Debate: Is there a such thing as "objective morality"?
Side: No

replaced it with obscure termsI didn't really think "hidden" or "prevalent" were obscure or debasing..."name them." A dishonest request and you know it.If you posit that objective morality exists, how is asking if you can name one objectively moral thing "dishonest"? You may argue that it isn't necessary to be able to name one, but it would be pretty hard to argue that it is a trick question.do these exceptions detract from the question on a macro levelIf they change people's opinion on what the "right" action to take is, then yes.objective facts about morality'objective facts about morality' is not the same thing as 'objective morality'.Being able to measure some aspects of an actions propensity to advance a given moral says nothing of that moral's rightness or wrongness (or its relation to other potential morals), nor is a subset of measurements of past actions necessarily sufficient for judging an actions contemporaneous or future moral impact nor the "right" weight for balancing the present and the future.I wasn’t the one who brought up morals having evolved from chimpsWhy not? It is fairly evident that they did.What I was pointing out was that some animals rape, some don't; some employ slavery, some don't; some animals eat their young, some don't. Nature didn't produce morality, certain behaviors were just more likely to survive a given environment. It says nothing of the morality of the survival of a given species.We just happened to have evolved from the animals that we did; primates exhibit altruism, kinship, sharing, etc. - things that we adapted/refined and reflectively called morals.anyone who would favor being alive over being deadThat is a subjective preference.I acknowledge that that seems to be the religious view of objective morals, but I trust that your skill is sufficient enough to see that that is not what I am arguing.I have to admit that I did think you were defending the position akin to the religious view. I had only read a subset of your posts before creating a response.I wish it had been phrased as moral realism since the religious sense is just far more common to be the case on this site. I swear I had this same thing happen 2 or 3 years ago. My apologies.I do think moral realism shares some weaknesses of the religious version in that it prefers a belief in something not known to exist (actually true moral claims), it is unfalsifiable, and that without such actual attainable morals it is useless for anything other than philosophical discussion.With many claims of objectivity, once you resolve linguistic ambiguities you are generally left with tautologies (pain is bad because it specifically denotes a perjorative, well-being is good, etc.)In terms of moral realism specifically, I don't believe in the ability to reduce a moral's rightness or wrongness to objectively true or false.Re: Sam Harris, et al.If I had to limit myself to one critique of the debates Harris, Hitchens etc. participate(d) in, it would be how they handle(d) morality. Hitch often said something like "innate" and Harris seemed to shoehorn a well-reasoned morality into an 'objective' one. I would have preferred that they pursued the route of showing that since the mind of God is unknowable, humans are still left with a subjective morality even on the God hypothesis.I have several Hitchens books and I have been thinking about picking up this one by Sam - did you like it?From your link: "Moral objectivism is the position that moral truths exist independantly[sic] from opinion."How is that much different than my description of "morality outside human ontology."Can moral questions which potentially affect the outcome of our behavior be answered in a practical manner and validated with data and facts?That is morality, not "objective morality"The goal of measuring some thing could be simply to find out the things dimensions.If your goal is to advance towards a certain position, more than just speed is needed to know if/when you will get there - you also need to know direction.Rape is wrong.As I mentioned in my other post, rape certainly isn't considered to be as "wrong" when it is done in prison to a child molester. There are also borderline cases like acting out rape fantasies, etc.Also, when it is done by animals is it considered "wrong"? Should (objective) morals be anthropocentric?Not always.But definitely sometimes.