How can objective morality exist in a godless universe?

The fact that there are certain universals to begin with is a good start. Most people have an idea of what is good, wrong, evil, just etc. but they apply it differently in practice. That is where the problem appears. You can argue that *that* is what subjective morality is, of course; but you can also argue that the existence of these preconceptions is an indicator that humans naturally have a sense of what is good and wrong. but that external factors (society, culture, circumstances) make them go different ways, resulting in conflict.

By fiat.

...

It's self evident that all experience is subjective experience.

easily

If I define morality to have objective measure, then yes.

Objective morality is derived from pure logic. Do to others as you would have them do is absolutely logically sound principle.

It can't.

Interesting post, never considered that, but assuming the universe is godless, soulless and has no afterlife, Is there any consequence to being amoral?

Yes, being ostracized by the people around you and by society at large.

A theist would say that the universe couldn't exist without God, so its really only a question for atheists to consider.

Isn't that just saying an immoral act is one that goes against people's subjective preferences? Because under that framework the morality of certain sexual acts changes when you move from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia. In what sense is morality objective here?

So it's not wrong if you don't get caught?

Morality refers to being accepted or rejected by a particular society. It doesn't matter what exactly the rules that you have to play by in order to be accepted. As long as you don't break them, you reap the benefit of the protection of the group. If you do break the rules, you will be cast out or outright killed as being a threat to that society.
Morality has it's base in biology. It is the acts that allows groups of individuals survive. Chimps are highly moral. The alpha male will also seize and distribute food so that no conflicts arise from other members. They also go to war and kill other chimps from different tribes.

If you do enough damage to the society, the society will eventually collapse. And so will any protection and stability that it offers. If you can survive on your own than it won't be a problem.

The main issue is in justification. People who want the protection of the group without having to sacrifice for it are immoral. If everyone wants protection but won't pay taxes for the protection to be possible, then when the nomadic horsemen comes there won't be anyone to fight them. And so have the state as a moral structure. That is why we support our troops and have courts and jails to put away immoral people.

>How can objective morality exist in a godless universe?

Destabilizing the equilibrum of the social group you are a part of (for example, killing a productive individual) = bad

Not doing that = good

Atheists would tell you that religious morality is just the same principle with some add mythos to make it more powerful

Oh, good, someone else said it before I was forced to.

I should have written "A social group". The fact that individuals belong to many overlapping groups that obey different equilibrums is the source of blurred morality

You asked for consequences, not objectivity.

no, our brains react to stimulus and form a conceptualisation of the world. Morality doesn't exist in the world, it is consciously made up.

I agree with pretty much everything you just said, but I don't see how that makes morality objective. If somebody thinks that premarital sex is immoral, what external thing can you point at to prove that it's not (or vice versa)? You can enumerate the pros and cons, but at the end of the day you're each making a subjective value judgment.

Prove it

Post yfw you realise it is impossible to prove that any moral imperative whatsoever is forceful or binding

That actually wasn't me asking the question about consequences. Maybe I read into it too much, but I interpreted it as "consequences suggesting that morality is objective."

Evolution. To be more precise, long term survival. If premarital sex has an immoral effect on the society, then, by definition, the society will eventually be destroyed because time will pass by without so much as a blink.
Truth is what helps you survive. You can store the various solutions a society have found through interactions in writing and call these writing a religion. Or you can take the harder, biological path and store the solutions through DNA. But the DNA process is much much slower and relies not on neural plasticity but on genetic mutation.

how is it "bad" and not just counter productive

Human nature doesn't exist, pseud.
You're fucking delusional.
Secular morality is a forced meme. Right and wrong do not exist in secularism.

Wrong, Christianity seeks to destroy society and replace it with something better.
Fuck off with your sociology memes.
That is not objective.

>evolution
Nonexistent and irrelevant.
Society must burn
>truth
Doesn't exist
>DNA
Doesn't exist.

Exactly. Look at these brainlets trying to wrestle with a very simple question.

care to put it in a statement of pure logic which affirms it as objective morality then?

It can't. Without God morality is simply a mental/social construct and people like Sam Harris are either completely deluded, don't understand the argument, or are knowingly feeding retards lies. In any case, it's tiring.

God does exist

Is the truth of a god an objective truth? What makes it objective?

I murdered my wife and don't regret it.

here is the assumption that people aren't addressing
goes with psychology and why we can't replicate findings from previous psychological experiments.

times change. context changes.
A morality can be objective in a godless universe. but it cannot be concrete.
it may be the case, but it most definitely won't always be the case when dealing with the human dynamic.

you skipped a step

Who nazi-fied the best emoji -_-

*tips*

Something can objectively exist but be different from instance to instance.

No, because goodness as a quality of being must have a source as such.

but that wasn't the question

Fuck off, OP.
Morals and Ethics are the same thing, only academic pseudointellectuals with bad childhoods pull this asinine distinction.

Morality is a survival strategy. Sonething that increases your group's adaptive fitness is objectively moral.

>our universe
>godless

>no one has successfully managed to logically justify this mode of thinking
>still believes this is the case
so this is the power of pure ideology
what the fuck is goodness outside of our cultural understanding?

so if you made a conventionally "good" or "bad" action which doesn't affect group adaptivness or survival for example walking up behind a stranger and murdering them for no reason, it would be neither moral or immoral?

>doesn't affect group adpativeness or survival
>murdering someone for no reason
these are mutually exclusive

no

They are, in the situation you provided you're murdering them for no reason- which by default affects the groups ability to adapt and possibly their survival. Now if you had a justified reason like you had foreknowledge that they were going to do something which would harm the group or you needed to control the population in order to distribute sufficient resources, then you might have a case

I don't really understand what you mean but its because I don't know at what level you're capping the group at family? country? species? genus? does affecting another group adaptivness incur a moral action from me?
does each group have its own morality? are the subdivisions in a group? and does the will affect the moral weight of an action? wouldn't a model of morality like this be totally divorced from will and foreknowledge, and be entirely judged upon the long term outcome of an action, but i don't know what at what point in history you would make the final judgment on the impact of an actions effect upon adaptivness

Its not a Godless universe

'what group' doesn't matter and how can anything moral be divorced from will and foreknowledge? in any given situation you should choose the action that will most likely provide your desired outcome.

The opinions of the majority becomes the objective perspective.

Morality is a mutual agreement on subjective matters. It only exists if both parties abide to agreed upon belief.

Ultimately the only real part of social interactions are the power dynamics.

as in butterfly affect buffoonery. because actions can have non willed and unknowable consequences that have long term affects on adaptivness and in this model would therefore have unpredictable moral weight. Or are we just going to make more arbitrary distinctions like 'group'

>so if you made a conventionally "good" or "bad" action which doesn't affect group adaptivness
You are confused. If action did not affect group fitness it wouldn't be "conventionally" (another confused term, unconvential morality only exists in the minds of philosophy students) bad in the first place. There is no human society that considers killing strangers to be a morally neutral act.

an undesired outcome is an unfortunate side effect in some cases sure, obviously this is neither moral or immoral if i'm understanding what you're trying to say. Also i just don't see what you're not getting about the concept of a 'group'. you have the individual and the family > the community > the nation > the species. If you want to go slightly deeper then of course you're going to look out for things in this order
i violently disagree with this assertion. when i ask someone for a pen there is no power play at hand, it's a mutually beneficial agreement with no power plays at hand wherein i gain the temporary access of a pen and they gain rapport and a possible favour down the road. no power plays are made in this interaction. also what if a homeless guy asks me for a cigarette? i would give him one not because i'm asserting dominance but because i might have some sort of belief of karma or i might like the same thing done for me if i were in his situation.

I like getting shat on my chest, mind if I squat on yours?

Why does it matter how "objective" it is since its use is to help ruling sujective and ever-changing imperfect societies?

>i violently disagree with this assertion.

Cheeky

Your examples prove my point, these interactions take place only under the requirement of mutual belief.
Power dynamics require no mutual belief, they are asserted, if however you suspend the mutual belief in your examples they do not take place.
The point is those interactions would not take place without shared belief in some fiction, be that the expectation of a mutual win, a subjective debt in the form of a favor, or the belief in some self-serving virtue fantasy. All matters floating on belief.

For how I see it, there isn't an absolute moral, but in every society man builds from certain principles his moral. So the fact that premarital sex is or isn't immoral can't really be proved as an absolute value. It depends on the rules of the moral structure of the society. You could also talk about animal stuff yadda yadda like other user said, but if we really want to talk about animal stuff then men should be able to have sex with a different woman every night and not give a fuck (and this looks kinda bad to me in a long term, even if great fun in the short term, because quoting Woody Allen "I think that people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics"). So it all depends from you and the rules you're playing with. To put it in a Wittgensteinian way, it's all a game, in the end. Being a good citizen in a given society is a game, for it has its rules, its reward and its prices. Different society = different rules.

>DNA doesn't exist
Why do you think that?

You could also talk about animal stuff yadda yadda like other user said
Shit I forgot to quote the other user (). I agree with pretty much everything he said (except the part about evolution, which is by the way what I meant by "animal stuff").
I'm glad to see we finally are having a thread about morality that isn't only filled with theists going full sperg, and in which there's some actual constructive discussion.

People that try to prove an objective morality beyond God often forget morality encompasses not only radically palpable, observable actions (such as murder, meat-eating, polygamous marriage) but also very subtle ways of acting and responding to the world's dynamics. How can you subscribe a objective moral code (i.e. a set of laws, a collection of imperatives based on common sense or biological traits) when morality permeates all of life itself - thus, is no longer a body of subscriptions but pure being?

Either morality is subjective and there's no God or morality is objective/universal/transcendental and God is necessarily it's "logic background" so to speak.

> Either morality is subjective and there's no God or morality is objective/universal/transcendental and God is necessarily it's "logic background" so to speak.
Not sure if I didn't understand what you just said or Captain Obvious. I appreciated the first part of the post, however

Quite simply, not through coercion

You do understand you're setting conceptual imperatives that have no way of being proved logically outside of their own predicates as long as there's no God, though? Your moral code is tautological, it retraces back to itself.

You are simply definin "good" as being what helps in social cohesion. You are only worried with the semantics and not the ontological. A cultural definition of what is good =/ good exists absolutely.

>How Can Mirrors Be Real If Your Eyes Aren't Real
seriously tho

Woah, easy there Berkeley

>Do to others as you would have them do is absolutely logically sound principle

No it isn't since I can exploit them and laugh instead

You suggest objective morality can exist if God exists, when both matters have nothing to do with one another.

Let Plato explain:
classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html

>our brains react to stimulus and form a conceptualisation of the world
This is itself a conception...

clever pic, nazi scum

test

But acquired traits cannot be inherited, user

Except they're not behaving oppositely to each other, they're both doing the exact same thing, which is killing each other

They can be passed on via cultural memetics however

Altruism is almost certainly a genetically inherited trait, and Tit for Tat always wins Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments wherein the winning strategies are reproduced in the next round.

Meditate on this

It cant. Therefore intelligent people should pretend that god exists so that retards wont end up killing each other.

Kill yourself, Solipsist, that your world may die with you.

It isn't possible to think correctly without thinking honestly. Ergo, honesty is a de-facto objective moral duty.

A concession that he is correct. Well fought, imbecile.

It is impossible to think correctly without thinking, ergo thinking is a def-facto objective moral duty.

>There is no human society that considers killing strangers to be a morally neutral act.
this concept of morality has nothing to do with what people think, that's my point
im saying that an undesired out come would have a moral value because
>Something that increases your group's adaptive fitness is objectively moral
and my point about the group is that you could extend it out as far a you like, eukaryotes, all life, all being. One indivdual would have multiple moralities and could make an action which is good for one group and bad for another which hes in. But even then you have to ask how would you know which at which point to morally delineate your 'group'

Anonymous democracy/statistics + Scientific Aesthetics + Comparing with other cultures contemporary and historically
>Which values have been lasting through time
If 100000 to 1 agrees that basic murder is wrong. And it holds through history and globally. Then that is the truth.

Also empathy is pretty "objective", don't wanna meme Peterson. But we all "act" biologically as if most of our morals are true. Our moral instincts control us, we have no choice but to feel bad for those who suffer; they're greater than our will.

>He's a Moral Rationalist

>self evident
it's also self evident that you suck cock