And Slaters Go Plop

I’ve observed conversations between theists and non-theists in which the theist will state that the non-theist doesn’t have a leg to stand on with regard to morality because if you don’t believe in a God then you can have no objective basis for your morals and so no moral belief can be better or worse than the other.

And I’ve watch many non-theists scramble to try to show that they do, in fact, have a basis for objective morality but I have to admit that I get a bit lost in the arguments. It’s likely that I don’t understand the finer details of what people mean by “objective” and “subjective”.

Every time I see such a conversation I think to myself that I’m quite happy to believe that there is no great measuring rod in the sky and that all such morals are evolved and subjective. To me, it seems to make sense that stealing can be both beneficial and detrimental depending on the circumstances (i.e. subjective) and that child rape is 99.9999999% detrimental (I always allow for those make-believe scenarios where you have to choose between, say, child rape and killing 1,000,000 people with a lawnmower).

I also think that when people use “wrong” and “right” as opposed to “detrimental” and “beneficial” it actually creates a circular argument for a kind of objective morality because the word “wrong” can be used in both an objective and a subjective sense (i.e. I hit the wrong key on the keyboard vs. abortion is wrong) whereas the word “detrimental” demands that you at least define a goal or framework that is being worked against.

So, theists and non-theists, is there really such a thing as objective morality? And what’s your definition of it? I’ve got no answers, only questions.