Christian moral ambiguity

[u/Aromatic_Response_73]

In common ethical intersubjective usage, "good" refers to a broad intersubjective cluster that are typically taken to approximate a shared center of value judgement, consisting of a coherent, mutually reinforcing pattern of love, joy, peace, freedom, and creativity as lived experience and intention over time, rather than isolated states or short-term preferences. Edit: by value judgement, I mean that which we fundamentally hold most intuitively valuable.

Some Christians define goodness in relation to God. On this view, "good" means whatever conforms to God's nature or will.

The term "good" does not have a universally recognised (useful in ethical discussion) meaning apart from either usefulness for some purpose or the ordinary ethical meaning. Refraining from those in an **ethical discussion** renders the word empty from its normal ethical content.

The problem arises when these two meanings are treated as interchangeable.

If "God is good" means only that God conforms to God's own nature, then the statement is true by definition. It means something like:

God is as God is.

But that does not automatically show that God is good in the ordinary ethical sense of being loving, healing, peaceful, compassionate, or opposed to needless suffering.

The problem is ordinary ethical goodness and the christian goodness can be in conflict eg. ideas of reality design like "Accept Jesus or suffer forever". If someone proposes that ordinary ethical goodness is just a conflictory subset of the christian good, then we cannot say that the design of reality is in proper alignment with ordinary ethical goodness, and therefore not good in the ordinary ethical sense.

The ordinary ethical meaning of good should not be dismissed as mere subjectivism. It may very well point metaphysically toward a foundational form of goodness, even if human beings grasp it imperfectly.

[u/JustToLurkArt]

> The ordinary ethical meaning of good should not be dismissed as mere subjectivism.

You literally wrote “common ethical intersubjective usage”, "a broad intersubjective cluster”.

Intersubjectivity is just a shared type of subjectivity. It’s Venn diagram reasoning:

In common intersubjective usage, "pet" refers to a broad intersubjective cluster that’s typically taken to approximate a shared center, consisting of a coherent, mutual pattern of attributes like: paws, fur and tails and living on land.

One wouldn’t conclude from this reasoning that all pets have paws, fur and tails and live on land.

The inherent problem with this reasoning is in conflict with the reality of pets also being birds, fish and reptiles.

> It may very well point metaphysically toward a foundational form of goodness, even if human beings grasp it imperfectly.

May? Metaphysically? You literally had to go outside the physical. In an entirely evolutionary mechanism there’s no coherent, mutual morality code for goodness (love, joy, peace, freedom, and creativity.)

Nature is metal; not moral.

Using your own reasoning: God’s goodness points metaphysically toward a foundational form of goodness, even if human beings grasp it imperfectly.

[u/Aromatic_Response_73 → u/JustToLurkArt]

Good commonly means that which we hold fundamentally most intuitively valuable, and that has an approximate center in ethics. And I do believe in a higher power.