for morality changing, I think Craig would assume that we would say slavery was always wrong and that it’s only the existence of a God’s moral law that could be the only justification we have for making that claim. But the problems with that are the same as the problems with his original argument.

Is something objective just because the vast majority of humans agree on it? If all of humanity agreed that the moon was made of green cheese, does that make the green cheese moon an objective truth?

Taking that point to a moral level, there was a time when slavery of one form or another was almost universally seen to be morally acceptable. Can objective truths change over time?

As for even murder, at one time certain Native American tribes allowed the family of the victim of a homicide decide if the act was moral or not and then what the punishment (if any) should be. The “we” in “we all agree” seems quite subjective in and of itself.

We “intuit” murder as wrong because of our language. Murder is by definition an *unjust* killing (rather, killing that is defined as breaking the law).

“Well of course there’s a God, otherwise why would murder be wrong? Or are you for Hitler or something since you don’t believe in a God-given objective morality?”

I didn’t deal with the 2nd part of this (the personal attack), might do it in a later post.

WLC makes his mistake in the strongest possible formulation of his argument (we know there’s objective morality because we all agree that “there is an ought”) by assuming that universal agreement means anything. For there to be objective morality, it would have to be something which we could analyze, and by so doing, discover testable-but-counterintuitive facts. The common-sense view of morality, though, is that our intuitions in some strong sense are the facts, which to me dunks the whole enterprise into total BS (objective morality, that is – not ethics as a whole).

Surely the point of anything being objective is that we can all investigate an uncover more facts about it leading, inexorably, towards the truth? In the number example, if the investigation into the perfect number yielded a clue that the number WAS (not ought to be) even then we’d have a small step on a long journey. I’d argue that we do not have this for morality.

The feeling that we ought not to harm/murder is easily, and better, explained by biology and evolution. We can see which parts of the brain actually engage when we consider harming another person.

I appreciate you’re attempting to argue the other side here, but “The argument is about the feeling that there IS an “ought”, not what that “ought” is.” just doesn’t wash with me. The fact that everyone (or every culture) has an ought but the oughts are different is one of the most compelling arguments that morality is subjective.

That there is an ought suggests there is such a thing as morality. That it is different in most societies can only lead (me) to the conclusion that it is subjective – virtually by definition: a person’s perspective or opinion, particularly feelings, beliefs, and desires. It is often used casually to refer to unsubstantiated personal opinions, in contrast to knowledge and fact-based beliefs.

(Not the best formed post – will, at some point, write a blog on it.)

He’s not arguing that everyone agrees on what objective morality says about any given subject — just that everyone without a brain injury (ie. discounting sociopaths) agrees that there are things you “ought” to do, even if they disagree about details. Plus, most people would say murder is wrong even if they have just murdered a “witch child” — such acts are usually justified by other reasons (eg. preventing the witch from murdering more people). The argument is about the feeling that there IS an “ought”, not what that “ought” is.