(Note added 9/3/08: Comments are closed here, but the discussion remains open. See the final comment on this thread for explanation.)
The real question Christopher Hitchens was trying to get readers focused on here (as opposed to the one he said he was answering), was something like this:
“Why should we think people who believe in God behave better than those who do not?”
He goes on to tell about Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses whose behaviors are less than exemplary, and he insists (quite rightly) that atheists most certainly do good things. I have several brief responses from a Christian perspective.
1. Christians are by no means committed to believing that belief in God or gods taken generally is good, or that it leads to ethical actions. The Bible is full of people who believed in a God or gods, and yet sacrificed children to their gods, practiced temple prostitution, and committed other abominable acts. Christians believe there is but one God, revealed in Jesus Christ, that contradictory beliefs are in error, and that there is no reason to expect extraordinary good to come from believing in any other religions.
2. This may come as a surprise to some readers, but Christianity is not committed to the belief that Christians are more ethical than others. The explanation for this comes in three parts.*
a. Following Jesus Christ with one’s whole heart, in a supportive context and practicing the normal disciplines of the Christian life, will certainly lead to growth in one’s character, with outwardly visible effects. Christianity is quite committed to this belief. If followers of Christ came from a representative portion of any population, the difference in our lives ought to be apparent for all to see.
b. But Christianity is not committed to the belief that followers of Christ come from a random, representative sample of any population. We’re a bunch of sinners. That means me, and it means any other Christian reading this. It includes Billy Graham and the Pope, and it includes anybody who does not yet believe in Christ, but knows they are not perfect. We do not come to Jesus Christ, and we do not (or should not) present ourselves to the world, as any better than anyone else.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Consider what Jesus said about the Pharisee, who was a model of ideal behavior, and the tax collector, who represented greed, thievery, and betrayal of his people. It was the tax collector who “went home justified.” Jesus was considerably more comfortable with those who misbehaved than he was with the Pharisees, who were outwardly the party of the perfect. He came to call not the righteous, but sinners, to follow him.
c. Therefore even if Christians grow in character through following Christ, we may very well just be catching up with the rest of the world in our outward behavior.
3. Nevertheless, there is good sociological evidence that followers of Christ are, on average, are doing okay with respect to character and ethics, in comparison with social peers.
*Credit goes to Timothy Keller for bringing this to light.
Update 9/6/08: I have turned off threaded comments, as explained here. This will unfortunately jumble up the sequence of the comments on this post, for which I offer my apologies.
In Hitchen’s world there is no grounding for morality so the more general question he should be asking is “Why should we think that someone is morally better than someone else?”
I think his answer would be “We shouldn’t”, which begs the question, “Why then do you keep insisting that we should?”
Hitchens mixes scientific data with reductionistic philosophy and tries to sell it as a scientific conclusion – Ha! If he were true to the facts of the evidence, he wouldn’t draw arbitrary/subjective lines between people animals and machines. Instead he would go where the ‘science’ leads him – people, animals and machines can be reduced to the status of matter and energy, nothing more.
Of course, Hitchen’s doesn’t believe what he says because if machines have the same status as people then why doesn’t he at least TRY to treat the machines he owns like his children?
I had a similar question for Sam Harris once. Scroll down to the Steve Turner poem….
Hitchen’s might, on a bet,
pretendtry to treat his machines like children, but I imagine he would never try to treat his children like machines – chaining them to his bedroom wall for future use. Good poem. I don’t expect Hitchen’s to carry out his beliefs perfectly but if you believe people have the same status as machines then at least TRY to live your life this way.IIRC C.S. Lewis noted that when looking at the results of a Christians’s life, one should consider if that person was better than they would have been otherwise, not compare them to other people, as we all start from different places, advantages and disadvantages in our lives.
Tom: forgive me if this is an intrusion and off-topic, but it seemed the better place to mention this (rather than AiD). You wrote here:
I welcome this view, but I assure you that it is not unanimously shared by the contributors to the Atheism is Dead blog. Some of them have very explicitly stated their belief that Christian morality is axiomatically superior. The person you were defending (medicineman) argued essentially to the same effect only in different words.
Well, I just popped over to this blog to get an idea of who you are (I had not seen you posting at AiD before).
Greetings, Adonais. (For those who don’t know the abbreviation, AiD stands for the Atheism is Dead blog.)
I hope I didn’t misstate my point here, because what you seem to think I was saying here was certainly not what I was intending to say. I agree with Medicine Man’s assessment on Christian ethics. The topic here is different: it’s not the quality of Christian ethics, but of Christians themselves.
This is tricky, and it’s where arrogance often crops up in reality or in perception. The way of Jesus Christ is by far the most excellent way. That does not mean that followers of Jesus Christ are necessarily the most excellent people, as I explained the post above; though as I also alluded to, sociological research nevertheless supports the idea that following Christ yields good fruit in persons’ lives.
Christian ethics’ superiority is not the result of Christian people being better, smarter, or wiser in concocting a system. Christian ethics are better because they reflect the revealed character of the wholly good Person who is at the very foundation of all reality.
Mr. Gilson;
I am a contributor to AiD and I wish that Mr. Adonais would have provided some quotations as examples of AiD claiming the sort of moral superiority which he claims MedicineMan et al assert.
I think that the issue is more basic and comes down to a gut reaction when an atheist is asked about moral foundations and told something to the likes of, “We have absolutes and you do not” they take this to mean, “We are better than you” etc. Certainly, this is not what we mean to conclude.
We have discussed morality on various occasions on AiD and have had some very odd statements made from an atheist condemning incest because “I have a visceral dislike of…” to an atheist claiming that they do good deeds because their brain produces chemicals that make them happy when they do good.
Moreover, I have chronicles various well known atheist calming that atheism is not only more moral than Christianity but also holier (example here).
I have also noted various reasons why Christians may actually be less moral than the average bear here (not to make excuses, by the way).
Lastly, I wish to mention that I too have taken to responding to some of Mr. Hitchens’ challenges beginning here.
Pardon me for dumping all of these hyperlinks but it seemed relevant.
aDios,
Mariano
Mariano (and Tom): honestly I don’t keep a score card of instances where atheists at AiD are accused of being amoral or having no basis for morality. Here’s one that I remember though and was able to find quickly; one of the AiD contributors wrote:
There have been countless more of the same or worse, who’s counting anymore. Do you really want me to dig up passages by stan, MM and yourself where you made yourselves guilty of the same? What purpose would that serve? You even wrote this jolly little article some time ago: A-theism is A-Potent and A-Moral. Your ostensibly humble posturing is not reflected by your actual arguments.
“Not being moral” and “having no basis for morality” are two entirely different things. The first means to act either in a manner that is manifestly immoral or with disregard for morality. The second could mean different things to different people, but this is how I take it: that atheism lacks a solid grounding for moral opinions and values, an answer to the question, “I don’t believe D moral duty or value applies to me, and I want you to tell me why I should. You might have some instrumental or pragmatic reasons for me to practice D, or you may tell me D is ‘what we customarily do in our culture,’ but I don’t know why D should be considered good in itself, or why I should take it on as a value or duty of my own.”
If anyone says atheists are (in general) immoral, they are wrong. See my original post above. I don’t care to have you dig up posts where someone has said that, because you and I will just look at them together and say, “that’s just wrong.”
If someone says atheism has no basis for morality, and if they mean it in the way I just summarized it, I believe they are right. So you don’t need to dig up comments from AiD (Atheism is Dead) to show that we said that there; I’ve gone ahead and said it here for you (saved you some work).
In my series of comments on a post over at AiD I tried very hard to define and draw out the distinction that I’ve made once again here. I wish you could catch it. Mariano’s post that you just linked to is on the second topic (atheism’s having no basis for morality). Are you bringing it forth as evidence he considers atheists immoral? I didn’t read his post through in careful detail, but I don’t think he said that.
Just to make sure I’m clear, I’m going to repeat the main message here. There are two propositions in play here:
(A) Atheists are immoral.
(B) Atheism lacks a basis for morality, as defined in B1:
– (B1) A solid and reliable answer to, “I don’t believe D moral duty or value applies to me, and I want you to tell me why I should… ” (see above).
I don’t know of anyone who affirms (A). I do affirm (B), but I do not believe (B) entails (A), or that (A) follows from (B).
If you are unhappy about people affirming (A), please do not use their affirmations of (B) as evidence that that is what they are saying or thinking.
Well Tom, the material point is that (B) is a veridically worthless statement because it is trivially true. You can replace (B) by any of the following propositions:
(B’) Swedish citizenship lacks a basis for morality
(B”) Being an astronomer lacks a basis for morality
(B”’) Believing in ghosts lacks a basis for morality
…….. etc.
There is a vast but finite set of trivially true but useless statements on the same pattern. No one would dream up an argument concerning morality based on any of the examples I gave above, it’s patently foolish. And yet, in the particular case of atheism, it apparently acquires significance and becomes a compelling argument to many people. I have not yet seen any explanation as to what exactly you think this argument is showing, but obviously you think that there is something special about atheism warranting the observation (B). But what is it? What moral significance does (B) carry that (B’) and (B”) does not?
Listening to you and Mariano (and the rest of the AiD crowd) often gives me a surreal feeling. On the one hand, a few of you are diligent to stress that atheists are not necessarily amoral. Happy thought and a fine concession, that. On the other hand, you aggrandize a trivial observation and apparently make it the basis of some argument – but what’s the argument? And finally, when one enters into debate at AiD, many religious apologists flat out deduce A from B or at the minimum leaves the implication lying on the table, leaving it up to my patience to argue otherwise if the discussion is to move on.
So let me be clear also. You said that there are two propositions here, and I say that there is none. The state of affairs is simply that A is false and B is worthless. So what are we discussing here? Nothing of substance.
Tom,
I, too, am confused about why you keep on repeating the fact that atheism lacks a basis for morality. I think you are refusing to accept the tenet that atheists do not see their lack of belief in the existence of God as having any moral consequence whatsoever.
Christian theists can say that they find their basis for morality in the Bible. (We could dispute the truth of this but that’s immaterial.) Atheists can say that they find the basis for their moral behavior in some INSERT PHILOSOPHY / RATIONALE HERE, but they can never say that it lies within their atheism because the source for morality lies outside their atheism.
I think maybe this dispute is based on your stated refusal to ever accept the fact that atheism is not a belief system. If one accepts that atheism is not a belief system, as I and many other atheists do, then it remains perplexing as to why you would continue to repeat that “Atheism lacks a basis for morality” as if this is somehow a failing or requirement of atheism.
I think you need to address why you think it is that atheism should provide a basis for morality. I’m also not entirely sure what it means to “lack a basis for morality,” and I’m curious how you define that term.
Then let me phrase it this way, to try to avoid trivial misunderstandings.
(B’) Only theism has a basis for morality in the sense that I defined it in my previous comment. Any system of thought that does not affirm the existence of a good, transcendent God has
ano basis for morality in that sense (typo noted by Tony, see below).(I’m going to have to write a post on the “atheism isn’t a belief” issue, but that will have to wait.)
The argument is that without theism you have no basis for morality. If you believe objective moral values or duties exist, then you have no explanation for them outside of theism. (If you don’t believe objective moral values or duties exist, then we have another discussion on our hands; see an earlier example here. But we are moving far from the point of the original post if we go there.)
Tom wrote:
Aha. Well then why don’t you just say so, because this is a non-trivial statement that can be addressed, as opposed to your original (B) formulation. I won’t take up anymore space here except to note that now you are saying not just that atheism in itself provides no basis for morality, but that it is only theism that does provide such a basis. That is a very different statement, and one that can be falsified empirically. Incidentally, the logical consequence of your new (B’) is essentially your statement A, which you had previously disavowed, unless you’re implying some mechanism for atheists to be moral individuals without having any basis for morality.
Falsifiable empirically? I’ll be interested to see how you do that!
But of course! Biblically it’s understood to be “common grace”–the light that God shines on all persons, not just those who believe in him. See Romans 2:14-15 for one source on that.
For as long as I have personally posted on atheism I have personally made the point that one should not argue that atheists are immoral but what is at issue is the various moral concepts that atheists hold.
Tom is correct that posts such as my A-theism is A-Potent and A-Moral were about moral foundation type issues.
I think that we are reaching the point where we can note that atheism has carved itself out quite the niche: it is not a belief, it is not a philosophy, it is not even a worldview, it is nothing but a lack of belief in God (of course, some atheists such as Michael Newdow claim that atheism is a religion but I am sure that he is wrong according to another sect of atheism). Therefore, there is no athe“ism” to argue against.
God could exist and atheists could say that they choose not to hold to a God belief.
And so, I suppose that all anyone can do is to ascertain the particular views held by individual atheists and see if there is anything there to agree or disagree about.
aDios,
Mariano
Okay, so at least I think I understand that you mean that atheists can only get their moral basis from God. But you do recognize the circularity of the argument — that only God provides a basis for morality because God says that when anyone shows morality, even though it is among those who are not privy to God’s law, it is through God?
I am not sure if Adonais is going to return here to falsify that only theism can provide a basis for morality, but I wonder if he even should bother seeing as how you can resort to the argument above. In other words, what would be the point of demonstrating that morality can be derived from a non-theistic source if you can always resort to a claim of “common grace?”
Okay, so at least I think I understand that you mean that atheists can only get their moral basis from God. But you do recognize the circularity of the argument — that only God provides a basis for morality because God says that when anyone shows morality, even though it is among thos
Tony
Maybe if I rewrite your statement in naturalist terms you will see it’s not circular.
Only nature provides the basis for the laws of nature because nature is such that anyone who falls down, even though it’s among those who are not aware of nature’s laws, it is through nature.
The laws of morality are simply a matter of fact, not fiat, because literally everything flows from the nature of God.
My rewrite of Tony’s comment reminded me of one reason why I, and many others, conclude that naturalism is unable to explain the natural universe.
Naturalism can’t account for the laws of nature as being matter of fact because not everything flows from nature. We know Sagan’s often quoted statement, “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be” to be incorrect. Nature has a finite past – not everything can flow from nature because something preceeded it. From this we know the natural laws themselves are contingent because they too have a finite past. But contingent on what? Whatever it is, it can’t be something else with a finite past. It must be something non-contingent. It must be something eternal.
Mariano,
You wrote:
Since atheism is not a moral system I don’t see why you would argue this. That’s like saying that since the appreciation of concert music is not a moral system all that is at issue is the various moral concepts that concert music listeners hold.
Here’s a question I have for you: say that as an atheist I choose to follow the moral system as described in the Bible and I am in precise concordance with your own interpretations of it’s moral teachings. I am free to do this. Or, say that through what Tom would call “common grace” I behave impeccably morally in every way as you would, although I remain an atheist. Why should you take issue with my moral concepts? Lastly, whose moral concepts are worse – Christian-based cults like David Koresh or other interpreters of the Bible whom you believe misinterpret the Bible, or me, an atheist who behaves morally in every way as required by you?
I’m glad to see you’re on board. Can you explain why it takes so long for so many theists to come around to this view?
Absolutely true. Thank you for agreeing that I have the right to come to my own convictions. I hope that you believe that were you or anyone else to provide credible evidence for the existence of God I would become a true believer in seconds. But I can’t fake it — if God exists I’m sure he’d see right through my attempts at false conviction.
Hence.
Tony,
You agreed that there is no atheism to argue against. What, then, are atheists arguing *for*? They are arguing for lack of belief in God, which puts that argument in a position to be argued against.
Tony,
I tried posting before and it failed so if my previous comment shows up, please disregard it. I have since changed what I wanted to say.
Ultimately, morality isn’t about you and I, it’s about God. Following the ‘moral system’ as described in the Bible means you are no longer an atheist. You are a Christian. This moral system as you call it involves giving your life to Christ, recognizing God for who he is, etc. In other words, the ‘system’ requires that your lack of belief go out the window.
Again, morality isn’t about what you and I think, but here I agree with you slightly. We are all saved by God’s grace and so I think a person can *honestly* not ‘see’ God, which is technically atheist, and yet be saved. An example here would be an infant who is incapable of having such mental faculties.
However it doesn’t appear that you are in that situation. By the grace of God you can be morally perfect, yet without that bended knee, you would still fall short in God’s eyes because that pride signifies that you don’t want to enter into a proper relationship with him.
Sooooo…..God would NOT take issue with your moral concepts. He’d embrace them I think. I think God *would* take issue with your insistence that your relationship with him be an improper relationship. For that, we are told, you get the divine boot out of heaven.
Have I gone too far off topic? 🙂
Tony,
This was in response to Mariano on “various moral concepts that atheists hold.”
I agree that’s an ambiguous phrase. Atheists can hold all kinds of moral concepts. What they cannot hold is a moral concept that is well grounded in the sense I first brought up here and revised later at 4:25 pm.
Atheism is not a moral system, granted. If followed logically through to its conclusions, it entails a lack of a moral system, or at least the lack of an adequately grounded moral system, as previously defined.
Let’s grant for the sake of argument that the two horns of the dilemma are even possible. Let’s suppose that Koresh’s cult is really Christian-based, and that you could behave morally in every way as required by the Bible, though without (as I think you would want us to presume) believing in Christ.
Let me first explain how I take issue with both of those. First, I don’t know that much about Koresh, but I know enough to know that if he started with Christianity, he distorted it beyond recognition. No religion can truly be Christian-based unless it is Christ-based, and Koresh made his religion Koresh-based. Second, I take issue with your being able to be a fully moral atheist in the Biblical sense, for reasons Steve already explained. Take a look at all of the Ten Commandments, for example, and at Jesus’ statement of the greatest commandments (Exodus 20:1-6; Matthew 22:37-40).
But suppose you could set that aside, and that you were perfectly moral in every way relating to your fellow human beings. Would you be more moral than David Koresh? In a way, yes, for Jesus directed his most significant displeasure toward those who distorted true religion.
In another way, the question is completely irrelevant, for several reasons. One is that we have already granted your point in part (this is not the first time I’ve asked commenters to re-read the original post!). For another reason, the discussion has turned now from moral behavior to moral grounding, which I’ve tried to explain more than once. And finally, comparing moral behavior is another instance of the pride that keeps people from God. Are you moral enough for God? See James 2:8-13 and Romans 3:23; also 1 Peter 5:5-6, Romans 6:23 and Romans 5:8.
SteveK,
I think that this
Only nature provides the basis for the laws of nature because nature is such that anyone who falls down, even though it’s among those who are not aware of nature’s laws, it is through nature.
sounds circular. Actually, I’m not really sure what it means, or what it has to do with my question to Tom as it relates to the question posed by Adionas. Sorry to be obtuse, but I don’t quite get your point, or your question.
Tom,
My questions to Mariano were to his comments, not those in your post. I apologize if that got us sidetracked.
You wrote
Actually, I wonder if maybe there’s a typo here – is the last article “a” you second sentence supposed to be “no?” Because if not, I think I’m even more confused.
Also, I am still looking for a definition of what you mean by “have a basis for morality.” I think that if you won’t define what that means, in a fairly short, concise way, then it will be very hard to have a discussion on the topic you see us discussing, which is moral grounding. So, I’m asking, can you define what it means to “have a basis for morality?”
In reference to what it means to have no basis for morality, you wrote:
As an atheist I can answer every part of that question on, say Mariano’s incest topic, and I am certain that we would agree with my choices. The fact is that I do feel compelled to act morally, I do know why it should be considered good in itself, and I know why I should take it on as a value or duty of my own. I imagine that my answers differ only superficially from yours.
Wow… this is everywhere! Fortunatly I have three words: Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma. Yes, basic philosophy answers this question.
As for people who believe morality and religion are related, our current pope would fall into this category.
Definitely a typo! I’m going to go fix it. Thanks for pointing it out.
Okay, Tony, let’s see how this works. I really do hope you’re right:
So perhaps you’re right, and we agree in almost everything with just surface differences.
I too feel compelled to act morally (imperfectly so, of course). Here is why it should be considered good in itself. There is a good God who defines ultimately reality. Goodness therefore is one of the fundamental attributed of ultimate reality. Goodness involves all kinds of things, including moral goodness. God created humans in his image, which means in part that we have the responsibility and the capacity (though this is marred) to reflect his good nature in the way we treat persons, animals, objects, and so on. So to act morally is good because it is a reflection of the nature of a good God who defines goodness.
This applies whether a person recognizes it or not. Those who do not believe in God are nonetheless created in his image, and have a sense of goodness (marred), derived from God and from ultimate reality. Goodness itself, then, is not contingent on any human attribute or belief.
There are first- and second-order goods, and human belief may enter into second-order goods. To love another person is a first-order good. To ground that person for six weeks may be a second-order good or it may be an evil: was that person your child caught with marijuana, or did you undertake a purely arbitrary act toward your child?
To nourish oneself is a first-order good. Some people nourish themselves with duck brains (a friend of mine just came home from a foreign country where he had duck head for one meal) and consider that good. Some of us do not consider that good. So there are some levels of goodness that are contingent, but goodness in itself is part of the eternal furniture of the cosmos, grounded in the eternal character of God.
Is that pretty much the same thing you were thinking, with just superficial differences? Remember, the current question is not the good things we may or may not do. The question is, on what do we ground our beliefs about moral goodness? How do we explain what moral goodness actually is, and why do we take moral values and duties to be “oughts”?
Tony,
I seem to be rambling a lot lately so I don’t blame you. I’ll step aside as Tom is stating it more clearly than I am. For what it’s worth, Tom’s comment below and my comments seem to be making the same point regarding moral grounding. Not just moral grounding but grounding for *all* reality.
Tom: There is a good God who defines ultimately reality. Goodness therefore is one of the fundamental attributed of ultimate reality.
Me: The laws of morality are simply a matter of fact, not fiat, because literally everything flows from the nature of God.
Me: Nature has a finite past – not everything can flow from nature because something preceeded it.
Tom,
Thank you for the explanation. The question I am asking is how does a theist justify the superiority of his moral system – how can you say that a theist’s moral system is more grounded (better?) than a moral system not based on theism.
You wrote, in reference to why to act morally is good in itself:
and later:
The second statement appears circular (to act morally is good because it is a reflection of the nature of a good God?). If that is your definition of theism alone being able to provide a basis for morality, why can’t I just say something like: “I base my moral system on the themes of great Literature. So, to act morally is good because it is a reflection of the nature of the themes of great Literature, which define goodness?”
That’s a hypothetical example. If you were to go to nature and study the behavior of animals you’d see altruistic behavior in monkeys, dolphins, and other highly social organisms. Most of this morality appears to be based on group dynamics, game theory, and intra-species competition. Among these different social animals a basis for morality is formed that balances individual competition for resources (and mating opportunities) using the principles of game theory – chiefly, the realization that assistance, weighed against the risks of cheating or non-reciprocation, provides a basis for moral systems in these communities. Those who aid are given aid in return. Those who cheat or fail to reciprocate gain short term advantages but at the expense of loss of support later from those they have cheated. In short, the species and their environments provide each group with the basis for their morality.
My point? There are philosophical alternatives to Theism (my Great Literature example) that could provide a basis for morality. Also, probably more importantly, there are behavioral studies (I highly recommend a book by Matt Ridley, “The Origins of Virtue”.) that provide many examples of social animals deriving moral systems based on their inherited characteristics and their environment.
It seems clear to me that there are multiple (countless) bases for morality. I will concede, of course, that your system may be the best, but the only to have a basis?
The other part of my question still seems unanswered, although I don’t see how you’re going to answer it without resorting to circularity. If Theism is the only to have a fixed basis for goodness, but premises 1) God exists, and b) God is goodness, are not proven, then is there another argument for your system that I’m missing?
Hi Tony,
As you attempt to ground morality without theism you have pointed to (alleged) instances of altruism in animals and in the next sentence relabeled that behavior as “moral”.
But, as Paul and I have discussed many times, animals exhibit all kinds of behaviors.
Some eat their young, steal, kidnap, commit murder, cheat, bully, assault, etc.
These animals obviously survived and evolved, so it would appear that nature did not express any obvious disapprobation. So why are these behaviours not the basis of our morality?
I forgot cannibalism and slavery.
Hi Charlie,
I guess that by morality you mean “good human behavior.” I meant it more broadly, as in a code of how to behave, depending on what kind of organism you are, what your social-relatedness is, and what your environment is like.
Yes, animals do exhibit all kinds of behaviors. So do humans. They all, including humans, do everything you have listed (including cannibalism and slavery). Even Christians, for that matter.
I don’t understand what you mean by “so why are these behaviors [the list of animal behaviors] not the basis of our morality?”
Do you think that behavior that our society considers bad is the basis for morality? (Because it seems obvious to me that value judgments of behavior are not the basis of those judgments, but the outcome of it.)
If so, I think you should ask Tom to clarify what is meant by the basis for morality, as I find the term vague as well, and can lead to this kind of confusion. I do not insist on the term, mostly because I don’t understand exactly what it means, or what Tom means by it.
I’m not sure where to start with a question like this:
Do you think it is the purpose of nature to express disapprobation of what we deem bad morality? Because man oh man does that not make sense when you look at what happens in nature. (Insects eating the heads off of their mates, parasites stealing resources from a host without aiding said hosts in any way, cowbirds, don’t get me started.)
I can’t tell if your last question (“So why are these [“bad animal”] behaviours not the basis of our morality”) is sincere or not, but it sounds rhetorical. Do you understand what I mean by the statement, “In short, the species and their environments provide each group with the basis for their morality,” and why this statement and your last question are unrelated?
Tony,
Because Literature is contingent; God is necessary, pre-existent, the ground of all reality.
Please explain how they could do this then. I’ve studied various alternatives at great length, and they’ve all come up short. Your assertion that there might be some other option needs some meat on it.
How am I going to avoid circularity? Here is how:
1. God is the ground of all reality.
2. God has a moral character that is an essential aspect of his eternal character.
3. The ground of all reality has moral character as an essential aspect.
4. Therefore there is an essential aspect to morality.
That’s not circular.
You asked, how am I going to prove theism based on this? Well, that’s a different question entirely. I haven’t tried to prove theism. I have only tried to prove that theism provides the only solid grounding for morality.
Elsewhere I have carried this another step, but I see no need to introduce that here. It would complicate the main point, which is that there is only one system that provides a solid grounding for moral values and duties (as specified above in comments that I don’t care to repeat again this time).
HI Tony,
“Code of how to behave”.
Now, is it good, bad, or neither that one adhere to this “code”?
How does an animal know that it is violating this code and what are the consequences?
That’s the point.
In humans we call violations of this code “bad” and adherence “good”.
But, if we inherit behaviour from animals we inherit both types – but we don’t inherit categories “good and bad” from them. Therefore, we do not inherit our morality via evolutionary means, therefore, morals are not grounded by reference to animals which may or may not be altruistic or may or may not be murderous, slave-holding cannibals.
How could this possibly be obvious? Animals obviously get along quite well with both “good” and “bad” behaviours, just as we do – as you just pointed out.
It better, if nature is to ground our morality.
Good to see we’re on the same page. So how does supposed animal altruism make any more sense of morality than these actions? Notice how those “bad” traits are just as evolvable, natural and, therefore, “moral”?
Not in the least. It sounds like you’re saying “whatever is natural, whatever evolved, and whatever worked” is moral.
There is nothing normative in this kind of morality and no way to make it normative.
How do you know which human traits are “moral” under this system? Reproductive fitness? Longevity? Dominion?
Tom,
You wrote:
You’re saying so doesn’t prove it. There is no logical proof for God. Pretending there is doesn’t make it so.
Without a better understanding of what you mean by “a basis for morality” then I guess I will have to assume that you are content and that I and others like me who read this blog have nothing more to gain here. For the record, I think that all of my examples counter your statement that “without theism you have no basis for morality.”
I guess you’re also content to hold that as long as propositions are related to one another there can’t possibly be any circularity to your argument.
I didn’t ask how you were going to prove theism; that’s a straw dog of my counter to your argument. I asked if there’s a way to prove your argument (that only theism can have a basis for morality) that doesn’t rely on the premise that God exists.
I’ve noticed a pattern recently here where you seem less able unwilling to engage in what I believe are sincere challenges to your arguments. In my reply to you on a previous topic ( https://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/07/despite-overwhelming-evidence-creationists-cling-to-unreality-rights-and-liberties-alternet/#comment-7838 ) I asked why you would:
1) wonder why anyone would consider ID an attack on science;
2) dismiss my response to your question, explaining that I do not understand what science really is;
3) provide your own definition of science;
4) deny that you provided a definition of science; and
5) pronounce that “Defining science is known to be a hopeless venture.”
I understand that we do not share convictions on every topic. But providing contradictory arguments, failing to respond to demonstrations of contradiction, and dismissing valid questions as already proven or unnecessary without reference is, to say the least, a tad dismissive.
Hi Tony,
Charlie:
That’s an odd way of looking at it. We inherit animal behavior because we are animals.
Of course we don’t form our morality by looking at animals, that’s a version of the naturalistic fallacy. Are you not confusing moral behavior with theoretical ethics?
Blimey. Well, since you think that only God can explain morality I can sort of understand why you might believe this! Listen, in the naturalistic explanation of morality, moral behavior does not come about because someone or something thought it was a nice idea. First of all, morality is something that we have defined ourselves, rather arbitrarily, as a loose collection of behavioral patterns that have something in common. It’s just a definition, and a vague one at that. Second, moral behavior can become manifest in a species when it produces an increase in the inclusive fitness, raising the probability of these individuals to pass on their genes to the next generation, gradually producing a population with innate altruistic instincts (among many other instincts). Nature does not need to have a theory of ethics in mind for this to work, it just happens by itself. And many hundreds of thousands of years later, along comes the philosophical ape and declares: “I shall call this type of behavior ‘moral’ behavior. I wonder where it came from.”
Now you’re saying that (we would claim that) anything that eveloved is “moral”, putting an equal sign between the two. That’s of course nonsense. Evolution can explain our inherited behavior, both good and bad – it is up to you which parts you want to later label vice and virtue.
Looks to me like you’re the only one saying that.
That is absolutely true, and I don’t think anyone has argued otherwise! Understanding where our moral behavior came from, which is what we’re trying to do here, is an entirely separate topic from the issue of constructing viable ethical systems for our modern day society. We do not derive ought from is.
Tom:
But you can’t prove that by only looking at theism, you have to look at the alternatives. At best, you’re arguing for God as a basis for morality, but you have done nothing to prove either its veracity nor its exclusiveness.
You say you “haven’t tried to prove theism” but you implicitly or explicitly assume the existence and character of God at the beginning of every argument. But you should know by now that atheists just don’t buy that assumption a priori and without argument: you have to argue for it. And when you do, you’ll no doubt spring the “moral argument” for God, and then you’re back into circularity: our morality indicates God, and God is the basis for our morality.
HI Adonais,
Trivially true and irrelevant.
That’s a funny way of looking at it – we are animals. See how pointless that was?
Of course we don’t. The point was about evolution, inheritance and grounding of morality.
I don’t know. I don’t equate morality merely to behaviour, but rather to the oughtness of behaviour, and I don’t know what you mean by theoretical ethics.
This, the entire point. Vaguely defined loose collections of behavioral patterns do not ground normative oughts. This is not morality and a system which tells us that it is cannot ground morality.
How can non-human species vaguely define their loose collection of behavioral patterns? How can they define what they ought to do?
Question-begging across the board. But a nice admission that nature does not ground morals.
True enough, it is nonsense. You continue to affirm the point that neither pointing to non-human animal behaviour nor our inheritance of any derived traits has anything to do with grounding morality.
Our perceptions disagree.
Then they have no basis for morality!
“Moral” behaviour is normative . The entire question in grounding or providing a basis for morality is to determine the ought.
re: Tom’s alleged circularity.
While objective morality is a great evidence of God’s existence one can’t use it in an argument where objective morality (morality itself) is being denied. Therefore Tom could use any other evidence for the existence of God to ground his argument. His personal experience and properly basic belief will suffice just fine as proving God is not necessary in order to demonstrate that morality does not exist without Him.
Charlie:
I’ll not humor your game of equivocation, but I would encourage you to read some books on evolutionary psychology if you want to know what you’re talking about. Tony gave some good references, look them up.
Regarding this:
This is simply not true. For it to be true, you’d have to show that a mode of morality exists which can not be explained by natural theories, and which can only be explained by invoking the supernatural. This has not been shown. And count it to the opposition that the natural theories of morality do have substantial (and ever growing) evidence to back it up. Your cited evidence for objective morality can not be weaker than the case made by evolutionary biology, population dynamics and psychology, it has to be stronger.
Hi Adonais,
That’s quite accusatory.
What am I equivocating and why don’t you clear it up?
adonais
I think you are giving much credit where none is due. These disciplines can test cause and effect and determine correlations. The question of what cause/effect or what correlation is a morally good one is *not* something these disciplines can determine. To do that requires the knowledge and expertise of the philosophy and theology departments, and it is here that we have strong support.
Charlie:
Ok then. To be fair, I don’t know if you were deliberately equivocating or just didn’t understand what I wrote.
You use the word “morality” with different meanings, sometimes referring to de facto behavior and sometimes referring to a normative system of thought or social policy. This makes you apply your concept of “morality” incorrectly to what I wrote.
To understand the naturalistic explanation of morality, we must distinguish between innate behavioral traits, which are ancestral, and modern environmental factors that act to alter or constrain the former. The latter are in modern society our theories of ethics, justice and moral conduct, while the former are ancestral evolutionary traits.
But here’s the point: both of these contribute to our modern day behavior. There is upon our ancestral animal instincts imposed a layer of social contracts and reciprocal altruism, which makes life in a dense modern society, relying so heavily on cooperation and mutual aid, possible. Now when we look to understand human behavior, both good and bad, vice and virtue alike, we have to look at both aspects to get the full picture. Yes, we can in evolutionary psychology understand the origins of our behavior, but no, evolutionary psychology is not normative and it will not tell us how we ought to behave in modern society. Yes, we do have normative theories of ethics and culturally distinct (normative) moral systems which are entirely distinct from the issues in evolutionary psychology.
We can not conflate the two, but you and many others frequently do, as in for instance saying:
Here you have mistakenly assumed that if evolutionary psychology, which describes elements of human behavior, does not offer an ethical system, then nothing does. That is of course false.
Here is another equivocation of “morals.” Nature does indeed lay the foundation for moral behavior, but whether we at some point begin to theorize about “oughts” and implement modern ideas is not something that the same theory speaks on. Can not conflate the two.
Then this:
Does not make much sense: theories of ethics and moral conduct can be normative, but behavior is simply behavior, it is what it is.
This in a sense is true but you are again missing the point that a basis for moral behavior has been produced by evolution. By “grounding morality” I must again assume that you mean a normative ethics, which is a separate issue from the aforementioned.
If by “grounding a basis for morality” you mean constructing a normative ethic, then this is true, but for understanding the roots of our morality it is not.
SteveK:
I think you are in part misconstruing the message in the same way as Charlie: I do not claim that these “disciplines” form a basis for normative ethics. Understanding the underlying principles and origins morality is a different project from implementing new schemes of social conduct. We are helped as moral beings by having evolved behaviors that enable cooperation and altruism within our species, as accounted for by those disciplines. But there is of course much more to modern day morality than this basis provides.
As for “much credit where none is due”…I’m not sure how to interpret that. If you’re referring to the merits of sociobiology qua evolutionary psychology, it is the only explanatory framework even attempting to include evolutionary constraints and consequences as a theory for understanding human and animal behavior. Run the simple thought experiment through your head: “Can we understand the present by ignoring the past?” and the rationale for studying the implications of evolution on human and animal behavior becomes clear. So far, having read a handful of books on the subject, it looks to me like a genuine success story, but it is still a relatively young branch of psychology that has much yet to accomplish.
Hi Adonais,
Not really. I never refer to morality as behaviour. I pointed out through the animal example that Tony’s evolutionary theory reduces to behaviour, and I said that discussions of behaviour are not discussions of morality. I always treat morality as the normativity of the behaviour. This is why I say you can’t explain it with reference to how animals behave.
So far so good. Behaviours may be the result of evolutionary influences. Our consideration of them as moral or not, normative or not, is not the same thing.
Therefore, it makes no sense to say that animals exhibit this or that behaviour and claim that this has anything to do with our moral feelings/thoughts/assessments about those behaviours as we have no idea what the animals feel/think about theirs. It seems you and I agree on this point as I was making it to Tony.
It is a fact that our thoughts affect our behaviours and we can grant that evolution also affects them – this does not evidence that evolution has created out thoughts. Worse yet, if it did then the case is already made – the objectivity of morality is defeated in that our beliefs about the normativity no longer relate to the truth of that belief.
I agree with your conclusion and can grant the premise for the sake of argument.
As you say, the human construct that is the theory provides whatever normativity exists in the system. Anybody not agreeing with that theory is not obligated to obey its precepts or accept the behaviours entailed as “moral”. As the normativity lies in the human construct it does not transcend human cultures and so loses its universal normativity – moral oughtness loses its grounding.
I wasn’t commenting as to whether or not there is an ethical system – I was refuting one putative source of it. Now, however, I am saying that no such system, absent a transcendent standard, can ground the morality. Anybody can opt out of the system and is no longer obligated by it. Thus, it loses its universality, defeats objectivity, and cedes tot eh fact that moral oughtness is not grounded.
Which I do not. Repeatedly I said that behaviours are not morals. We have no evidence that anything in nature theorizes about “oughts” so we cannot extrapolate from behaviours or our observations of nature to our “oughts”.
The quotation marks on the word moral were meant to emphasize the morality as what is normative. There was no reason, ,as demonstrated from here on, to presume any equivocation here.
From the first comments to Tony I asked how behaviours could be the basis of morality, I discussed not “behaviour” but knowledge of a code, categories of good and bad (which we did not inherit). To flesh out Tony’s position I made explicit that if nature does not provide the disapprobation of our behaviours then nature is not the source of our morality (I know you’ll dispute this, but the point is that I was disputing the implication that behaviour=morality.
I flat out said to you right off the bat:
Further as I responded to you:
Again, explicitly stated that behaviours do not = morals.
Your quote of me:
““Moral” behaviour is normative ”
follows all of these explicit statements and not a single equivocation. As though it weren’t clear enough from each and every statement, when you quoted this you cut off the second sentence which again made it apparent:
It is all about the ought of the behaviour, not the behaviour itself.
So, to be truly fair, I wasn’t equivocating at all – either deliberately or not.
So here you agree but presume I am missing a point about the development of the system by which the behaviour is judged. I have not missed it, I was polishing off first the idea that observing so-called altruistic behaviours in animals (non-human) has anything whatsoever to say about human morality.
What I mean is basically defined in the statement. If a system of morality is to be grounded, if we have a basis for our morality, we actually have to know that there are oughts.
A system that allows us to opt out or that does not hold true for all humans does not provide oughts and does not actually define morality at all.
Tony, you wrote (and repeated the same question later also),
I defined it informally in this comment as
Tony, I think I can respond satisfactorily to this:
In this thread I am not trying to prove theism. I said that last night. I am trying to show that theism provides a ground for morality. You could take it this way if you prefer: theism, if true, provides a ground for morality. Conversely, then, naturalism (or any non-theistic system), lacks a ground for morality.
I guess you’re also content to charge me with circularity without bothering to show how I have committed circularity; viz, by showing that I have used my conclusion as one of the premises of the argument.
You did?? Then I missed it. I would have had an easy answer: if theism does not include the premise that God exists, then it is not theism, and your question cannot be answered. Please see my clarification on what I’m trying to show: that theism, if true, provides a ground for morality, and that naturalism (or atheism) lacks one.
Adonais,
You missed the point. The point was not behavior (how many hundreds of times do we have to say that!), it was the concepts of behavior being good or bad.
You wrote,
Arbitrary? Loose? Then it’s a completely unsatisfactory grounding for morality as I have asked for it to be defined. (See my first comment to Tony this morning.)
There you go again…
Grounding, not behavior!
If you can show me a genuine grounding for morality (grounding, not behavior!) in another system, great. I actually am considering the alternatives, my friend! But “arbitrary” and “loose” don’t qualify as grounding.
This is arguing out of court. The discussion here is about whether theism provides grounding for morality, and whether other systems of thought can provide grounding for morality. Let’s stick to the topic.
If we come to a valid conclusion to this topic, then it is perfectly legitimate to take that valid point as a premise in another argument. It is also perfectly legitimate to set that other argument aside for the moment. That is what I’m doing here.
Adonais,
Again and again, we get behavior confused with grounding for morality. I am not unfamiliar with EvoPsych. It is, for one thing, a pseudo-science in that it is unfalsifiable. It provides the same answer to why we like broccoli and why we do not; why people are monogamous and why they are not; and on and on.
More to the point here, however: evolutionary psych, as you have just said, can provide descriptions of what has been declared to be good or bad behavior. It could (at best) explain how it came to be through evolution that we considered certain behaviors good and bad. But it always does so by reference to one thing: that which contributes to reproductive fitness of a population. The ultimate good, in evo psych, is reproductive fitness.
Now, what is it about reproductive fitness that is good? Please avoid circularity in your answer.
Let’s cut to the chase here:
Does naturalism (or any version of atheism whatever) provide an answer to the question by which I have (informally) defined grounding?
A proper ground for morals would be something that, if true and if understood by the subject (the questioner, in this case) to be true, would provide sufficient reason for the subject to change his or her mind about the goodness of the behavior, value, or duty in question. It would explain how said behavior, value or duty actually is good in itself; not merely instrumental, pragmatic, or customary.
It would do so by reference to some condition of reality that can bear the weight placed upon it. For example, if it is suggested that D is good because it contributes to reproductive fitness, then reproductive fitness’s goodness would have to be good in itself (or based on something else that is good in itself).
I maintain that only theism can provide a grounding for moral values and duties in that sense. Am I wrong?
You may want to answer by saying, “That’s your definition of moral grounding, and it seems important to you, Tom, but I don’t think it’s accurate, or I don’t think it matters that much.” If you want to talk about that I’ll be glad to start another discussion thread on that.
But here I am calling for an answer to the question of whether any version of atheism can provide moral grounding in this sense.
Tom,
I have found your definition for what it means to have a basis for morality to be inscrutable. You say that you defined it informally in this comment:
The above is not a definition. It is a series of statements of what you consider to be failings of atheism. Definitions usually read something like: “Communism is the final stage of the political reform started with a revolution, according to Marx. First masses of workers will rebel in a industrialized country; they will implant a socialist government in order to adapt the country for later changes. After private property is banished, and the people possess everything, then there will be no need for government, thus the state will be destroyed, to form a society with no social classes.”
Your definition for what it means to have a basis for morality has read to me so far like my defining communism as “Capitalism allows great disparity in economic outcomes, and fails to equitably distribute wealth among wage earners and the holders of capital.”
So, I am looking for something that reads like: “To have a basis for morality means that…”
Tom,
Definitions for circular reasoning:
– Circular reasoning is an attempt to support a statement by simply repeating the statement in different or stronger terms. In this fallacy, the reason given is nothing more than a restatement of the conclusion that poses as the reason for the conclusion.
– Circular reasoning is problematic because the claim is made on grounds that cannot be accepted as true — because those very grounds are in dispute.
– In contemporary usage, circular reasoning often refers to an argument where the premises are as questionable as the conclusion.
If you can’t admit to the circularity in this…
… and this…
… then we have truly reached a point where discussion is useless.
Evolutionary psychology is not falsifiable? That statement reads a tad reckless to me — it sounds like something someone says when they have only read criticism of a field, and not any works from the field itself.
There are apparently still a few small tribes in the Amazon that have virtually no contact with the outside world. Were we to make contact and observe utopic behavior then, yes, evolutionary psychology would be falsified.
There are, of course, plenty of primate societies that have not been studied. Given facts about the primate’s physical characteristics and their environment evolutionary psychology can make predictions on behavior. Again, failure by a control group of evolutionary pyschologists to adequately predict the behavior of said primates would be falsification.
Aah, this is the kind of definition / framing of the issue I was looking for.
I’ll think about this and reply.
Tony,
You haven’t shown circularity in these statements. If you show it to me and I see it, then I’ll admit it. Perhaps I’m blind and I need it shown to me very, very plainly.
That would involve this: show that the conclusion of the argument is contained in one or more of its premises. State how the conclusion is contained in that premises.
I think this is the problem, and I addressed it already this morning: I am setting forth what theism says, and how the system of theism, if it is true satisfies the conditions for a grounded morality. I have said over and over again that I am not trying to prove theism in this thread. Let me state it more plainly:
In this thread I am describing what theism affirms, and the implications of those affirmations. I am not trying in this thread to prove theism.
Therefore when you see this:
… please read it this way, for the sake of this thread:
This argument contributes, non-circularly, to showing that theism (if it is true) provides a solid grounding for morality. That is my objective here: to show that if it is true, then theism provides a solid grounding for morality; and also that no version of atheism of which I am aware can do likewise.
By the way, this is a poor definition for circular reason and I do not accept it:
If the premises are questionable, then it’s a poor argument for sure, but it’s not (on that basis alone) a circular argument. Some other fallacy or evidential problem must be named instead.
Sorry. Evo Psych is not falsifiable, and I stand by that. But I don’t think that’s essential to this argument, so I’m not going to go into it further.
I’ll look forward to it!
*sigh*
This discussion is just another one of the futile kind. I don’t know why I even ended up here, I’ve had this discussion ad nauseam over at AiD over and over. You seem to use a different language here though, obsessing about “grounding” instead of some other word.
What absolute grounding do you have for, say, how to furnish your house? We must admit that there are a vast number of arrangements that nobody ever applies, like placing the sofa upside down in the kitchen or the stove in the bathroom. We all tend to do things in rather similar ways, variations on a pattern. Is that because there is an absolute grounding for that pattern?
Or is it perhaps because some things just don’t work? Some arrangements are outright dangerous and may remove us from the gene pool, and yet others will make us the laughing stock of the neighborhood and ostracize us from society. Could these sort of things be incentives to voluntarily adopt some constraints? To choose to follow a traditional pattern even though we know of is no absolute grounding for that pattern?
Clearly that can not be: we shall need a transcendent standard for how to furnish one’s house, or we have no basis at all for how to do it.
Sort of like God, then?
Hi Adonais,
Your home-decorating example ignores everything we’ve established and equivocates, analogously, on what we have been discussing as “moral”.
How you furnish your house is a behaviour and says nothing about your duty.
Behavoural descriptions all. Talking about what we do, and even why we do them, is not talking about ought. You might be providing a grounding for the behaviour, or the pattern of behaviours (no difference) but you are not providing anything in your analogy to demonstrate oughtness – the very point of moral discussions.
You accused me of missing the distinction between”facto behavior and … normative system of thought or social policy” and here you have totally obliterated any such distinction.
You bring back into play all of my arguments against Tony’s case and make irrelevant your charge of equivocation and ignorance on my part.
Worse yet, you completely make the case for us. You admit, again, by analogy, that there is no absolute grounding in the system you are presenting, and you make opting in or out voluntary. You may voluntarily take on the duty, but you have no duty to have done so. Your described decorating system is based upon rational reflection and personal comfort as its ground. Both of these are variable and allow that the person not only can behave with or without respect for the norm, but also that there is no obligation to comply. If he chooses to forego public standing and comfort or does not reason to the same conclusion then the ought does not apply to him. He may be ostracized, but he is not bad – he is not wrong, merely different.
After your attempt to chasten me you have reduced the moral discussion again to a description of behaviours – exactly of what you accused me of doing when that was just what I was correcting. You might describe why we tend to behave one way or another but you are saying nothing about why we ought to. You are talking about grounding behaviours, and not morals.
. That question certainly crossed my mind as well. For my part, I am glad you did.
Charlie:
There appears yo have been a major misfire here. I am indeed arguing for relative morality, as well as relative house decoration. There are no absolute oughts in either case, we create the relevant oughts for and by ourselves, nature does not possess them. Your arguments here implicitly assume that objective morality, “grounded” by some transcendent thing, is the name of the game, and all your reasoning proceeds from that. You are basically assuming that which I am asking you to prove. But that is not an assumption I can grant you. You have to start by showing that morality in fact appears as if it were based on objective laws. Everything I have seen suggests the opposite, that morals are fluid in time and space, between cultures and subjects and individuals, and what commonality exists can be explained by our common evolutionary ancestry… I simply can not take your word for it that some completely different, objective, morality lies behind it all; I’m going to require more substance to that underlying assumption of yours.
No.
Hi Adonais,
Indeed, it does. If there is no transcendent standard beyond human culture and institutions then we are left, as you say, with relative morality. Which is to say, there is no morality in the sense that there are duties, obligations and oughts.
I certainly have an opinion about what morality is, what it means for it to be grounded, and how it is based.
I’m not sure I do, although I wouldn’t mind demonstrating why it appears to be objective. For instance, Dan Dennett, who thinks of morality as an illusion of consciousness even thinks it appears to be objective. I don’t think there is much doubt that this is the way it appears. Every relativist I’ve talked to here has admitted that our language treats morality as objective and that the vast majority of people who use the terms “good” and “bad” believe they are referring, at least in some cases, to more than opinion and societal norms.
I see much commonality in universal beliefs and don’t see any reason, as I’ve argued above, to credit these commonalities to biology.
But, as I said, I don’t think I have to show you such a thing…
As we’ve said, the morality your system offers is not grounded and a claim to a duty or obligation under such fluid, culturally-derived, personal influence is baseless.
This has indeed shifted, hasn’t it? It took a long time to get the first issue clarified, which I think happened this morning. The issue was whether there is grounding for morality in any system other than theism.
And as soon as that question was clarified, it was dropped like a hot potato. Now the question is whether grounding matters. I predicted that, at the end of that post.
So: can we agree that the point has been demonstrated, that there is no grounding for morality in any system other than theism, if grounding is defined the way it was in that post?
If so, we can clear that question out of the way and move on to the one everyone wants to discuss, which is whether that grounding actually matters.
Wow.
I go away for the day to enjoy Labor Day and things go from bad to worse.
Tom, I have lots of problems with your rush to move on. Mostly it’s related to the problem that you haven’t proven what it appears that you think you have. Also, I’m not so eager, seeing as how this last discussion went, to move on to a new one.
Adonais, you have chops. I admire you for staying in this game as long as you have, and I wish I had your quick mind and firmer grasp of both argument and science. If you want to compare notes later, feel free to contact me at tony@superfetch.com — I’ll scan my e-mail and filters over the next few days to see if you pop up.
Tom, Charlie, it’s a holiday, so no promises but I’ll try and gather some quick thoughts tonight or tomorrow morning.
Okay, then. Let’s try another clarifying step. I’m going to open up two new threads, to discuss separately the two directions this is going.
First: Is there grounding for morality outside of theism?
Second: Does that question even matter?
I suggest we move our conversations there now.
Hi Tony,
I’m surprised to see these two statements in the same comment as the direction this conversation has taken directly reflects Adonais’ arguments.
Since you seem to accept Adonais’ grasp of both fact and argument do you agree with him that ….
1) we cannot conflate our behaviours with our theorizing about the morality of that behaviour?
2) “Understanding where our moral behavior came from, which is what we’re trying to do here, is an entirely separate topic from the issue of constructing viable ethical systems for our modern day society. We do not derive ought from is.”
3) “I am indeed arguing for relative morality”?
4) “There are no absolute oughts in either case, we create the relevant oughts for and by ourselves, nature does not possess them.”? and
“morality is something that we have defined ourselves, rather arbitrarily, as a loose collection of behavioral patterns that have something in common. It’s just a definition, and a vague one at that.”?
5) ” Everything I have seen suggests the opposite [morals are not based on objective laws], that morals are fluid in time and space, between cultures and subjects and individuals, and what commonality exists can be explained by our common evolutionary ancestry”?
I presume that you do. If so, are you still “confused about why you [Tom] keep on repeating the fact that atheism lacks a basis for morality.”?
Contra your statement,
do you see the the consequence? Does the commitment to an arbitrary and vaguely-defined loose collection of behaviours in a fluid, relativistic system seem entirely inconseqential?
Enjoy. My holiday ends tomorrow as the new season gets underway in earnest.
Charlie:
You equate relative morality with no morality, or one that is worthless.
I know that you think this, but I ask you to stretch your imagination for a moment and consider the possibility that duties, obligations and oughts that emerge from the interaction between agents in a society of individuals, created and defined relative to that society, when consciously or unconsciously followed are no less real and no less effective in guiding and constraining our behavior than consciously or unconsciously followed absolute moral laws imbued by a supernatural law giver.
If you think otherwise, please explain why.
Then please go ahead.
I think you are equivocating again: without knowing the context of your quote, I however strongly doubt that Dennett by “objective” means what you mean, a transcendental set of laws put in place by a supernatural entity. You have to be clear about what you mean by “objective”; if we only take it to mean independent of human opinion, as is sometimes implied, then even I have referred to otherwise relative morals as “objective” occasionally, in the sense that whatever genetic predisposition to altruism evolution has endowed us with, it is certainly not subject to our opinion. But morality as a whole is a social construct, and parts of it are definitely subjective, or relative to our mode of society and cultural norms.
This is not a convincing argument at all. This only shows how people speak and that it may instead be that language has adapted to a general idea of moral truths; it says nothing about the veracity of objective morality.
How many relativists have you talked to that were well read in ethics? Did any of them mention contractualism or consequentialism?
Well this is where it becomes interesting to look at other animals, which you previously disavowed as a useless study. What if we were to observe some core elements of morality in other animals, how would you try to explain that? Animals surely don’t have any theories of ethics, and I don’t know that you would like to include them under God’s moral umbrella, for that would lead to all sorts of awkward behavior to justify, like the sexual habits of bonobos.
A commonality with humans does exist, of course, in our evolutionary history. To be clear, it is not merely in biology, as in cells or organs or whatever, that we see commonality, but in the combination of biology with a mode of society. Hence “sociobiology.”
Let’s cut to the chase here. Why do you make the assumption that morality must be “grounded” in some higher, absolute standard? Because your religious belief tells you that this is how it is; do correct me if I’m wrong about that. All that this shows is that you have great faith in your own faith.
When I look to investigate things, I don’t pre-decide what it is that I’m going to find. Now if it turns out from looking at the world that there’s a good reason to believe in objective morality, and that biology and evolution has nothing to do with it, so be it, that would be very interesting to discover. But whatever it is, nature is going to tell us about it, and we can’t decide before we look what the answer is going to be.
Anyway. Ethics is older than Christianity, and the question of grounding morality in absolutes has been tossed around for centuries by the brightest minds. In modern times it is to my knowledge rejected by ethicists across the board, save the exception of religious moral philosophers. But the Bible just isn’t relevant in modern society, and it hasn’t been relevant for hundreds of years. Time to move on.
Eminent thinkers such as Mill and Kant have seen their once proud moral philosophies crumble into a theoretical shambles, as new, modern approaches to ethics replaced them. Same in psychology, with icons like Freud and Skinner: they got many things right, but also much of it wrong because they lacked the knowledge of the underlying biological principles and the implications of our evolutionary legacy. Of the enlightenment thinkers, Hume’s early emotivism is probably one of the few that contained a germ of the underlying truth, although he had no way of knowing why–it is only in the late 20th century that we have become able to know why, and that from a field of study previously unrelated to ethics or morality: evolutionary biology.
Here is some suggested reading on the current state of affairs. I won’t test you on it….it’s up to you whether you want to be informed or not.
The Moral Instinct
Scientist Finds the Beginning of Morality in Primate Behavior
The Emerging Moral Psychology
Moral Thinking
Brain Injury Said to Affect Moral Choices
Scientists Draw Link Between Morality and Brain’s Wiring
Tom,
Regarding the circularity of your arguments, you wrote:
Hmm. I’ve notice a trend here recently where it appears that you don’t like admitting your contradictions or even allowing the possibility that some of your convictions could be, on examination, incorrect. Still, I’m game.
Statement One:
1. To act morally is a reflection of the nature of a good God.
2. A good God defines goodness.
3. Therefore, to act morally is good.
Since the nature of a good God is (equals) good, your conclusion is basically the same thing as your first premise. That’s the strict definition of a circular argument.
Statement Two:
[ Adding “Theism affirms that…” before each premise doesn’t really change things for me — I think all that does is delay the argument. I can insert “Tony Hoffman affirms that…” to any string of arguments, hence making my contested premises “true,” but that does nothing to argue the broader point. ]
Statement Two is circular because 1 is an all-encompassing premise into which 2 and subsequent premises will be enveloped; Given 1, whatever you insert as a subsequent set of premises will fit into this argument. Or, said another way, stating the premise is the same thing as stating the conclusion.
Here is a similar, circular argument.
1. God is the ground of all reality.
2. God has a knowledge of aircraft that is an essential aspect of his eternal character.
3. The ground of all reality has knowledge of aircraft as an essential aspect.
4. Therefore there is an essential aspect to the knowledge of aircraft.
You can do this ad infinitum. It’s kind of fun.
If you still don’t like my calling your reasoning circular it doesn’t really matter. Both of your arguments above begin with contestable premises, and without resolving those they are fallacious arguments.
Anyway, that’s my first set of objections to your moving on and using your conclusions above in further arguments.
Next I want to talk about obscure language and fuzzy definitions, and I also owe Charlie a reply.
Tony,
I have often admitted my errors. Ask around on the blog. But you have not, until now, shown where you think there’s a conclusion contained in a premise.
Now we’ll consider whether you are correct. First:
I could make anybody look like a logical idiot by treating their summary statements as if they were the full argument. I prefer to argue in good faith instead, however. I’m going to call on you not to ignore context, okay? Here is how I wrote it.
Here’s the same thing broken out more formally. In all of what follows here, as I have iterated more than once recently, you may take the premises to include the thought, “Theism affirms that…” and all the conclusions to include the thought, “If the premises are true, then…”
P1. There is a good God who defines ultimate reality.
P2. God’s goodness includes moral goodness.
C1. Therefore moral goodness is one of the fundamental attributes of all reality.
P3. God created humans in his image.
P4. Being created in God’s image includes the (marred–as linked in the original) capacity to reflect his good nature.
P5. Reflecting his nature involves (among other things) reflecting his moral nature.
C2. (from C1 and P5) In reflecting God’s moral nature we reflect that which is among the fundamental attributes of all reality.
Now let’s move even further out into a larger context yet. What was the purpose of this paragraph in the overall course of the discussion? It was to explore whether this statement, written by you, was true:
You see, I wasn’t trying to prove anything, not even C1 and C2, in that context. I was trying to test whether your assertion just quoted was accurate.
Tony, you accused me of a circular argument. But the “argument” you called circular wasn’t an argument. It was the summary of a more extended statement I made, a statement that could be represented as a non-circular argument for human morality being grounded in the nature of God. But even though that extended statement wasn’t intended for that purpose. It was intended entirely to show it’s not true that your answers and mine would differ “only superfically.”
Oh, and by the way, I’ve been calling the statement you criticized a “summary statement.” If you’ll re-read the whole comment from which it came, you’ll see it’s only a sub-summary, a summary-so-far in the course of my entire answer. The real summary statement was in the form of a question that I don’t recall you answering:
I’ll come back to the rest of your comment in a moment.
Hi Adonais,
That I do. There are aspects of determining actions in which things become relative but if all morality is relative in the sense that there we have no transcendent standard then we don’t actually have morality. We have, as I think you’ve said upthread, a code of ethics or behaviours. But this is a code limited in time, place, culture, willingness, etc. and it cannot, therefore. determine or convey what is actually good or bad.
It’s not about whether or not they are effective. Chains and bars are effective at limiting behaviour as well, but they do not dictate morality or define the good. Anybody can dictate and enforce behaviour by dominating another. But when somebody comes along who cannot be dominated and says that he/they will not follow said pattern of behaviour then we have a new set of rules and new rights and wrongs. Obviously none of these systems is actually determining the good and is touching upon it only by accident.
As I’ve said before, if all somebody means when they say “I am moral” is that they can follow rules then they are misusing the word “moral”.
Oh, zing, right?
Add enough qualifications and you can deny anything. But first, a huge qualification on my part – I was WRONG -I meant Ruse, not Dennett (Dennett believes that not only morality, but consciousness itself, is an illusion). Still no, Ruse did not say that morals appear objective because God decreed them to be so. He’s an atheist, you know.
First, the argument: you asked if morals appear objective. Of course they APPEAR objective. When people tell me that we ought not destroy the planet they are not telling me that they and their friends think this, but that I am equally correct to opt out of their belief system. When they talk about a woman’s right to choose they don’t think that this ought to apply only in their county, but that any other culture is right to do just as they will. When they criticize the BIble for “condoning slavery” they presume that slavery is wrong, not merely unfashionable, and that it is wrong everywhere and when.
The APPEARANCE is that morality transcends time, place, culture and taste.
Those who argue for relativism are arguing against appearance and trying to educate those who, perhaps, are ignorant or just haven’t thought enough about the issue.
Now onto Ruse (not Dennett, sorry for the error):
Not only does he deny the metaphysical grounding of morality, he denies a meta-ethical one. He calls it an illusion, even.
But morality appears to be so objective for the very fact that, in his parlance, though an illusion, it IS objective. Right is right and wrong is wrong and if you disagree you are in error as much as if you had done your maths wrong. He claims that evolution has led us to not only perform altruistic (for instance) acts, but to believe they are altruistic AND to believe that this is objectively good – thus, morality appears to be objective – and evolution did it. It is an illusion with an objective meaning, to Ruse. And in so saying he denies relativism.
Whether his arguments hold or not (I disagree with him) even he admits that morality appears to be objective. It is just that appearance of objectivity that needs to be explained (or explained away) by the atheist since he has no grounding for it.
Here’s a discussion of Ruse’s idea:
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/tabid/68/id/6007/Default.aspx
It speaks to the appearance of objectivity.
Oh, look:
As I predicted above, those who hold this view (the vast majority) must be ignorant or superficial. By this charge you admit that morality does, in fact, appear to be objective but that you can explain that away if properly-read.
You mean like altruism? I’d note that we also observe murder, rape, infanticide, slavery, dominance, etc. and I’d say what I said before.
The commonalities surely do exist in both biology and behaviour. And yet we judge behaviours as right and wrong and act against our urges to do what is right and we judge some acts as wrong – even when we do them and even when we wanted to do them.
You are wrong. You should have gleaned this from all of my other comments, but I will attempt to cut to the chase.
If one society determines an act to be right and another determines it to be wrong then , by relativism, it is both right and wrong. Tis is impossible. Therefore, the moral systems that render these judgments are actually unable to tell us whether the act is right or wrong, therefore, the moral system is not a moral system at all.
I applaud your objectivity. I’ll have to admit to being a member of the human race and am endowed with biases.
So is the transcendent source of good.
More rulingout of court. 1) Of course those who don’t believe in a transcendent moral lawgiver don’t believe in a transcendent moral law. Somehow they, like Natural Law proponents and evolutionary ethicists find room for a transcendence anyway, but try to ground it in biology or nature.
2) The “brightest minds” include theists. But I certainly don;t want to make a fallacious appeal.
Then you admit again that your moral system has no grounding and that grounding is irrelevant? I believe Tom has stated a thread for the discussion of that position.
It is true that it has been treated as an irrelevancy. I haven’t thought much of the results.
Would moving on be right or wrong? Ought I move on?
Okay, now, is Statement Two circular? You wrote,
If it is indeed true, as you say, that stating the premise is the same thing as stating the conclusion, then the error of which I’m guilty is not circularity but tautology. Tautology is not a logical error but rather more along the lines of being a waste of time.
But let’s go way back to why I stated this in the first place. In the context I was showing that theism, if it is true, provides an actual basis for morality that exceeds that of Great Literature. You had written,
My answer was for the purpose of showing the difference between God and Great Literature. Premise 1 is a tenet of theism, and it states that God is the ground of all reality. I left unspoken the comparative statement, “There does not seem to be any system of thought that takes Great Literature to be the ground of all reality.”
Your accusation of circularity again fails to take account of what I was saying in the original statement. I was saying that there’s a difference between theism and Great Literature-ism.
I hope this makes sense to you. If I was not clear enough in the first place, I apologize for that, and I hope it’s clear enough now.
I made a mistake in my first sentence above and can’t access the edit function right now.
“That I do” refers to the first half of the sentence.
I do not treat relative morality as worthless. A bicycle is not a car, but it is not worthless. It can even perform some of the same functions as a car. Similarly, a relativistic ethic has worth and can be useful within a relativistic framework – it just doesn’t encapsulate morality.
Tom,
You wrote:
But now you’re moving the goalposts. I’m answering your challenge. You were specific. You wrote, and I quote you for reference:
That was your challenge. My last post was in reference to that specific challenge.
I showed you what you asked for. I can only say that it appears that either you cannot see (when I assure you others can) it, or you won’t admit it.
Tony, if I have to re-state the entire context every time… well, you can guess how that would have to play out. I assumed that when you listed those statements you were doing so in good faith, meaning that you were using them as representative snippets of what I was saying with those statements in their original locations; and that you were not actually going to employ them out of context in the continuing discussion.
What I wrote, when I first wrote it, was not circular, as I have just carefully explained. (Will you acknowledge that?)
What you quoted out of context is of little interest to me and should be of little interest to anyone else. Everybody knows that out-of-context statements are likely to be distorted. I set out to defend my views, not distortions of my views.
But since you asked me to acknowledge some error, I will now do so. The statements you quoted out of context, taken just as they are, without reference to the way they were originally employed in the context of a larger discussion, are not very strong arguments. Whether they are technically “circular” could still be debated, but since you insist I yield the point.
Satisfied?
Tom,
Now you’re accusing me of acting in bad faith.
Here is your exact challenge:
Tom, I defy you to tell me how I took that challenge out of context. And you accuse me of acting in bad faith?
That’s an absurd statement. Either what you write is circular, or it is not.
I have striven to be meticulous in quoting your arguments and pointing out what I think are flaws in the reasoning quoted. Instead of responding to the challenge by simply admitting the merit in the challenge and modifying your statement (continuing the discussion), you dug in. You don’t have to stay there, but that’s where you are.
Tony, you don’t have to “defy” me to show how it was taken out of context. You can just re-read my 1:44 pm comment!
Will you acknowledge that what I wrote, as I have now meticulously explained, was not circular in its original context? Or will you continue to act as if context is irrelevant?
Oh, and by the way, the conclusions (3) and (4) are not contained in the premises (1) and (2) of this argument. So even apart from context, this argument as it stands is not circular. It doesn’t prove a lot (in this form, apart from any context), since it leaves it premises unsupported, but its weakness is not circularity.
The conclusion certainly follows from the premises, but that’s not circularity, that’s validity.
I thought it worth pointing that out. I’m going back to technicalities in doing so; but then, that’s where you’ve been in this relentless accusation that I’ve been circular, without any regard for the original contexts of the so-called circular statements.
So let me ask you this: just now I stated why, in technical terms, this statement devoid of context escapes your charge of circularity. Suppose I’m right (and I think I am). Where does it get us? Does it help us understand what I meant in the first place? No. Does it help us understand each other in any other way? No.
Your charges of my arguing in a circular fashion: did they help advance any understanding? Did they help you or me think through what I originally meant when I said what I said? Did you even want to understand what I said?
It seems to me you have only wanted to prove a point, and to jump all over me when I wouldn’t acknowledge it. I’m doing the same back to you now, in my own defense, and quite frankly it makes me ill, because it’s not helping us understand each other any better. But I would suggest that the approach I’m taking is a lot more worthwhile than the one you’re taking. That’s because you’re hammering on a technicality, and I’m hammering on trying to understand each other in context.
So now I’ll close off my part in this argument, unless your response gives me good reason to continue with it.
Hi Tony,
I’m obviously not everyone, nor am I unbiased, but I will tell you that I can see why you think Tom is being circular but you are mistaken.
You committed for some reason to this claim of circularity before any of these syllogisms came up and your pugnacious attitude of late toward Tom hasn’t looked good to me.
Tom,
You wrote:
Here’s the original context (again):
So I can’t admit that your challenge to me was taken out of context. How could I?
You wrote:
Actually, I do think it helps us understand one another, and it also resulted in you not using the argument because it was discovered to be fallacious. So it gets us a better argument.
But I’m pounding on this because of a broader issue. If you or I prove ourselves unwilling to either to accept rigorous challenges to our arguments or ever cede points, then we have established that discussion is futile. I like a healthy, vigorous debate, but I also like to check that the game isn’t rigged.
You wrote earlier in these comments of how pride can prevent people from knowing God. I have written earlier about what I see as an alarming trend in your discussions here, and I think that it is related to pride. In short, you appear to be sometimes immune or dismissive of criticism to your arguments. I think you have maybe become too prideful in your convictions and in your arguments, and I will challenge those examples I see because I think it makes for better arguments and better people.
I have to remind you that you raised the challenge, and framed it precisely. Once offered, my not accepting your challenge is tantamount to ceding your point. If I don’t do that, I’m complicit. (I agree that it’s kind of like being trapped on board a submarine that’s going down for the last time.)
This sounds as if I’m the only showing pride and that you have been nothing but a picture of humility. I have to remind you that you made the challenged me to find circularity, and that you have accused me of acting in bad faith, taking your comments out of context, and scoring technical points instead of seeking understanding. I also have had several recent discussions with you where you have dismissed or ignored my valid arguments. In other words, my combativeness has, in fact, come about as a result of a greater context.
I think my contesting your statements helped clarify an earlier argument that I thought was being used to base a broader one. When you said you were ready to move on, I thought you meant with all uncontested conclusions being determined. Did you ever consider that I might be arguing for more than what I considered a technicality?
Tony,
That four-point list of statements was an answer to a question, “how am I going to avoid circularity.” The question was asked in response to an earlier set of discussions. The context is larger than five sentences.
In spite of your claim, “Here’s the original context (again),” Tony, that is not the original context. It’s the original quote! The quote is not the context. And that’s all I’m going to say on that, because this is getting ridiculous.
I agree 100%. That’s why I have had no intention of taking your out-of-context statements as defining the game.
As to pride or humility, all I can do is say again that even my own part in this process has made me ill. I’m not happy about it. I don’t like hammering on anything in such a confrontational mode as this has been. I never have been happy doing that.
But I honestly never have thought your charges had any merit, and I still don’t. I have explained the reasons why that was so. I placed my explanation in a context, which you you have steadfastly refused to look at beyond just five sentences. Not only that, but you have studiously ignored half of my answer to your challenge.
Until you actually respond to the real context, and look at what I really said, as I have repeatedly reminded you this afternoon, I’m afraid I’ll have to keep hammering that point. Because you’re never going to convince me that context doesn’t count. If that’s rigging the game, then so be it.
It’s not circular, it’s not fallacious and Tom hasn’t abandoned it.
The point remains that morality, because it is grounded in the essential nature of a good God, also has an essential nature.
If it is not so grounded it has no such essential nature.
This is not only the claim of the theist but also of the atheist. It’s not only the result of a logical syllogism but also the admission – if not the boast – of many prominent opponents of religion; if there is no God there is no objective morality.
If it is grounded in culture, biology, evolution, etc. then it is subject to each of these and does not apply to anybody with a different outlook. In other words, nobody has any basis to say “you ought not do that, you are morally obliged to do this”.
Adonais, I’ve looked at articles like this often. Here’s one of my responses.
That’s a pretty little piece of hyperbolization. It does not address any of the interesting points of the article though, that what philosophers may only speculate about scientists are now in a capacity to confirm or refute by functional neuroimaging. With such capacity comes the potential to discover things philosophers never dreamed of. Such knowledge may be of no interest to you, in which case I don’t see why you bother writing a dilettantish a “response” like this, but it is certainly of value and interest to other people who see the merit in the research.
Thanks for bothering to write your incisive review of the fine points of my dilettantish interesting little piece of hyperbolization.
Tom,
You continue to be disingenuous by claiming that I am taking your comments out of context.
Here is the other part of the original context of your challenge to me.
I haven’t touched a thing. It’s one two, right after another. Your claims that these are sub-summary arguments, or part of some other argument are irrelevant. You stepped out of whatever broader discussion we were having, put your pride on the line, and challenged me to find my defined fault with your statements.
Your last paragraph doesn’t say, Tony, look at the broader parts of my argument and view my comments in context. It says, “You haven’t shown circularity in these statements. If you show it to me and I see it, then I’ll admit it. Perhaps I’m blind and I need it shown to me very, very plainly.”
Like I said before, if you can’t concede a little point like this (that my taking up your challenge to show how your statements could be circular was not a result of my taking your comments out of context, but a result of heeding your words exactly as they were meant), then I have indeed lost hope with having a discussion with you.
At this point, I couldn’t seriously care less about their circularity, by the way.
In other words, are you truly willing to have a discussion where your words and my words mean something, or are you only interested in pontificating in a less rigorous way? Because I was hoping for the former, but if you won’t stand for my taking your words as, well, your words, then I’m not so keen on being scolded, ignored, and lectured-to without having a small hope of getting a word in edgewise.
By the way, I did have every intention of answering your ultimate question from which this little scuffle has arisen, which I’m sure will be mightily anticlimactic now, but as I said, I’d like to see if you can concede a point.
Could go either way, I think.
Charlie,
With regard to your list of questions it looks like I agree with everything you say Adonais has stated (with the possible exception of 1, which I’m not totally sure I understand). I have to say they read like a pretty innocuous list of statements.
For what seems like the umpteenth time it’s going to be said to you, I have to say that 1) atheism is not a moral system, and 2) that does not mean that atheists must have no moral system. (In fact, they pretty much have to get it from somewhere else. And they do.)
I’m not sure what you mean by “do I see the consequences?” Are you making a reactionary argument or something?
Tony, I’m sorry. I don’t think the word “circular” is the correct term for these arguments, even if they are weak, and even if they are considered apart from their context.
This is not a point of personal character.
Taken out of context, as you say we ought to be considering them (because I did not point to the context at the key moment, which I do acknowledge), one of the statements lacks evidence or demonstration that its premises are true. I have already acknowledged both of those flaws ( and here).
Now, do you really want me to admit with you that this acknowledged flaw is equivalent to the flaw of circularity? It isn’t
And in the course of calling for admission of errors, will you acknowledge anything at all about the value of context? Let me remind you how this first arose. You wrote,
Plainly you are referring back in time to a point in the discussion where you felt I had been unwilling to admit the circularity of the statement. Now, here I will acknowledge that the statement taken out of context is open to the charge of circularity. Note, however, that the statement begins with the word “so,” and that (as I have said) when you brought up the charge you were making reference to earlier context. Since you were making reference to earlier context, I thought it fair to assume you would be taking the context into account. If that was a misguided assumption, then I am guilty of that error and I acknowledge it.
Now let’s go back one occurrence earlier, when you wrote,
Tony, if this was about throwing accusations around, I should have pointed out a lot earlier, right at this point, how you took that out of context. You took my one sentence, the end of an extended argument, quoted it, and then said “If that is your definition… ” Of course it wasn’t. It was part of it, and out of context it was a distorted part of it. This is what frankly irks me about this whole discussion. You’re trying to get me to admit that I mishandled something, when that something is the result of your out-of-context distortions.
I acknowledge, once and for all, that the statements out of context do not constitute adequate arguments. One of them, out of context, is open to a charge of circularity; the other is open to the charge that its premises are unsupported.
Will you please acknowledge that the statements were not intended to be taken out of context?
Charlie:
But this is a failing only when you presuppose that there must exist such a thing as absolute good and bad; it’s a problem created by your own philosophy. Allow that good and bad exist only as relative concepts, and there is no philosophical problem at all, and no practical one either.
It is very much about whether they are effective, or of any practical significance at all. If you put meta-ethics before ethics you have abandoned the rationale of doing ethics in the first place: determining how to live the good life. Knock yourself out with meta-ethics all you like, but unless you can connect back to ethics and to how your theories apply to us, the real people who are the subject of ethics to begin with, it is ultimately nothing more than an academic exercise and only so much word games.
In all of your description that followed, you have described personal opinion and consensus of opinion and called it the appearance of objectiveness. Your extreme example of destroying the planet is poorly chosen to demonstrate objective law, since that is something that we all (well, not these guys) agree would be bad for everybody. That’s just self-preservation, selfish-genery at work, no reason to construe this as an appearance of transcendental law at work.
Objective laws is one possible speculation about the underlying mechanisms of such observed commonalities, but the observation of many dissimilarities and cultural differences destroys, at least in my view, the appearance of objectiveness underlying the phenomenon. Or stated differently, you would see transcendent objectiveness underlying morality only by counting all the hits and ignoring all the misses.
Consider public smoking, which has recently become moralized in some spheres of society, but was not an issue of moral reprehension in the past. Something changed with time, indicating the relative nature of the moralization process. Here’s one example from the Pinker article:
“In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?”
Here the moral spheres of the west and the east have drifted towards different positions, clearly indicating their relative nature. It is this sort of phenomenon that you have to explain somehow in your theory of objective morality, and I’m still waiting for you (or just someone) to do this.
Why are you using the words of an atheistic philosopher of science to describe objective morality for your theistic philosophy? They appear to be completely different! I haven’t read Ruse, so I can’t comment on the statements that you have borrowed from him. From your rendering of it I would probably disagree with him on many points, but then I don’t know if you did him justice with your description. I certainly disagree that normative ethics would be a biological adaptation.
But again, it appears from your description that Ruse’s meaning of “objective” is not at all the same as your meaning. Again you are equivocating between different meanings of objective.
In your moral philosophy I think you made it clear that the nature of objectivity of moral laws, the theory that you are arguing for, is that they derive from a transcendent supernatural being. But none of your arguments for objectivity in this post use that definition. Instead you help yourself to an array of weaker definitions to make the case for “objectivity” – how does that help you argue for objectiveness as it is required by your philosophy?
What? I have not the faintest idea what you’re on about here, but it sounds vaguely insulting.
You can make things appear “objective” by not looking very hard and by glossing over the discrepancies, as I think you are doing. If you want to explain what is observed by objective mechanisms, you have to come up with a theory that explains not only the similarities but also the differences. “Objective” in the sense of innate and independent of human opinion by way of evolutionary mechanisms, is compatible with what we observe. The transcendental supernatural “objective” might also be, but you have given no account for how it explains the widespread differences.
Indeed we do: all the more commonalities between ourselves and other animals requiring a powerful theory to explain these. Thank you for making the point.
This is not an explanation or even an argument: all you show here is that you, again, presuppose the existence of absolute values and base your analysis of moral relativism upon that, unsurprisingly finding it to be contradictory or worthless. Like I said many posts ago, you’re assuming that which I am asking you to prove. Your reasoning becomes circular.
Care to back that up with any argument, analysis or evidence?
Your binary reading appears to prevent you from appreciating the viability of anything that is not absolute or transcendental. That’s not my problem. The way I see it, our moral system is grounded well enough in society and biology to help us live decently in an immensely complex society. Already at the level of only a handful of individuals, some system of regulation (e.g. observance of rules and/or authority) appears to be necessary for successful group living. If tighter group living in itself increases the inclusive fitness of the species (by offering better protection, food sharing, etc), then evolution sees to it that such systems of regulation that contribute to the inclusive fitness of a species will evolve in tandem with its society.
Why are you asking me…check with your transcendental ought-maker.
Forgive my presumptuousness, but I can not think we have anything more to discuss.
Another instance of presupposing the answer to the very question we’re trying to analyze.
“Morality is grounded in the nature of God because it is grounded in the nature of God.”
Of course it’s circular. Good luck with that. And why not give us your take on the Euthyphro dilemma while you’re at it. It’s so fun to watch.
I’m outta here!
Almost as vaguely insulting as a “dilettantish,” “pretty little piece of hyperbolization” (quoting from you earlier today)? Or “it’s so fun to watch” (quoting from below)?
You’re running very, very close to violating the discussion guidelines, especially with responses like this one here, and you very well may soon be “outta here,” just as you said.
Hi Tony,
Why are you saying this? Did I imply that it was? No, in fact, I hold that it denies the basis for the single true moral system.
And the entire point of my every argument is that any so-called source is insufficient given the starting premise.
You/I said:
You agree with Adonais that morality is an arbitrary and loosely defined set of behavours in which we determine our own oughts based upon our relativism.
You don’t see any moral consequences to this? How would we justify imposing our morality on others if we know that we have arbitrarily determined what that would entail?
Hi Adonais,
I do hold that it is a failing and have demonstrated why. The philosophical problem is that you have a system which claims to dictate behaviour with reference to what is right and wrong but it entails that right and wrong do not exist.
Practically, one problem is that it reduces all punishment to utilitarian and denies the existence of justice.
Only because the meta-ethics are in place can these properly work back to a subject of ethics. Otherwise all you have are arbitrary, loosely defined rules enforced against those to whom they don’t even apply.
I think the comment I made to which you made this reply is my best answer:
===
True. It’s only persons who can give their opinion about how morality appears. We have no other subjects to ask. It is the very appearance of objectivity that your systems try to explain away.
It would not be bad for those who profit and die in the interim and who don’t care at all about future generations.
Since good and bad are relative they are no more bad than anybody who would prefer they save the planet for the good of the future generation.
You would think their selfish genes would care so much about their future progeny that nobody then would run the risk of destroying the planet for profit. But they do.
But not in the view of all the people who chastise and make moral proclamations thinking they are actually talking about something greater than their own feelings – thus, the appearance of objectivity.
You’ve never received an answer to this? It’s not difficult. We weigh one moral ought against another as fallen human beings and come up with our best approximation of the real good. This is a question of epistemology and not ontology.
Why? Because testimony from a hostile witness is the most compelling. And to Ruse, morality appears objective. So much so that he actually finds a way, within his atheistic world view (I know, which is not a world view) to actually refer to morality as objective. Bad behaviour is actually, objectively wrong, in his opinion.
Not at all. This is about appearances. Morality appears to be so objective, so beyond human preference and subjectivity, that Ruse finds a way to call it objective, even without the transcendent moral being that grounds morality. The fact that I think that it requires the existence of God as the ground for this standard which transcends human opinion doesn’t change the fact that Ruse believes there is such a standard.
As I said before, those who don’t agree will be ignorant or superficial. When you asked for evidence that morality appears objective I said:
To which you replied:
Thereby charging just what I said – that they are ignorant or have a superficial knowledge of the subject.
Easy – error. Sometimes a planet which is objectively spherical and revolves around a star appears to be flat and stationary. The objective truth is not affected by the differences which accrue when fallible subjects observe them.
The point does not reduce to behaviour. The point is whether or not a behaviour is right and how or why we come to know this. Altruism is no more right than rape if the test is “we inherited it from non-human animals”. And the inheritance of behaviours from animals says nothing about whether that behaviour is right or wrong. The case of animal behviour has nothing to say about morality until you can show that morality, and not behaviour was inherited.
It’s only worthless if you ask it to do what it claims to do -identify right and wrong. If you want it to control behaviour and enable admonition or coercion then it is fine.
Arguments for God? Sure.
Here are a few.
http://www.theapologiaproject.org/two-dozen.htm
It has no grounding to determine right and wrong. All it can do is tell you what is allowed, what is in fashion or what seems most beneficial. This does not need the language of morality and misuses the language when it appropriates it.
1) Regulation is not morality. All you need is power for that – like our ancestors demonstrate. 2) I don’t share your faith that evolution will just produce whatever is deemed necessary by humans after-the-fact.
By your evolutionary account the belief in right/wrong is an illusion and there is no reason for evolution to have created it.
We agree again.
This is not a presupposition but a thesis tested by logic and theology.
I don’t feel like rehearsing this anymore than I do the arguments for the existence of God, so here’s Bill Craig’s take.
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6063
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6087
Thanks for that summary, Charlie.
A couple of days ago, I started two threads to discuss the substance of this topic. Later this morning I’m going to close discussion on this one now so that we can move to those new ones for real. This will give you all one further chance to comment here first.
First: Is there grounding for morality outside of theism?
Second: Does that question even matter?
Some of you may have noticed that Adonais left one final comment here that is gone now. I removed it for violation of the comment guidelines, about which I had given him a warning. Nevertheless it there was substance in it worthy of thinking about. I have already communicated to him that I plan to post a main blog entry on it sometime in the next couple of weeks, and that he will be welcome to join the discussion on that. He is out of this discussion now, however.
Tom,
I can’t acknowledge that I purposely or even knowingly took your words out of context. (I honestly never thought I was being sly, disingenuous, or even technical.) I have trouble acknowledging that what I did was not exactly as you challenged me to do.
Of course, I will accept that you did not intend for me to actually apply a rigorous criticism to the specific statements you made in the way I framed to you. I don’t know how you came to that understand it so differently, but if that was what you understood than so be it.
And if it makes you feel any better I do agree with your final determination that Statement One represents a circular argument, and Statement Two does not qualify for that strict definition (but still falls under a broader rubric of circular reasoning — my original claim was that the arguments were circular).
My purpose in these discussions has always been to challenge what I think are questionable premises. My second goal has been to see that the same standards apply to both sides of the argument — if I see you (or others) taking someone to task for practices you also exhibit, I will point that out as often as I can without getting kicked out.
We okay?
I think that’s a fair statement, and I can accept it that way. We okay.
And with that I’m going to close comments and direct us elsewhere, as noted in the very last one on the bottom of the page.