Secular Values: Arbitrary?

[Dimmesdale]

I was reading a book by Tim Keller recently, and in one section he talks about morality and God and how you can't justify the former without the latter.

He talked about Western secular democracies, and how we value tolerance and the individual and his/her rights more than at any other time in history. And yet, in also a unique way, we have no way to justify them. We cannot appeal to anything other than the laws we have made. There is no rationale for things like "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" but rather we take them for granted and see them as self-authenticating, without any appeal to God or religion or other values.

In the past societies also held up morality as good, but they appealed to things like scriptures, ancient wisdom, or the moral order inherent in the universe. We modern seculars, again, see things like what I outlined above as good, but we stop at there, and don't go into particulars.

One might say: so what? Values like these should appear obvious to people. Why bother with a justification for them?

And yet there are certain societies now where Western values do not seem obvious. They may seem byproducts of Western dominion, but otherwise seem arbitrary and imperious. So how do we say to others "my values are better than yours" without simply imposing them by force and fiat? We seem to be only able to coerce, not persuade.

So there is the appeal to objective morality, and apologists think the only sensible worldview to offer a grounding for morality is in God, otherwise, morality is simply subjective, arbitrary and by fiat only.

I actually disagree that one need only have recourse to this solution however. I will get to that in my next post.

[Purple Knight]

You can certainly support that racism is wrong today, and you'll obtain a very high decree of consensus. However, to claim that it is "objectively" wrong loses sight of the very essence of human moral values.

Morality in this sense is about discarding the evolutionary reasons and simply being selfless.

People first learned to be selfless to help their tribe.

Now there is a new challenge: Be selfless and help the other tribe over your own.

You can find me racists who will give plenty of logical reasons for racism, because, if we're being honest, there are logical reasons for it. When you find one that claims his racism is moral, you have found a liar.

I would argue that the consensus is actually 100%.

But it wouldn't matter if the consensus wasn't 100%. Racism is objectively morally wrong. That is simply an axiom. It needs no support. It is basic truth.