Answering an Atheist (2 points I want help with)

[frangiuliano115]

But I do - it’s called Faith!

An atheist who knows the mind of God ?

After all this heavy stuff, a good laugh is needed!

: )

Fran

 

[frangiuliano115]

Buon Giorno Bradski,

Your reply made me kind of sad.

Where’s the party? There is no party. We’re in a mess and the only explanation is the one the bible gives.

Now you keep asking Peter Plato for an example of an immoral act that does not cause harm. I have been thinking about it. Here’s your example:

Someone harmed me in some way - that’s clearly immoral.

Now I hate that person - that is also immoral.

But you would say that it isn’t. But let’s see…

When Jesus did all His teaching, He raised the bar. Considerably. Luckily, He gave us the capacity to adhere to the new and stricter standards.

So when He said “You have heard that the ancients were told ‘You Shall Not Commit Murder’ but I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother, shall be guilty before the court…”
Mathew 5:21

Because Jesus brought every action and thought down to the heart. See also Mathew 5:27-28. And this is how the bar was raised.

But, who am I hurting by hating my brother? Myself, of course. And cannot that be considered harm? Of course it’s harm. Just think of the high blood pressure it causes and the energy it takes away from you. But to the outside world, it would seem as though no harm is caused by the hate which no one can see. With Jesus’ higher ethical standards, the hate can be considered immoral.

Jesus was the first and best psychologist of all time. Think of it; all those self-help books (which are fine) are based on concepts such as the above, or Love Your Neighbor As Yourself. The bible is such a complete book and so much can be gleaned from it.

Could I just say why your respnse to me was so sad? It made me feel alone. Maybe God is just a crutch, as I’ve heard many times. But I’ve seen things we can’t get into and I wouldn’t put them in the category of being a crutch. Have you seen the movie Signs with Mel Gibson? It’s not about an alien invasion. Well, maybe in a certain kind of way.

 

[frangiuliano115]

Buon Giorno Bradski,

Your reply made me kind of sad.

Where’s the party? There is no party. We’re in a mess and the only explanation is the one the bible gives.

Now you keep asking Peter Plato for an example of an immoral act that does not cause harm. I have been thinking about it. Here’s your example:

Someone harmed me in some way - that’s clearly immoral.

Now I hate that person - that is also immoral.

But you might say that it isn’t because it’s not hurting anyone. But let’s see…

When Jesus did all His teaching, He raised the bar. Considerably. Luckily, He gave us the capacity to adhere to the new and stricter standards.

So when He said “You have heard that the ancients were told ‘You Shall Not Commit Murder’ but I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother, shall be guilty before the court…”
Mathew 5:21

Because Jesus brought every action and thought down to the heart. See also Mathew 5:27-28. And this is how the bar was raised.

But, who am I hurting by hating my brother? Myself, of course. And cannot that be considered harm? Of course it’s harm. But to the outside world, it would seem as though no harm is caused by the hate which no one can see. With Jesus’ higher ethical standards, the hate can be considered immoral. So, are we not conforming to God’s standards once again?

Jesus was the first and best psychologist of all time. Think of it; all those self-help books (which are fine) are based on concepts such as the above, or Love Your Neighbor As Yourself. The bible is such a complete book and so much can be gleaned from it.

Could I just say why your respnse to me was so sad? It made me feel alone. Maybe God is just a crutch, as I’ve heard many times. But I’ve seen things we can’t get into and I wouldn’t put them in the category of being a crutch. Have you seen the movie Signs with Mel Gibson? It’s not about an alien invasion. Well, maybe in a certain kind of way.

 

[Bradski]

He gives us law and guidance and a capacity to reason. Well meaning people may well come to different conclusions.

Good grief, isn’t this what I’be been saying all along? That we have to make these decisions ourselves using our God-given capacity to reason. So if harm has occurred we can debate if it relates to a moral or an immoral act.

I do not accept this axiom because (a) it’s meaningless and (b) you’re not God to be defining the right and the wrong, the just and the unjust.

Immoral acts don’t have negative consequences? What on earth…?

And I certainly do reserve the right to declare something as being right or wrong. As Rau says above, God has given us the capacity to reason and reach conclusions about matters of morality ourselves. Whether we can agree or not is another matter.

And I hope that you realise that your statement that only God can define right or wrong means that you are declaring that you are not in a position to do so. Despite suggesting that, for example, slavery is wrong. Are you defining this as being wrong yourself or are you getting this info from God?

Again, I am not disputing that immoral acts involve harm, I just suspect that you can’t explicate a compelling set of criteria for distinguishing those harmful acts which have moral implications from those which don’t. The reason I suspect you don’t is because you keep trying to deflect the question.

And I think that we are now indisputably in agreement that I or acts have negative outcomes. Please tell Trevor. He seems to think it’s all nonsense.

As to how we determine the immorality of any given harmful act, you give the answer yourself below. We need to work it out ourselves, using reasonable arguments. That is, arguments that you would expect a reasonable person to accept. It’s not easy, but as has been said previously, we have been given the capacity to reason but even then we might not be able to reach consensus.

The answer is both. He does give an unequivocal answer but we also do need to work it out for ourselves precisely because part of being a good moral agent is to grasp what it means to be a good moral agent and to act from that state. We are autonomous beings after all.

God has given an unequivocal answer as to whether killing a mosquito or a slug or a dog is moral or not? Please let me know where I can find this information.

 

[Bradski]

There is a sentence above that has a typo. Noticed too late to edit, so here it is in the corrected form:

‘And I think that we are now indisputably in agreement that immoral acts have negative outcomes. Please tell Trevor. He seems to think it’s all nonsense.’

 

[Pallas_Athene]

But I do - it’s called Faith!

I am sure you are aware that the words: “faith” and “knowledge” are not the same. If you have knowledge, there is no need for faith. And if you need faith, you have no knowledge.

An atheist who knows the mind of God ?

A rational person, using logic can make correct inferences from the presented facts. If someone is in the position to prevent something that he does not want to happen, and he does not prevent it, then he do not care. Elementary, my dear Watson. Whether that “someone” is you or God, it makes no difference.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Good grief, isn’t this what I’be been saying all along? That we have to make these decisions ourselves using our God-given capacity to reason. So if harm has occurred we can debate if it relates to a moral or an immoral act.

Immoral acts don’t have negative consequences? What on earth…?

And I certainly do reserve the right to declare something as being right or wrong. As Rau says above, God has given us the capacity to reason and reach conclusions about matters of morality ourselves. Whether we can agree or not is another matter.

And I hope that you realise that your statement that only God can define right or wrong means that you are declaring that you are not in a position to do so. Despite suggesting that, for example, slavery is wrong. Are you defining this as being wrong yourself or are you getting this info from God?

And I think that we are now indisputably in agreement that I or acts have negative outcomes. Please tell Trevor. He seems to think it’s all nonsense.

As to how we determine the immorality of any given harmful act, you give the answer yourself below. We need to work it out ourselves, using reasonable arguments. That is, arguments that you would expect a reasonable person to accept. It’s not easy, but as has been said previously, we have been given the capacity to reason but even then we might not be able to reach consensus.

I am saying we do need to “work it out ourselves,” but that does not entail that WHATEVER we do work out for ourselves is the final and definitive morality that we must adhere to. This is the point at which we diverge. You seem to be of the mind to claim that whatever it is that we do work out ourselves, THAT is what we, our self alone, are “held” to – well, sort of – emphasis on SELF. You defer to the right of each individual to have and hold their own morality since no one can or should impose their morality on others – the “Sez who?” conditional.

My view is that morality, to be at all meaningful, is of the type that by its very nature compels ALL moral agents to abide by it, whether or not they agree to it. When we look for objective morality what we are actually looking for are those principles, moral facts, end goods etc., which by their very nature impose obligations on all moral agents, no exceptions. To say we are morally obligated is to imply that there is no opt-out clause by which we can exit when we don’t like where things are headed. THAT is no longer morality but self-interest masquerading as morality.

This, again, is where we fundamentally disagree. By insisting on working it out “ourselves,” you put the onus on the right and prerogative of self to accept or reject, to opt in or out.

By insisting that we “work it out ourselves,” I put the onus on our responsibility as moral agents to discover the moral obligations we inherently incur qua moral agents. Working it out “ourselves” is our first moral responsibility, so that, properly understood, we will unflinchingly carry out the implications of morality as a reality, not as a self-imposed “system” over which we retain full authority and power to change or opt out at will.

If we can’t get past the requirement that morality imposes obligations on all moral agents, it would seem that you will squirrel in your “Sez who?” option when the going gets a little more demanding than you wish to allow – even when the best of “reasonableness” takes us there.

Which brings us back to your unwillingness to define when harm becomes morally relevant. (You, once again, took a wide path around the question, hoping no one would notice that you didn’t address it.) It would appear to be another “back door” which allows you to escape the down and dirty task of actually committing to the obligatory nature of moral principles while keeping up the appearance of “being moral.”

Are fetuses harmed during abortion procedures? It would appear that they are. Is the harm inflicted upon them morally insignificant? You appear to insist that it is, at least “insignificant” with respect to the convenience of potential mothers. When direct harm, in this case, is weighed against the “benefits” of recreational licentiousness, you appear to drop whatever case you were trying to make for harm being morally determinate in favour of some other principle – the right to pleasure on the part of consenting adults. So harm isn’t the abiding criteria for your morality, is it?

Again, the issue of ‘when is harm morally relevant’ raises its malformed head. Harm, it seems, can’t be THAT morally important if you are ready to throw it overboard as a guiding principle whenever the opportunity for pleasure arises. Your ‘harm-based’ moral system appears to be a fickle and capricious one.

God has given an unequivocal answer as to whether killing a mosquito or a slug or a dog is moral or not? Please let me know where I can find this information.

I would suppose that since
mosquitoes and slugs are killed in huge numbers every day merely as the natural course of life in nature, the act of killing one or other is not morally significant, in itself. However, that depends a great deal on one’s motives for doing so and may indicate something about the moral state of one’s being. Similarly, killing a dog isn’t, in itself, morally wrong. Killing a human being may or may not be. However, doing either one capriciously or maliciously is morally significant in that it harms the agent committing the act in a morally significant way.

Recall that the Church’s teaching on morality points out that there are three dimensions to any moral act – the motives of the agent, the circumstances surrounding the act and the nature of the act itself.

All very reasonable IMHO.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I am sure you are aware that the words: “faith” and “knowledge” are not the same. If you have knowledge, there is no need for faith. And if you need faith, you have no knowledge.

Well, that would be the fundamentalist notion of the relationship between faith and knowledge, but that would all depend upon your faith in your knowledge.

In other words, it is simplistic to think that if you have knowledge you don’t need faith, since an abiding faith in your current knowledge is what led YOU to make the above claim in the first place. :ehh:

 

[Rau]

Good grief, isn’t this what I’be been saying all along? That we have to make these decisions ourselves using our God-given capacity to reason. So if harm has occurred we can debate if it relates to a moral or an immoral act.

You’d recall I said some time back that all systems of morality require judgement by the actors. This is evident in that no system of moral law is exhaustive but relies on a finite set of rules. The application of these rules to a situation needs to be recognized and one’s proposed actions need to be analysed. And after all that, a human judgement may be necessary and it may be one with no clear “right” answer.

As to the “laws”, you say either they don’t exist (no intrinsically evil acts) and you will simply use reason to judge a given situation, or alternatively, that human reason must determine them (…not sure which position you hold) and I say that God has given us a playbook - through his revelation and the teaching capacity of the Church. Through faith, I ought to follow this playbook, even when my human reasoning does not understand.

As you say Bradski, our capacity to reason comes from God. I agree, but I also believe he gave us more than that.

 

[Trevor_Dewey]

A rational person, using logic can make correct inferences from the presented facts. If someone is in the position to prevent something that he does not want to happen, and he does not prevent it, then he do not care. Elementary, my dear Watson. Whether that “someone” is you or God, it makes no difference.

God did not create a kindergarten Universe.

A Universe where an omniscient being immediately corrects all the errors of the children under his care, covers all the sharp corners with felt, and locks all the cabinets, is not a place anyone would want to live. And that includes you, if you took some time to sit down and examine the consequences of the statement you make in this quote.

As for your faith and knowledge quip? It just shows you have very little knowledge about faith, particularly the Catholic faith.

 

[Trevor_Dewey]

There is a sentence above that has a typo. Noticed too late to edit, so here it is in the corrected form:

‘And I think that we are now indisputably in agreement that immoral acts have negative outcomes. Please tell Trevor. He seems to think it’s all nonsense.’

There is no such thing as an immoral act (or a moral act) in a Godless universe. So when you say that you think “immoral acts have negative outcomes” that is a null statement coming from you (not trying to insult you here by “you” I mean by your perspective that there is no God, but you’re going to try and create a moral system anyway).

It’s a different statement coming from a Catholic, who necessarily must base his or her definitions of morality on the wisdom received from God via the Church.

Cheers

 

[Bradski]

I am saying we do need to “work it out ourselves,” but that does not entail that WHATEVER we do work out for ourselves is the final and definitive morality that we must adhere to. This is the point at which we diverge. You seem to be of the mind to claim that whatever it is that we do work out ourselves, THAT is what we, our self alone, are “held” …

If we discern ourselves what is to be the correct action (and you do agree that this is something that we need to do), then what other course would you possible expect anyone to follow. If you decide that X is wrong, then ‘X is wrong’ must then be the basis for your actions. How else do you think this could possibly work?

You defer to the right of each individual to have and hold their own morality since no one can or should impose their morality on others – the “Sez who?” conditional.

Everyone DOES have their own view of morality. Because, as you say: ‘we do need to “work it out ourselves” ‘. Unless you think that everyone is going to come up with exactly the same answers to all possible questions, then it is plainly obvious that people will hold different views.

Now whether they are free to act on those views is another matter. If what you believe causes unnecessary harm (this is where the harm comes into the equation) then I am free to try to dissuade you from action. If you think that genital mutilation is morally acceptable, then I have very good (secular) arguments to show to you that it isn’t. And I don’t need to quote scripture or appeal to any higher authority to do it.

If, however, you think that masturbation is morally acceptable and I don’t, then I have no interest in taking it any further. As far as I am concerned, there is no harm done if you practice it so go for your life. If the situation was reversed and we held the opposite views, then you would have to show that harm was being done to convince me it was immoral.

The fact that I am including harm as a determinant is to prevent anyone saying: ‘Well, it just is…because God says so…because it is written…’.

My view is that morality, to be at all meaningful, is of the type that by its very nature compels ALL moral agents to abide by it, whether or not they agree to it. When we look for objective morality what we are actually looking for are those principles, moral facts, end goods etc., which by their very nature impose obligations on all moral agents, no exceptions.

What you are describing is a universally held moral view (which does not make it absolute – we don’t vote on these matters). But if someone says do whatever is necessary to win the battle., then there are infinite number of possible scenarios and it would be literally impossible for everyone to reach agreement on where to draw the line. At some point we all have to say – well, I don’t really agree with you but I understand your reasoning. That doesn’t make me right and the other guy wrong. There are very many areas where there is no ‘correct’ decision’. Just one with which you might disagree.

By insisting that we “work it out ourselves,” I put the onus on our responsibility as moral agents to discover the moral obligations we inherently incur qua moral agents. Working it out “ourselves” is our first moral responsibility, so that, properly understood, we will unflinchingly carry out the implications of morality as a reality, not as a self-imposed “system” over which we retain full authority and power to change or opt out at will.

Why do you think I’m insisting on anything else? If I decide on a course of action regarding morality (assuming that I have all available information and have debated the matter responsibly), then I have chosen that course because I believe it to be the correct one. I will then ‘unflinchingly carry out the implications of morality as a reality’. It becomes real for me. Not some ephemeral quote from scripture or dogma from one or more religions.

If we can’t get past the requirement that morality imposes obligations on all moral agents…

It does. On the understanding that no harm is done.

Which brings us back to your unwillingness to define when harm becomes morally relevant.

It’s entirely dependent on the situation. I’m sure we have different views on it.

…mosquitoes and slugs are killed in huge numbers every day merely as the natural course of life in nature, the act of killing one or other is not morally significant, in itself.

Not morally significant because lots are killed anyway? I don’t think I like that argument. For all sort of reasons that I shouldn’t have to articulate. It would also mean it would be OK to kill a primate. I think that would be immoral.

Recall that the Church’s teaching on morality points out that there are three dimensions to any moral act – the motives of the agent, the circumstances surrounding the act and the nature of the act itself.

I don’t need the church to point out the bleedin’ obvious. As I said, harm becomes relevant entirely dependent on the situation. Nice to know the church agrees with me.

 

[Bradski]

You’d recall I said some time back that all systems of morality require judgement by the actors. This is evident in that no system of moral law is exhaustive but relies on a finite set of rules. The application of these rules to a situation needs to be recognized and one’s proposed actions need to be analysed. And after all that, a human judgement may be necessary and it may be one with no clear “right” answer.

As to the “laws”, you say either they don’t exist (no intrinsically evil acts) and you will simply use reason to judge a given situation, or alternatively, that human reason must determine them (…not sure which position you hold) and I say that God has given us a playbook - through his revelation and the teaching capacity of the Church. Through faith, I ought to follow this playbook, even when my human reasoning does not understand.

As you say Bradski, our capacity to reason comes from God. I agree, but I also believe he gave us more than that.

I have no reason to disagree with anything you said there. With one exception.

When my human reasoning says: ‘This doesn’t make sense. There is no reasonable argument to support it’, I am at liberty to reject it (in fact, I have no choice). You appear to be saying that you do not have that option.

 

[Bradski]

There is no such thing as an immoral act (or a moral act) in a Godless universe. So when you say that you think “immoral acts have negative outcomes” that is a null statement coming from you (not trying to insult you here by “you” I mean by your perspective that there is no God, but you’re going to try and create a moral system anyway).

Well, yes. I’m going to give it my best shot, if it’s OK with you.

So let’s just say that in my moral system (such as it is and godless as it may be – and you should be using a lower case ‘g’ in this case) and also in yours, immoral acts have negative outcomes.

So if you can’t persuade me that any given act is harmful, then I’m going to reject it as immoral. In my system and in yours.

 

[Rau]

I have no reason to disagree with anything you said there. With one exception.

When my human reasoning says: ‘This doesn’t make sense. There is no reasonable argument to support it’, I am at liberty to reject it (in fact, I have no choice). You appear to be saying that you do not have that option.

Not quite - I have the same options as anyone else. We are all at liberty to choose any outcome. I may have a rationale (“follow God’s law”, not my own reasoning) which provides a basis to look beyond human reasoning and choose what I (or am taught) is right. The Atheist would have no reason to depart from his reasoned conclusion (unless choosing what he concludes is “wrong”).

Ideally, your human reasoning (acknowledging your human frailty) should say: *]“I don’t understand this. I cannot see a reasonable argument to support it”. * For the atheist, there is only human reason, but he also knows his reasoning and fact base is imperfect.

A “believer”, in thinking about an issue, may conclude exactly the same thing as the Atheist (cannot through reason understand why something is taught as immoral). But, he is called to subjugate his reason to God’s law and the teaching authority of his Church.

 

[Peter_Plato]

It does. On the understanding that no harm is done.

We SEEM to be making progress. Now, since harm is the definitive benchmark by which the moral permissibility of actions is grounded, we are left with at least one minor detail to be ironed out, I suppose.

How is harm measured?

Do you mean physical injury alone constitutes harm? Do you count injury to internal psychological or subjective states as harm? Is harm in those instances, purely self-reported?

Relying on such non-objective indicators would make determining harm to be highly problematic.

It would seem to me that to properly ascertain harm, it must be with reference to objectively determinable final ends or goods, so actions that bring about the deprivation or removal of these goods from someone entitled to them would make such actions harmful to their interests. Would you agree with that?

Harm cannot be purely defined as physical or obvious trauma, but more crucially related to the interests and well-being of the whole and human individual with moral standing. So, then, it would make sense to speak of harm done to someone if it debilitates or removes from them the possibility of attaining some good to which they are entitled merely by virtue of being human, yes?

In order to adequately address this question of harm, it would be necessary to arrive at a complete accounting regarding those goods to which any moral beings under consideration are properly entitled. That, in turn, means we would need to arrive at a plausible depiction as to what kind of moral beings these are, the good to which they are entitled based upon the ends to which they are properly ordered.

Otherwise, it seems to me, we are left with a rather shallow view of morality that only counts obvious physical trauma as harm, discounting anything else as frivolous or unnecessarily complicated. Such a position would mean that commonly held notions that acts such as betrayal, slander, deception, and the like, would not be “immoral” since they cause no observable, physical harm – except when they do, of course.

It would appear that for a proper understanding of harm as a ground for morality to be achieved we need a fairly robust account of what it means to be human in order to determine when the actions of others create determinable harm to our humanity, fully detailed. We aren’t merely physical beings, correct?

There is more to being human than hosting a myriad of chemical perturbations inside a bag of dermal tissue. Therefore, what it means to be “human” would be THE salient question to be properly answered before we can adequately discuss what it means to “harm” a human being in any meaningful moral sense. Yes?

 

[Rau]

If we discern ourselves what is to be the correct action (and you do agree that this is something that we need to do), then what other course would you possible expect anyone to follow. If you decide that X is wrong, then ‘X is wrong’ must then be the basis for your actions. How else do you think this could possibly work?

Very often it is not about choosing the right course, since there are usually a multiplicity of right courses. God’s Law - “honour the father and thy mother” - certainly teaches us something valuable about a positive obligation we have, but is not definitive in telling us how we should assist our parents in their final years. Human judgement and conscience will need to play a large part in guiding our choices.

What is “wrong” - what we may not do (“the negative precepts of the Law”) - are considerably more definitive in God’s law. Intentionally murdering innocents is ruled out - no ifs or buts. There is no room for human reason to figure out if, in such and such a particular circumstance, it would be OK to set out to murder some innocent person. Happily, human reason of many people (not all) concludes the same thing.

In other cases, we avoid breaking God’s law (theologists would say “there is no evil moral object” in out act), but (morally relevant) harm results. We need to apply reason to understand:

• Was our motivation Good?
• Did we choose a course to minimise bad consequences?

and if we can honestly answer yes, then we judge we’ve acted morally.

 

[Peter_Plato]

So if you can’t persuade me that any given act is harmful, then I’m going to reject it as immoral. In my system and in yours.

Don’t you mean…

“So if you CAN’T persuade me that any given act is harmful, then I am going to ACCEPT it as permissible, in my system and in yours.”

Your expression simply doesn’t make sense according to your own “system.” Why would you reject an act as “immoral,” if it can’t be shown to be harmful, given that harm, for you, is the determiner of “immoral?”

 

[JakeG]

To return to the original post:

MC: “Gotta say that the logic of “if there are bad things in the world, God is implied” is completely illogical, and is a HUGE leap of faith. The concept of evil is more easily defined as the things we don’t want done to us, or others. The worse the indiscretion, the more evil we perceive it to be. **Those ideas can and do exist without God. To say that I need God in order to know that killing, stealing, etc, is bad is to give away your common sense to a man in the sky. We know it’s bad because we can see the effects it has on people everyday. **They’re tangible. They effect us. **To accept that there is a “way things are supposed to be” is incredibly naïve. People shouldn’t hurt each other because people know what it feels like to be hurt. **That’s logic. Anything else is just arbitrary reasoning for things you don’t, or can’t understand.”

I don’t see how it is possible to prove, or disprove, the existence of God. I don’t want to get involved in an argument about evolution. Suffice to say that the existence of a moral code MAY be explained in terms of the evolution of adaptive behaviour. A pioneer in this field is Martin Nowak, a practising Catholic. See his book, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed

As an amusing aside, I don’t think anyone has caused Richard Dawkins to spit the dummy like Martin Nowak.

According to Wikipedia:

Nowak was co-director with Sarah Coakley of the Evolution and Theology of Cooperation project at Harvard University, sponsored by the Templeton Foundation.[11] He is also a member of the Board of Advisers of the Templeton Foundation.[12] In a lecture given at Harvard in March 2007 called “Evolution and Christianity”, Nowak, a Roman Catholic,[13] argued that “Science and religion are two essential components in the search for truth. Denying either is a barren approach.”[14]

So why do some people believe in God and others not?

I don’t know.

I grew up in what was essentially an atheist family. Over decades I sort of drifted towards a belief in God. In my case there was no Damascene conversion, no sudden moment of seeing the light, nothing dramatic. It just sort of happened. I can’t give any logical explanation for it.

 

[Rau]

It would also mean it would be OK to kill a primate. I think that would be immoral.

Why is it immoral to kill a primate?

I don’t need the church to point out the bleedin’ obvious. As I said, harm becomes relevant entirely dependent on the situation. Nice to know the church agrees with me.

The view that morality rests on a 3-font structure is not “bleedin’ obvious”. It is, however, the basis of Catholic moral theology, very briefly outlined here:
vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a4.htm

And from all you’ve written, it does not fit the picture you paint or your system of morality.