Where does morality come from?

@LucyJr

where is the argument in saying that something exists?
edit: sorry, you don't need to respond if you don't want to debate.
 
Elis said:
@LucyJr

where is the argument in saying that something exists?
edit: sorry, you don't need to respond if you don't want to debate.
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I don't think I understand well enough your question to respond. Could you rephrase it more clearly?
 
I believe morality comes from ethics and ethics are set of principles created by man to navigate the duality of nature and the duality of humans. The duality consisting of good and bad in the most basic form. But not all things are clear cut and principles or guidelines are created by society and humans to better navigate and understand how good and bad manifests itself and how we can best make sense of it all. The set of principles are then adopted as beliefs and actions and it helps give society an organized way to live. The principles appeal to the most fundamental nature of good and bad in a man/woman and also relates to the fundamental human laws of nature. Morality exists for individuals as a compass; to navigate through one's dark and light aspects and ultimately learning to create and live from a light source of Universe/God and to learn to control and transcend the darker aspects of humans. The principles can help a man/woman transcend from living from a purely instinctual and animalistic desires to a more conscious and creative living.
 
I didn't read the article but by going by the phrase, "if one has no belief, where does morality come from". I think it comes from our virtue. (Every persons mind is tilted towards one direction or another). Whether it be love, justice, or fairness. Morality in excess is like any other poison. It's one thing to have principles but it's another to beat ourselves to death with them. The truth changes and if you're closed minded to that you're going to 'should' all over yourself. Morality has it's place. But I do not think it's a place we should dwell to the neglect of progress.

The process does not necessarily mean enhancement, strengthening or achieving. But truth is warped to suit our neurotic needs and this distorted or delusional truth is soothing and digestible and more times than not, sugar coated with morality. So. It's important to maintain the ebbs and flows of objectivity and participation within the human experience.

And part of that delusional truth and objectivity is to realize that we are not at the center of our universe (lest we fool ourselves with our very own mythology). The understanding that we can not form the world to create our world but to create ourselves to form within the world to produce progress. And it's diligent practice and in time getting good at catching ourselves caught up in our game, or morality, our "beliefs" whatever those beliefs may be.

Morality as all things natural, have their place. And have their portions of what's appropriate to produce value in our lives and in that for others.
 
LucyJr said:
Whith the honest desire to avoid a debate here, I would leave my thoughts on the table.

1. If there is no objective morality, there is no subjective morality either. So those who are saying "Morality is subjective", what they are saying actually is that there is no morality at all. Subjectivity implies vanilla vs chocolate, crime vs inch on the foot, and so on.

2. Objective morality means something is wrong and bad EVEN IF everyone on this planet would believe is right. For example, to torture a little child for fun is wrong EVEN IF in this entire Universe nobody believes so. It is objectively wrong, independent of our beliefs. If Hitler would had succed to convince everybody that the Holocaust was good, independent of what people would believe, the act was wrong, in this world and in any other possible worlds.

3. Traditionally, morality is based on the existence of God, especially the Monotheistic God, like in Judaism, and Christianity. A classic argument for the existence of God goes like this:


1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.

3. Therefore, God exists.
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Lucy...
Just because people have “morals” does not prove the existence of God whatsoever...
One could just as easily argue that what we consider to be our “morality” is ingrained within our DNA as a species survival instinct.
Because we have the brain power to think of consequences for our actions, to empathize with one another...we have taken those basic instincts and built upon them into what is considered to be our current worldview of “morality”.

Your argument is like saying - “Flowers cannot bloom without the sun, which was created by God...if there is no sun then flowers wouldn’t exist, therefore because we have flowers God must exist.”. It still does not prove that the sun was created by god...you can circumnavigate the question all you want but it doesn’t change the proof.

On the topic of this thread, I read an interesting article in the Huffington Post....here it is for those interested.


"Reach for your goal." "Reach for the stars." "Chase your dreams." Since childhood, most of us have been inundated with the philosophy that everything we want to achieve is outside rather than in, that life is about finding ways to get what we want. It is consumerism dressed up in the fad of achieving our personal potential. If you grew up in the Christian faith, for example, you might have been taught that "God's mysterious will" is nowhere near, that his will is somewhere out there, that our lives are about guessing where his will is and what it's supposed to look like. But even outside the confines of claustrophobic Christianity, there is a pervasive message that whatever we're searching for is completely and utterly separate from us. I think we have also come to do the same with morality.
We've gotten it in our heads that morality is a plumb line that we grapple for or wrestle with others over. But what if morality is deeper than something that's out there? What if morality has been ingrained within us? Maybe somewhere deep down, embedded in the acids of our DNA, is the coding for morality. We can go to any country in the world and somehow everyone knows that killing is destructive behaviour. Somehow people know at a very young age that stealing is wrong. Most people try to explain it away as parental nurture, but there is more to it than that.
For some, morality is something that is either taught, learned, or gained through familial contact or social interaction. Yet there are people who didn't have good parents, or who had no parents at all, or who grew up without much social interaction or exposure to accessible information but who still know the basic "rules" for morality. For others, morality seems to be something that we have to achieve or earn. For them, the more we do, the more moral we become. If that's true, then morality is a commodity that we can purchase. It sits in our hotel vending machines waiting for us to choose it.
But morality isn't a rule. It isn't a plumb line. It isn't a tool to determine who is in and who is out. It is something that is part of each person. We don't earn morality; it earns us. The more in touch with our humanity we become, the more moral we become. Morality is a gene -- not one that we can see or study, but one that evolves progressively over time. Unlike other genes, it is affected and altered by the decisions we make and don't make. It is transformed by compassion and deformed by the lack of it.
Morality wasn't somehow born out of the ancient Christian scriptures. It wasn't birthed out of the introduction of evolution. It isn't a course you can take at a university. There's no degree you can get in morality. Morality is in us. We are all moral. Its how we choose to use that knowledge that will determine how we nurture the growth of morality within us. So, the origins of morality lie in each human being but are grown through the everyday process of making choices.
If morality is subjective, then the first apparent question is whether there is a plumb line. If there is, it is found in a multi-systemic worldview. Morals are encouraged by living in a moral society or community. But they are birthed in each person, each individual. They are also spurred on by what we choose to expose our minds to. Moral subjectivity is not the enemy to the progress of any society; moral homogeneity is. Moral homogeneity says that everyone needs to see everything the same way, to fit into neat little boxes, and it is used to marginalize those who don't. Moral subjectivity leads a society to embrace diversity by seeing that a particular worldview isn't the only right one.
Now the problem comes when one thinks that his or her moral worldview is more valuable than the next person's. The moment that moral subjectivity becomes moral superiority is when things like the Holocaust or the Crusades happen, leaving open scars on history. Events like this make people cringe when they hear words like "moral subjectivity," fearing the next global episode to occur as a result of such terminology. Most people tend to blame atrocious acts on a lack of parenting or chock it up to bad high school experiences. For the most part, they blame events outside the perpetrator to help explain his or her behavior. But maybe it's deeper than regarding those who have made historically destructive decisions as victims of external circumstances.
Decisions belong to those who make them. The effects of our decisions are the lifelong souvenirs that we carry with us, souvenirs that indicate the origins of where we learned to make moral choices. If the origins of moral subjectivity lie in the heart of the individual, then no longer can people blame outside, unseen forces. If moral subjectivity is true, then the individual can only blame himself. This is an incredibly empowering discovery because it means that everyone is responsible for developing morality in light of his or her own journey. This doesn't mean that there aren't objective morals to follow; it just means that our development can remain subjective even as we search for the objective, that we don't have to push, pull, and prod our way through the library to find the book that will teach us about all things moral. This reality leaves us with a responsibility not only to choose progress but to help one another on our journeys. By doing so we help usher in a new morality that is much needed in light of our current cultural shift.
 
Skarekrow said:
Lucy...
Just because people have “morals” does not prove the existence of God whatsoever...
One could just as easily argue that what we consider to be our “morality” is ingrained within our DNA as a species survival instinct.
Because we have the brain power to think of consequences for our actions, to empathize with one another...we have taken those basic instincts and built upon them into what is considered to be our current worldview of “morality”.

Your argument is like saying - “Flowers cannot bloom without the sun, which was created by God...if there is no sun then flowers wouldn’t exist, therefore because we have flowers God must exist.”. It still does not prove that the sun was created by god...you can circumnavigate the question all you want but it doesn’t change the proof.
[/I]
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Just because people have “morals” does not prove the existence of God whatsoever...
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Yes, but I said objective morals and duties, not just morals, which is a big diference. The argument goes that if objectives values and mrorals exist, God must exist too.

One could just as easily argue that what we consider to be our “morality” is ingrained within our DNA as a species survival instinct.
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Well yes, of course there are many counter theories these days. But again, let's get back to the argument I gave.

What you said, the DNA theory, it makes morality a illusion, a thing that goes with instincts. There is nothing inherently wrong or good on your theory. In this DNA theory, killing a innocent child is neither good, neither bad. Its just instincts. Criminals are not criminals, are just people with different instincts.

Because we have the brain power to think of consequences for our actions, to empathize with one another...we have taken those basic instincts and built upon them into what is considered to be our current worldview of “morality”.
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Again, this makes it all subjective ( and illusory actually). There is nothing to be set as a standard in this view. There is just what comes by nature. If a guy like Hitler appears in history, its just nature's 'will', nothing else. There is no good or bad. Of course, we could pretend there is, to feel nice and good, but we deceive ourselfs.

Your argument is like saying - “Flowers cannot bloom without the sun, which was created by God...if there is no sun then flowers wouldn’t exist, therefore because we have flowers God must exist.”. It still does not prove that the sun was created by god...you can circumnavigate the question all you want but it doesn’t change the proof.
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I think you have missunderstood the premises of the argument with their argumentation. I just gave the premises, not the argumentation.
 
Ok, so I believe in a higher power, yet I can not and will not shove it down people's throats. Being that I was an Atheist for most of my life at this time. 19 years to be exact. Anyways, I think that there is a mixture of inherent morality and taught morality in each of us. Due to the fact that throughout history in different cultures certain behaviors were considered okay by societal standards. Some examples: human sacrifice, beastiality, incest, and cannibalism. Clearly by our society standards today these practices are not okay. Morality can and does change with the progression of society and knowledge.
 
Love_Conquers_All said:
Ok, so I believe in a higher power, yet I can not and will not shove it down people's throats. Being that I was an Atheist for most of my life at this time. 19 years to be exact. Anyways, I think that there is a mixture of inherent morality and taught morality in each of us. Due to the fact that throughout history in different cultures certain behaviors were considered okay by societal standards. Some examples: human sacrifice, beastiality, incest, and cannibalism. Clearly by our society standards today these practices are not okay. Morality can and does change with the progression of society and knowledge.
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Absolutely. And the innate morality I personally feel is as unique as the individual themselves. Their "virtue" if you will. Their, preoccupation. Some people will be firemen and risk their lives for others (courage), some people will overcome adversity and serve as comfort for those in need(fortitude), some will serve with their strength and protect and uphold justice. Integrity is when our behavior is congruent with our beliefs, or virtue.

I think for me to be strong and fight battles would be immoral as I'm more naturally inclined towards emotional fortitude and love. I think it immoral for the courageous to berate themselves for not being as strong or having the tenacity to endure emotional hardships as one whose natural predisposition is to. I think it absurd for me to expect the strong to protect me when I fake strength and deny the natural processes I've been through time and time again, in order to maintain my integrity.


Morality is NOT subject to religion. It is NOT subject to God (whichever one you prefer) and it is NOT something taught. What is taught is societal norms, expectations, and reasonable amounts of relationship skills to maintain the currency for trade for the survival of our species. I believe that religion permeated or rather, penetrated the very spirituality of our souls (and individualistic virtues) and this is not to say God does or does not exist. If he does, surely he is disappointed at our misappropriation of the intrinsic morality that survives within our life energy.

Morality matters and yet, it does not. It matters only to the person who utilizes it as such. Morality is NOT something I believe can conform and it inhibits the psychological mind with accepting things beyond it's control without the sacrifice of our individual capabilities, talents, strength, virtues and gifts to share with the world.

That's what I think of morality personally. To live with integrity to who we are. And while I believe it the natural process to lose ourselves time and again, it is only for us to re-calibrate and deepen our integrity, and grow. Thus, not all that is considered "immoral" is necessarily so. It is a part of the human condition we call life, shared as it is.
 
the said:
Morality comes from a desire to provide security for yourself by controlling others.
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No humans are more complex than that

people will risk their own security to help others
 
There has been a lot of immoral acts committed in the name of religion in the past and the idea of what is 'moral' has changed through history so I believe that you have to be careful in claiming that religion is the source of morality. I think in some cases people do use religion to help them form their morality. In the past I probably would have associated more of a godly quality for morality but really when you think about it morality is self-serving. We are moral because either we can put ourselves in the place of the other and realize that if we do something bad to somebody then others might as well do the same thing to us, or it is because we generally have a need to 'belong' and if we act in immoral ways we will be rejected. I don't think you need religion to have morality but I do think that 'well-practiced' religion can help form a framework to help guide people. I say 'well-practiced' simply because I believe that religion can be used for great good but for great evil also, and religion can have great power over people so it can be incredibly harmful when it is twisted in a way that causes more harm than good.
 
say what said:
I read this today on an Eco-Islamic site:

"If a person has no belief, one has to question where the morality comes from"

http://www.theecomuslim.com/2013/03/10-environment-quran-verses.html


I've read a lot of discussion on beliefs, ideologies, religion, etc. and I thought it might be interesting to see what you guys think of this.

At first I was offended...suggesting that because I don't subscribe to a particular ideology, that I don't have morality...but then I began to think, "Well, where does my morality come from? What do I base it on?" ... now I'm left quizzical, rather than offended.

I would be interested in hearing what you guys think!
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I think most religions in contemporary society get a bad rap. The reason why is because from a biological standpoint, from an evolutionary standpoint, morality has value. If you help people around you and you build a social foundation you are more likely to survive in whatever environment you are in. So people naturally have morals, but this doesn't make them selfless, their morals are hardwired into them to give them an advantage through life. Morals give you social status and social status is a competitive advantage.

That being said I feel like religion tends to push people outside of their biological or evolutionary boundaries in regards to morality. And it can go all ways; it can make a person fight in a war and risk their life in a way that clearly goes against the first law of nature which is self-preservation. And it can also make a person act compassionately or selflessly when there is absolutely no chance of personal gain. Religion can override our human nature.

I grew up in a Catholic church and they always stressed the idea that gifts somewhat lose value when you try to take credit for them. The best gifts are the ones where the person doesn't know you did it, or you don't care that people know you did it. This is a perfect example of religion teaching people to act selflessly with no chance of personal gain.
 
I think it a rhetorical question; moreso stating there must be something out there to believe in, lest where would our morals come from. There must be a higher power, or God(if I may), to have instilled morality in us all.
 
Saying that morality comes from God implies that we couldn't possibly have figured out on our own that the natural consequences of murdering or stealing are bad. No, we had to have a burning bush explain it to us.
It also implies that without God, we could happily rape, murder, and steal because there is no eternal consequence, no judge watching over us.
The rest of society should fear those who require an omnipotent being watching their every move just so that they behave themselves. This person is not behaving morally because they authentically wish to be good, but rather because they believe they are under constant supervision.
We are intelligent beings capable of being ethical all on our own. Being good because a God says so is being good for the wrong reasons.


God as the intelligent source of morality fails as a concept if it's carried out logically. Socrates posed The Euthyphro dilemma long before Jesus was born. He asks whether God commands goodness because it is good, or if what God commands is good because he commanded it. In other words, does God follow an existing moral code, or does God author the moral code himself?

  1. If God follows an existing moral code, then we can rule him out as a necessary part of the Moral Argument. Morality, in this case, would exist independently of God. There would still be right and wrong regardless of whether or not God existed.
  2. If God decides on his own what is right and wrong, then morality has become arbitrary and subjective again. This is what seems to be supported by scripture. If God commands someone to cut off someone's head, it becomes just to do so. If God commands someone to marry multiple women, it becomes just to do so. If God instructs a man to blow up a building, it becomes just to do so. If God is the author of the moral code, then morality is just as subjective and arbitrary as if there were no God at all.
If we believe our sense of morality was intelligently planted into us, we run into another logical problem. We have no reason to trust that the moral code God gave us is a good one. If he can decide what does and does not feel right, then we have no way of knowing if he is an evil or amoral God and has simply programmed us to believe he is good.
We are only feeling what he wants us to feel. How could we know that God is perfectly good if we're using the moral compass he gave us?
The premise of the Moral Argument is somewhat flawed. It's very difficult to make a case that there is any sort of objective morality. We know that many notions of right and wrong can and do change depending on the time and the culture. Public nudity is generally inoffensive in much of Europe, while in areas of the Middle East, it is taboo for a woman to reveal a bare ankle.
Even in the same society, there is plenty of disagreement over what is right or wrong. Abortion, gay marriage, capital punishment, and stem cell research are just a few current examples, and people who believe in the same Holy Book stand on both sides of these issues.
Reviewing the Old Testament shows us that morality can be very flexible. Polygamy, incest, genocide, and animal sacrifices were all acceptable at least on occasion. Slavery was once acceptable in the United States, and the Bible was used to support it:
"[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts."
-Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America.

"There is not one verse in the Bible inhibiting slavery, but many regulating it. It is not then, we conclude, immoral." -Rev. Alexander Campbell

"The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example."
-Rev. R. Furman, D.D., Baptist, of South Carolina

These men believed they were in synch with God's morality, but today we would say they were wrong. If it's possible for them to believe they understood God's morality but be wrong or deceived, how do we determine that our idea of God's morality is correct?


But let's go ahead and grant that despite variations in culture, there are some shared desires nearly all societies hold. Nearly all people want to be safe and all people want to avoid pain. With these shared desires, morality develops.
Most of our moral options can be looked at rationally, and this is also known as game theory. Stealing is immoral because a society who freely stole from each other would quickly degenerate into chaos. Thus, a society who prohibits stealing will be more successful than a society that did not. Game theory is a way of analyzing the costs and benefits of any choice, and it turns out that what we call moral choices are usually winning moves. Everybody benefits when everybody is most moral. Someone who tries to benefit themselves at the expense of others is thus acting immorally, and if caught is shamed, punished, or expelled by the others. And this isn't unique to humans.

For decades, scientists have been uncovering hints of moral behavior in other animals. And why not? If our own sense of morality evolved as just another survival mechanism (groups that help each other survive better than those who don't) then we should expect to find traces of that same kind of morality in nature, particularly among social animals.
One lab test trained monkeys to put a coin in a slot for food. One of the male monkeys picked up the trick quickly, but an older female monkey was having trouble figuring it out. On three separate occasions, the male picked up her dropped tokens, put them in the slot for her, and then let her have the food.
Another experiment would give a rat some food if it pressed a lever, but the same lever was rigged to give a rat in a neighboring cage an electric shock. When the rats realized that in order to get food they had to cause another rat pain, the rats refused to eat. They went hungry.
Another study found that a rat will help another rat get food, but only if they themselves had benefited from similar charity in the past. Once they learned the value of being helped, they were willing to "pass it on."
Many other animals have been found to show surprising levels of generosity with each other, even when there's no obvious immediate benefit to themselves. Of course, this isn't to say that animals share the same level of morality that we do. They do still fling poo at each other, after all. It only means that the seeds of morality exist in nature, and the human animal, with it's complex and imaginative mind, has been able to expand on it in many more ways.
The sensations of feeling good or guilty is just nature's way of motivating an organism to do what's in it's best interest. How we interact with others benefits or hurts the survival of our genes, so we've evolved a sense of "right" and "wrong" to help us maximize our success as a species. It feels good to donate time at the homeless shelter because we're helping our species, and evolution has found a way to reward us for that.

So we're genetically programmed with a sense of morality. It is most often better to help other people than to not help other people. It is better to protect little children than to not protect them. These kinds of instincts are part of us, for evolutionary reasons. But our brains are also complex enough to be able to adapt, and learn, and reconsider appropriate actions.
It's essential that we be able to restructure our sense of morality when situations change. Murder is wrong, unless we're acting in self-defense. Then it may be perfectly fine. New facts reorganize our moral priorities. Society, culture, and religion have the ability to "hijack" our moral senses and point them in new directions. If we've accepted a book or an authority figure as a source of truth, our sense of morality can be adjusted under false pretenses. We only have to believe witches are real in order to burn them with a clear conscience. It is more moral to kill an agent of Satan than to permit one to live. Shooting doctors, mutilating genitalia, and crashing airplanes into buildings all happen because religion has "hacked" into our moral programming.

"Good people do good things and evil people do bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion."
- Steven Weinberg

This may be part of the explanation for why more and more people are saying they are not "religious" but they are "spiritual." They are finding the authority and the dogmatisms of organized religion too distasteful. They don't want to believe that homosexuality is a sin merely because they've been told it is. They don't want to believe that their choice in jewelry says something about their ability to make righteous choices. Rather than submit to the demands of a human authority figure or ancient book, they prefer to find their own path to God or enlightenment. They are taking control of their own sense of morality, rather than allow others to dictate what it ought to be.
The universe doesn't care about what we do any more than we care about what bacteria does. Our actions won't matter in a million years. Nobody beyond planet Earth will ever notice or care about what we do. But so what? The song will end, that doesn't mean we can't enjoy listening to it.
But we don't need to be so arrogant as to think that unless our actions did matter in some infinite, cosmic sense, they don't matter at all.
What we do matters to each other. We're still responsible and accountable to ourselves and everyone around us. Compassion, generosity, and support are all good things in and of themselves. They make a real difference here and now. Our actions don't have to matter to the cosmos to be important. A little girl's smile should be all the reason we need. Our own integrity should be enough.
 
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I think morality... well, morality is an idea pushed on others. "I believe this and that this is good, if you don't believe the same as me you are bad." The word "morality" to me is a way for people to control others by their own ideals. That being said I think the word carried a lot more merit in making others feel bad when there wasn't social media and an ease in the ability to talk to like minded people. While some think it's immoral for people who are the same sex to have sex with each other, I think it's immoral to demean someone for who they are to the extent of making them want to kill themselves. And while there are groups of people that agree with me, there are groups of people that agree with the former as well. I think morality is a word that gets thrown around to bully others though now it's come to the point that it doesn't have the same effect that it use to.
 
muir said:
No humans are more complex than that

people will risk their own security to help others
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True. How would this go with silly claims that morality is actually selfish in its very nature?
Why would a man go into a fire to save a child from a fire, whle knowing that he could die in trying to save that child?
 
DonTaushMe said:
I think morality... well, morality is an idea pushed on others. "I believe this and that this is good, if you don't believe the same as me you are bad." The word "morality" to me is a way for people to control others by their own ideals. That being said I think the word carried a lot more merit in making others feel bad when there wasn't social media and an ease in the ability to talk to like minded people. While some think it's immoral for people who are the same sex to have sex with each other, I think it's immoral to demean someone for who they are to the extent of making them want to kill themselves. And while there are groups of people that agree with me, there are groups of people that agree with the former as well. I think morality is a word that gets thrown around to bully others though now it's come to the point that it doesn't have the same effect that it use to.
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It will always have the same effect. Just think about the vale of freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of life and so on. The best way to show that your view is self-contradictory is when someone pulls a ad-hominem at you and attacks you in any sort of way. Then you and any other person, even sociopaths, in that situation will behave like there is morality.
 
Lone Wolf said:
I grew up in a Catholic church and they always stressed the idea that gifts somewhat lose value when you try to take credit for them. The best gifts are the ones where the person doesn't know you did it, or you don't care that people know you did it. This is a perfect example of religion teaching people to act selflessly with no chance of personal gain.
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Yes, and its a perfect refutation of supposedly refutations of morality that claim morality is self-serving and selfish. As many people said, people do things that are apparently irrational, like giving own life for a friend, or self-confess a murder or a bad action. Why would they do that?
 
Skarekrow said:
Saying that morality comes from God implies that we couldn't possibly have figured out on our own that the natural consequences of murdering or stealing are bad. No, we had to have a burning bush explain it to us.
It also implies that without God, we could happily rape, murder, and steal because there is no eternal consequence, no judge watching over us.
The rest of society should fear those who require an omnipotent being watching their every move just so that they behave themselves. This person is not behaving morally because they authentically wish to be good, but rather because they believe they are under constant supervision.
We are intelligent beings capable of being ethical all on our own. Being good because a God says so is being good for the wrong reasons.


God as the intelligent source of morality fails as a concept if it's carried out logically. Socrates posed The Euthyphro dilemma long before Jesus was born. He asks whether God commands goodness because it is good, or if what God commands is good because he commanded it. In other words, does God follow an existing moral code, or does God author the moral code himself?

  1. If God follows an existing moral code, then we can rule him out as a necessary part of the Moral Argument. Morality, in this case, would exist independently of God. There would still be right and wrong regardless of whether or not God existed.
  2. If God decides on his own what is right and wrong, then morality has become arbitrary and subjective again. This is what seems to be supported by scripture. If God commands someone to cut off someone's head, it becomes just to do so. If God commands someone to marry multiple women, it becomes just to do so. If God instructs a man to blow up a building, it becomes just to do so. If God is the author of the moral code, then morality is just as subjective and arbitrary as if there were no God at all.
If we believe our sense of morality was intelligently planted into us, we run into another logical problem. We have no reason to trust that the moral code God gave us is a good one. If he can decide what does and does not feel right, then we have no way of knowing if he is an evil or amoral God and has simply programmed us to believe he is good.
We are only feeling what he wants us to feel. How could we know that God is perfectly good if we're using the moral compass he gave us?
The premise of the Moral Argument is somewhat flawed. It's very difficult to make a case that there is any sort of objective morality. We know that many notions of right and wrong can and do change depending on the time and the culture. Public nudity is generally inoffensive in much of Europe, while in areas of the Middle East, it is taboo for a woman to reveal a bare ankle.
Even in the same society, there is plenty of disagreement over what is right or wrong. Abortion, gay marriage, capital punishment, and stem cell research are just a few current examples, and people who believe in the same Holy Book stand on both sides of these issues.
Reviewing the Old Testament shows us that morality can be very flexible. Polygamy, incest, genocide, and animal sacrifices were all acceptable at least on occasion. Slavery was once acceptable in the United States, and the Bible was used to support it:
"[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts."
-Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America.

"There is not one verse in the Bible inhibiting slavery, but many regulating it. It is not then, we conclude, immoral." -Rev. Alexander Campbell

"The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example."
-Rev. R. Furman, D.D., Baptist, of South Carolina

These men believed they were in synch with God's morality, but today we would say they were wrong. If it's possible for them to believe they understood God's morality but be wrong or deceived, how do we determine that our idea of God's morality is correct?


But let's go ahead and grant that despite variations in culture, there are some shared desires nearly all societies hold. Nearly all people want to be safe and all people want to avoid pain. With these shared desires, morality develops.
Most of our moral options can be looked at rationally, and this is also known as game theory. Stealing is immoral because a society who freely stole from each other would quickly degenerate into chaos. Thus, a society who prohibits stealing will be more successful than a society that did not. Game theory is a way of analyzing the costs and benefits of any choice, and it turns out that what we call moral choices are usually winning moves. Everybody benefits when everybody is most moral. Someone who tries to benefit themselves at the expense of others is thus acting immorally, and if caught is shamed, punished, or expelled by the others. And this isn't unique to humans.

For decades, scientists have been uncovering hints of moral behavior in other animals. And why not? If our own sense of morality evolved as just another survival mechanism (groups that help each other survive better than those who don't) then we should expect to find traces of that same kind of morality in nature, particularly among social animals.
One lab test trained monkeys to put a coin in a slot for food. One of the male monkeys picked up the trick quickly, but an older female monkey was having trouble figuring it out. On three separate occasions, the male picked up her dropped tokens, put them in the slot for her, and then let her have the food.
Another experiment would give a rat some food if it pressed a lever, but the same lever was rigged to give a rat in a neighboring cage an electric shock. When the rats realized that in order to get food they had to cause another rat pain, the rats refused to eat. They went hungry.
Another study found that a rat will help another rat get food, but only if they themselves had benefited from similar charity in the past. Once they learned the value of being helped, they were willing to "pass it on."
Many other animals have been found to show surprising levels of generosity with each other, even when there's no obvious immediate benefit to themselves. Of course, this isn't to say that animals share the same level of morality that we do. They do still fling poo at each other, after all. It only means that the seeds of morality exist in nature, and the human animal, with it's complex and imaginative mind, has been able to expand on it in many more ways.
The sensations of feeling good or guilty is just nature's way of motivating an organism to do what's in it's best interest. How we interact with others benefits or hurts the survival of our genes, so we've evolved a sense of "right" and "wrong" to help us maximize our success as a species. It feels good to donate time at the homeless shelter because we're helping our species, and evolution has found a way to reward us for that.

So we're genetically programmed with a sense of morality. It is most often better to help other people than to not help other people. It is better to protect little children than to not protect them. These kinds of instincts are part of us, for evolutionary reasons. But our brains are also complex enough to be able to adapt, and learn, and reconsider appropriate actions.
It's essential that we be able to restructure our sense of morality when situations change. Murder is wrong, unless we're acting in self-defense. Then it may be perfectly fine. New facts reorganize our moral priorities. Society, culture, and religion have the ability to "hijack" our moral senses and point them in new directions. If we've accepted a book or an authority figure as a source of truth, our sense of morality can be adjusted under false pretenses. We only have to believe witches are real in order to burn them with a clear conscience. It is more moral to kill an agent of Satan than to permit one to live. Shooting doctors, mutilating genitalia, and crashing airplanes into buildings all happen because religion has "hacked" into our moral programming.

"Good people do good things and evil people do bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion."
- Steven Weinberg

This may be part of the explanation for why more and more people are saying they are not "religious" but they are "spiritual." They are finding the authority and the dogmatisms of organized religion too distasteful. They don't want to believe that homosexuality is a sin merely because they've been told it is. They don't want to believe that their choice in jewelry says something about their ability to make righteous choices. Rather than submit to the demands of a human authority figure or ancient book, they prefer to find their own path to God or enlightenment. They are taking control of their own sense of morality, rather than allow others to dictate what it ought to be.
The universe doesn't care about what we do any more than we care about what bacteria does. Our actions won't matter in a million years. Nobody beyond planet Earth will ever notice or care about what we do. But so what? The song will end, that doesn't mean we can't enjoy listening to it.
But we don't need to be so arrogant as to think that unless our actions did matter in some infinite, cosmic sense, they don't matter at all.
What we do matters to each other. We're still responsible and accountable to ourselves and everyone around us. Compassion, generosity, and support are all good things in and of themselves. They make a real difference here and now. Our actions don't have to matter to the cosmos to be important. A little girl's smile should be all the reason we need. Our own integrity should be enough.
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Hard to understand we were made in the image of God?
 
Skarekrow said:

God as the intelligent source of morality fails as a concept if it's carried out logically. Socrates posed The Euthyphro dilemma long before Jesus was born. He asks whether God commands goodness because it is good, or if what God commands is good because he commanded it. In other words, does God follow an existing moral code, or does God author the moral code himself?

  1. If God follows an existing moral code, then we can rule him out as a necessary part of the Moral Argument. Morality, in this case, would exist independently of God. There would still be right and wrong regardless of whether or not God existed.
  2. If God decides on his own what is right and wrong, then morality has become arbitrary and subjective again. This is what seems to be supported by scripture. If God commands someone to cut off someone's head, it becomes just to do so. If God commands someone to marry multiple women, it becomes just to do so. If God instructs a man to blow up a building, it becomes just to do so. If God is the author of the moral code, then morality is just as subjective and arbitrary as if there were no God at all.
If we believe our sense of morality was intelligently planted into us, we run into another logical problem. We have no reason to trust that the moral code God gave us is a good one. If he can decide what does and does not feel right, then we have no way of knowing if he is an evil or amoral God and has simply programmed us to believe he is good.
We are only feeling what he wants us to feel. How could we know that God is perfectly good if we're using the moral compass he gave us?
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This is a false dichotomy. There is no dillema here.
GOD does not will something because something is good, neither something is good just because God wills it, but is rather that God will something because HE is good.
Check this video with explanation of way The Euthyphro Dilemma fails.
[video=youtube;wBvi_auKkaI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBvi_auKkaI[/video]
 
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