Objective Morality
Objective morality (also known as Moral Objectivism or Moral Realism) is the philosophical belief that moral principles and values are universally true and exist independently of human opinion, cultural norms, or personal feelings.
Bob feeds the orphans. This is a good act because humans only survive when the tribe survives. Those children may be in need of help today, but in the future they may be in a position to help Bob in return. Sam does not feed the orphans. This is bad because when the children starve, the tribe would be smaller, and there might be a time that Sam could use help but it is not there.
In this view, moral truths are like facts about the physical world. Just as the statement "The Earth orbits the Sun" is objectively true regardless of who believes it, proponents of objective morality argue that statements like "Causing gratuitous suffering to an innocent person is wrong" are also objectively true.
At this point we have established some things:
- Morality is defined as the way to live a good life.
- Humans depend on each other to survive, so the good life is a good life in the community, and must be good for the community as well.
- Morality is then the best way to live and work together.
- Morality is not simplistic rules, but take into account and may apply differently to different contexts.
- Actions we take have objective consequences that affect others.
Therefor there will be actions that are objectively better for the community than other actions. There will be a best action to take in any given circumstance.
The Easy Cases
Morality is not arbitrary, but there are in fact real reasons that some actions are better than others.
Is the arbitrary killing of fellow tribe members (a.k.a. murder) good (or bad) for the world in general?
Consider two tribes: one says that murder is "bad" (immoral) and the other says that murder is "good" (moral). Which tribe will live longer and live better? I think that the one that believes arbitrary killing of a fellow tribe members would die out fairly quickly. People would waste tremendous effort to remain safe, and that would detract from activities that aid survival. The one that insists murder is "bad" would survive much more easily, and the tribe members would survive in the tribe as well.
Consider again two tribes: one says that stealing property from others is "bad" and the other says that stealing is "good". Which tribe will live longer and live better? Without the assurance that you will be able to keep anything you make, you are not going to invest a lot of time into making things, such a spears or arrows to help with hunting. If stealing is good, it would be smarter to just wait for someone else to make it, and then steal it. Of course, nobody is going to actually make those things in that tribe. It should be obvious that a lack of property rights would ultimately bring about the demise of that tribe, fairly quickly.
Morals are in fact the rules for living and getting along with others. Rules that promote the well being of the entire tribe are objectively good. Those that decrease survivability are objectively bad.
Existing Is Not Knowing
There is fundamentally an objective aspect to what is and is not moral, and that is determined ultimately by survivability. That is, there exists a single best action. However there is no guarantee that I or that anyone knows what the best action is.
This is profoundly disappointing. How can it be that you have a moral system and you don't know what it is? The answer is that the best action for a situation, the best way of behaving, has to be discovered. It turns out that discovering objective morality is like discovering physical laws about the universe. The only real way to know what the action is to try a number of them and see which one works out better.
But it may take thousands of generations to actually determine whether a particular action is good or bad. We can not isolate one moral rule from the others so it might be impossible to tell which rule caused a particular tribe to fail. So we have to treat the morals all together. A tribe holds a set of morals to be true, and then that tribe either survives or it doesn't. Other tribe how different combinations, and again it is survival that says whether they are right.
The fact that I cannot tell you whether capital punishment is moral or not does not say that it is morally ambivalent. None of us are omniscient.
Good Morals Survive With The Tribe That Exhibits Them
So we have to treat the morals all together. A tribe holds a set of morals to be true, and then that tribe either survives or it doesn't. Other tribe how different combinations, and again it is survival that says whether they are right. Occasionally societies appear with bad morals, like the Nazis, but they died out because their morals were bad. So did the communists. The fact that they died out is evidence (maybe proof) that their morals were wrong.
So it is hard to determine what is and is not objectively moral, but that does not mean that objective morality does not exist. Cultures are selected to survive based on whether their morals are 'true".
A simple moral rule can be wrong. With subjective morality, no moral rule can ever be wrong: what you think is right is right. But morality is objective because tribes and cultures survive or die based on their moral rules.
Goodness Is Equated With Existence
Sure, a particular action may be optimized to bring the best consequence to the most people, but does that make it morally good?
Morality is meaningful only as it relates to the survivability of the tribe or culture holding those morals. Morality is how we get along together. Don't murder. Don't steal. Don't sleep with a family member. Don't lie. Don't cheat on your spouse. Don't harm others unnecessarily. Don't be lazy. These are all rules that enhance the tribal fitness.
If you look at the traditional use of the term "moral" and the phrase "good life" you see that living together well means survival and flourishing.
It is true that some religions promote superstitions as moral behaviors. Cross yourself is a moral action. Saying "Amen" is a moral action. Slaughtering a lamb (or even human sacrifice) to appease an angry God would be considered a moral action. The difficulty in saying whether these are moral or not is that most superstitions have no material effect on the world. You can do them or not, and it has little effect on the flourishing of the people. In some cases the actions, like rituals, actually bring about good side effects that are not obvious. A funeral or a memorial can help individuals and the community carry on after the loss of a loved one.
Having considered this issue from many sides I just can't find any justification for thinking that an actions can be good just because God declared it so. Every traditional moral rule has a founding in the success of the tribe. Those who break moral rules are outcast, and left to fend for themselves, thereby protecting the tribe from the person who is not working the betterment of the tribe. I don't know of any examples of moral rules that are detrimental to the success of the tribe.
Conclusion
As actions can have a material impact on the success of the tribe, so too the moral guidelines about what actions to take have a material impact on survivability. An action has a single objective consequent. There exists better and worse actions, and so there is an objective basis for morality. You can not simply say that an action is subjectively good, when the consequence of that action makes the tribe objectively worse. It is hard to know exactly what actions are moral in what situations, but we can discover these through the same kinds of experimentation that scientific investigations take.