If selfishness was morally wrong, and if mass murder was morally wrong and if religious and ethnic prejudice was morally wrong, then these points would have significant force.

These points have significant force without any connection to morality whatsoever. Most people do not like the prospect of living in a world full of selfish people, or a world controlled by ideological or religious zealots intent on slaughtering large subgroups of the population, especially when there is always a significant chance that they will belong to one of the subgroups. There is no reason why people who share these particular whims cannot unite to work for a world more suited to their tastes, without invoking morality.

But according to you, there is no such thing as right and wrong, so these points are merely matters of personal taste or subjective preference, and thus carry little weight, on your view of things.

I know of no mechanism that will automatically cause objective morality to spring into existence because, in your opinion, personal tastes or subjective preferences are not sufficiently weighty reasons for acting one way or another.

These objections to moral realism strike me as very similar to the view of moral relativists who argue against objective morality on the grounds that belief in objective morality leads to intolerance.

I’m sorry if my objections to moral realism strike you that way, but I am neither a moral relativist, nor do I believe that the question of whether objective morality leads to intolerance has the slightest bearing on whether it exists or not, any more than the physical existence of a rock depends on whether or not there is a finite chance that it might fall on someone’s head.

What these moral relativists fail to notice, however, is that tolerance is a moral value, and it is a moral value that is used as the basis or ground for adopting moral relativism, which then makes the moral value of tolerance into nothing more than a matter of personal taste or subjective preference, thus undermining one of the main reasons given for becoming a moral relativist in the first place.

For reasons similar to those cited above, the hypothetical question of how it might affect the arguments of moral relativists has not the slightest bearing on whether objective morality actually exists or not.

This is like climbing out on a limb of a tree, and then cutting the limb off the trunk of the tree while standing on that very limb.

You are the one sitting out there on your “objective morality” limb. I never climbed the tree to begin with. Somewhat ironically, Christian apologists like Mr. Craig are usually much more astute than atheists at noticing that the particular limb you are sitting on is hanging in thin air.

The “clear and specific” arguments in my essay are that:
a) Santa Claus and God do not exist, and,
b) Evolved human behavioral traits are the ultimate reason for the existence of morality. Moral emotions are, therefore, by their nature, subjective impressions in the brains of individuals. It follows from this that there is no such thing as “objective morality,” nor any mechanism by which Good and Evil can acquire the status of things in themselves, independent of the minds of individuals in their ability to acquire legitimacy and normative power over other individuals.

As with William Craig, it is challenging to find a clear and specific argument in your essay. But it does appear that you have raised a couple of points that are worth serious consideration.

Before I attempt to address your more substantial points, there are a couple of points that should be set aside as unhelpful to your case.

You appear to raise some moral objections to moral realism, which seems logically inconsistent to me:

1.Morality “enables us to do remarkably selfish things in the name of selflessness.”

2.Advocates of objective morality sometimes “manage to convince others that they’re right, and commit mass murder as a way of eliminating the evil people.“

3.Belief in “ ‘objective morality’ convinces us that we are perfectly justified in murdering millions of people because they are Jews or ‘bourgeoisie.’ ”

If selfishness was morally wrong, and if mass murder was morally wrong and if religious and ethnic prejudice was morally wrong, then these points would have significant force.

But according to you, there is no such thing as right and wrong, so these points are merely matters of personal taste or subjective preference, and thus carry little weight, on your view things.

These objections to moral realism strike me as very similar to the view of moral relativists who argue against objective morality on the grounds that belief in objective morality leads to intolerance.

What these moral relativists fail to notice, however, is that tolerance is a moral value, and it is a moral value that is used as the basis or ground for adopting moral relativism, which then makes the moral value of tolerance into nothing more than a matter of personal taste or subjective preference, thus undermining one of the main reasons given for becoming a moral relativist in the first place.

This is like climbing out on a limb of a tree, and then cutting the limb off the trunk of the tree while standing on that very limb.

http://chronicle.com/article/Prominent-Scholar-Was-Banned/139027/

I was struck by your comment no one had reported on this unusual series of events, despite Trivers’s fame.

—CS

i entirely don’t understand why and how the media aren’t all over this. there seem to be zero details anywhere on google.