Most of this makes sense so far, especially afleitch's first post, although I'm not sure I can really tell whether he's positing ethical naturalism or ethical non-naturalism, since he expresses approbation for the idea that 'good' is irreducible but then describes it as a function of what seems to me an awful lot like
dependent arising out of human subjectivity. (If he's willing to ascribe that term to what he's discussing, I actually immediately understand it a
lot better, because that's a concept with which I'm in other contexts already familiar from studying Buddhism, and envisioning how one would apply it to ethical propositions isn't really that big of a cognitive leap for me.)
However there are a couple of aspects of what bedstuy's saying to which I'd like to take exception.
For one thing, the existence of God is irrelevant to ethics. If doesn't do anything to establish conceptions of the "good" and God doesn't seem to have a benefit in terms of ethical behavior. There's no evidence that any supposed Gods have established ethical principles or even that being a creator of the universe entitles you to make up ethical principles. What if a God is evil? Surely, ethics can't come from an evil God, right? So, I don't get that.
By what sort of robust definition could a creator deity even
be evil? If there was something that independently of that deity set any kind of objective moral norms, the deity wouldn't be capital-G 'God' as that term is conventionally philosophically defined because it wouldn't be omnipotent. There would be something identifiably existing outside its demesne, something that it likely wouldn't have created (I guess it's conceivably possible that a deity could establish moral norms according to which its own actions would be wicked, and that would indeed raise the question of why exactly the pronouncements such an apparently self-contradictory being should be considered trustworthy). It would be some sort of demiurge and whatever mechanism or principle set the moral norms would be if anything closer to being 'God' than it would. If there was something that independently of that deity set moral norms that
weren't objective, how if at all does that differ from other forms of moral relativism or moral nihilism? I grant that it's not by any means
self-evident that creating the universe would give a deity the right to establish moral norms but I don't see where else
in a divinely created universe moral norms could have come from, without positing either that the deity that created it is in some way not omnipotent and has less than complete power over it
or that the moral norms are not objective. I don't see any options for a theistic universe having any other setup than its creator deity establishing moral norms or morality being entirely subjective, and neither of those provide any real basis on which to call the creator deity 'evil'.
The last sentence of this paragraph is as far as I'm concerned and as far as I can tell manifestly untrue, in that the mere fact that non-theist metaethicists exist renders the issue such that I'm...really not sure why you'd claim that, actually. Metaethics is just the discussion of by what process one distinguishes good from bad. The idea of 'moral realism vs. moral non-realism' as a dichotomy or an argument is probably most people's idea of The Big Metaethical Question, and it's completely false to claim that
that's an issue that only religious people raise. That doesn't, of course, mean that it's not an 'ivory tower' issue--it is--but I don't understand why whether or not an issue is 'ivory tower' has any bearing on whether or not it's a legitimate subject, unless one's view of the world is thoroughgoingly pragmatist.
Regarding afleitch's second post: He's in my opinion entirely right about the near-impossibility of reconciling some of the events described in the Bible with the generally-stated moral propositions according to which God is 'supposed' to operate. That's what I meant by saying that divine command theory leads down some pathways to which my heart doesn't exactly thrill. It requires either accepting the idea of the sort of divine moral relativism that he's describing (
not appealing) or approaching Christianity as primarily a series of philosophical and mystical exercises that either disclaims or takes no position on the historical truth of what would for a lot of people be uncomfortably large sections of the Bible (certainly
less unappealing than the first option. By far). This is why I think Christians who take moral philosophy seriously should be just as leery of the idea of the Bible as a morally unimpeachable and entirely literally true text as non-Christians are.
(I don't quite understand on what basis afleitch is claiming (if this in fact
is what he's claiming, which I'm not sure of either) that not containing a mechanism for change makes a system of morals more relativist, though.)
I think I should mention at this point that I'm not claiming that divine command and ideal observer are the only metaethical theories that make sense to me
at all. Like I said, not-necessarily-theistic ethical non-naturalism of the G.E. Moore variety also makes sense, more or less, and I have to admit that complete moral relativism and emotivism do too. In particular, the reason why when choosing my stance from among these I reject emotivism is...ironically...pretty much emotive, actually.
