Apologetics Pt 16

The Second Premise of the Moral Argument

1. Objective moral values and duties do exist

Last week we took a very brief and basic look at the foundation of moral values and duties. Basically, I tried to show that without God, objective moral values and duties cannot exist. Without God, there is no other standard by which we could call some action good or bad objectively, that is to say valid and binding regardless of opinion.

So, are the moral values and duties we live by actually objective? Are they valid and binding no matter what our opinions on them? Well, we have no reason to believe they aren’t actually objective, just like we have no reason to believe our five senses don’t give us an accurate perception of the world around us! In the absence of some big reason to distrust our senses, we are rational to accept the information the send to our brains. In the same way, in the absence of some defeater, we should accept the moral values and duties we all apprehend to be objectively true.

All we have to do to see this is ask the horrible, yet most obvious set of questions regarding this… Things like is murder wrong? Is rape wrong? Is abuse and torture wrong? “Of course!” we all proclaim, anyone who would say otherwise has something wrong with them. Agreed! And that proves the point. In any culture, in any period of history, people have always been able to agree on the most part that there really are such things as ‘the good’ or ‘the bad’, ‘the right’ and ‘the wrong’. We all know this to be true.

And so, even if our moral knowledge has developed over time to learn more and more about morality (e.g. slavery is wrong), it still says nothing about the objectivity of morality. For, we have discovered more and more about mathematics, logic, science and more – the discovery of moral truth actually goes to show the validity of the claim that moral truths are objective. We are not inventing them, but discovering what already exists.

– Dave