Yes, Hume assumes a skeptical position and his problem is critique of naive empiricism (along with his problem of induction which is a classic defeater for empiricism). He demonstrates that observation of what is alone can't tell you what is good, preferable, desirable, etc. There is an epistemological gap between knowledge of how things are and how they should be. So everyone has to appeal to some other paradigm that informs morality. The problem is, atheists and materialists can't justify the existence of a moral standard because their paradigm only accepts empirical observation and sense data. Their position always reduces to moral relativism where nothing is inherently good or bad, but everything is a matter of personal preference.
So for moral realists, the question ultimately is what is the standard for morality and how do we have knowledge of it. I'd argue only the Orthodox Christian worldview can give a coherent, consistent and holistic worldview that can justify and answer those questions. In essence:
metaphysics: God is the ultimate good and we're created in His image with free will that allows us to choose the good.
epistemology: we know what's moral through divine revelation and through our communion with God in His Church (participation in the divine energies).
The reason why our intuition and reason alone is insufficient to have that knowledge is our fallen nature which inclines our free will away from God, thus being deceived into choosing evil/sin.
All objective morality has to appeal to some standard. And then the question of "Why is that the standard?" shows that it likewise is in some sense relative. You can answer that question with some reasons, like God having authority to decide what is moral in his creation, but it never disproves other standards of morality which are justified by other reasons, such as the atheist's "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral".
Yet again, the problem is trying to justify everything from first principles. It's impossible because it will always go back infinitely, use circular logic or go back to something unjustified. Instead it makes more sense to base things on what is unprovable yet intuitively obvious, like other people having agency, some actions being wrong, and that wrong actions by those with agency should be punished.
That is in fact what everybody does, looking into their conscience, and to the extent one looks to an outside source for morality, it is rarely to go completely counter to one's conscience. Hence why Christians deep down don't believe slavery as practiced in the Bible is A-OK, don't believe children who curse their parents deserve death, don't believe it's ever OK to kill a whole city including women and children (or capturing the women for soldiers to have), and don't think it's normally a good idea to give a woman to her husband's brother or a man who raped her. Likewise I judge nature by my conscience while also trying to learn what is good from nature.
And if we trust our consciences (and we all do) we need an explanation for why they are trustworthy. The obvious explanation is that they were meant to guide us, being given to us by the creator(s). And then it only makes sense that the creator would have a similar sense of morality to our consciences, and being the source of our consciences is a more reliable measure of what is moral - for we know our consciences do not always agree. And knowing this creator also made other people's consciences, as well as the whole of nature, it follows that we can get closer to the creator's morality by studying the consciences of others and the things of nature, which appear to be made for our benefit, given how so many of them are good for our health in contrast to artificial things.
All objective morality has to appeal to some standard. And then the question of "Why is that the standard?" shows that it likewise is in some sense relative. You can answer that question with some reasons, like God having authority to decide what is moral in his creation, but it never disproves other standards of morality which are justified by other reasons, such as the atheist's "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral".
That's why such debates boil down to worldview comparison and transcendental argumentation - which worldview can justify the thing in question, in this case morality. The problem with the atheist position is that they can't justify their claims within their worldview. Why? Because atheists believe in a meaningless and purposeless deterministic universe of random chemical processes in constant flux. They can't give an account how the laws of logic, metaphysics, knowledge and ethics exist in such a universe. It's a self-refuting position. But even if we grant them the proposition "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral", they can't answer why it is the case and how they know that without being ad hoc or circular. Even if the proposition is true, it's not a justified belief but an axiomatic/self-evident one. But nothing can be self-evident and everything needs to be justified.
And if we trust our consciences (and we all do) we need an explanation for why they are trustworthy. The obvious explanation is that they were meant to guide us, being given to us by the creator(s). And then it only makes sense that the creator would have a similar sense of morality to our consciences, and being the source of our consciences is a more reliable measure of what is moral - for we know our consciences do not always agree. And knowing this creator also made other people's consciences, as well as the whole of nature, it follows that we can get closer to the creator's morality by studying the consciences of others and the things of nature, which appear to be made for our benefit, given how so many of them are good for our health in contrast to artificial things.
Those are a lot of assumptions. Maybe the creator is the evil demiurg of the Gnostics? Maybe we're supposed to rebell against the evil demiurg and transcend the limitations of the nature he created by using artifice and becoming transhumanists? Maybe the creator didn't make all people the same and maybe some people don't even have a soul and are vessels for evil spirits (shout out to Scientology)? The point is without God's explicit revelation we can't know any of this just by looking around.
This is not to say that outside of Christianity people can't be moral - they can and they have been historically obviously (which is in line with the Christian teaching of God's law being written on our heart). What they can't do is justify objective morality.
they can't answer why it is the case and how they know that without being ad hoc or circular.
But nothing can be self-evident and everything needs to be justified.
But then you can't have any knowledge. There has to be a starting point which isn't properly justified. We already have these starting points within our minds so we may as well just be explicit about them instead of pretend everything we think has some justification. Your starting point is that it's OK for you to kill babies? Great, but we're going to judge you according to our standards, not yours.
Maybe the creator is the evil demiurg of the Gnostics? Maybe ...
You think these are good explanations for the way things are? No, of course not. The fact people can come up with dumb theories doesn't tell us that we can't work anything out for ourselves. You still do work stuff out for yourself, which is how you arrived at your views. You're no different from everyone else trying to figure stuff out and judging other people's views to be wrong. You think Orthodox Christianity makes the most sense of things - cool but lots of people judge you to be wrong. You think the Christian Bible is God's explicit revelation - cool but lots of people think it's some other collection of books. Nature is the only thing that everyone who believes in a creator can agree is the work of the creator. So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims?
But then you can't have any knowledge. There has to be a starting point which isn't properly justified. We already have these starting points within our minds so we may as well just be explicit about them instead of pretend everything we think has some justification.
In epistemology, that would be assuming the classic foundationalist position. There are two other possible options - infinite regression and coherentism. I reject foundationalism because it's ad hoc. Foundationalism (like Descartes' famous cogito) got nuked during the Enlightenment by skeptics like Hume and later Kant and became an untannable position. If being ad hoc is allowed, then all argumentation and philosophical discourse about truth, existence and the good becomes impossible.
Your starting point is that it's OK for you to kill babies? Great, but we're going to judge you according to our standards, not yours.
That's an appeal to irrelevancy and an appeal to authority/majority. Nothing about this has to do with the position being true or not.
You still do work stuff out for yourself, which is how you arrived at your views. You're no different from everyone else trying to figure stuff out and judging other people's views to be wrong.
Sure, how we arrive to knowledge depends on our worldview but worldviews aren't equal. I already demonstrated how the materialist worldview can't justify it's basic principles and assumptions. The point is that the laws of logic and thought are objective. Just because I'm the one making the claim or the argument doesn't make it a subjective claim. If I can demonstrate that competing worldviews are incoherent, unjustified and lack explanatory power, while making the case that my worldview is coherent and grounds the things we all appeal to (reason, logic, meaning, purpose, free will, universals, etc), then my worldview is true.
You think these are good explanations for the way things are? No, of course not. The fact people can come up with dumb theories doesn't tell us that we can't work anything out for ourselves.
They may be dumb, but you still have to demonstrate why they're false. That something seems dumb or unlikely to you is not an argument about it being true or not. Atheists think all religious claims are equally dumb and made up. So what?
Nature is the only thing that everyone who believes in a creator can agree is the work of the creator. So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims? So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims?
Saying we all believe in nature therefore belief in nature is the common ground doesn't work. Nature to a Christian is an entirely different concept than what nature means to a materialist, new age gnostic or a Buddhist. This is a word-concept fallacy - just because the same word is used (like God, creator, nature, etc) it doesn't follow that it points to the same idea. Nature itself is a metaphysical concept. How you interpret nature depends on things that are not found in nature itself - this ties back to what Hume is/ought problem and Thomas Kuhn's ideas about paradigms and theory-ladenness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness).
This is why broad generic theism (like perennialism, theosophy and freemasonry) doesn't work in making a coherent worldview because it's riddled with incompatible core beliefs. There's no "lowest common denominator God".
Yes, Hume assumes a skeptical position and his problem is critique of naive empiricism (along with his problem of induction which is a classic defeater for empiricism). He demonstrates that observation of what is alone can't tell you what is good, preferable, desirable, etc. There is an epistemological gap between knowledge of how things are and how they should be. So everyone has to appeal to some other paradigm that informs morality. The problem is, atheists and materialists can't justify the existence of a moral standard because their paradigm only accepts empirical observation and sense data. Their position always reduces to moral relativism where nothing is inherently good or bad, but everything is a matter of personal preference.
So for moral realists, the question ultimately is what is the standard for morality and how do we have knowledge of it. I'd argue only the Orthodox Christian worldview can give a coherent, consistent and holistic worldview that can justify and answer those questions. In essence:
The reason why our intuition and reason alone is insufficient to have that knowledge is our fallen nature which inclines our free will away from God, thus being deceived into choosing evil/sin.
All objective morality has to appeal to some standard. And then the question of "Why is that the standard?" shows that it likewise is in some sense relative. You can answer that question with some reasons, like God having authority to decide what is moral in his creation, but it never disproves other standards of morality which are justified by other reasons, such as the atheist's "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral".
Yet again, the problem is trying to justify everything from first principles. It's impossible because it will always go back infinitely, use circular logic or go back to something unjustified. Instead it makes more sense to base things on what is unprovable yet intuitively obvious, like other people having agency, some actions being wrong, and that wrong actions by those with agency should be punished.
That is in fact what everybody does, looking into their conscience, and to the extent one looks to an outside source for morality, it is rarely to go completely counter to one's conscience. Hence why Christians deep down don't believe slavery as practiced in the Bible is A-OK, don't believe children who curse their parents deserve death, don't believe it's ever OK to kill a whole city including women and children (or capturing the women for soldiers to have), and don't think it's normally a good idea to give a woman to her husband's brother or a man who raped her. Likewise I judge nature by my conscience while also trying to learn what is good from nature.
And if we trust our consciences (and we all do) we need an explanation for why they are trustworthy. The obvious explanation is that they were meant to guide us, being given to us by the creator(s). And then it only makes sense that the creator would have a similar sense of morality to our consciences, and being the source of our consciences is a more reliable measure of what is moral - for we know our consciences do not always agree. And knowing this creator also made other people's consciences, as well as the whole of nature, it follows that we can get closer to the creator's morality by studying the consciences of others and the things of nature, which appear to be made for our benefit, given how so many of them are good for our health in contrast to artificial things.
That's why such debates boil down to worldview comparison and transcendental argumentation - which worldview can justify the thing in question, in this case morality. The problem with the atheist position is that they can't justify their claims within their worldview. Why? Because atheists believe in a meaningless and purposeless deterministic universe of random chemical processes in constant flux. They can't give an account how the laws of logic, metaphysics, knowledge and ethics exist in such a universe. It's a self-refuting position. But even if we grant them the proposition "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral", they can't answer why it is the case and how they know that without being ad hoc or circular. Even if the proposition is true, it's not a justified belief but an axiomatic/self-evident one. But nothing can be self-evident and everything needs to be justified.
Those are a lot of assumptions. Maybe the creator is the evil demiurg of the Gnostics? Maybe we're supposed to rebell against the evil demiurg and transcend the limitations of the nature he created by using artifice and becoming transhumanists? Maybe the creator didn't make all people the same and maybe some people don't even have a soul and are vessels for evil spirits (shout out to Scientology)? The point is without God's explicit revelation we can't know any of this just by looking around.
This is not to say that outside of Christianity people can't be moral - they can and they have been historically obviously (which is in line with the Christian teaching of God's law being written on our heart). What they can't do is justify objective morality.
But then you can't have any knowledge. There has to be a starting point which isn't properly justified. We already have these starting points within our minds so we may as well just be explicit about them instead of pretend everything we think has some justification. Your starting point is that it's OK for you to kill babies? Great, but we're going to judge you according to our standards, not yours.
You think these are good explanations for the way things are? No, of course not. The fact people can come up with dumb theories doesn't tell us that we can't work anything out for ourselves. You still do work stuff out for yourself, which is how you arrived at your views. You're no different from everyone else trying to figure stuff out and judging other people's views to be wrong. You think Orthodox Christianity makes the most sense of things - cool but lots of people judge you to be wrong. You think the Christian Bible is God's explicit revelation - cool but lots of people think it's some other collection of books. Nature is the only thing that everyone who believes in a creator can agree is the work of the creator. So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims?
In epistemology, that would be assuming the classic foundationalist position. There are two other possible options - infinite regression and coherentism. I reject foundationalism because it's ad hoc. Foundationalism (like Descartes' famous cogito) got nuked during the Enlightenment by skeptics like Hume and later Kant and became an untannable position. If being ad hoc is allowed, then all argumentation and philosophical discourse about truth, existence and the good becomes impossible.
That's an appeal to irrelevancy and an appeal to authority/majority. Nothing about this has to do with the position being true or not.
Sure, how we arrive to knowledge depends on our worldview but worldviews aren't equal. I already demonstrated how the materialist worldview can't justify it's basic principles and assumptions. The point is that the laws of logic and thought are objective. Just because I'm the one making the claim or the argument doesn't make it a subjective claim. If I can demonstrate that competing worldviews are incoherent, unjustified and lack explanatory power, while making the case that my worldview is coherent and grounds the things we all appeal to (reason, logic, meaning, purpose, free will, universals, etc), then my worldview is true.
They may be dumb, but you still have to demonstrate why they're false. That something seems dumb or unlikely to you is not an argument about it being true or not. Atheists think all religious claims are equally dumb and made up. So what?
Saying we all believe in nature therefore belief in nature is the common ground doesn't work. Nature to a Christian is an entirely different concept than what nature means to a materialist, new age gnostic or a Buddhist. This is a word-concept fallacy - just because the same word is used (like God, creator, nature, etc) it doesn't follow that it points to the same idea. Nature itself is a metaphysical concept. How you interpret nature depends on things that are not found in nature itself - this ties back to what Hume is/ought problem and Thomas Kuhn's ideas about paradigms and theory-ladenness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness).
This is why broad generic theism (like perennialism, theosophy and freemasonry) doesn't work in making a coherent worldview because it's riddled with incompatible core beliefs. There's no "lowest common denominator God".