Responding to Moral Apologetics
In comments on the essay The Case Against Moral Realism , I challenged someone (Stephen Lindsay) to define good and evil, or in other words, to define moral value. In response, he wrote a defense of belief in objective morality: Three Perspectives on Objective Morality . In the essay, he gives a definition of moral rightness and wrongness: • Right (in the moral sense) - behaviors, ideas, philosophies, etc., that are thought to overall positively impact individuals and society. Wrong is the opposite. There can exist behaviors, ideas, and philosophies that are neither right nor wrong. However, this definition does not actually define moral value. It does not explain what moral goodness and badness (or rightness and wrongness) are. It presupposes moral value. To call something “good” or “bad”, in a moral sense, is not a description. Moral value is normative. To call something “good” (in a moral sense) means that it ought to be, and that we should try to create...