BurnTheShips:
I hate to sound like I am speaking on his behalf (shudder) but it seems that real one claims an external objective standard that he uses to guide his moral decisions (even if this is not true, please allow the assumption for the sake of argument).
Agreed. Or at least assumed, in the absence of a statement by real one to the contrary.
Yet you claim that to do this makes the state of being a "moral person" impossible.
Being a moral person requires making decisions about matters of morality. real one does not do this. At most he has made one decision, to always obey a particular source.
I think you fail to distinguish, FD, that in your own moral framework morality is independent of authority and is completely subjected to your own sense and logic, which itself has been informed and molded by others--to an unknown degree.
I'm quite aware of that. This is ultimately the case for everybody. Being aware of this reality allows us to make more informed, better decisions.
Under that scheme, something you yourself find morally abhorrent would possibly not be so to a different moral agent residing in a different time or place whose own moral sense and logic had been molded and informed by a completely alien formative experience than your own.
Agreed.
If you conform to the best of your ability to your own sense of morality, and the other moral agent to his, and your actions are contradictory, who is immoral and who is not?
Well, how do we decide? If the solution is to check the correct answer in a book, then how do we decide which book (or which interpretation where several exist) contains the correct answers? (Appeal to any authority has the same problems.) It seems we're back where we started (or at least where I started.) We need to use our admittedly limited brains to come to the best solution we can find. Using reason will - as it always does - produce better results than a simple appeal to an arbitrary authority.
So what you are saying is that even if there was a creator of the universe (yourself included, along with the moral sense and reasoning ability you possess), and it was personally involved enough to provide a moral code to you, and your own reasoning, sense and desire were somehow opposed to some rule in that code (possibly due to a formative experience), you would elect to follow a derivative of that creator (you own sense and reasoning) rather than the direct creator's code itself?
A universe in which there was a creator who had an interest in human affairs and whose wishes and intentions were known would be very different from the one in which we live. As we have already established, my being born in a different time or place, or having read different books, would change my standards of morality (which do actually change from time to time as I acquire new information and an ever-changing perspective). So living in a universe so different from ours would inevitably alter my perspective on the matter.
But, if tomorrow were to dawn and a god were to finally reveal itself and its purposes, how would I react? It would obviously be foolish of me to ignore this world-changing information, but there is no reason to believe that the morality of that creator would correspond with my own. It could, for example, be the sadistic god of the Catholics, and while I might modify my behaviour to avoid spending eternity in hellfire, one's behaviour under threat of torture is not necessarily a good indication of true morality. I like to think I would do what I believe to be right regardless of the consequences.