I talk about morals a lot on my blog, in this post I want to explore the idea of morals even more. I would like to see if morals even exist.
For this post, the meaning of morals will be principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour.
I am going to consider three main points of morals, those being the subjective, objective and nihilistic view of morals.
Objective Morality
A good illustration of the objective argument of morality would be a quote from William Lane Craig:
To say that the Holocaust was objectively evil is to say that it was evil, even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was good, and it would still have been evil even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everyone who disagreed with them, so that everybody thought the Holocaust was good.
However, objective moral values can only exist if the distinction between right and wrong has been set out already by someone who is not us. In this case, it would mean God; objective moral values cannot be upheld without the existence of a higher being. Some may say that the distinction could be made by humans, but the definition of good and bad would be continually changing. We need a constant, so if God doesn't exist, we cannot have objective moral values.
Subjective Morality
With subjective moral values, morality is much looser. We do not need this constant as we do with objective morality; right and wrong are constantly changing to suit our situation. It depends on the certain individual's thoughts and influences.
Let's take the example of the Holocaust as William Lane Craig did. Almost everybody in the world knows that the Holocaust was a horrific and horrible era in human existence, but the Nazis that were carrying out orders didn't know it was bad. They were brainwashed into believing a false reality. Their sense of morality is much different to us. In their eyes, they were doing as they were told; they think they were doing right.
Nihilistic Morality
The last viewpoint I will explore is nihilistic morality. Moral nihilism is the belief that ethical values do not exist. I will be looking at the Error Theory by Mackie for this part to examine moral scepticism. There are three main points of this theory,
- There is no morality in this world; nothing is right or wrong.
- No moral judgements are correct.
- Our attempts to describe moral features of things always come up short.
Moral scepticism believes that morals are just a part of our imagination. To describe it to you a different way, learning requires truth. In this theory, there is no moral truth. Therefore there is no moral knowledge. Consequently, morals do not exist.
There are many more areas that I could look at concerning morality, and it's existence such as ethical expressivism, moral suspicion, moral authenticity, moral non-cognitivism, etcetera, but this is all I'll settle for regarding this post.
What are your thoughts on the existence of morals?