re political atheists reference line trimmed livesey solntze wpd sgi com jon livesey writes there is a good deal more confusion here you started off with the assertion that there was some objective morality and as you admit here you finished up with a recursive definition murder is objectively immoral but eactly what is murder and what is not itself requires an appeal to morality yes now you have switch targets a little but only a little now you are asking what is the goal what do you mean by goal are you suggesting that there is some objective goal out there somewhere and we form our morals to achieve it well for example the goal of natural morality is the survival and propogation of the species another example of a moral system is presented within the declaration of independence which states that we should be guaranteed life liberty and the pursuit of happiness you see to have a moral system we must define the purpose of the system that is we shall be moral unto what end murder is certainly a violation of the golden rule and i thought i had defined murder as an intentional killing of a non murderer against his will and you responded to this by asking whether or not the execution of an innocent person under our system of capital punishment was a murder or not i fail to see what this has to do with anything i never claimed that our system of morality was an objective one i thought that was your very first claim that there was some kind of objective morality and that an example of that was that murder is wrong if you don t want to claim that any more that s fine well murder violates the golen rule which is certainly a pillar of most every moral system however i am not assuming that our current system and the manner of its implementation are objectively moral i think that it is a very good approximation but we can t be perfect and by the way you don t seem to understand the difference between arbitrary and objective if keith schneider defines murder to be this that and the other that s arbitrary jon livesey may still say well according to my personal system of morality all killing of humans against their will is murder and wrong and what the legal definition of murder may be in the usa kuweit saudi arabia or the prc may be matters not a whit to me well objective would assume a system based on clear and fundamental concepts while arbitary implies no clear line of reasoning keith
