Morality Without God: Would I Care?

“So no, I would not know of any reason to practice justice”
Especially sacrificial justice.

Good comment, Charlie.

Just a slightly off-topic comment.
I was intrigued by the "strange credulity of unbelievers" comment and looked up your post on it. I was interested as it went against
information I have come across myself. Though a less rigorous and most likely of a smaller sample (and of a different country) nonetheless intriguing how it differed from the information you summarised. Perhaps the results you speak of are just representative of American culture? Know of any more relevant information?

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2009/12/23/politics-and-faith-a-nielsen-poll/

The information at hand
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/files/2009/12/belieftable11.PNG

Tom,

I’m still confused by your response.

On the one hand you say:

No, doctor(logic), I don’t think I would. There would be no reason for me not to pursue my own pleasures above all else, and I believe I would recognize that and act accordingly.

Then you say:

It’s the desire (inconsistent and incomplete, but present nevertheless) to pursue the good; for in fact I do care about justice.

Why doesn’t the desire for good fall into the pleasures column along with the sex?

You say you care about justice and the good. Why is that different from caring about sex?

You speak of absurdity, but again you seem to be creating a division where I see none.

You feel a desire to be good. You like the idea. You feel a desire to have sex with a girl. You like that idea, too. Why is the former idea absurd, but not the latter?

Tom,

I’m still missing something. You said you would act differently and pursue your own pleasure if there were no absolute right and wrong.

You say “If it didn’t bother me and I didn’t get caught, then I could do it freely for my own satisfaction.”

Sounds kinda reasonable.

But acting contrary to your present values DOES bother you, does it not?

If it does bother you, then you wouldn’t change if morality was shown to be relative.

I assume that the rape example was a red herring, and that rape does in fact bother you, and you wouldn’t rape if morality is shown to be relative.

So is there some better example you can provide? An example, X, where X doesn’t bother you, X gives you pleasure, and you would do X if you could get away with it, but where moral realism stops you.

Placing believers in God in the same bin with believers in a universal spirit renders this result almost meaningless.

A valid objection Tom. I must have overlooked that. I think/agree the “New Age” universal spirit-type of person would be inflating those believer numbers. Though I do not have any data to suggest so, speculatively, I think if we were able to separate the believers in God and believers of a universal spirit we would find such a distinction. I would also not be surprised if it were these same types of people that are a contributing cause of the non-religious belief numbers.

Either way it seems no one can claim irreligious people are less superstitious then religious without having to deal with this data. Perhaps they are wrongfully attributing non-religious people with naturalists and which case (again speculatively)I would hypothesis that the naturalist numbers would be lower then non/super-naturalists.

Tom,

You have been trying hard to prove that persons will generally make moral choices, whether or not they believe in moral realism. How about if I just stipulate that for you? With this caveat: we have different meanings for “moral.”

Hmmm. That’s probably true.

I’ll sum up. The arguments presented to me here are contradictory.

They say, if we abandon moral realism, then:

1) we will just act the way we like,

2) and we won’t like the way we act,

3) therefore, moral subjectivism/relativism must be avoided.

This is problematic on at least two levels. First, it’s contradictory to say that we will act how we like, but won’t like how we act. If we don’t like how we’re acting, we’ll take steps to to make actions more to our liking.

Second, if moral realism has a case, it cannot depend on how we feel about the results.

On your view, however, “But it seems kind of arbitrary.” Think about that a while. What is there, on your view, that isn’t arbitrary?

Morality, on my view, is arbitrary in the absolute sense. It’s not arbitrary in the subjective sense. So there’s no argument you can possibly provide that could attack my view based on my arbitrary (from the absolute perspective) subjective dislike of fascism, genocide, murder, rape, killing unhappy people to raise average happiness, etc. If I subjectively dislike these things, then I shall continue to oppose them. Any argument you supply for realism must be independent of my subjective feelings, but, alas, no such argument exists.

JAD,

You talk of a utilitarian scheme that prescribes what we all consider to be atrocities. And it seems we all reject such a scheme for subjective reasons. Yet you say that such utilitarian schemes are now “thinkable”.

Are you saying it disturbs you that we all thought about it, even if we all soundly rejected it?

Personally, I think the utilitarian case you cite is a great argument against moral realism. Moral schemes of all flavors are judged according to our subjective dislike of their consequences or policies. If morality were real, we could be wrong about such schemes, e.g., we would be forced to conclude that we ought to, say, kill off unhappy people to raise average happiness. That never happens.

BillT,

True morality (if it isn’t objective it isn’t morality) can only exist if God does. Without him it’s all just choices.

Why isn’t this the No True Scotsman fallacy?

It seems like you’re defining morality so that the only kind of morality that can exist is moral realism.

Let’s suppose that, as Tom suggests, we have different definitions.

Let’s suppose that all we have is choices under subjectivism. No true morality. Only apparent morality. Why should I care?

And justice isn’t a matter of comeuppance. It’s a matter of moral reality. If there is no justice then there isn’t a moral reality.

What is justice without comeuppance?

Do you think universalism is viable?

“It seems like you’re defining morality so that the only kind of morality that can exist is moral realism.

Either morality is an objective truth or it’s just a personal preference. My abhorrence to “torturing children for pleasure” isn’t just a personal preference. It’s an objective truth that is true for every person on earth. That couldn’t be true if there was no God.

JAD,

It seems to me that subjective feelings make a very poor firewall against moral decadence.

Whether you are a realist or relativist, subjective feelings are the only firewall. The Nazis were moral realists.

Consider this. To do the right thing, a moral realist has to be in one of two positions.

Position #1: the realist has the correct knowledge of what is absolutely right, AND emotionally desires to act in accordance with that moral knowledge.

Position #2: the realist has the incorrect knowledge of moral reality, AND emotional desires to act against that incorrect moral knowledge. (E.g., the person who incorrectly believes loyalty is a higher moral absolute value than honesty, but tells the truth about a crime committed by a family member nonetheless.)

In either case, the chain is no stronger than its weakest link. Even if we suppose that abstract cognitive recognition of the moral landscape was the stronger link, subjective feelings remain the firewall between “right” and “wrong” behavior, even in the realist picture.

Of course, I think the realist scheme is nonsense (because I think the cognitive factor is relatively insignificant), but even if we posit that realism is a correct account, there’s no stronger firewall under realism than under relativism.

Catholic priests should be a good example here. Few should be more aware of moral realism than they are. Yet they offend at rates comparable with people in the population at large. (They probably have more victims because they are in a position to victimize a lot more people.) According to your theory, priests should be like saints. They have a lot of discipline, and a lot of attention to realist moral theory. But their firewalls are just like those of people in the general population.

BillT,

Either morality is an objective truth or it’s just a personal preference. My abhorrence to “torturing children for pleasure” isn’t just a personal preference. It’s an objective truth that is true for every person on earth. That couldn’t be true if there was no God.

This isn’t an argument. It’s a statement of your beliefs.

How do you know your abhorrence to “torturing children for pleasure” isn’t just a personal preference (albeit a very strong one)?

It’s completely conceivable that we could possess very strong personal preferences about what other people do. You seem to rule this out without giving it its due.

“How do you know your abhorrence to “torturing children for pleasure” isn’t just a personal preference (albeit a very strong one)?”

Hummm? I don’t know? Maybe it’s because it’s shared by virtually every person who has ever lived? If it is just a personal preferance wouldn’t a 50/50 breakdown be the more expected result. Or even 75/25 might convince me. But nowhere has this kind of behavior (and many others as well) ever been tolerated as anything but depraved. That doesn’t speak to a personal preferance and trying to claim it does hardly enhances your personal credibility.

Great discussion on here everyone!

DL,

I just wanted to add – The existence of moral realism in no way directly relates to the following of those morals I believe. As an example, the existence of a rule generally results in people either following that rule or not. The actual existence of this rule does not govern the conformity to it!

Going back to the original question given to Tom, I also believe that my actions would be different if I did not believe in objective BECAUSE my belief in objective morality stems from my belief in God, and this belief has changed how I behave. Hypothetically, if I believed in subjective morality, my belief in God would not be there so that is in fact the reason as to why I would act differently.

As Bill quoted “If there is no God, anything is permissible”. I think that this is true as without God there is no objective morality.

In the Western world we sit back and squabble about morals and if they are objective or subjective, but for the child who’s been sold into human trafficking, or the woman who is raped by her abusive husband there is no arguing about if evil does really exist. Injustice is present all over the world and without God there is no final justice – I think living in a world without moral realism would be horrifying, and people will only be held accountable for things that they were caught doing. I don’t think I could stand to live in a world like that.

You’re trying to argue that because we (almost) all agree on certain principles, those principles can’t possibly be the result of our shared evolutionary history.

Genetic fallacy. I didn’t see Bill commit this. Whether we \evolved\ the ability to see the moral truth or whether we were created with it, the truth is still the truth.

I really, really, really don’t like them either. But that doesn’t mean that our dislikes are anything more than dislikes.

Exactly. Neither the objectivity nor the morality is determined by our feelings.

Some people don’t really, really, really, really, dislike herding people onto trains to their deaths. It is still wrong.

The left brain has to make sense of the compulsions somehow.

And yet it doesn’t cause us to try to compel chocolate lovers to love vanilla.

If you had good reasons for overcoming your compulsions, you would have rationalized for them already.

In your book it is all compulsions all the way down, so it doesn’t matter.

When morality is objective we have an obligation to discipline our compulsions and then to train them.

So I think you’re sitting on the wrong side of the branch you’re sawing.

🙂

DL,

Aren’t you assuming that being a realist makes you less likely to commit crimes? Because you haven’t shown that at all.

Aren’t you assuming realism is true by even asking the question? If realism is false then what possible data/fact could be offered?

What possible data would convince you that moral realism is true, DL? If you believe that some yet-to-be-discovered data could convince you then you are a believer in moral realism and you are searching for supporting data. If you believe that it is impossible to find data, because you believe morality is entirely subjective, then why are you asking for someone to give you data?

I would argue that you are the former, even though you claim to be the latter. Your questions/comments are testimony to that. Or…are you irrational?

DL,

Your suggestion that torturing children for pleasure can be considered a preference (even a “strongly held one”) is simply stunning. A preference is whether you like vanilla or chocolate ice cream. Torturing children for pleasure is a heinous depravity. A preference is whether you like reading fiction or non-fiction. Torturing children for pleasure is an outrage. A preference is a fondness or a liking or an inclination. Torturing children for pleasure is abhorrent. Do you really think of torturing children for pleasure as merely a preference? It’s truly hard to believe anyone would admit such a thing.

As far as this position affecting your personal credibility, perhaps you should try testing this out. The next time you are out, let’s say, with some casual acquaintances or someone you are just meeting why don’t you raise this subject. Explain to these folks that you believe that torturing children for pleasure is just a personal preference. I’d be interested to see whether they will agree to meet you again or possibly more telling, hire you to babysit their children.

Steve,

It’s hard to believe how anyone can’t see the intellectual corner this position puts them in. This is an argument to relativize the torture of children. What exactly would “winning” this argument look like. If you woke up in a world where this was true, how would you bring yourself to live out the day.

I posed a similar question. My conclusion is that anyone who is looking for data/arguments to support what they experience – that person is a realist. If they didn’t believe in realism they wouldn’t bother to look. There would be no such thing as a winning argument.

What possible data would convince you that moral realism is true, DL? If you believe that some yet-to-be-discovered data could convince you then you are a believer in moral realism and you are searching for supporting data.

What would a “winning argument” like DL’s look like? C.S. Lewis provides a clue in The Great Divorce in the people who loathe to remain on the outskirts of heaven (in particular the theologian and Napoleon):

(1) the theologian “knows” he’s “right,” and would never countenance staying in a place where his “being right” doesn’t matter, nor would he put up with people who actually take faith seriously as opposed to theoretically, and

(2) Napoleon is in the deepest parts of Purgatory/Hell–millions of miles from the next person, pacing back and forth, mumbling to himself “he/she were wrong…”

(3) in the man who couldn’t stand the fact that a murderer was forgiven by the murdered person, and hence the murderer chose to enter the true freedom of heaven. The man turned away because his argument was “more logical,” i.e., it was a “winning” argument.

I’ve stayed out of this conversation because I’m deeply saddened by DL’s fallacies, his scientistic outlook on morality, his historical ignorance, his arrogant “rightness”, and his refusal to consider things beyond his own self-centeredness. I weep real tears for him.

I’ve also stayed out because of being convicted by John Mark Reynolds’ 25 October essay “On Letting Go” the Evangel blog (http://firstthings.com/blogs/evangel/2010/10/on-letting-go/#more-9191). Way too many times I’ve fallen into the syndrome “Sorry, dear, but not now… somebody is wrong on the Internet.” Intellect ordered to evil is no longer intellect. Intellect perfected by God’s Grace is true intellect. I have a long way to go.

SteveK,

Sociopaths and moral relativists/subjectivists have a lot in common, BillT.

Cheap shot. That’s like me saying that moral realists and Hitler have a lot in common.

BillT,

It’s hard to believe how anyone can’t see the intellectual corner this position puts them in. This is an argument to relativize the torture of children. What exactly would “winning” this argument look like. If you woke up in a world where this was true, how would you bring yourself to live out the day.

You think that my position, what you call “relativizing”, means accepting any moral behavior as having equal value. It doesn’t mean anything of the sort. And until you realize that, you’re out of your depth. You don’t understand moral subjectivism, and you’re making a straw man argument.

Here’s how your argumentation looks.

1) If there’s no absolute reason why act X is wrong, then we absolutely ought to be tolerant of X as much as not X.

2) We have a strong moral passion/aversion against committing certain kinds of acts. That is, we have a strong subjective values about X.

3) Suppose that morality has no objective basis.

4) Therefore, by (1), we ought to ignore or suppress our values, and tolerate X.

This is complete and utter nonsense. (1) is a moral realist claim, not a moral subjectivist claim. It is contradicted by (3).

Your argument is contradictory and illogical.

Under subjectivism, (1) does not hold. It is not the case that I absolutely ought to tolerate things that go against my values. “Oughts” are subjective, and the only thing we can do with them is either apply them subjectively, or describe them objectively.

Until you recognize this, you can’t be said to understand what it is you are arguing against.

Also, just because someone is a moral subjectivist doesn’t mean they are more likely to torture children. In fact, that person might have a greater aversion to torturing children than you do (and certainly a LOT more aversion than a lot of moral realist Catholic priests and nuns who have been guilty of beating and sexually abusing children).

DL,

Cheap shot. That’s like me saying that moral realists and Hitler have a lot in common.

I didn’t intend it to be a cheap shot. It’s accurate wrt the moral beliefs that both hold according to the definition below. That is what I was talking about. If moral subjectivism is true then what’s the fuss anyway? I may have hurt your feelings, but I’m a realist who isn’t concerned with your feelings at this point.

a person, as a psychopathic personality, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.

I suppose that realists and Hitler would have a lot in common – but only if Hitler was a realist. If not, then what they have in common is not pertinent to this discussion about morality.

DL,

Also, just because someone is a moral subjectivist doesn’t mean they are more likely to torture children.

When “torture” is stripped of any objective moral component it reads the same as any other action verb. So yeah, moral subjectivists do stuff to other people. In subjectivist terms expressed objectively, you would say they aren’t any less likely to interact with children compared to realists. Nothing to write home about there. The fact that you find that interaction to be subjectively good or evil is no concern to anyone but you. That’s the reality you live in.

Tom,

These studies do not single out moral subjectivists, but if moral objectivism is more prevalent among religious believers than non-believers, then they do suggest that moral subjectivists are more likely to commit crimes of all sorts—as a matter of sociological reality.

Churches are hubs for community and civic activism. I think it’s pretty obvious that these attributes would reduce crime.

But let’s say we did a survey of secularists polling for membership in those secular organizations and structures that are most focused on community and civic activism. We would see a nice big correlation. “Secularism reduces crime!”, some might shout.

If you divide the population into “religious people with civic activism” versus “everybody else” you might see an effect. That’s because you diluted all the non-religious people with civic activism by lumping them with the “religious people and non-religious people without civic activism.”

Even if these studies did show that religiosity was the exclusive way to civic activism, it would be a ginormous stretch to say that this had something to do with relativism.

Tom,

Perhaps you don’t know this, but researchers in the social sciences are not unaware that religiosity and social solidarity go together. They know that, and they even know how to control for it through research design and statistical techniques like multiple regression analysis, partial correlation, and so on.

Oh, all of a sudden you have a big interest in eliminating bias? 😉

I still don’t think the issue I was raising is obviously a thing they would be controlling for. These abstracts can read the same way, even if they’re not controlling for secular do-gooders.

Suppose that they were comparing fitness of people who are members of cycling teams against the general population. They could validly conclude that joining a cycling team will improve health. And they would be right! They would only be wrong if they concluded that joining a cycling team was the exclusive way to good health.

I don’t see these abstracts saying that religiosity is the exclusive way to avoid a life of crime. So why should they control for all the other ways of avoiding crime? They’re just claiming that religiosity is one way to avoid crime. They’re not denying that having a higher income or more education makes you less likely to commit crimes, but why should they?

It has something to do with belief in moral realities, doctor(logic). It’s no ginormous step at all. It’s a step, to be sure, and I’ll grant that there doesn’t seem to be any research specifically on relativism that I can get my hands on, but I think there’s a strong suggestion there. It’s speculative, but unlike your speculations, it does not fly in the face of research results.

Even the commentators on this blog don’t have much of a grasp of moral subjectivism. What percentage of the general population are familiar with it, do you think? 2%?

What makes a lot more sense is that people who are are morally righteous simply have strong convictions. I’m just not seeing the utility of realism. What seems to have utility to conviction is conviction itself.

Tom,

Actually the non-realist is not rationally persuadable, because rational persuasion is irrelevant if moral realism is false.

This isn’t strictly true. If I know your values, I can make an argument that policy X is a better fit with your values than policy Y, even if my values differ from yours. Of course, I will only try to make this argument is policy X fits with my values, too!

We see this a lot of the time when people offer consequentialist arguments for policy X when they actually would always go with policy X anyway (for non-consequentialist reasons).

For example, on the abortion issue, anti-abortion folk will attempt to use consequentialist arguments to make their case. For example, they might say that women are psychologically damaged by abortion procedures. However, if the evidence fell the other way, and it was discovered that abortion had a positive effect on a woman’s psychological state, they would not find such evidence persuasive. This is because the typical person who opposes abortion is not primarily motivated by consequentialist ethics. Yet when people debate abortion (e.g., in writing), their claims are generally phrased as a rational argument.

If you read an anti-abortion argument that referred to psychological outcomes, wouldn’t you consider that a rational argument against abortion?

Or would you say it was only a rational argument against abortion if the person making the argument committed himself to changing his mind if the evidence went the other way?

JAD,

But if subjectivism on the divine level, involving just one moral agent (God), makes morals and ethics arbitrary, what happens when we multiply it by 300 million moral agents for a country like the US, or 5-6 billion moral agents for the world?

When I get in one of my moods, I like to point out that even if moral subjectivism is true, the unsaved are still in big trouble if Christianity is true. They’re destined for hell either way, so I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on this debate. Time would be better spent on the question, is Christianity true?

Is DL having trouble with thought experiments again?
The more things change….

How do you know?
Because I told you.
How do I know the people in the row boat aren’t going to be rescued at the last minute? How do I know that there won’t be someone else to rescue the baby while I save the embryos? How do I know there are even aliens with the technology to make a vat for my brain?
That’s how thought experiments work.
Really, your contrived attempt to avoid answering is too transparent. I haven’t seen its like since, well, earlier in this thread. It’s like I’m in a tag team match against the WWE’s Legion of Obfuscation.
…
Notice how even with you changing the subject I can still just go ahead and answer your questions.
I contend that this is what you get when you are conversing with people who are both discussing what they think to be true and also intent on pursuing and conveying the truth.
March 22, 2007, 7:35:43 PM MDT (CA) – Like – Reply

…
So, are we done with my racist/murderer thought-experiment? No response other than to challenge my right to define its parameters?
March 23, 2007, 9:02:02 PM MDT (CA) – Like – Reply

…

Funny, when you [DL] constructed your thought experiment, calling mine absurd, I just went ahead and answered the questions.

I didn’t bother to question how we could ever establish that only counseling, sans any jail time, would lead to rehabilitation without any recidivism or whether this could ever work with real people. I just supposed what I was asked to suppose.
To each his own, I guess.
March 24, 2007, 5:26:15 PM MDT (CA) – Like – Reply
https://www.thinkingchristian.net/C2031585454/E20070316093254/index.html

“Now, you could argue that, if most people in the world were like Ted Bundy, the world would look very different. Maybe we would be teaching parents how to raise serial killers. That could be true. But that’s not the world we live in, for reasons that make sense under evolutionary biology.”

Thats a fine piece of rhetoric but actually no it doesn’t make sense under evolutionary biology. In evolutionary biology the only logical priority is survival. each organism looks out for itself and is not infused with the mission of survival for the entire species just its own existence. Atheistic evolutionists often try to infuse a mission impossible level of purpose for the organism in relationship to its species but the organism need have no tom cruise save the world – protect the future of the species mentality. So serial killers are just fine under evolutionary biology. As long as they leave enough of the opposite sex to propagate. There are “serial killers” all throughout the animal kingdom. It makes perfect sense. As usual you are merely begging for your position not making a compelling case for it.

SteveK,

There’s nothing apparently wrong about the Holocaust, DL. It’s wrong. Let us know when you have the evidence to back up this claim.

Wait… it’s not apparently wrong?

Is it apparently right?

Just kidding, of course. You are begging the question for realism, as usual.

“There’s no contradiction between evolution and the existence of a small number of serial killers in the human population,”

Who said there was? My response was to this

“But that’s not the world we live in, for reasons that make sense under evolutionary biology.”

You obviously were trying to trace the lack of a wide spread culture supporting an immoral act to evolutionary biology as you have been trying to do post after post.

We can have a world in which people teach their children how to kill. we’ve had entire cultures that did. nothing forbad us based on evolutionary biology. We don’t do it because we live in a world that has been greatly steered and motivated by morality and yes Religion. Thats our undeniable history.

You are simply doing what I pointed out to you before. Arguing in a circle. You argue that moral choices are derived biologically and then argue that the moral choices make sense in light of the same.

Our inherited mental capabilities make it quite possible to choose behaviors that wipe out large amounts of our species at a time. We’ve even created means to wipe out nearly the entire planet under mutual destruction theories of deterrents (again the over riding first drive that from your stance emerged by evolution.)

Like I said the organism need not have any save the world philosophy or mission. It can make decisions for its own sense of survival that can wipe out the whole human race. Nothing in Evolutionary biology forbids it. We’ve tended down that road several times and the only thing that has truly stopped us is a sense of right and wrong that historically was taught to us by a history of religion.

“I wasn’t concentrating on your definition of evolution at all. I made a side comment to correct doctor(logic)’s statement. In spite of my vague statement that I thought your statement also had room for correction”

Understood. I haven’t even attempted to make a definition. Sorry if I am showing too much disgust (not at you) but I don’t think anything turns me off as much as intellectually dishonesty and to me there’s nothing as intellectually dishonest as assuming and answering a point before you have even really heard it (Proverbs says as much but with a word I wouldn’t use in this context).

This seems to be the standard self hypnosis of online atheists. They show a staggering lack of logic in several of their arguments but don’t feel they have an obligation to answer for it because its just assumed as a priori that they are smarter. Quite honestly I think that’s the only reason they really get into debates on Christian sites. They can feel smart without having to think beyond where their thoughts already are.

Well….. on the other hand it can be quite humorous at times too. 🙂

“if you can answer the following in the affirmative:do you believe it to be true?”

Charlie you summed it up much better than I could and then there’s the more direct one

“Do you believe in God?” the affirmative is the very definition of ignorant because if that can be established as the definition then they don’t have to engage on merit. That and the ever more popular tactic of assuming any belief in God is synonymous with superstition.

Lots of mind games.

Tom,

(BTW, your server only emails me your first draft, not your edits. In future, I’ll try not to rely on the emails I get.)

a. The morality of the Nazis (as seen from years later) is determined according to who won the power struggle. The military struggle, primarily. If the Nazis had won the war, then the Holocaust could conceivably be seen by the majority of Western culture as having been morally good; meaning that the predominant (regnant, ruling) cultural position would be, “That was good,” and therefore, given what you believe about morality, if the Nazis had won, then the Holocaust would fully meet your definition of “good.”

There’s still equivocation all over the place, as displayed in (b).

b. The strongest power decides what’s actually good for the rest of us (and their answer becomes the right answer by virtue of their power).

No. I’m not happy with this. You’re equivocating on “your” and “rest of us” and “decide”. I don’t know whether your equivocation is deliberate or just careless.

First of all, the armies of today don’t “decide” morality for the losers. They kill or suppress the losers. So, if Nazis beat the US and repress the population, the majority of Americans will still think that the Nazis are apparently morally wrong.

However, people raised in the resulting society (i.e., NOT “the rest of us”) will typically regard the conquering army as morally righteous, assuming the standard of living in the new society is comparable.

You also refer to my definition of “good”. If you mean my definition of “what a society calls good”, or my picture of “how a person decides what is good”, then be clear about it. Because an individual’s “definition of good” typically refers what that person finds apparently moral. My “definition of ‘good'” typically would refer to what I find apparently moral, which in your reading makes me sound like a Nazi. Was that intentional or careless?

Maybe you agree with my clarifications here, but your original writing is not clear.

So, let me rewrite your text.

a. The morality of the Nazis (as seen [by people raised in the resulting society] years later) is determined according to who won the power struggle. The military struggle, primarily. If the Nazis had won the war, then the Holocaust could conceivably be seen by the majority of Western culture as having been morally good; meaning that the predominant (regnant, ruling) cultural position would be, “That was good.” and therefore, given what you believe about morality, if the Nazis had won, then the Holocaust would fully meet your definition of “good.” [People in this new society will appear morally wrong to you and me, but the way they decide what is right and wrong is practically no different than the way you or I decide what is right and wrong. Under subjectivism, we cannot point to the morality of this hypothetical society and say that their methodology for identifying right and wrong was implemented incorrectly, because the (1) there is not correct methodology, and (2) the methodology they use is the same as ours, i.e. reference to gut feelings. However, under subjectivism, we can still agree that “this hypothetical society is wrong” because “wrong” in that linguistic context refers to what is apparent to us.]

b. The strongest power decides often determines what future generations perceive as actually good for the rest of us (and their answer becomes the right answer by virtue of their power).

We go around in circles because you keep equivocating and being imprecise. I mean, “their answer becomes the right answer by virtue of their power”?!!

Do you not see how that statement is imprecise at the very best?

I have to wade through this stuff in every debate. And, in case you think that your equivocation is harmless, check out comment #95. SteveK, confused as usual, suggests that my moral convictions disappear under subjectivism:

Our nation has the ability to help end this situation quickly and peacefully, but unfortunately, as a card-carrying moral subjectivist, I don’t desire to help at this time.

I get this BS all the time, but I don’t see you stepping in and condemning this sort of comment as a clear misunderstanding of subjectivism. So do you not care or do you agree with Steve? Because if you don’t care then you’re not debating in good faith, and if you agree then you don’t understand.

“Also, serial killers usually lack empathy. Not a normal (or viable) condition from an evolutionary perspective.”

🙂 thats actually quite funny. You have yet to make a case for morality in an evolutionary framework and you certainly have not made it for empathy. You just keeping adding any and everything you need to the evolutionary framework to get where you want to sans compelling evidence or even rational. Sorry but lack of empathy is VERY common in our species. You obviously have not traveled much. Empathy is and can be very selective. Less of us apply our empathy to murder because socially in the religious environment we live in its abhorrent. However once people get into war time situations, depressed conditions etc many often do enter into states of lacking empathy quite naturally. The circumstances/culture just have to be right. So again your logic fails. We do have the capability to have a lack of empathy . it is not hard wired into us. Your claims about killing for pleasure fail the same test. Soldiers are often very satisfied with a kill.

“I think religion teaches that we’re all one family”

Like I said before thats your own invented theology not mine. Quite frankly its usually the religious illiterate that make such arguments. None of the world’s three major religions heap all humans together in a shared family

To the Jew there is and was the Gentile
To Islam there is the faithful and there is the infidel and in Christianity children of light and children of darkness

Hi JAD:

I wrote: His “reasoning” mimics that Peter Singer or even Ted Bundy…

subject: “reasoning”
verb: mimics

It was his “reasoning” to which I referred, not his extra-mental actions. I meant exactly what I wrote.

But let me raise the ante again: disordered “reasoning” avalanches into more disordered “reasoning.” Eventually, that “reasoning” is acted upon. I’m not suggesting DL is a serial killer. What I am suggesting is that his disordered “reasoning” opens his soul to grave dangers. By intentionally rejecting God, and hence His grace, DL has no means by which to avoid, sooner or later, actualizing his “reasoning” into sin… Which is quite similar to Bundy’s “reasoning” leading him, ehem, “astray.” That’s why I was also serious about my admonition not to buy a used car from DL.

By the way, DL’s whining accusation that people here don’t understand “subjectivism” simply because they don’t agree with his errors is self-serving nonsense. It is much closer to the truth that DL himself doesn’t understand subjectivism (or at least its implications) because he’s so busy warping all sorts of things to fit his preconceived notions. (He’s been shown to be “how?” wrong many times here. “Why?” he’s wrong is because the only tool he has is his scientism–itself animated by other errors: if the only tool DL permits himself is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail to him.) Remember: much of what DL is about is power.

John 3:
19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.

Tom,

Also related to that same issue, in your last paragraph, you have again made morality about psychology and behavior and nothing else, which is begging the question.

Look back at the paragraph in question:

You repeatedly offer examples of real or hypothetical people who do not care for the things we care about, and you seem to think that it is a failing of subjectivism that it doesn’t provide a means to logically convince the other person that his cares are wrong. But that’s not what subjectivism does (because it’s non-normative). Moreover, realism doesn’t help if the other party doesn’t care.

I am answering your general criticisms that subjectivism is somehow internally inconsistent, or inconsistent with our psychology and behavior. This means I have to start from my premises, not yours. I’m not using this paragraph to prove that realism is wrong. If anything, I’m saying in that paragraph that your version of moral realism is identical to subjectivism in terms of psychology and behavior. Which agrees with you: the difference between subjectivism and realism cannot be found in psychology or human behavior.

As for the question you asked in #87… I am disinclined to acquiesce to your request. I have better things to do than go mining for quotes from past arguments. Off the top of my head, I can think of just one area where my opinion has changed. I used to think that Jesus probably didn’t exist, and that the entire NT story was mostly mythical. Through discussions here, I now think he probably did exist, and that his followers came to believe he was resurrected within a short time (months/years) after he was crucified. I still think that a lot of the NT is false, and that myth has had a lot of influence on Christianity, but at least I think the characters were real people.

Through discussions here, I now think he probably did exist, and that his followers came to believe he was resurrected within a short time (months/years) after he was crucified.

This is encouraging to know. Thanks for sharing, DL.

DL,

You say that your position is obvious, but you bring no evidence. Subjectivism doesn’t contradict the human experience of morality (by definition), and you admit that it is not inconsistent. So why exactly is it absurd?

I think it does contradict the human experience. The last part of my prior comment was an attempt to point this out. It’s only when rationalization goes to work that the contradiction can be masked over and hidden – but the experience is still there as evidenced by the fact that the experience keeps bubbling up.

The fact that you think – via rationalization – that moral subjectivism is not absurd is a contradiction to the collective human experience. You’ve papered over the contradiction and are now pretending there is none. Here’s the absurdity and the contradiction at work…

You cut off a piece of pizza because you desire to eat it. You then cut off a piece of flesh from a child because you desire to watch it bleed. Those two situations are meaningfully different in a way that you immediately recognize. It’s meaningfully different in a way that goes beyond the subjective experience.

We know this because when people talk about moral wrongs as opposed to food-related desires, they talk in terms of absolutes that are not a matter of opinion. So (a) it is a contradiction of human experience to say that this meaninful difference is grounded inside you when you also say it isn’t, and (b) this contradiction can be covered up and masked by rationalizing it away.

DL,

If X is “the Earth is not flat”, I have an objective, predictive basis for belief in X, and I won’t accept contrary opinions because to do so would mean a rejection of objective facts.

What about predictability makes something necessarily objective, especially when you don’t know if it ought to be predictive? Please explain that without resorting to circular arguments or question begging. EDIT: actually, I think the problem lies in how you define predictive and how you assume that a lack of understanding defaults to unpredictive and therefore subjective.

Objective to me means that the reality in question is grounded in such a way as to be outside of my being (the subject). What makes something objective are the facts of the matter that have nothing to do with my being – which includes my opinions, my beliefs, my experiences, etc.

When we talk about child abuse not being a matter of opinion, we mean that we’re not able to accept the opinion that child abuse is okay. We mean that we cannot even accept a consensus view that child abuse is okay. But this inability to accept the contrary doesn’t mean that child abuse being bad is an absolute.

I’m trying to point out the contradiction that is moral subjectivism and you are sidestepping that by arguing what is moral or immoral.

In the example I gave above, the human experience is X (a truth claim about your being) and the rationalized experience is -X (a truth claim also about your being). That’s a contradicting truth claim about the subject – you.

Moral subjectivism is trying to say, I’m hungry but after rationalizing it away, I’m not. Meanwhile the hunger pangs continue, which refute your rationalizations. That’s a real contradiction that you, as a subjectivist, must deal with and explain.

When you are ready….

DL,
A quick note on contradiction. My point isn’t getting through.
Use whatever subjective term or meaning you want for “X”. This X being a subjective truth about you.

The law of non-contradiction applies to all reality, so when your initial subjective reality is X, and a fraction of a second later, via rationalization, it is -X, I see that as a problem. If not a contradicting reality, a sign of a schism (?).

A person who experiences a desire for pizza immediately followed by a desire against pizza has some explaining to do. Parallel that with my child torture example if it isn’t clear.

Tom,

Is it possible to become a better musician, a better artist or a better cook?

And if so, does that mean that these fields are not subjective?

If disgust is your only reaction, that’s true. I wonder in that case how the thought of torture differs for you from seeing maggots on a carcass. I think you’re saying there is no essential difference; there is an emotional response in both cases, and not much more. Please correct me if I misunderstand you there.

I think that torture is a lot more disgusting than maggots on a carcass. I assume you feel the same thing that I do.

But I don’t just feel that torture is disgusting. I feel compelled to speak out against it, and stop it if I am in a position to do so. Just imagining torture is unpleasant. Torture is offensive to me.

Of course, I can say similar things about rotting carcasses. I feel compelled to avoid them. I want to avoid death, and if things do die, I don’t want them lying around nearby. I’ll probably bury or burn a carcass to avoid the disgusting consequences of decay. I’ll probably discourage others from keeping rotting flesh around so that I’m not likely to have to encounter it. Rotting carcasses are offensive to me.

At this point, I expect you will say that we’re more accepting of other people’s tastes when it comes to smells, tastes, art, music, etc. than we are of torture, robbery, etc.

But this is easily traced to empathy. I can empathize with a person getting what they want, a person being free, etc. If you like country music, I empathize with your enjoyment of music, even if that kind of music would make me sick.

But if we posit that you are being forced to listen to music you don’t like, I empathize with that unpleasantness. And it doesn’t matter if you are hating techno while I’m loving it. I empathize with your displeasure, and I don’t want you to be subjected to techno if you don’t like it.

Now, there could be some cases where I think that your current pleasures will lead you into long-term pain, and so I might discourage you from those immediate pleasures. After all, I would want someone to intervene if they thought I was about to get myself into trouble without knowing it.

We have all of this subtlety in psychology and behavior. Obviously, this isn’t enough for you. What’s missing?

Steve,

A person who experiences a desire for pizza immediately followed by a desire against pizza has some explaining to do. Parallel that with my child torture example if it isn’t clear.

I don’t see what this has to do with subjectivism. I don’t like torture, and never have. Subjectivism doesn’t change that. Do you think it does?

Subjectivism says that liking apple pie is subjective. I don’t stop liking apple pie just because it is subjective.

So, no, this isn’t clear at all. It looks to me like you’re equivocating.

The subjectivist says “I am offended by torture.”

The realist says “You are offended by torture because torture is objectively offensive in and of itself.”

The subjectivist says “I am offended by torture, but torture is not objectively offensive in and of itself.”

You agree with my description of ‘objective’. Under subjectivism, all of your desires must then be grounded within your being, with no connection to the reality outside of it. If there is some sort of relationship between the external reality and your subjective experience of that reality then it is ultimately objective by definition even if you are having difficulty understanding it subjectively.

No. Suppose that when you were a child, your parents brought home a blue dog. This blue dog bit you and stole your food for several years. Consequently, you hate the color blue. The color blue makes you feel ill. You act to avoid anything blue in your house.

Of course, there’s nothing objectively wrong or offensive about the color blue itself. Your dislike of blue is subjective AND your subjective dislike of blue is objectively caused by your history of encounters with blue dogs. So, it is possible for us to objectively know the existence and origin of a person’s subjective opinion. I think we could make an objective case that your hatred of blue was caused by the blue dog’s influence on your childhood. That doesn’t make blue objectively nasty in itself.

Moral subjectivism doesn’t say that there’s no objective cause for subjective opinions and attitudes about morality. It says that our opinions and attitudes aren’t indicative of an exactly correspondent objective fact.

In my example, color subjectivism says that your opinion that blue is nasty isn’t indicative of blue being nasty in itself. It’s an indication of your history of experience with blue things. Subjectivism doesn’t deny that you don’t like blue, nor does it say you should stop disliking blue things. We don’t need all of our opinions to be indicative of simplistic corresponding objective truths. I don’t need my like of techno to be indicative of the objective superiority of techno. I can just like techno, even if it isn’t objectively better than country.

DL,

I don’t like torture, and never have. Subjectivism doesn’t change that. Do you think it does?

No.

Subjectivism says that liking apple pie is subjective. I don’t stop liking apple pie just because it is subjective.

I don’t disagree, but keep reading…

The subjectivist says “I am offended by torture.”

I’m talking about the subjectivist that experiences subjective offensiveness as a result of witnessing the torture, immediately followed by the subjective experience of being unoffended after some rationalization. Followed by being offended when looking at the torture again, followed by being unoffended after rationalizing. I dare say that everyone’s first experience is one of offensiveness – even the Nazi’s.

My description of objectivity, in which you agree, comes into play here so keep that in mind.

If nothing outside of your being (you) grounds your subjective reality then your being is the only grounds for it. You are creating contradicting realities within your being (mind), either willingly or not – all by yourself. I’m offended. I’m not offended. I’m offended. I’m not offended…

Either way there’s something going on that is troubling to me and needs explaining in order to resolve the contradiction or explain why the subjective experience vacillates wildly between opposites. It appears manic.

Steve,

Either way there’s something going on that is troubling to me and needs explaining in order to resolve the contradiction or explain why your subjective experience vacillates wildly between opposites. It appears manic.

I still have no idea what you are talking about. In what way does my subjective experience of morality vacillate wildly between opposites? If not mine, then whose?

DL,

I still have no idea what you are talking about. In what way does my subjective experience of morality vacillate wildly between opposites? If not mine, then whose?

It might not happen to you, but it happens to most everyone at some point in their lives.

Take for example, the typical person who’s subjective experience is the desire to rob innocents. They act on that desire and then, immediately, they experience, in some sense, the subjective desire to not rob innocents. This, according to your theory.

Focus on this next part, because this is my primary point.

If the grounding for that experience is entirely within subjective reality, then the reasons for desiring and not desiring MUST all be grounded in subjective reality.

“I desire to because it makes me feel pleasure.”, followed by “I desire not to because it makes me feel sad.”

If that subjective swing from desire to not desire is entirely grounded in the mind of the subject then that seems very weird to me. There is no external reason why the change occurred. Like I said, it appears manic.

What causes a mind to swing between pleasure and sadness all by itself, or even willfully? If it was the act of robbing innocents, then objective reality would be the grounds for the subjective reality – but that’s not your theory.

Your theory says robbing innocents has NOTHING to do with the reason for the existence of the subjective reality. That is a very anti-realistic theory.

DL,

A person is the result of their history and of the history of our ancestors, and of the history of our species. That’s what grounds the changes.

That list is all part of objective reality. Your theory says that the moral experience is grounded in subjective reality so I don’t understand your argument now as you appear to have changed it. Or perhaps you’ve held this position all along but confused the situation by saying morality is grounded in the subjective.

Why do people change their moral tastes? They change because of changes in their chemistry or because of changes in their environment.

….

However, the subjective judgments of each person are determined by objective facts of history and biology and environment.

Here again you are arguing for an objective basis for moral experiences. I disagree with your grounding sources, but nonetheless you are saying the experience is not grounded in subjective reality.

Morality is not entirely subjective, you are saying.

I’m glad to see we are making progress. Let’s now discuss the objective grounding source. Can history, environment or chemistry provide the grounding for the subjective experience “I ought to desire X, not Y”? I don’t see how they can any more than ink and paper can provide the grounding for the story in a book.

Steve,

You’re barking up the wrong tree. Subjective judgments have objective causes.

I gave you a very specific example of this: the dog that makes you miserable as a child. The fact that it made you miserable by biting you and stealing your food is objective. This causes you to devalue dogs in adulthood. Again, this cause of your valuation of dogs is objective – it’s objectively in your interaction with dogs. However, this does not mean that dogs inherently have less value, more value or any value at all. Dogs only have an objective value with respect to a specific subject. They do not have a value independent of subject.

Another example: suppose the best years of your life were spent in the presence of blues music. This would be an objective fact. This causes you to value blues music more than other kinds of music (another objective fact). Does this mean that blues music is objectively more valuable than hip hop?

NO! It means that we can say, objectively, that you value blues music. It does not mean that blues music is valuable independent of subject.

So, the fact that your values have objective causes doesn’t mean that values of things in themselves are objective.

DL,

So, the fact that your values have objective causes doesn’t mean that values of things in themselves are objective.

You can’t point to objective reasons for why certain subjective experiences exist and then say those experiences lack any objective grounds.

If the reason for your experience of pain is the hammer strike, then the experience isn’t entirely subjective.

If the reason for you experiencing desire is the person standing in front of you, then the experience isn’t entirely subjective.

Conversely, if the person standing in front of you has NOTHING to do with you experiencing desire, then that is an ENTIRELY subjective experience. The person standing in front of you could be anything or nothing and you would still have the same experience because objective reality plays no role. Subjective reality explains it all.

DL

But no one is using your definition of subjective.

I’m using the definition of objective that you already agreed with. Seems clear to me that subjective is that which is not objective.

Objective to me means that the reality in question is grounded in such a way as to be outside of my being (the subject). What makes something objective are the facts of the matter that have nothing to do with my being – which includes my opinions, my beliefs, my experiences, etc.

Steve,

You imagine that subjective thoughts are totally random and disconnected from reality. No one thinks that. Suppose I value country music, and my valuing it is subjective by your definition. By your definition, my valuing country music is random, uncaused by anything in the material world, either now or in the past. It’s not caused by my ever having heard music before, nor by the country music I am now hearing.

This is not how I (or anyone else) defines subjective.

I define objective as meaning that a property isn’t only apparent in my interaction with a system, but in the system itself.

Here’s an example. Suppose I tap on a cymbal with a drumstick. This creates the familiar “hissing” vibration on the cymbal. Does that mean that my drumstick is filled with hiss-creating energies?

Now I tap on a timpani. It creates a booming vibration. Is my drumstick filled with deep boom creating energies?

No, what we recognize is that my drumstick has something in itself that is neither hiss-creating nor boom-creating. My drumstick has hardness, mass, momentum and energy. These physical things are all the objective facts that are to be had. If the drumstick were objectively boom-creating that should be true independent of the other physical factors. The sound created when I tap my drumstick depends on the thing I’m tapping on – on the interaction between the drumstick and the instrument. The sound isn’t objectively in the drumstick alone. The sound is objectively in the drumstick-instrument combination. It’s subjectively in the instrument.

We can objectively say that a drumstick-timpani combination creates a booming sound, but not that the booming sound is objectively in the drumstick. This is because the drumstick makes a different sound against different surfaces or instruments.

In this analogy, we are the instruments, and the drumstick is a moral situation. Humans are very similar instruments, and they respond in similar ways to drumsticks. We can objectively say how any given human will react to a moral event, and objectively say that most humans will react in a certain way. But to say that morality is objective is to say that the sounds produced by drumsticks on different instruments are in the drumsticks themselves. It’s like saying that cymbals are incorrect because they don’t accurately respond to the drumstick’s booming energy by producing a boom.

Tom’s argument is that because the overwhelming majority of us agree on the morality of certain extreme situations, therefore, the morality of extreme situations is objective. But we’re all human, the same species, sharing a common heritage. We’re all the same instrument. In a Bayesian view, it doesn’t shift our priors because we would expect this anyway.

DL,

The sound is objectively in the drumstick-instrument combination. It’s subjectively in the instrument.

Transferring this line of thinking to the human moral experience, what exactly do you mean when you say morality is subjective?

Are you saying it is (a) subjectively experienced in the human, but objectively part of “the system” somehow, or do you mean it is (b) subjectively experienced in the human, and that is as far as it goes?

If (b), then I don’t know what to make of your statement “This is not how I (or anyone else) defines subjective.” because it sure sounds the same. If (a), then we agree apparently.

If you have a (c), then go ahead and explain.

Tom,

I would believe that morality was objective if it was fundamental. If we could detect good and evil without knowing any material details of a situation, then I would believe that morality was objective. Although this sort of moral realism exists in folklore, I don’t think it’s the kind of realism you are talking about. Moreover, I don’t think that even this creates the kind of moral reality you seek. Knowing that good and evil were fundamental doesn’t seem to have any objectively normative consequences. The universe can tell the difference between good an evil, but this wouldn’t tell us whether we ought to be good or evil.

I don’t think you’re talking about the kind of moral realism (above) in which there’s a good/evil field that we are detecting. I think your kind of moral realism is the kind in which God has designed us to psychologically mirror an otherwise invisible moral reality. A huge problem with this is that the only thing we have to go on are our psychological states, which makes your moral reality look exactly like moral subjectivism.

But my rejection of your kind of moral realism goes far deeper. There’s no possible experience we can have that can justify a moral belief.

When we study morality, we find that the following don’t determine right and wrong:
* Punishment (some are punished for doing nothing wrong, some who are rewarded are evil)
* Material outcomes (evil people get rich)
* Happiness outcomes (some evil people are happy)
* Psychological states can be known (self-knowledge), but moral reality is not identified with psychological state (only correlated sometimes)
* “Performing as designed” is not an objective good because one could be designed to be evil.
etc.

Given that psychological and material outcomes are widely agreed to have no bearing on the moral goodness of an action, there is no possible way for us to get objective justification for our moral beliefs. Any attempt to make moral reality knowable degenerates into happiness utilitarianism, material utilitarianism, authoritarianism, or some other failed realism.

Adding God to the picture doesn’t help. I know you reject the Euthyphro dilemma, but neither horn of the dilemma gives us a determinate moral reality. In other words, our accepted inability to use outcomes to detect good or evil means that (1) God isn’t good just because he has the power to punish, and (2) there’s no way for God to know morality either, even if morality exists independently of God.

Your answer to Euthyphro is to say that God is bound up with the good such that neither horn of the dilemma applies. I don’t think this makes any sense, and it seems to me like a device for escaping Euthyphro, and nothing more. But even accepting that God escapes Euthyphro, you simply move the goalposts, replacing the undetectable moral reality with the undetectable goodness of God.

If God is one with evil instead of good, but God wants us to have the free will to choose evil, then the world might look very much the same as it does. And, our inability to detect the evil of God mirrors our inability to detect the goodness of God.

It seems to me that in order to justify moral realism, you’ll have to settle on a definition of morality that’s consequentialist. For example, by saying that God guarantees that people who act according to his rules go to heaven, and people who act contrary go to hell, this creates a kind of moral reality, no matter what God’s rules actually consist of. I just don’t think you’ll get any takers with that kind of utilitarian approach.

DL,
A quick note and I’ll be back later with more. You appear to reject the idea that morality is grounded in psychology and you accept that it is grounded in some objective reality we have been calling “the system” (referring to your term).

What you are struggling with most is trying to figure it all out. That is all well and good, but I encourage you to not do that at the expense of giving up the objective grounding. That’s already been established. It’s there, you just want to know more about it.

DL,
You MUST stop with the term ‘moral subjectivism’. Although I disagree with your grounding source of ‘physics’, you’ve already admitted that it is not subjective.

ME: Are you saying it is (a) subjectively experienced in the human, but objectively part of “the system” somehow, or do you mean it is (b) subjectively experienced in the human, and that is as far as it goes?

YOU: (a) in the same sense as above. The physics of human perception and emotion ground our moral feelings.

Subjectively experienced, yes. But we already know that and aren’t arguing over that. You wouldn’t use the term ‘rational subjectivism’ or ‘scientific subjectivism’ just because we experience them subjectively, would you?

The term ‘morality’ is just fine without the modifier in the same way that the term ‘rationality’ is just fine.

Hi DL,
We’ve established that morality, like rationality, is subjectively experienced and objectively grounded. Do you want to continue discussing this?

Tom,

I sure would love to see you be more careful about the distinction between “grounded” and “caused.” As your last statement stands, doctor(logic), it’s pretty muddled. On your view, morality is caused. Grounding has to do with being rationally supportable, and causation is nothing at all like rational supportability.

Criticism accepted.

Got that, Steve? I’m saying morality is objectively caused.

DL,

The fact that this cannot be done is significant evidence that morality is just how we feel about other objective facts.

You continue to contradict what you’ve said previously. If the experience is grounded in a reality outside of our being, then “how we feel” cannot completely explain the experience and the objective facts under consideration MUST play some role because of what those objective facts actually ARE. Who my child IS helps to explain my feelings of love.

On the other hand, if “how we feel” completely explains the experience then the objective facts under consideration (what they ARE) have nothing to do with our experience. Our feelings explain the experience because the reality is that my child has no quality about him that can explain the love I feel.

You’ve already confirmed that the former is the correct view, which means the moral experience is not “just how we feel”.

Does ‘nature’ have a quality about it such that it can explain our moral experiences? If no, then the experience is grounded entirely within us. If yes, then nature is not what naturalists typically think it is.

I was just pointing out your contradicting statements, DL (it’s just how we feel), while reminding you that you have already taken a position (it’s not just how we feel).

So we agree that there really is something about my child that explains my emotional experience of love.

We also agree that there really is something about the situation before us that explains my moral experience of “ought to be”.

You’ve tried to explain this “ought to be” experience in naturalistic terms and I’ve been explaining why everything you’ve said so far falls short of actually explaining.

What is it about the situation before us that explains the moral experience? Is it the mass, the chemistry, the velocity, the randomness, the energy – or perhaps all of these? What, DL?

Tom,

No serious philosopher and no formal apologist I have ever heard of thinks that moral reality means having the ability to create barriers that are permeable only to good and evil. And most reject this idea because they know it’s plainly false that evil can be detected this way (well, like I said, I think there’s.

However, I was responding to your question about the kinds of evidence I would accept for moral realism, or at least “moral dualism”. There’s no need to worry, no such evidence exists, and no one in the debate expects it to emerge.

It means what it says. It means that the universe is fundamentally moral, and that all of reality is fundamentally moral.

Is this the same thing as saying that there is cosmic justice? Or does this still hold even if universalism is true or if no one is rewarded or punished for their actions?

In other words, when we say that physicalism is true, we’re saying that physical conservation laws are always respected (as far as we can tell). You are proposing a kind of dualism in which physical laws are lower than moral laws. For example, the evil-doer always gets his comeuppance even if it violates physical laws. Presumably, cosmic justice in the afterlife satisfies this condition.

How about we cut a deal, doctor(logic). How about you quit ignoring what I’ve put to you at least four times in this thread:

Way to miss my point completely. The case I’m talking about is to consider the possibility that murder and rape are objective goods, and your avoidance or prevention of them is evil. This is a standard technique in bias cancellation. We consider cases in which our emotions are biased oppositely, and then see if the argument is still compelling.

I’ll repeat the paragraph that followed that made my point clear:

Look at it this way. The reason why realists are concerned about realism is that they want to have something to hold up to people who have differing subjective goods. You want to be able to walk up to someone like Hitler or Ted Bundy and tell them moral reality is contrary to their subjective beliefs. But when I try to place you (hypothetically) in the same psychological position as Hitler by asking you to consider a world in which your subjective good is an objective evil, you simply declare my hypothetical situation out of bounds.

This situation is a mirror of the moral reality you believe in. I asked you once if there was any aspect of moral reality that you found morally repugnant. While you admitted that you don’t live up to your moral ideals (no one does), you could not point me to any aspect moral reality that you thought was morally repugnant. In other words, moral reality appears to line up perfectly with your moral ideals (shocker).

What happens when moral reality doesn’t line up with moral ideals?

I’ll ask this question yet again. Why be good? If moral realism were found to require the practice of torturing babies (something that certainly violates our moral ideals), do you want to be really good? Or is this question arbitrarily out of bounds?

What evidence do I bring for my position? We all know it’s possible to become better or worse individuals.

Equivocation. We don’t know it’s possible to become absolutely better individuals, and it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

On what basis is not torturing babies for fun better than torturing them for fun? That’s the question: an actual ethical decision, not an ethical system. It’s not just subjective opinion.

Yes, I know that this is your opinion. You don’t need to give me your opinion again. Just give me reasons to accept your opinion, please.

DL finds that there are causes for our moral sensations and assumes that by providing partial explanations of the psychology of morality he has explained the rest of it away. I still contend that he’s making that leap only because his metaphysic requires it.

Again, I know my opinion, and yours. Let’s stick to reasons that support them.

How about you also acknowledge that the question is about ontology and not just epistemology?

So we are free to make up whatever ontology we want to? Is it just a matter of aesthetics? If so, knock yourself out.

Charlie,

Go and sit at the back of the class with Steve.

re physicalism and the brain.
When I said:

As well, here’s a thought on physicalism and emotion:
My girlfriend is talking on the phone and starts to cry. What physical event caused her emotion? Not talking on the phone itself or receiving soundwaves, obviously, as she experiences those all day without crying. It can only be the reception of non-material information which caused the emotion. That information could have been transferred any number of ways and it would have had the same effect (it need not even correlate to a real physical happening, as the information could be false or fantastic). At the same time, it can also be transferred to me but have no effect. Therefore, there is nothing physical which causes the emotion. Therefore, the immaterial has affected the material. Her brain received nothing but physical/chemical/electrical signals – as it does at all times – but it was the content of the message, not the medium, which caused the reaction. The physical elements are as they always are while what has changed is the non-physical part – the information.

DL would have none of it, as his theory of the mind has to support his atheism:

DL:

The inbound information is purely physical.

Me: No it isn’t. It is carried in a physical medium, but it is non-physical.
DL:

Maybe the phone message was “Vote for Fred,” but a technical glitch in the phone makes it sound like “Luke is dead.” In that case, the person is not responding to non-physical information. The person is (mis)interpreting physical sensation.

Me:
It is not the physical sensation which is misinterpreted but the information content. I stepped on a dime which conducted heat away from my body in such a fashion that I misinterpreted it as water on the floor. Misinterpreting physical sensations does not make us cry.

https://www.thinkingchristian.net/C228303755/E20070615122655/index.html

And then
https://www.thinkingchristian.net/C936247104/E20071130155153/index.html

You made a big deal, when discussing materialistic accounts of the mind, of the fact that physical changes could account for changes in the mind (claiming, therefore, that the mind was entirely the material brain). You ignored the fact that non-physical changes also could (placebo effect, for instance) which shows that the mind is likewise immaterial and non-physical. You disputed my example where I said that my girlfriend could have a physical change of brain state, initiated by non-material information being relayed to her.
http://www.haloscan.com/comments…5122655/ #217644

You denied this and claimed the information was material (?!).
http://www.haloscan.com/comments…5122655/ #217738

But now you refute this spurious claim yourself by allowing that beliefs (not objective, material reality) cause the physical states of the brain that result in moral preferences.

Now, of course, you will suddenly be compelled to answer the question, try to call the beliefs themselves “physical”, and try to account for this, but the ship has sailed. Nothing “moral” has been received into the brain (as per your denial of realism), and yet the brain goes through all of the belief stages necessary to “feel” the moral implication. The subject even “feels distress”, with accompanying physical brain changes caused by belief alone, when nothing has happened other than its imagining an activity halfway around the world.

Your theory of morality has defeated your materialism – the very thing it is invented to shore up.

Likewise, you just admitted that morality is contingent upon choice. But choice is not choice without free will. So your theory of morality has also defeated another of your great pillars, the denial of free will.
(Of course you will now slip back into compatibilism and say that you can have a determinsitic universe and free will).

Not to mention that your theory of morality has long since defeated itself when you claimed such things as “no crime could warrant a given punishment” and that “justice can never be served by a third party paying a moral debt”
https://www.thinkingchristian.net…0050/ index.html
and when you made moral value independent of your own feelings (the burn victim case), etc.

You have also admitted what Paul was adamant was not the case; that preference for ice cream flavours is the equivalent of morality to the relativist and that the individual, not the group, determines the moral value of an action.

Thanks for the chat.
Charlie | 12.03.07 – 12:04 pm | #

Three years and the more things change … the uglier the view from the back of the classroom.

Charlie,
This attempt to blame the subjective experience on a mistake made in the mind conflicts heavily with DL’s admission that objective reality has something to do with the experience.

If the torture I witnessed has something to do with my moral experience then all the mental biases, misinterpretations, mistakes or rationalizations can’t change that. All of this talk about mind tricks, bias, irrationality, etc is moot.

DL,

However, the peanut allergy is NOT objectively in the peanut itself!
…..
Do you understand this? We can come up with an objective picture of everything that happens, but the peanut allergy is not objectively in the peanut.

I understand it. I understood it long, long ago. I understand it now and I will understand it next week. I am NOT saying morality or evil or goodness is IN the murder, nor is it in you or me. The reaction/perception is in you and I, but not the morality itself. Can I be any more clear than that? Write it down.

To sum this up, you keep thinking that a subjective thing cannot have an objective basis. This is wrong.

I must be living in the Bizaro World because I do not think this at all. In fact, I’ve gone out of my way several times to say the following:

ME: The subjective experience is grounded in objective reality

Please interpret that as me saying “the subjective thing has an objective basis”. I thought it was clear.

The question we are debating is whether our reaction to murder (i.e., a reaction of intense dislike, disgust, etc.) is caused by more than the objective physical facts of the murder. You say it is, I say it isn’t.

I don’t say it is “caused”. That is your term. I say it is “grounded”, or “explained by” or “the reason for”.

You say the reaction is explained by – or grounded in – the objective physical facts of the murder. Take out the word “physical” and we agree at least a little bit, although I would not ground it there. This next series of questions are similar to those I asked before in previous comments. They get to the point of my question in comment 183.

1) What is it about the nature of objective reality that explains the existence of moral reactions? It’s the reason why moral reactions even exist.
2) If this nature explains moral reactions, then doesn’t it follow that morality is grounded in the nature of objective reality? I think, yes.
3) What is the nature of reality?

I think naturalism has a very difficult time answering these questions so that it makes any sense out of morality. Dare I say, they are impossible to answer in naturalistic terms.

Lastly, a better analogy that fits my argument is words on a paper. The meaning isn’t in the paper, or the ink, nor in your mind. The meaning is grounded in the nature of the objective reality that explains why you have any reaction at all. Your reaction to the words on the paper (or lack of one) doesn’t change that.

Steve,

Let’s go from the paper and ink analogy. Suppose I have a piece of paper with a banana pudding recipe on it. It’s possible to imagine an alternative universe in which the words on the paper are actually instructions for installing a kitchen sink, i.e., in which our language is different, but almost everything else is the same.

What differentiates the two worlds? What makes the words mean different things? What differentiates them is the history and context of the words. Someone somewhere had to make an arbitrary choice for the word for water. In a parallel universe, a different choice might have been made. Indeed, in different cultures different choices WERE made. In each case, there is a line of causation that explains the choice, and which fixes the references on the paper.

The debate here is not about whether the references are objectively fixed. I think we both agree that they are fixed. The issue here is whether the word “water” is the one and only correct word for water. We would both agree that the word is arbitrary and culturally and historically dependent.

In the case of morality, we can both agree (I think) that our moral feelings are caused by our history, culture, biology and by the physical facts of the moral case we’re considering. The question is whether our caused feelings about the facts are absolutely correct ones. I’m not seeing any compelling arguments that they are.

Suppose I have a piece of paper with a banana pudding recipe on it. It’s possible to imagine an alternative universe in which the words on the paper are actually instructions for installing a kitchen sink, i.e., in which our language is different, but almost everything else is the same.

What differentiates the two worlds? What makes the words mean different things? What differentiates them is the history and context of the words.

Something doesn’t add up here.

Your example has you asking what makes the collection of atoms and quanta add up to \ink in the shape of words on paper, and the words mean a banana pudding recipe\. You appeal to \history and context\ – but that’s like appealing to \these other collections of atoms and quanta and they have words on them which assert that those words are, in fact, a banana pudding recipe\.

What gives the ‘history and context’ the meaning that you say it has? Yet more history and context? Is there some never-ending chain of history and context going on unto eternity? Do we simply, in time, arrive at ‘brute’ meaning? Either option seems far more friendly to theism than naturalism as typically construed.

First, it’s not at all obvious that there could be an absolutely correct word to reference a thing by. Second, if you assume that such correctness is possible, there seems to be no formula anyone (including God) could use to make such a selection. Applying this analogy to morality yields another problem for me: if we suppose that criteria exist but we are too dumb or ignorant to understand the formula, why should we care about correctness if it fails to cash out in terms of feelings? Who cares about being good if it doesn’t feel good?

Standing alone in this thread, I’d like to try a different approach. Just for fun.

What if there were a definite, singular state of maximal pleasure X? And this state, in order to achieve it, required the abandonment of certain acts A, B and C that – while capable of providing some kind of pleasure in and of themselves – were necessarily in conflict with this absolute state of pleasure, such that to engage in A B or C is to remove the possibility of achieving state X.

If you were to grant – for the sake of argument – that there were some maximal state of \feeling good\ X, would you agree that all rational persons should pursue state X?

Steve,

In my picture of the world, meaning to an individual is tied up with that individual’s ability to recognize a thing. For example, I don’t know the meaning of the word rabbit independent of my ability to recognize a rabbit, and my ability to recognize a rabbit derives from my experience of rabbits seen in the past. I can now meaningfully speak about rabbits I have not seen by referring to my existing capacity to recognize rabbits – for me a rabbit is what my internal rabbit-recognizer would recognize.

Whatever. As I wrote to Crude, I don’t see the direct relevance of this line of thinking.

Crude,

Wow. That was… one hell of a non-answer.

Gosh, sorry if I wasn’t clear. My answer was “NO. Pleasure isn’t all there is to morality, rational agents aren’t concerned exclusively with pleasure, and even if they were, pleasure is different per person.”

DL,
I don’t really follow your last comment to me. Here’s my final word on this for now.

We have moral experiences that are not rooted in pleasure or desire or feelings because that would make them grounded 100% in subjective reality, and you have already said this is not the case. You said the subjective experience has an objective basis.

So, we know these experiences are not made up out of whole cloth by our minds. That means the reason that explains why we have them, preceeds us or is outside of us even though we play a role in that experience.

You say that the reason is found in what I call ‘the process along the way’, and you gave examples of that: history, biology, culture, etc. But that process isn’t carried out in isolation all by itself. History, biology, culture, etc. cannot create what wasn’t possible from the very beginning. So the very beginning explains why any of this is even possible. The very beginning is the reason, the grounding reason.

I don’t know what your complete view of naturalism is, but all the explanations I have heard say something similar to what you said. That the explanation can be found in the randomness, mutations, molecules in motion, biological changes, etc, etc –- in other words, it can be found in the process along the way. That makes no sense at all for the reasons I’ve already given.

I think naturalism cannot account for this on it’s own terms. It cannot account for the possibility of moral experiences, right from the very beginning. Christianity explains it well, and when you combine this fact with the evidence for the resurrection, the case for Christianity is very strong when compared to naturalism.

Thanks for the conversation, DL.

Tom,

Do you have a specific argument that excludes the possibility of secular moral realism? The post you listed does not provide such an argument.

Crude,

Do you really think that what you are saying is the smoking gun against all the living moral realist atheistic philosophers? You really think atheistic moral realism is impossible? That sounds quite ambitious considering that we know so little about meta-ethics and most philosophers have to admit that their own opinion is not the only rational option.

Stanly Fish and Steven Smith are not philosophers. They are not an experts and their arguments fail to appreciate the depth of philosophy. The objections to philosophy in favor of religion are meaningless because to favor “religion” over “philosophy” is to favor unjustified beliefs over justified ones. “Religious philosophy” might be acceptable, but that doesn’t solve the problem.

The argument can be summed up as the following:

1. Atheists can’t get an ought from an is.
2. Atheists can start with “is” but will never get oughts.
3. Therefore, religion will save us!

That’s quite a leap there.

How do we justify the fact that you can’t get an ought from an is? It’s basically an argument from ignorance fallacy. “There’s no way it can be done because I don’t know how!” I think there are “moral facts,” so an ought can be an is. That’s what moral realism is all about. Religion isn’t going to give us a non-fact from a fact either.

You said:

The moment we start talking about “intrinsic values”, we’re also talking about “final causes” and teleology – and that’s the case whether or not we call the ultimate ground of this “God”, or whether we just assert it as a basic fact that some things are ‘good’ as a fundamental property.

One, I disagree that intrinsic values have much to do with anything stated here, and I see no argument here. You provide no argument, so I need to give no argument.

To repeat from earlier: “I know that other people’s pain and pleasure count for something. I have a reason to give a drifter an aspirin to help relieve a headache because reducing pain tends to be the right thing to do. I don’t see why God is needed to make the drifter’s pain matter. It matters because the pain is real and the drifter is part of the world.”

Two, even if it were true that morality is basic (whatever you think that means), so what? Is that impossible if there is no God?

You then say,

Whatever that is, it ain’t secular. Not unless secular just means “Anything that isn’t Christianity specifically”.

Teleology and final ends — if that is what you were thinking of — is Aristotelian. Aristotle didn’t say God had anything to do with morality. I think what Aristotle said about morality makes a great deal of sense based on the assumption of atheism. Happiness (eudamonia) is what we take to be the “most final end.” Even if his biology and teleology is rejected, we can still agree that it’s rational to want to be happy. We experience that happiness has intrinsic value.

Fish/Smith argue that we can’t get morality from empiricism/experience. That isn’t obvious at all. In fact, there are many naturalist moral realist philosophers. To dismiss their arguments and theories like they don’t count at all is silly.

Let’s say that empiricism can’t get us morality. In the worst case scenario Plato is right and something like the forms might be required. That’s not God, and many philosophers think something they call “abstract entities” might exist. That doesn’t require the existence of God and it’s not even obvious that “abstract entities” are supernatural.

Holopupenko,

Wow, James… it’s pretty clear you could use a few good doses of maturity (itself with a large helping of humility), nuance, and fact-checking.

Please explain.

Let’s get off topic just for a moment to speak of your “what is philosophy” e-book (i.e., not “really” published, which means not “really” peer-reviewed except perhaps by certain members of your choir): it’s a utilitarian vision of philosophy—not in the JSM sense but in the sense of using philosophy to achieve a certain goal: “philosophers hope that they can understand the universe and use that knowledge to live a good life.” Wrong answer.

What’s that have to do with utilitarianism?

You say it’s a wrong answer, but again, I see no argument.

If you seek to philosophize other than for the good it is in itself, then you and your two degrees haven’t gotten out of Plato’s Cave: you put proximate ends ahead of the ultimate end… which, by the way, is really what atheism is all about, isn’t it?

I don’t know what you are talking about.

Ultimately it’s about control over the universe, yourself (except for those nasty, uncomfortable things known as virtues)… and eventually others. Been there, done that kind of atheism…

I think virtues are very important.

So, to address your “impossible” problem: why, yes indeed, objective realist morality is impossible without God. I’m not going to argue over the things you present in your “books.” Rather, the whole jumping-off point for your approach is: God does NOT exist, and I WILL form a realist morality that suits me just fine, thank you very much.

No, I seriously consider the facts. I can’t imagine moral realism being false, and I can’t imagine God’s non-existence making pain lose it’s badness and so on.

Kind of puts the kibosh even on your own personal definition of philosophy “understand the universe,” doesn’t it? Maybe you don’t like the evidence or you reject as evidence that which challenges and corrects your jumping-off point… but that’s too bad.

Is there an argument here?

Faith as “unjustified beliefs”? Really? Per YOUR understanding of what counts as “justified”… again, just because it doesn’t serve YOUR personal purposes. That is truly the mark of a NON-philosopher, in fact. I’m not even sure Socrates could knock some sense (read: wisdom) into you MA degree-level knowledge of reality.

That is one definition of faith. Religion can have religious philosophy. I already admitted that.

“Stanly Fish and Steven Smith are not philosophers. They are not an experts and their arguments fail to appreciate the depth of philosophy.” On the first statement: so what? You, as a self-proclaimed philosopher employing the genetic fallacy. Well, well, well… as participants at this blog have seen over the years, the genetic fallacy is part of the standard arsenal of atheists. On the second: really? Let me play your game: as a philosopher, while I reject some of the things Fish and Smith assert on their own merits, you’re manipulating their views to promote your point. I have no interest in addressing what’s animating this little rhetorical ploy of yours.

I wasn’t impressed with their argument and I’m not convinced that they fully understand the atheist position. Are they trying to understand opposing views or just argue against opposing views to protect their own beliefs? If they are trying to understand opposing views, then they didn’t seem to do a good job at it for the reasons I stated.

Your syllogism is a facile straw man: have a ball—shoot away. We’ll just relax and watch.

What syllogism? I didn’t say they were wrong because they aren’t philosophers. I said why they were wrong. You are putting words in my mouth.

And this is beautiful: “How do we justify the fact that you can’t get an ought from an is? It’s basically an argument from ignorance fallacy. “There’s no way it can be done because I don’t know how!” I think there are “moral facts,” so an ought can be an is.” Did anyone else notice the switcharoo? “ought from is” becomes “is from an ought”.

Yes, it’s a switcheroo based on what I believe. So what?

Second, just how do you move from an observation in the physical world to a moral obligation ought? We have remote sensing technologies that can detect weapons of mass destruction. Which science or technology do you propose tells us how to move from that “is” to at least a philosophical “ought”. Sheesh—talk about “taking a leap”!

We experience pleasure, pain, our own existence. I already made that point. We can experience that some of these things have value. I discuss this in more detail here: http://ethicalrealism.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/objection-to-moral-realism-part-1-the-isought-gap/

and here: http://ethicalrealism.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/can-morality-be-known-through-science/

and here: http://ethicalrealism.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/moral-realism-by-torbjorn-tannsjo/

I don’t want to say that atheistic moral realism has to work one way because the debate is continuing right now. I don’t even say that anti-realism is impossible. I personally can’t imagine anti-realism being true, but I respect anti-realist philosophers and realize that they struggle with these questions. I must admit that various meta-ethical beliefs can be rational/justified.

I also don’t want to say that theistic moral realism is impossible. I can’t imagine it being right, and I’m not convinced that it is rational; but if God exists — he could indeed have something to do with moral reality. (He could have created all of reality.)

Your knowledge of Aristotle is sophomoric when you suggest “Aristotle didn’t say God had anything to do with morality.” Perhaps, but that inconvenient little truth about Aristotle’s demonstration of the First Unmoved Mover and the immateriality of the human soul was left unmentioned by you, wasn’t it? Also, Aristotle DID accept the existence of a Deity—not the Christian one, granted.

First, it’s not clear how the unmoved mover relates to morality. If there is no unmoved mover, I think Aristotle’s ethics would still make a lot of sense.

Second, there might be “some” relation between the “unmoved mover” and Aristotle’s ethics, but it’s not an essential connection that would invalidate ethics.

I’ll grant you haven’t come clean on what pedigree of that deadly worldview called atheism you adhere to, so it’s unclear what you might be implying by a “worst case scenario” of Platonic forms. (Boy, I’d love to see how an atheist deals with material/physical participation in immaterial forms!) Nonetheless, you pick a narrow aspect of Aristotle out of context and use it as a weapon against an extremely important point Crude raises. Whether you like it or not, you’ve got to account not just for the whole of reality but for order in reality as well.

I’m implying that atheism isn’t a worldview. Atheism is many different opinions and belief systems. Platonism could be an atheistic worldview, but it might not be exactly what Plato thought.

Finally, (because it would be a waste of time to pursue the remaining personal opinions) you’re a coward: Crude didn’t provide an argument (re: teleology) because, if I read him correctly, what he did provide was a “for your consideration” response to you. That you then high-tail it out of the point with the childish “You provide no argument, so I need to give no argument.” Excellent non-philosophical style, that.

And I responded with a “for your consideration” as well. I continued to actually provide some analysis and argumentation if you didn’t notice. What’s the problem?

My advise: let St. Thomas do the philosophizing for you… so you don’t hurt yourself. Oh, wait, he’s automatically, out-of-hand dismissed because it’s better to comfort oneself in a warm bath of historicism and genetic fallacies that permit one’s own proximate personal opinions to be rammed down people’s throats as truth.

I don’t think theistic philosophy should be totally ignored by everyone and I think they often have something to contribute. You missed my point entirely.

The impression that I gave people is that I am very rude, and maybe I am, but I am interested in the truth and I provided some arguments for my beliefs. The online debate format is limited and much is left unsaid. There is obviously more to the “can’t get an ought from an is” argument then I should say in a comment.

Tom,

Really? To borrow from a line I heard somewhere, Do you really think that what you are saying is the smoking gun against all the living theistic philosophers? And do you think that constitutes an argument?

I clarified what I said by mentioning theistic philosophy. Yes, theistic philosophers count too. That’s what I tried to say — although I was not as clear as I should have been. The mere fact that there are theistic philosophers doesn’t solve the ought from is debate — but they also think you can get an ought from is. That’s why they are moral realists.

Your three-part representation of the theistic syllogism is badly distorted. It’s a straw man. And you represent yourself as an expert?

I am only an expert compared to some, but certainly not as much as I would like. If it’s a straw man, then what’s the argument? It’s never explained how religion solves the problem nor is it explained why it’s impossible for atheists to solve it.

The theistic moral argument is not an argument from ignorance, by the way; it’s an argument from what is known about the nature of reality.

The “can’t get ought from is” argument is the argument from ignorance that I am talking about. It’s possible that some moral arguments for God do not commit the argument from ignorance fallacies — but that certainly doesn’t mean none of them do. I respectfully respond to many of these arguments elsewhere in a way that satisfies me, but it might not be satisfying to everyone.

This would not get you an MA in philosophy:

I think there are “moral facts,” so an ought can be an is.

This is my opinion. I discuss the justification in more detail elsewhere. It’s not an argument, so you are not committing the straw man.

That you think there are moral facts leads to no conclusion whatever, except for something descriptive about yourself. You have to show some reason why you think it, and why that thought implies the proferred conclusion. You knew that, right?

Exactly, so why did you misread what I said?

You provide no argument, so I need to give no argument.

Yes, I did. I can experience that pain is bad, and other people do as well. This can certainly be expanded into a greater argument and you know it has been elsewhere. Torbjörn Tännsjö and I have both our own arguments for this position, but I think that many other philosophers also have this belief considering how popular naturalism is right now. My argument is here: http://ethicalrealism.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/an-argument-for-moral-realism/

My argument is my serious attempt to argue for moral realism based on why I am really a moral realist. It’s not a sophistic attempt to prove moral realism just to be an atheistic moral realist. If I was a theist, I would still find the argument plausible — and the argument has little to do with God. I’m not a moral realist because God has giving me reason to be one (as far as I can tell).

The relation of abstract entities like numbers to the empirical world makes sense without too much work. Can you tell us how abstract ethical entities would relate to the world we live in?

I suspect that Robert Audi has that belief. He thinks that moral facts are self-evident and that the intrinsic disvalue of pain involves the “concept of pain.” It would be impossible for pain not to be intrinsically bad and suggesting such a thing would be a misapplication of the concept.

However, it should be noted that many philosophers talk about “abstract entities” in a Platonic sense. Such philosophers tend to reject epistemic naturalism (empiricism). Atheists don’t have to be empiricists and claiming such is a straw man of atheism.

Telling atheists that they aren’t allowed to believe in intrinsic value is certainly a straw man idea of atheism. I suspect that almost everyone believes in intrinsic values and certainly their behavior implies such.

Do you really think that what you are saying is the smoking gun against all the living moral realist atheistic philosophers? You really think atheistic moral realism is impossible? That sounds quite ambitious considering that we know so little about meta-ethics and most philosophers have to admit that their own opinion is not the only rational option.

That’s nice. Too bad I didn’t say anything like this. Where did I say ‘atheistic moral realism is impossible’?

I said that talk of ‘intrinsic value’ is not secular. You seem to be under the impression that, so long as someone is an atheist (or better yet, just says they are an atheist or secular) that this automatically makes everything they do, say, think or believe ‘secular’ by default.

It ain’t the case.

Stanly Fish and Steven Smith are not philosophers.

Neither are you, as far as I’m concerned. (Note: I don’t really care what classes you took or degree you have.) And guess what? It doesn’t matter. Observations and arguments don’t suddenly become invalid just because a person is in the wrong field.

The argument can be summed up as the following:

1. Atheists can’t get an ought from an is.
2. Atheists can start with “is” but will never get oughts.
3. Therefore, religion will save us!

Fish doesn’t say this, nor did Smith in that article, and I certainly did not either. Again, they pointed out something very basic: Once you start talking about final causes, purposes, intrinsic values, etc.. you are no longer in the secular realm. Even if you stamp your feet and huff and say ‘But I’m an atheist!’

Atheism is not the same as secularism. It’s not even the same as naturalism.

I suggest you pause, take a few deep breaths, and reread two things here: First, my very limited, quick comment. And then, your rant that went after utter strawmen, things neither I said nor Fish and company.

I didn’t raise an argument against the possibility of ‘atheist morality’. It’s enough at this juncture to point out that final causes, intrinsic value, and more are not ‘secular’. Not when Aquinas or Natural Law philosophers raise them, not when atheist philosophers raise them.

Crude,

That’s nice. Too bad I didn’t say anything like this. Where did I say ‘atheistic moral realism is impossible’?

That was my impression when you said intrinsic value is non-secular.

I said that talk of ‘intrinsic value’ is not secular. You seem to be under the impression that, so long as someone is an atheist (or better yet, just says they are an atheist or secular) that this automatically makes everything they do, say, think or believe ‘secular’ by default.

That was my impression, but I think intrinsic values can be believed by people just almost any religion — but I now see your point. (More later.)

Neither are you, as far as I’m concerned. (Note: I don’t really care what classes you took or degree you have.)

And rightfully so. A philosopher is not just someone who takes classes and so on.

And guess what? It doesn’t matter. Observations and arguments don’t suddenly become invalid just because a person is in the wrong field.

Yes, I agree. However, my impression of the article was that it is written by sophists using poor arguments, and I explained why I saw it as such. I might have been wrong.

Fish doesn’t say this, nor did Smith in that article, and I certainly did not either. Again, they pointed out something very basic: Once you start talking about final causes, purposes, intrinsic values, etc.. you are no longer in the secular realm. Even if you stamp your feet and huff and say ‘But I’m an atheist!’

What exactly did they argue? What are the premises and what is the conclusion?

I am sorry that I misread the article, but I’m still not sure what exactly it’s about.

I suggest you pause, take a few deep breaths, and reread two things here: First, my very limited, quick comment. And then, your rant that went after utter strawmen, things neither I said nor Fish and company.

I didn’t raise an argument against the possibility of ‘atheist morality’. It’s enough at this juncture to point out that final causes, intrinsic value, and more are not ‘secular’. Not when Aquinas or Natural Law philosophers raise them, not when atheist philosophers raise them.

I think I see your point now. The article said, “policy decisions should be made on the basis of secular reasons, reasons that, because they do not reflect the commitments or agendas of any religion, morality or ideology, can be accepted as reasons by all citizens no matter what their individual beliefs and affiliations.”

Given that definition of secular, I agree that intrinsic values aren’t secular because they are moral ideas. That is true by definition and the ought from is argument is then irrelevant. Moral realism isn’t secular either then.

However, the argument of the article seems to be that we can’t talk about morality without pre-existing moral beliefs. That might not be true. If you can get an ought from is, then they seem to admit that the argument fails. I think that is possible and their argument still seem fallacious to me. If we can get to moral conclusions starting without moral assumptions, then we can have “secular” discourse of a sense (or so the article implies).

Tom,

Yes I think there is some problem going on with communication and I realize that some things I said were unclear.

Furthermore, even if you had said it already, it would have still been irrelevant. To say that “theistic philosophers” count is by no means an answer to the question I asked in #216. What I was asking was whether you thought your statement in #214 (already quoted above) constituted a strong argument against theism. To answer, “theistic philosophers count too” is a complete non sequitur.

I didn’t give a strong argument against theism here. I don’t know why you would think that.

There is also a failure to communicate in that you apparently think your having written an argument on your blog somewhere serves as your having presented it here. For example:

Yes, I did. I can experience that pain is bad, and other people do as well.

I didn’t say that it counts that the argument was found elsewhere. From comment 214: Happiness (eudamonia) is what we take to be the “most final end.” Even if his biology and teleology is rejected, we can still agree that it’s rational to want to be happy. We experience that happiness has intrinsic value.

Perhaps this is not a detailed argument, but no one ever challenged it and I think it’s obviously true. More evidence for this position could be the example I gave of giving a drifter an aspirin.

You had pitted religion against philosophy, saying that to favor religion over philosophy is to favor unjustified beliefs over justified ones.

Read what I said again. If someone favors philosophy over religion, that person has put religion against philosophy. That doesn’t mean that everyone puts religion above philosophy. Religious philosophers, for example. I was discussing the article — what the article seems to imply. It seems to imply that we have to put religion against philosophy. That is my impression and I explained why. They never mention religious philosophy.

Clearly the implication is that religion unjustified beliefs, whereas philosophy justified beliefs. That is certainly creating a dichotomy.

I mentioned the false dichotomy without endorsing it — to show that the assumption is silly. I didn’t say “Therefore, we should reject religion!” That is what people are reading me as saying. It is a mis-reading.

Crude,

Wonderful. Then talk of a “secular morality” is a contradiction in terms. What you are advancing here and on your blog is just yet another non-secular morality.

Where does Fish say ‘we can’t talk about morality without pre-existing moral beliefs’?

The closest he comes is when he writes: If public reason has “deprived” the natural world of “its normative dimension” by conceiving of it as free-standing and tethered to nothing higher than or prior to itself, how, Smith asks, “could one squeeze moral values or judgments about justice . . . out of brute empirical facts?” No way that is not a sleight of hand. This is the cul de sac Enlightenment philosophy traps itself in when it renounces metaphysical foundations in favor of the “pure” investigation of “observable facts.” It must somehow bootstrap or engineer itself back up to meaning and the possibility of justified judgment, but it has deliberately jettisoned the resources that would enable it do so.

Note: Fish is not arguing that you can’t mount a philosophical, or even theological argument in favor of this or that moral belief or conclusion. He’s pointing out that philosophical or theological arguments for morality… are philosophical and theological arguments for morality. They are tied to a prioris, to intuitions, to metaphysical beliefs, and so on. In other words, it’s not that you can’t “get an ought from an is”, but the sort of reasoning that allows even for the possibility of this is not available to purely ‘secular’ reasoning.

First, why would he talk about getting ought from is and the impossibility of doing so for empiricists unless it is somehow relevant? Given your interpretation, it’s not relevant — and no one reading this will understand why he is doing it.

Second, what people call “secular” is obviously different than his definition considering that there are “secular ethics” and the historical motivation of being secular is precisely that an argument can apply to a person without requiring unwarranted assumptions.

Third, if we could get an ought from an is that is relevant because then we could have a secular discussion and reach moral conclusions, which is exactly what people have been trying to do with politics.

Your interpretation of the text is charitable, but I don’t see how the interpretation connects to real life issues that we face in everyday life. The interpretation seems to give the impression that the article is written with no practical application.

Fish says the requirement to make public discourse secular is a ” neat division, to be sure, which has the effect (not, I think, intended by Locke) of honoring religion by kicking it upstairs and out of sight.”

However, he also admits that religious reasons are permitted “to be voiced in contexts of public decision-making so long as they have a secular counterpart: thus, citing the prohibition against stealing in the Ten Commandments is all right because there is a secular version of the prohibition rooted in the law of property rights rather than in a biblical command.” Note that he himself is talking about “secular” as opposed to “religion” and he claims that “secular” is “not moral” but this is a false dichotomy if there is nonreligous ethics. Is nonreligious ethics secular or not?

He adds that, “This picture is routinely challenged by those who contend that secular reasons and secular discourse in general don’t tell the whole story; they leave out too much of what we know to be important to human life.”

In other words “secular” discourse is lacking moral facts. But then he is assuming that nonreligious morality is impossible. He admits that, “No they don’t, is the reply; everything said to be left out can be accounted for by the vocabularies of science, empiricism and naturalism; secular reasons can do the whole job,” but he wants to argue against this. You can’t account for morality from science, empiricism, or naturalism.

He mentions Smith’s book that attempts to prove that “secular reason can’t do the job (of identifying ultimate meanings and values) we need religion to do; it’s worse; secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job — of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects — without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.”

In other words religion is necessary for morality, and secular ethics is impossible. It’s impossible for atheists to get an ought from an is, but somehow religious people can do it.

It’s self-described naturalists, atheists, and materialists who have trouble there (And the ones who don’t generally reduce ‘naturalism’ and ‘materialism’ to near-meaningless ideas, and have views which sit at tension with atheism as well.)

I already discussed why I don’t think they “have trouble” with such a position.

Tom,

I admitted that I wasn’t clear in what I said already. The context of that paragraph was what those two seem to think to me.

I said the following:

Stanly Fish and Steven Smith are not philosophers. They are not an experts and their arguments fail to appreciate the depth of philosophy. The objections to philosophy in favor of religion are meaningless because to favor “religion” over “philosophy” is to favor unjustified beliefs over justified ones.

i.e. To argue that we must reject philosophy in favor of nonphilosophical religion is silly.

Crude,

I pointed out how it’s relevant, and even provided the quote where Fish frames its relevance: Because the tools one is limited to under the heading “secular” are inadequate. It’s not that someone can’t mount the appropriate arguments in other contexts, with other tools.

What are the “tools” one is limited to in secular context? Philosophy? Empirical data? Either way, moral facts could be made known.

But what assumptions are ‘unwarranted’ spins off into endless argument anyway, and ethics are not morals.

Perhaps. I never said that all religious thought should be silenced. Reasonableness is merely a motivation for being secular because there are many irrational nonphilosophical arguments given by religious people and people tend not to want to hear them in the public arena. Religious philosophy could be considered to be secular insofar as whatever they argue for could be accepted by nonreligious people.

Further, I have a very different understanding of “the historical motivation of being secular”. Communism required numerous unwarranted assumptions, but it is still regarded as a secular project.

Right, “Secular” doesn’t mean “reasonable.” Being secular could be necessary but not sufficient for rationality. Being secular might merely “help” one be rational from time to time without even been sufficient for it.

Thomists, religious people, Aristotileans, and more think they can get an ought from an is. They also would argue their views are warranted. Are they secular now?

I don’t equate “reasonable” with “secular.”

And you said he wasn’t a philosopher.

What about it?

If to be not-secular is to be religious, then apparently Fish is claiming that much of what we take to be “secular” is, as a matter of fact, religious after all. He’s certainly claiming that much of what gets branded as “secular”, isn’t.

Is that just a semantic point? What exactly is religion supposed to be in the first place? It’s not defined and he isn’t warranted to tell us that “all morality is religious” based on the information given here.

And here you go again – you seem to think that religious or non-secular beliefs are “things theists have, but not atheists”. And Fish is helping to illustrate that that ain’t true. If you want to call Thomist thought ‘secular’, be my guest. The Thomists will love that green light into politics. So will I.

Exactly, I don’t think all atheists have a religion. I don’t personally affiliate with any religion. Of course, that depends on what you mean by “religion.” If it just means that I have beliefs about the world and such, then I am religious — but that isn’t what anyone tends to mean by the word “religion.”

Try to accept this: You can be religious, you can have non-secular views, and still be an atheist.

Yes, like Buddhists, etc. Not all atheists affiliate with a religion, though.

And Fish is pointing out that once you start dabbling in “intrinsic value”, teleology, final causes, purposes, etc, you have – *even if you are an atheist* – left the secular behind. You’re in the territory of the non-secular now.

Again, I disagree — insofar as I don’t agree to whatever mysterious definition of “religion” is being used here.

If this is what Fish is arguing, then what are his premises to reach that conclusion?

Crude,

I think your understanding of the ‘secular’ divide is woefully inadequate. Plenty of religious arguments are regarded as ‘rational’ and ‘philosophical’, including ones meant to persuade others to be ‘religious’.

You are putting words in my mouth. I never denied it.

It sure is in the context Fish is speaking, precisely because he’s noting the connection between talk of final causes, metaphysics, etc, and the non-secular. And plenty of people do equate having metaphysical beliefs, certainly beliefs about morality and purpose, as ‘religion’. Again, it’s not enough for someone to personally say “I am not religious”, anymore than it is for someone who wants to pass law X to say “I want law X passed for reasons that have nothing to do with religion”.

Do you have an argument in there? Sounds like we have nothing but a semantics debate.

What’s so mysterious about noting that talk of final causes, intrinsic value, purpose, metaphysics and so on goes beyond the secular?

What’s mysterious about it is that it’s inconsistent with how people use the word and our tradition of non-religious organizations. There’s a tradition of nonreligious philosophy e.g. Stoicism and Epicureanism) that has beliefs about reality

Dennett didn’t seem to think it was very ‘mysterious’ when he equated communism under Mao, Stalin, Lenin, etc as religious/proto-religious.

What about it? I never said I agreed with him. I would have to study the rituals and dogma associated with communism in Russia and so on to know for sure if he is right.

But hey, by all means – if you think intrinsic value, final causes, metaphysics, purpose, etc are secular, as I’ve said previously, go for it. It’s a great way to utterly deflate the secular, and likely turn everything from the Iranian regime to the Dali Lama’s old one ‘secular’ in the process.

So, you’re point is that no argument is needed. His article is meant to prove that moral realist atheists are religious by definition. The article was never clear on that point to me. I see no premises or conclusion. But for some reason I am not allowed different interpretation of the article than you.

Part of the article was meant to show that empirical evidence couldn’t lead to moral conclusions. I disagree with that point and it comes out of nowhere. If such a contentious point is merely used as an “example” of something (which was never clear from the article), then it is a horrible example.

I personally don’t see the dichotomy between secular and religious reasons to be a helpful one. If Thomists want to join the political debate, feel free. Any reasonable political views should be welcome over what we’ve been getting.

Smith’s article is incredibly vague and it is easy for me to imagine that it implies something that you could disagree with. You could say that I am misrepresenting his view, but it’s mysterious if anything is really being said there. It’s unclear what the premises and conclusion is supposed to be. For some help to understand Smith’s argument, information about Smith’s book might be of some help. The Amazon blurb says the following:

Thus, Rawlsian “public reason” filters appeals to religion or other “comprehensive doctrines” out of public deliberation. But these restrictions have the effect of excluding our deepest normative commitments, virtually assuring that the discourse will be shallow. Furthermore, because we cannot defend our normative positions without resorting to convictions that secular discourse deems inadmissible, we are frequently forced to smuggle in those convictions under the guise of benign notions such as freedom or equality.

Based on this blurb, some comments should be made. First, Rawls’s idea is not to require comprehensive doctrines and doesn’t single out religion. It is smith who smuggles the words “religion” into the issue by equating it with “comprehensive doctrine” (and equating “secular” with “noncomprehensive doctrine.”

Second, Smith’s position that “we cannot defend our normative positions without resorting to convictions that secular discourse deems inadmissible” is contentious and vague. I would have to read the book to know if he can make more sense than the blurb on amazon, and Fish’s review doesn’t help.

I can’t remember much about Rawl’s Political Liberalism, but I must admit that a ban on “comprehensive doctrine” from public discourse sounds like a good way to ban all philosophical thought from public discourse. Rawls thinks that moral theories are questionable and each person is entitled to disagree about the best moral theory. It could be preferable for a political argument to lack ties to morality (or a moral theory) if possible; but it seems a bit extreme to ban it.

A fairly decent review of Smith’s book can be found here: http://jcs.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/12/20/jcs.csq131.full

It’s hard to know how well he argued for his position, but it is clear that his main mission is to get “religious discourse” into the public arena — “Smith’s prescription is simply to open up the cage, which might lead to more meaningful and educational conversations, notwithstanding our disagreements. Or it might not. But the old adage, we will never know until we try, still rings true.”

In other words, Smith doesn’t actually defend the possibility of meaningful religious political discourse, he merely attacks “secular” discourse — including philosophy itself.

It is also made clear that Smith agrees that there is secular morality and he attempts to prove philosophers are wrong to defend such things.

If the review is accurate, it isn’t clear that Smith thinks philosophy has anything to offer morality at all. His book seems to imply fairly “anti-intellectual” conclusions just like Fish’s article seemed to imply to me.