Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Thu Apr 18, 2024 3:17 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Apr 17, 2024 8:27 pm
Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Wed Apr 17, 2024 6:57 pm
If I have the power to prevent an immoral/wicked/evil act, and I don't prevent it, then I am immoral/wicked/evil. And, of course, moral objectivists agree.
But IC's team believes its god has that power - but worships it as the source of all goodness. Moral conclusion?
You'd better include more data, I would say.
First, you'd have to know that the right solution for God to adopt would be to prevent all evil/wickedness/immorality from happening, before it could happen. That is, you'd have to know that a world with no evil in it was, in every way, preferable to one in which people had the option to act wickedly. So I must ask...on what basis do you assume that?
Secondly, you'd have to have an objective moral standpoint from which to judge God's actions. That is, there'd have to be a morality higher than God Himself, so as to be capable of passing an objective judgment upon Him, and you'd have to be the one having access to it. Do you now believe that there IS an objective moral standard, one higher than God Himself, and that Peter Holmes has access to it?
Absent those two conditions, not only is your "moral conclusion" not
conclusive; it's not actually "moral" either, since there's no
objective morality.
You can take them one at a time, if you like...
1 As usual, you peddle a false dichotomy: morality - judgement about moral rightness and wrongness - is
either objective
or foundationless, irrational, incoherent, self-regarding, and so on. And that's not so, how ever often you repeat it. These are two sides of the same counterfeit coin.
Hey, sometimes the truth hurts. But it's absolutely right.
"Subjective" means "only Peter has to think it." Nobody else ever has to agree. But in point of fact, it doesn't even mean that Peter HAS to agree with it...he could choose otherwise in the next five seconds, and subjective morality would have nothing to say about it, if he did.
So yeah, that's how it is.
2 I notice you don't try to defend the wickedness of a god...
Wait..."wickedness"? How does a subjectivist get to insist that somebody else's behaviour, far less God's, is "wicked?"
You see? You don't even believe what you say.
3 I believe 'that a world with no evil in it [would be], in every way, preferable to one in which people had the option to act wickedly'. But I don't claim to know that,
Right! But if so, what are you complaining about? You don't know that God hasn't done what amounts to the best possible thing...
4 I'd like to know if you believe it too - if, in your moral opinion, 'a world with no evil in it [would be], in every way, preferable to one in which people had the option to act wickedly'.
It would depend on a correct cost-benefit analysis, wouldn't it? And who is positioned to give the right cost-benefit analysis? Only God.
However, I can certainly see some huge benefits to a universe in which some evil is allowed to exist temporarily...free will, personhood, choice, individuality, autonomy, relationship, love, mercy, charity...of course, these things would only be possible in such a world that was devoid of any alternatives. That might well be a price worth paying. You'd certainly have to make the case that it wasn't.
Do you think the undeserved suffering of some, for example, is a price worth paying for the blessing of free will for the wicked?
Reverse the question: do you think the blessing of
everyone having free will is a price worth paying for some temporary suffering being allowed, especially if such suffering is eventually compensated and removed? That's how the right question should be framed.
It seems to me that's quite plausible. Depending on the right cost-benefit analysis by an ominiscient Observer, it might be, as Leibniz said, "the best of all possible worlds."
No, I don't think there is any higher moral authority, such as me, whose moral opinion trumps anyone else's.
That wasn't my question: it was whether there was an objective moral standard one might employ to judge God. But obviously, if Peter Holmes is the one proposing to do that, as he is, then he would also have to think that he had access to that higher and objective moral standard.
I think you don't, too. So now we do agree on something.