non-existence of objective morality

[Bronzeage]

So a group, say, United Statesians elect a lying fool to act as chief executive. He puts naysayers at the head of every department, eliminates executive actions by his predecessor because that predecessor was of darker hue and for no other reason.

In effect subjective lawmaking.

So are laws objective or are they subjective commerce?

If they are subjective commerce then how can one come to the conclusion that morality is other than objective?

This question turns on the notion that laws are objective things.

It's all in the fine print. The definition of "law" differs according to application. We have "natural law", or we did at one time. I'm not sure the term is still used, but The Laws of Newtonian Motion were based on natural law. They seemed objective, and were by any understanding, until Einstein came a long and pointed out that our experience with gravity was actually a special case of a very small body(us), very close to a really big body. What we experience on Earth, is subjective and may not be the same if we were drifting in open space.

I think the desire for objective morality is the ultimate appeal to authority. A religious person can defer to God, when authority is needed. The lack of moral objectivity puts the individual truly in control of their own actions. Fortunately, most people can go through life without suffering a great moral crisis, but when it occurs, one must decide between what is prescribed by the current morality, or defy it. The social sanctions which are applied to the immoral must have broad support. When people no longer feel any particular act is a threat to group security, there's no motivation to do something like stoning an adulteress. This is how moral codes change over time.

Morality is a reaction to the environment and environments change, both through natural processes, and by our own efforts. It may take a while, but when conditions improve and death, either by starvation or marauding hoards, is not likely, we can loosen up a bit. This might mean treating women as humans and not property, or distributing resources so that fewer people go hungry. There's nothing objective about any of that.

 

[bilby]

Right on cue bilby shows up to ruin the interesting thread with vulgar personal attacks

... And the 'personal attack' is a figment of your imagination ...

Actually, "Perhaps you should consider learning to think ... On reflection, I would advise you against learning to think, because were you to do so, and to then re-read your above post, the embarrassment could be fatal." is a vulgar personal attack.

I think it's sound advice in this case, so I stand by it. It's unsolicited and probably unwelcome advice, but that doesn't make it an attack. It's personal, certainly. Whether it is vulgar (and whether vulgarity is a bad thing) is a matter of opinion.

 

[Lion IRC]

I'm not pissed at bilby for vulgarity or ad hominem arguments.
I'm pissed off because it's spammy and lazy and off topic
...and because I know for a fact that bilby is smart enough to take the high road.

 

[bilby]

I'm not pissed at bilby for vulgarity or ad hominem arguments.
I'm pissed off because it's spammy and lazy and off topic
...and because I know for a fact that bilby is smart enough to take the high road.

I am; But your arguments just aren't worth the effort. If you don't know how to recognise and avoid logical fallacies by now, or you choose not to regardless, then why would I waste my time refuting something that you put fuck all effort into formulating?

Lazy arguments get lazy rebuttals.

 

[Bomb#20]

If there is no such (extant) thing as the objectively true demarcation between rabbit and duck season then we can argue or wage war about it forever and never know which is right - because there IS no objective right or wrong.
This is ontology 101

But being able to argue or wage war about it forever and never know which is right is not evidence against objectivity. If people choose to we can argue or wage war over whether the star Icarus (spotted by Hubble 9 billion light years away) has a planet larger than Jupiter, and never know which is right. Yet there is an objective fact of the matter. It has one, or it doesn't, independent of any human's opinion. "We can argue or wage war about it forever and never know which is right" is a property possessed by everything.

BUT if an objectively true definitive hunting season does exist transcendent and independent of competing opinions about the time of year, then we are entitled - obligated - to explore epistemology 101.
How might two people, who both agree there is such an objectively real/true thing as a hunting season, decide the matter?

They'd have to make inquiries as to what the law is, of course. But that's because "hunting season" is an artifact of authority, the same way "Icarus has a Jupiter-mass planet" isn't an artifact of authority. Many different phenomena are objective, and some depend on authority and some don't.

The only thing all objective things have in common is, if you make for each one a list of all the things it depends on, you will not find personal opinion on those lists. But the circumstance that you find X and not personal opinion on list A, and you also don't find personal opinion on list B, do not imply you will find X on list B. So you can tell me about Bugs and Daffy until you're blue in the face, but until you come up with an argument for why morality has to depend on the same things hunting season depends on, you've got nothing. Hunting seasons are arbitrary -- a legislature can designate anything it pleases to be hunting season. Morality is not arbitrary. When some action is wrong, there's a reason it's wrong.

I'm not arguing might equals right in the sense that Bugs Bunny and Daffy should settle it by arm wrestling. I'm arguing that if there is no enforceability of the so-called 'law' then Bugs and Daffy can freely ignore each other's opinions.

So what? "Morality is objective" doesn't mean "You can't ignore morality". It means "If you do certain things, you're a bad person, regardless of your opinion."

How do you figure enforcement and inability to ignore opinion would make something right if it wasn't already right? Help me out here -- walk me through your reasoning. Stalin used to order those in his circle to personally execute people. (He did it for the purpose of implicating them all in his crimes, so their futures would be tied to his own.) If Stalin told you Igor Ivanov should die, that was enforced, and you couldn't ignore his opinion. Do you think that was enough to make it objectively immoral not to murder Igor Ivanov?

One of the epistemic criteria for and objectively real/true moral law must surely be that it is enforceable. If I can violate a (supposed) moral law with zero consequences - because there's no punishment - then what other alternative way do we have of differentiating subjective opinion from objective moral law?

If (since) God exists we have an objective transcendent law giver, law arbiter and inescapable consequential enforcement. And this doesn't in any way imply that God's Laws are moral just because they are universally, inevitably enforced. It means they are more than just God's opinions.

How does it mean that? Suppose God says Igor Ivanov should die. How does that make a man who refuses to murder Mr. Ivanov a bad person? Breaking Stalin's law is inevitably punished too. So what makes God's opinion that Igor Ivanov should die an inch more objective or an inch less just His personal opinion than Stalin's opinion that Igor Ivanov should die? What, Daffy Duck's personal opinion that God is always right? It's Bugs Bunny's personal opinion that Comrade Joseph is always right.

We can freely argue whether it's rabbit season but God gives us an objective way to find out if it isn't.

"God said it; I believe it; that settles it." does not qualify as objectivity.

 

[fromderinside]

So a group, say, United Statesians elect a lying fool to act as chief executive. He puts naysayers at the head of every department, eliminates executive actions by his predecessor because that predecessor was of darker hue and for no other reason.

In effect subjective lawmaking.

So are laws objective or are they subjective commerce?

If they are subjective commerce then how can one come to the conclusion that morality is other than objective?

This question turns on the notion that laws are objective things.

It's all in the fine print. The definition of "law" differs according to application. We have "natural law", or we did at one time. I'm not sure the term is still used, but The Laws of Newtonian Motion were based on natural law. They seemed objective, and were by any understanding, until Einstein came a long and pointed out that our experience with gravity was actually a special case of a very small body(us), very close to a really big body. What we experience on Earth, is subjective and may not be the same if we were drifting in open space.

I think the desire for objective morality is the ultimate appeal to authority. A religious person can defer to God, when authority is needed. The lack of moral objectivity puts the individual truly in control of their own actions. Fortunately, most people can go through life without suffering a great moral crisis, but when it occurs, one must decide between what is prescribed by the current morality, or defy it. The social sanctions which are applied to the immoral must have broad support. When people no longer feel any particular act is a threat to group security, there's no motivation to do something like stoning an adulteress. This is how moral codes change over time.

Morality is a reaction to the environment and environments change, both through natural processes, and by our own efforts. It may take a while, but when conditions improve and death, either by starvation or marauding hoards, is not likely, we can loosen up a bit. This might mean treating women as humans and not property, or distributing resources so that fewer people go hungry. There's nothing objective about any of that.

Got it.

Doah.

I just found a loophole.

Twitches are controlled by squirts, both processes are objective, verifiable, so ....never mind all that cage shaking you did above. Morality is just a folk song.

 

[Lion IRC]

But being able to argue or wage war about it forever and never know which is right is not evidence against objectivity.

Did I say it was? No.
I said "If there is no such (extant) thing as the objectively true demarcation between rabbit and duck season then we can argue or wage war about it forever and never know which is right - because there IS no objective right or wrong.

...a legislature can designate anything it pleases to be hunting season. Morality is not arbitrary. When some action is wrong, there's a reason it's wrong.

Agreed. If we accept the ontological existence of 'good' and it's opposite then all we have to do is work out how we can objectively recognize it when we see it. If there really is a True North on our moral compass how do we rationally justify our claim that someone is going the wrong direction? The person who wants to go South is right to ask what's the consequence of wilfully or ignorantly using defective compass and what's so wrong with the destination they are heading?

I'm not arguing might equals right in the sense that Bugs Bunny and Daffy should settle it by arm wrestling. I'm arguing that if there is no enforceability of the so-called 'law' then Bugs and Daffy can freely ignore each other's opinions.

So what? "Morality is objective" doesn't mean "You can't ignore morality". It means "If you do certain things, you're a bad person, regardless of your opinion."

Sure, but what's wrong with being a (supposedly) bad person?
You at least have to give the bad person a valid reason not to be bad which will endure (transcend) long enough to say "I told you so" once the bad person learns they really are objectively "bad".
If you can't say to the bad person that objectively true/real moral laws are inescapably enforced, what then distinguishes the fleeting, subjective, occasionally-enforced moral opinion from the real thing?

Again - I don't argue that it is the enforceability alone which makes it a moral law. We are talking about just one of objective criteria - namely that everybody agrees the law is enforced. Being in hell is not a matter of opinion.

There are two other criteria. 1. The law giver is omniscient. Surely everyone can objectively agree that an all knowing law maker is necessary to make the wisest laws. You can have an opinion about those laws but your opinion can't be as wise and your opinion can't be enforced. 2. The law giver is an impartial judge with no direct conflict of interest. The laws He makes are not for His personal gain so there can be no claim that His law selectively favors some and not others.

 

[Bomb#20]

There is no human act which can be perfectly moral, given the proper circumstances, and abhorrently immoral in other circumstances.

Sure there is. Killing your uncle, for instance. Perfectly moral if you do it because it's the only way to stop him from killing you; abhorrently immoral if you do it in order to inherit his riches.

To try to write an absolute code of right and wrong is an exercise in futility.

...
So if you mean an absolute and complete code of right and wrong that answers every moral question, I expect you're perfectly right, but so what? Why should the impossibility of reaching Andromeda stop us from launching moonshots? But if you mean it's futile to try to write an absolute but incomplete code of right and wrong that only answers some questions, show your work.

Hey, I'll give it a try. It's wrong for people to rape other people for fun. Can you exhibit a circumstance in which that moral rule is wrong?

I don't know if my syntax was unclear, or you misinterpreted my words, but your uncle analogy agrees with what I intended to say.

Oh, okay, you must have meant "There is no human act which cannot be perfectly moral, given the proper circumstances, and abhorrently immoral in other circumstances."

So, sure there is. Show us a proper circumstance where raping someone for fun is perfectly moral.

Your apparent moral stricture against "rape for fun", as opposed to the other motivations for rape, contains a lot of assumptions. The first assumption is that the rape victim and the rapist are contained within the same moral code.

What evidence do you have that my moral stricture contains that assumption? What does it even mean for a person to be "contained within" a moral code?

We need to remember, moral treatment only applies to members of our own group and interactions between group members.

"Remember"?!? Let's leave "I don't need to make an argument because I decree that you already agree with me" to the Christians.

If moral treatment only applied to members of our own group and interactions between group members, then cruelty to animals would be just hunky-dory.

If there is no moral stricture against killing someone from outside the group, it would be inconsistent to think rape, for whatever reason, would be taboo.

Well, in the first place, show your work. How does "It's okay to kill outsiders" logically imply "It's okay to rape outsiders"?

And in the second place, I didn't ask if you can exhibit a circumstance where the people of some group don't have a taboo against rape for fun. I asked if you can exhibit a circumstance where raping people for fun isn't wrong. If I had asked for a circumstance in which a human and a monkey aren't relatives, and someone had replied by pointing out to me a society of fundamentalists who all insist it's perfectly correct to say a human and a monkey aren't relatives, would you regard his reply as responsive to my request?

What we have here, is not an absolute moral code, but a case of you believing your code is superior to all others. There's nothing new in that.

Nonsense. Where the bejesus did I suggest that code was superior to all others? It covers very little of morality, so it's clearly inferior to any number of larger moral codes that answer other moral questions correctly in addition to questions about raping people for fun. That code was just an exercise in repeatedly narrowing a moral generalization until it stopped having readily identifiable exceptions.

No, what we have here is you claiming "To try to write an absolute code of right and wrong is an exercise in futility." and not supporting your assertion. There's nothing new in that.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

If you can't say to the bad person that objectively true/real moral laws are inescapably enforced, what then distinguishes the fleeting, subjective, occasionally-enforced moral opinion from the real thing?

The "if" suggests that there is a connection, but there isn't. Criminal laws are not inescapably enforced, but there is something that distinguishes true claims about criminal law from false opinions about what criminal law says. The difference is not the same in the moral case as in the criminal law case, and the details what the difference is is a very difficult matter for future research (e.g., what's the difference between blue and red, or between true and false claims about what is red, etc.; that sort of question is usually difficult), but that's beside the point. Why would you even suspect that the difference is related to enforcement?

Being in hell is not a matter of opinion.

Right, it's a matter of fact: it's a fact that there is no hell, and it's a fact that the monstrous creator of hell is evil - assessing the character in the story, of course. Darth Vader is also evil.

There are two other criteria. 1. The law giver is omniscient. Surely everyone can objectively agree that an all knowing law maker is necessary to make the wisest laws.

What is to "objectively" agree and how does it differ fron just agreeing?
Anyway, I disagree of course. First, omniscience does not imply rationality. An omniscient irrational being could come up with anythig that is not wise at all. But second, an omniscient rational agent will make the choices that are the best to achieve her goals. If her goals are pretty bad for humans, then the laws in question will be pretty bad for human.

2. The law giver is an impartial judge with no direct conflict of interest. The laws He makes are not for His personal gain so there can be no claim that His law selectively favors some and not others.

If she's rational, the law she makes will help her achieve her goals. Now, it might be stipulated that her goals are not what is usually called "personal gain", but she intends to have just laws. But then, that's not a lawmaker that makes the moral law (which would not make sense); rather, according to the moral law, this (hypothetical) maker of positive laws is omniscient and intends to make just laws.

 

[Underseer]

So a group, say, United Statesians elect a lying fool to act as chief executive. He puts naysayers at the head of every department, eliminates executive actions by his predecessor because that predecessor was of darker hue and for no other reason.

In effect subjective lawmaking.

So are laws objective or are they subjective commerce?

If they are subjective commerce then how can one come to the conclusion that morality is other than objective?

This question turns on the notion that laws are objective things.

It's all in the fine print. The definition of "law" differs according to application. We have "natural law", or we did at one time. I'm not sure the term is still used, but The Laws of Newtonian Motion were based on natural law. They seemed objective, and were by any understanding, until Einstein came a long and pointed out that our experience with gravity was actually a special case of a very small body(us), very close to a really big body. What we experience on Earth, is subjective and may not be the same if we were drifting in open space.

I think the desire for objective morality is the ultimate appeal to authority. A religious person can defer to God, when authority is needed. The lack of moral objectivity puts the individual truly in control of their own actions. Fortunately, most people can go through life without suffering a great moral crisis, but when it occurs, one must decide between what is prescribed by the current morality, or defy it. The social sanctions which are applied to the immoral must have broad support. When people no longer feel any particular act is a threat to group security, there's no motivation to do something like stoning an adulteress. This is how moral codes change over time.

Morality is a reaction to the environment and environments change, both through natural processes, and by our own efforts. It may take a while, but when conditions improve and death, either by starvation or marauding hoards, is not likely, we can loosen up a bit. This might mean treating women as humans and not property, or distributing resources so that fewer people go hungry. There's nothing objective about any of that.

Even in Newton's time, Newton's laws were merely mental constructs that represented our best attempt to understand and predict the motion of physical bodies.

Newton's laws were not what Lion imagines laws to be because as you pointed out, Einstein discovered that Newton's laws were slightly wrong. Newton's laws are still laws, but the laws turned out to be really good approximations rather than the "absolute truth" Lion imagines laws to be.

 

[Underseer]

Did I say it was? No.
I said "If there is no such (extant) thing as the objectively true demarcation between rabbit and duck season then we can argue or wage war about it forever and never know which is right - because there IS no objective right or wrong.
[...]

Wait, are you suggesting that unless we have absolute truth, it's impossible to label things true or false?

Really?

 

[Lion IRC]

I'm not pissed at bilby for vulgarity or ad hominem arguments.
I'm pissed off because it's spammy and lazy and off topic
...and because I know for a fact that bilby is smart enough to take the high road.

Fixed.

 

[Lion IRC]

Did I say it was? No.
I said "If there is no such (extant) thing as the objectively true demarcation between rabbit and duck season then we can argue or wage war about it forever and never know which is right - because there IS no objective right or wrong.
[...]

Wait, are you suggesting that unless we have absolute truth, it's impossible to label things true or false?

Really?

Wait!
Are you suggesting that you can just verbal people with your sock puppet ventriloquism routine and get away with it?

 

[fromderinside]

Wait!. .... wait, er .... pause, wait, nothing is being advanced here so why should one wait.

Funny though. I'm pretty sure truth and false claims wouldn't be claims if they weren't contestable, not absolute. So Underseer does have a strong point. Why would we need evidence if true and false were absolutes?

 

[bilby]

I'm not pissed at bilby for vulgarity or ad hominem arguments.
I'm pissed off because it's spammy and lazy and off topic
...and because I know for a fact that bilby is smart enough to take the high road.

Fixed.

It's a good start. You might want to also review some of the other things that you imagine you know for a fact. You may be surprised at how many of them you should also strike out.

 

[fromderinside]

How can you suggest Lion IRC strikes out? Has he claimed to play ball? Has he ever played ball? I want the Truth.

ahem, please.

 

[Underseer]

Did I say it was? No.
I said "If there is no such (extant) thing as the objectively true demarcation between rabbit and duck season then we can argue or wage war about it forever and never know which is right - because there IS no objective right or wrong.
[...]

Wait, are you suggesting that unless we have absolute truth, it's impossible to label things true or false?

Really?

Wait!
Are you suggesting that you can just verbal people with your sock puppet ventriloquism routine and get away with it?

What?

OK, I'm going to assume that you genuinely believe that if we don't have absolute truth, that truth can't exist, and further that you know this argument is bad.

Are you also making this argument about morality? We can't have morals unless we have absolute moral good or something like that?

Let's take the logic of your argument and see how it holds up in the real world, shall we?

Absolute straightness does not exist. If we look at something really straight with a powerful enough microscope, we see that it is made up of bumpy molecules and atoms that are not perfectly straight at all, and further jiggle around. Further, we know that space-time warps in the presence of matter, so even if you could make a perfectly straight anything, tiny perturbations in space-time would make it something other than perfectly straight.

So according to your argument, straightness doesn't exist.

We have the same problem with roundness. Perfect roundness is impossible, and according to your own argument, roundness cannot exist unless there is perfect roundness. Perfect roundness is impossible, therefore, as per your own logic, roundness is impossible.

Absolute cold is impossible in our universe (except with certain accounting tricks that we don't need to discuss). You cannot have a volume of space that is completely absent of energy, so coldness is impossible, therefore we can never say that something is colder than something else.

Absolute heat is also impossible. It is impossible to put infinite energy in a finite volume, so according to your argument, heat also does not exist. If perfect heat is impossible, then heat is impossible.

We can't compare two things and say one is straighter than the other because straightness doesn't exist.

We can't compare two things and say that one is rounder than the other because roundness doesn't exist.

We can't compare two things and say that one is colder than the other.

We can't compare two things and say that one is hotter than the other.

There are other examples, but I'm sure this is enough to demonstrate the point. Your claim simply does not match up with reality. Just because you can't understand how straightness can exist without perfect straightness does not mean that the existence of straightness proves that there must exist something that is perfectly straight. We don't need perfect straightness to have a concept of straightness.

The same thing goes for truth and morality. Your claims about the existence of either "proving" god is yet another elaborate argument from ignorance fallacy.

 

[Lion IRC]

If you don't think there is such a thing as objectively true morality (absolute straightness) then the moral argument for God is a complete non-starter. So you're off the hook.

What? You think I don't understand the moral argument for God?

Save your breath. I've prefaced my claims with the word "IF" several times.
If objective moral laws exists then....

And one of my contentions is that IF they exist then their universal enforceability would a notable difference between them and contrary opinions masquerading as morality.

 

[Bomb#20]

Did I say it was? No.
I said "If there is no such (extant) thing as the objectively true demarcation between rabbit and duck season then we can argue or wage war about it forever and never know which is right - because there IS no objective right or wrong.

Yes, that's what you said, and I was assuming you were trying to make a point. But "... then we can argue or wage war about it forever and never know which is right" applies to everything. So telling us it applies to "If there is no such (extant) thing as the objectively true demarcation" gives us zero information about objectively true demarcations. So why tell us? What was your point?

When some action is wrong, there's a reason it's wrong.

Agreed. If we accept the ontological existence of 'good' and it's opposite then all we have to do is work out how we can objectively recognize it when we see it. If there really is a True North on our moral compass how do we rationally justify our claim that someone is going the wrong direction? The person who wants to go South is right to ask what's the consequence of wilfully or ignorantly using defective compass and what's so wrong with the destination they are heading?

The consequence is he's a bad person. What's wrong with the destination is it's the sort of destination a good person wouldn't want to go to.

I'm not arguing might equals right in the sense that Bugs Bunny and Daffy should settle it by arm wrestling. I'm arguing that if there is no enforceability of the so-called 'law' then Bugs and Daffy can freely ignore each other's opinions.

So what? "Morality is objective" doesn't mean "You can't ignore morality". It means "If you do certain things, you're a bad person, regardless of your opinion."

Sure, but what's wrong with being a (supposedly) bad person?
You at least have to give the bad person a valid reason not to be bad which will endure (transcend) long enough to say "I told you so" once the bad person learns they really are objectively "bad".
If you can't say to the bad person that objectively true/real moral laws are inescapably enforced, what then distinguishes the fleeting, subjective, occasionally-enforced moral opinion from the real thing?

Where by "a valid reason" you mean an incentive? A valid reason for why it would be in his self-interest not to be bad? Such as his interest in not being tortured by a psychopath? That appears to assume what motivates morality is self-interest. Do you regard self-interest as the foundation of morality then?

If a person does what we would normally consider a good thing -- say, tells the truth about whether he saw the defendant ten miles away from the crime scene at the time -- but he only does it because somebody incentivized him to, with a threat to murder him if he lied or a promise to pay him a thousand dollars if he tells the truth, would you regard his telling of the truth as a virtuous act?

What's wrong with being a bad person is it's bad. Virtue is its own reward. Most Christians appear to understand this on some subconscious level. That after all is the whole point of the "You can't have objective morals without God." argument. You guys are not trying to convince atheists not to accept objective moral principles; you're trying to convince listeners to believe in God. So you're assuming listeners want there to be objective moral principles. You're assuming people want to be good. And that's generally a correct assumption. Normal people want to be good. That's why we spend so much of our lives thinking and talking and arguing about morality.

Now, if your question means, "What can the rest of us say to a sociopath to motivate him to want to be good?", that's a stumper. It's rather like asking what Dr. Freud needs to say to the crazy person on his couch to persuade her to be sane. There probably isn't anything he can say. For those people, we need jails and supervisors and insane asylums to protect ourselves from them. But that's not a reason to assume the rest of us need inescapable enforcement in order to want to be good or want to be sane. We already want that. Wanting to be good is a perfectly valid reason to be good.

Again - I don't argue that it is the enforceability alone which makes it a moral law. We are talking about just one of objective criteria - namely that everybody agrees the law is enforced. Being in hell is not a matter of opinion.

But nobody agrees the law is enforced. Not even Christians agree with that. In the first place, there is no enforcement, only punishment -- you know what the word "en - FORCE - ment" means, don't you? Nobody is actually forced not to do evil in his lifetime. In the second place, Christians don't even agree there is punishment for being bad. According to Christians you can lie, cheat, steal and do violence to your neighbor all you want, repent on your deathbed, pray to Jesus, and have all your sins forgiven. And in the third place, being good won't actually keep you out of Hell. It's called "Justification by Faith". Any sociopath you threaten with Hell in order to "give the bad person a valid reason not to be bad" with any intelligence will surely say to himself, "God is allegedly omniscient; so He'll know I don't sincerely worship Him; so even if I refrain from the wicked deed Lion IRC is trying to give me a valid reason not to do, his God will send me to Hell anyway." So how the heck do you figure the theological bait-and-switch you call "enforcement" gives anyone a valid reason not to be bad?

There are two other criteria. 1. The law giver is omniscient. Surely everyone can objectively agree that an all knowing law maker is necessary to make the wisest laws. You can have an opinion about those laws but your opinion can't be as wise and your opinion can't be enforced. 2. The law giver is an impartial judge with no direct conflict of interest. The laws He makes are not for His personal gain so there can be no claim that His law selectively favors some and not others.

As for the rest, see Angra Mainyu's excellent post.

 

[Lion IRC]

Angra Mainyu all but declared theoretical objective morality an illusion.
When folks relentlessly disagree with my criteria for objective/transcendent moral law but don't propose an alternative method of distinguishing same, I suspect they don't have anything better.

Angra Mainyu said hell (punishment/enforcement) didn't matter because it wasn't real.
Angra Mainyu said omniscient law makers had no greater rational insight than anyone else.
Angra Mainyu said God's laws were just her opinions.