Hitchens and ethics

[hatsoff]

Hatsoff, thanks for responding.

You appear to have tersely stated a basic utilitarian argument for ethical behavior, that ethical behavior is that behavior which minimizes pain. You appear to have appended the word “value” to it without really connecting it, and this is the crux of the argument.

I can see why you might think I’m a utilitarian, based on what I wrote in my last post, but let me presently assure you that I am not.

If Hitchens had said in any of his interviews “I am an animal, I act according to self-interest although given the complexity of my brain and the behavioral options it affords, the exact path of self-interest may be a bit circuitous and difficult to follow, but ultimate like all animals my behaviors have no higher meaning” I would have given him a pass.

However, as I noted, Hitchens (the very popular and visible atheist celebrity) regularly invokes value terminology like right and wrong, without context or foundation. This is precisely why I am interested.

I cannot defend Hitchens’ ethical philosophy, since I am not familiar with it. Heck, I probably disagree with him on a few small matters. However, in my experience, theists and atheists alike tend to badly misunderstand each other. So, I suggest that you pay close attention to precisely what he says, and try not to imbue too much of your own interpretation into it.

No one has supported the assertion that everyone has uncontrollable empathy for their fellow man. I submit that since your assertion is a completely unsupported universal, a counter-example suffices to refute it. See the killing fields. Any of them.

I do not recall making that assertion. I only told you that I have uncontrollable empathy for my fellow man. To that I will add that I usually assume my peers do, as well—but I fully expect exceptions. For them I have little hope.

 

[AntiTheist]

What I’d like to know is what ethical theory do the modern pop atheists espouse?

I can’t speak for Hitchens and Dawkins specifically, but the versions of ethics embraced by atheists that I’ve heard all seem to turn around the ideas of natural empathy and the rational construction of human communities.

The short version is this: I’d rather not be killed and have my stuff stolen. Since I possess empathy, I have the feeling that most other people wouldn’t like being killed or having their stuff stolen either. So I talk to a bunch of people and find out that my feeling was correct – they don’t like those things either. So we decide that we’re going to form a community in which we all agree not to kill each other and not to take each other’s stuff. We further decide that we will band together and punish any member of the community who does.

Over time, we add more rules, we take away rules, and we learn from experience what rules work best for securing the things that we want.

The “source” of morality, then, is simply that: our inclination to work together and build a better society that we all want to live in.

Now me personally, while I agree with the above as a description of how communities got started, I don’t agree with the “morality” label. I’m a moral nihilist. I don’t think “morality” or “ethics” is the proper term for it at all.

Our behavior comes from our values, which come from a wide variety of sources: our natural empathy, our reason, our social training, tradition, and probably other sources, too. In any given situation, there’s only what I do and how I judge what other people do – all of it deriving from my values.

In essence, “good” means nothing more than “my values approve” and “evil” means nothing more than “my values disapprove.” So I tend not to use “good” and “evil”; instead, I use words that make it clear that I’m pronouncing a value judgment.

I imagine that most people won’t like that, that most people would prefer to live in a world with morality – but, of course, what you like and what you prefer has nothing to do with what is true.

 

[AntiTheist]

The point of these objections is that, if Darwin’s theory of natural selection were applicable to humans as to the other animals, in order to weed out the helpless weak, nothing would be morally wrong with the use of eugenics.

Evolution isn’t prescriptive; it’s descriptive. It tells us how we got here, not how we should act now.

 

[ipwnuathalo]

I imagine that most people won’t like that, that most people would prefer to live in a world with morality – but, of course, what you like and what you prefer has nothing to do with what is true.

Antitheist - Thanks for responding.

I have a leading question. If you’d answer it, I’d be grateful.

May I kill a human being if I wish to?

This is presuming that I have done an analysis on the situation and I have determined that, for me, it is the best course of action and accomplishes my goals.

Thanks for indulging my thought experiment. I am anxious to see if you respond in the way I suspect you will or in some unsuspected way. Thanks.

 

[Touchstone]

I spent a few hours listening to the “four horsemen” (Dawkins, Hitches, et al) discuss atheism and theism. My previous experience with atheism was with Neitzsche.

I am hung up on something here. Neitzsche makes perfect sense to me. If God does not exist, all things are permissible. This is an atheism which is perfectly accessible and understandable. If God does not exist, then I am a product of random chemical processes, and I do not possess any other reality than my physical reality. As such, anything I may do or not do has no more and no less significance than what any animal does. And, it follows, that it makes no more sense to assign a moral value to any human action than it does to any action by any animal.

First off, no one, least of all Nietzche, supposes that man in a godless world is the product of “random chemical processes”. This term is a creationist shibboleth that fundamentally misunderstands evolution as a law-based, impersonal process. Life, in diverse forms, emerges as a matter of law. Randomness is a powerful source of creativity at low levels, but the macro processes are no more magical and no more random than sodium and chlorine combining to form salt.

Second, “God is dead” is not a statement of God’s non-existence for Nietzsche. God was a concept (regardless of whether he existed or not) that needed to be killed because God had become an obstacle to moral valuation and ethical thinking, in his view. Nietzsche’s views on “eternal return” push in exactly the opposite direction you are supposing here, giving each moment an eternal value – how would you live each moment if you had to live that moment (and relive it, and relive it…) for an eternity? This is Nietzsche’s basis for placing cosmic import on every little (and big) thing we do: “Gesetzt, wir wollenWahrheit: warum nicht lieber Unwahrheit? Und Ungewissheit? Selbst Unwissenheit?” he says in *Beyond Good and Evil *(Granted we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?).

For Nietzsche, the significance obtains just in our be able to consider such a question. This is a transcendental question for Nietzche; man, evolved with the brain he has, makes the question of significance significant just be coming to grips with the question.

I don’t happen to agree with Neitzsche’s premises, but I give him a pass because he lived before Hubble and Gould and others destroyed the scientific foundations of 19th century atheism. Different topic for different thead (many threads). I do, however, find Neitzsche clear and his conclusions logical given his premises.

This badly misunderstands Nietzsche. Inflationary cosmologies and punctuated equilibrium don’t address Nietzsche’s foundations here at all. As many have noted over the years, we might suppose Nietzsche to some kind of deist, affirming some creative, remote god, and for him, his arguments still hold: *God is dead. *That’s not a statement about God’s existence, remember, but a statement about God as a tenable or even relevant concept about morality and ethics. Nothing Hubble found changed that a bit, and couldn’t.

My problem is that Hitchens, a couple of times in the interviews I’ve listened to, passes off very, very lightly the problem of atheistic ethics. Specifically, his quote is “It’s not as if I need a cosmological dictatorship to tell me what’s right and wrong”. I need the long version of his ethicla theory, and I haven’t located it yet.

There’s not a lot about that in God is Not Great, but enough to understand and predict what comes out in his many debates (see his debate with Frank Turek, and many moments in his recurring clashes with Doug Wilson, for example): Hitchens accepts the conclusions of modern biology in a godless context – man is an evolved being that developed innate sensibilities that are essential to his surviving to this point after millions of years of evolution. Morality, for Hitchens, has lots of cultural and subjective leeway on the surface, but is grounded in the bedrock of human physiology and psychology as honed by evolution. Man has a “moral grammar” intrinsic to his physiology in a similar way that man has a “linguistic grammar” innate to his physiology. These are brute facts of man’s existence, no more subjective and changeable than any other feature of his physiology. They have all worked together to produce a complex being that has managed to survive to the present day.

-TS

(con’t)

 

[Touchstone]

I have read some JS Mill, and am starting to read Hume. I’m no expert on ethics at all, but I’m interested.

 

[ipwnuathalo]

Well, reality doesn’t much care if you’re disappointed in it or not. It is what it is. From Hitchens’ standpoint, and from mine, empathy, selfishness, cooperation, game-theoretic choice-making and and competition all obtain by our nature. It is wrong to kill gratuitously for man, because it drives us to extinction to embrace that to any significant degree. Groups of humans (or proto-humans, or other species, for that matter) that cultivate and enforce co-operation, social contracts, suppression of cheating, etc. tend to survive and thrive, and drive competing groups that don’t do these things to extinction.

That’s a very substantive question to pursue, though, and the serious investigation in to the real history and source of man’s ethical and moral sensibilities has only just gotten underway in the past few decades. We have much to learn and discover in this area, yet. There’s much to “dig into”, but it’s building knowledge the hard way, the real way – outside of theological hand-waving

You like to do a bit of hand-waving yourself, I see.

It’s wrong to kill gatuitously - does that mean that non-gratuitous non-extentinction threatening killing is not wrong? Maybe?

What Hitchens said, and the reason for my post, was “It’s not as if I need a cosmic dictatorship to tell me in order to know what is right or wrong”…implying that he had some other means to know what is right and wrong, and also plainly and necessarily implying that right and wrong are valid concepts.

Above, you reduce right and wrong to biological expediency, and it’s not very difficult to see that biological expediency is neither right nor wrong, it simply is. As noted earlier, the lion may kill cubs. This is neither right nor wrong, it is just lion.

On to Neitzsche…

 

[ipwnuathalo]

Stopping off at Darwin…

First off, no one, least of all Nietzche, supposes that man in a godless world is the product of “random chemical processes”. This term is a creationist shibboleth that fundamentally misunderstands evolution as a law-based, impersonal process. Life, in diverse forms, emerges as a matter of law. Randomness is a powerful source of creativity at low levels, but the macro processes are no more magical and no more random than sodium and chlorine combining to form salt.

No, life does not emerge as a matter of law. This is the worst sort of internet debating. Life emerged. Form the materialist perspective, it was not a necessaity of any kind, it was one of many, many processes which can and did occur. Leaving aside the perennial debate on the likelihood of this, your above statement is drifting away from materialism into what looks to be either a Gaian spirutalism or possibly (and believe me, I’m in no hurry to find out) a Marxist sort of biological determininsm which smacks of the supernatural anyway. Life’s probably too short to learn every internet poster’s idiosyncratic spiritualism. It’s pretty apparent that the above paragraph has next to nothing to do with biochemistry and everything to do with religion.

Second, “God is dead” is not a statement of God’s non-existence for Nietzsche. God was a concept (regardless of whether he existed or not) that needed to be killed

Bzzt. Stop right there. That’s taking a lot of liberty. In point of fact, Neitzsche predicted a coming age of barbarism in the wake of the loss of the religious ethical framework before the potential emergence of a new one. Some even describe him as “in mourning” for the fading ethical structure.

My connection of Neitzsche to the age was his fatalism concerning the death of the framework. One thing I believe about him is that he would never, ever have expected Christianity to exist in 2009, and this colored his philosophy, and this was a product of his age. Atheism and theism now debate on much different territory than the static universe of his time.

In point of fact, Neitzsche was quite wrong about one thing, God turned out not to be dead after all. Society has not been faced with stark loss of ethical guidelines because religion remains a very widespread phenomenon, and the hard sciences are part of that history.

 

[James_S_Saint]

Yes, although I think you must have skipped over my area of interest in that last part, as well.

I understood your post to be asking how an atheist comes up with ethics void of mere historical influences. I am a bit of an “odd duck” in that I am both and neither atheist and theist. Much like the Israelite walked the dry path between the raging walls of passion, I too stride that line, but unlike the Israelite staying away from the opposing torrents, I hold one finger in each torrential mass allowing myself to be pulled by both yet never consumed by either. If I stay in either too long, I begin to sound either like a “Glory Hallelujah” Baptist or a cold hearted Nietzschian Satanist. But in reality, I am “NotA, none of the above”.

Thus I can “speak for” either side of the argument, yet I can also “speak against” either side. To me an Atheist is only wrong when he declares that the Theist is wrong and the Theist is only wrong when he declares that the Atheist chooses to be blind or have no faith. Thus I find that I can only really agree with the real founders of the religions and the very few who have come to understand them.

To me, a man fully occupied in answering to his need, hasn’t the time to ask if there is a God. But once the question has arrived, it is a philosophical question and doesn’t become a religious question until his philosophical stance is in the affirmative. I hadn’t address the question myself until I was about 30 and as usual for me, and after I finally figured out what a “god” actually is, my answer was, “well, yes and no”. And then proceeded to dismiss the question as irrelevant.

How an Atheist actually comes up with any sense of ethics is actually through a political source. Their arguments are waves of fad and fashion as the political strategy resolves how to address each challenge. Through years of observation, it is obvious that the horde unwittingly gets marching orders from their “Secular Homeland Security”.

But I took your question to mean more of by what means COULD an Atheist derive ethics void of such politics. From that thought, I can present the logic and rationale perspective leaving out any religious reference. But this is not what currently represents Atheism. Secular Humanism has not matured to the point of being able to answer such questions as it seems to be too fully occupied in political battle.

I could easily write a book on how to derive ethics or all of creation without ever thinking in terms of a God and I’m not certain that God would care if I did. God doesn’t stop existing merely because people call Him by a different name (as the Atheists actually do without realizing it). It is only when they stop attending that God steps in to intervene.

So when you say that I skipped your point of interest, that could represent a sizable volume to me. But I can see that some outstanding Atheist representatives (Touchstone, Anti-Theist,…) have stepped up to the plate, so I will let them speak for themselves and certainly always disagree with me, as all people must.

 

[Touchstone]

You like to do a bit of hand-waving yourself, I see.

It’s wrong to kill gatuitously - does that mean that non-gratuitous non-extentinction threatening killing is not wrong? Maybe?

What Hitchens said, and the reason for my post, was “It’s not as if I need a cosmic dictatorship to tell me in order to know what is right or wrong”…implying that he had some other means to know what is right and wrong, and also plainly and necessarily implying that right and wrong are valid concepts.

Sure. So what’s the problem? They are valid concepts, and obtain from reality around us.

Above, you reduce right and wrong to biological expediency, and it’s not very difficult to see that biological expediency is neither right nor wrong, it simply is. As noted earlier, the lion may kill cubs. This is neither right nor wrong, it is just lion.

This is precisely my point. You are not a lion. You are not a black widow spider – where you’d be quite “morally” eaten as an after-intercourse course of a meal by your spouse.

You are a human, so you have human sensibilities, human rules, human drives and innate dispositions – these come with being human the way devouring the male is part of the natural routine for the female black widow.

A human has all sorts of horsepower for conceptualization and meta-representational cognition that a spider or a lion do not have, and so this question as a question is particular to us. But by “right” or “wrong” we are establishing meaning, conceptualized meaning through abstract language, a faculty the lion does NOT have, and this meaning does make human actions different, because we can process ideas conceptually, in meta-representational fashion.

For the lion and the spider, no such meta-representational faculties are available, so far as we can tell, so those concepts are, by necessity, unavailable, meaningless for them. For us, though, they are rich with meaning, but no less sourced in our shared natural history with the lion, the spider, and every other living thing.

-TS

 

[James_S_Saint]

A human has all sorts of horsepower for conceptualization and meta-representational cognition that a spider or a lion do not have, and so this question as a question is particular to us. But by “right” or “wrong” we are establishing meaning, conceptualized meaning through abstract language, a faculty the lion does NOT have, and this meaning does make human actions different, because we can process ideas conceptually, in meta-representational fashion.

I believe that is divergent from Secular humanism and Atheism as a whole or perhaps average. The argument tends more toward the idea that humans are really more just arrogant animals, with a little more cognitive prowess. I more agree with your take, but I do not see Atheism espousing such understanding. More often I see “right and wrong do not exist and are merely subjective evolved concepts” as being the Atheistic stance.

 

[ipwnuathalo]

For the lion and the spider, no such meta-representational faculties are available, so far as we can tell, so those concepts are, by necessity, unavailable, meaningless for them. For us, though, they are rich with meaning, but no less sourced in our shared natural history with the lion, the spider, and every other living thing

If someone had suggested that right and wrong had meaning to a lion, your above quotation would not be a non sequitur.

For us, though, they are rich with meaning,

Why? That is the constantly unanswered question.

but no less sourced in our shared natural history with the lion, the spider, and every other living thing

“but no less sourced in”…do you mean to say “they have their source in”? Soon I will decide you are not writing to be understood.

And, if you mean to say “our ethical meanings are sourced in our shared history with animals” then, apparently, you are saying: “our ethical meanings come from the source without any potential for ethical meanings”.

Really, really needlessly abstruse.

 

[Touchstone]

No, life does not emerge as a matter of law. This is the worst sort of internet debating. Life emerged. Form the materialist perspective, it was not a necessaity of any kind, it was one of many, many processes which can and did occur. Leaving aside the perennial debate on the likelihood of this, your above statement is drifting away from materialism into what looks to be either a Gaian spirutalism or possibly (and believe me, I’m in no hurry to find out) a Marxist sort of biological determininsm which smacks of the supernatural anyway. Life’s probably too short to learn every internet poster’s idiosyncratic spiritualism. It’s pretty apparent that the above paragraph has next to nothing to do with biochemistry and everything to do with religion.

Well I’m on record here, in many posts, as denying those urges – that’s the same self-indulgent mysticism that fuels theism, and cannot support itself epistemically. Emergence is just the description of phenomena and features that appear (“emerge”) through combination and interaction that are not obvious or detectable in a straightforward way at lower levels of description. The example I usual begin with is the “wetness” of water, an “emergent” feature of a particular combination of hydrogen and oxygen.

As it turns out, as per usual in science, ideas of magic and supernaturalism are unwarranted; the wetness of water is not apparent or manifest in hydrogen atoms themselves or oxygen atoms, but the chemistry, once analyzed in detail, shows the material basis for “wetness” of water.

Even for such a basic phenomenon like that, it’s a tricky bit of physics. Emergent properties, in the scientific view, are just as natural and law/randomness based as everything else, but are tougher nuts to crack in terms of explanation, as it typically requires a very robust model of the underlying components.

In any case, you’re welcome to your prejudices, but the models that the most compelling and robust are precisely the ones that eschew “spiritualism” and mystical pseudo-answers in building models for emergent properties in complex systems.

Bzzt. Stop right there. That’s taking a lot of liberty. In point of fact, Neitzsche predicted a coming age of barbarism in the wake of the loss of the religious ethical framework before the potential emergence of a new one. Some even describe him as “in mourning” for the fading ethical structure.

Yeah, “out fo Eden”, as it were. Human kind reaching the beginning of intellectual puberty as a species. But the point was conspicuously not the issue of God’s non-existence, which was the framing you offered. It was the inadequacy and irrelevance of “God” as a concept in thinking morally and ethically, even if he did exist.

My connection of Neitzsche to the age was his fatalism concerning the death of the framework. One thing I believe about him is that he would never, ever have expected Christianity to exist in 2009, and this colored his philosophy, and this was a product of his age. Atheism and theism now debate on much different territory than the static universe of his time.

God doesn’t play dice!, Darwin: *So, I have this idea about ‘phlogiston’… – *and he simply did not understand the biological disposition of man as an evolved animal toward credulity on the issues that carry Christianity and many other superstitions of mankind. Man is naturally superstitious, and this has important adaptive benefits for man as a species trying to survive and thrive in a very competitive, demanding environment. Nietzsche supposed that merely thinking in some disciplined way would suffice, collectively to overcome our physiology. Whoops. Like so many back then, he way underestimated the innate seating of our superstitious dispositions. We survive as a species by inclining toward paranoia and pareidolia – it’s much cheaper in terms of cost and risk to accept lots of false positives in terms of seeing the world in teleo-centric terms than it is to allow false negatives; if you fail to imagine that that creepy sound behind you might be a predator or some enemy plotting your demise, the cost of that mistake can be very, very high.

Nietzche shows no knowledge of this in his writings, and while we was cognizant of the basic dynamics of evolution, never acknowledged the basic intentional stance man has toward superstition as part of his biology. If he had, he’d certainly not expect Christianity to go away in mere centuries or even millenia.

In point of fact, Neitzsche was quite wrong about one thing, God turned out not to be dead after all. Society has not been faced with stark loss of ethical guidelines because religion remains a very widespread phenomenon, and the hard sciences are part of that history.

Nietzsche was way off on many issues, and here, the very reason you identify with him in your OP (given that God doesn’t exist), is the same reason Nietzsche was mistaken, ignorant. He failed to understand man as a biological being, governed heavily by his innate physiology and psychology. This was a pandemic problem in philosophy for a long time going back before Neitzsche – the failure to recognize man as an integrated unit, a monist unity, rather than a disembodied mind. In a godless world, man would still have the innate nature evolution designed into him – a predilection for superstition, yes, but also strong sensibilities regarding empathy, social connection, and fairness. These are “built-ins” that work right against naive lawlessness and mayhem – if we had these proclivities as a rule, we wouldn’t survive as a species.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

I believe that is divergent from Secular humanism and Atheism as a whole or perhaps average. The argument tends more toward the idea that humans are really more just arrogant animals, with a little more cognitive prowess. I more agree with your take, but I do not see Atheism espousing such understanding. More often I see “right and wrong do not exist and are merely subjective evolved concepts” as being the Atheistic stance.

I have to point out, again, that atheism *qua *atheism offers no positive arguments on this at all. As a concept, it is just the denial of gods. But secular humanism is a different matter (not all atheists are secular humanists!) and here, you may be right, although I think the differences you point out between “their” version and mine may be more semantic than substantive.

Theists often want to equate animal “amorality” with man’s “amorality” as seen from a secular humanist standpoint. That is, they indulge the conceit that if no God, no possible meaning for “right” and “wrong” – look at the animals! they say. Well, that’s a non-sequitur, just because meaning as we use the term is the product of faculties they appear to lack. Nothing has meaning on that level for a lion, for example. In a godless world, then we would not find any conflict between realizing that a lion had no sense of “right and wrong” and man having and acute sense of “right and wrong”, even though both are thoroughly animal, products of evolution. The reason there’s not conflict here is because humans have evolved the faculties, the cognitive infrastructure by which “meaning” for right and wrong are obtained, derived, and integrated into action.

I think that actually matches what you described as the “Atheist stance”, substantially. The salient point would be that man, because of his ginormous cerebral cortex, has evolved faculties – language and meta-representation – that enable concepts like “right” and “wrong”. Morality, then, on a naturalist view, is a conceptual by-product of big brains, brains plastic enough to wire themselves for language and the vehicles for meaning of such concepts as “right” or “wrong”. Morality as an evolved feature of homo sapiens, then. Many species have social dynamics and “codes of conduct” that influence or govern their interactions. Only man talks about that in an abstract way, so far as we know.

-TS

 

[James_S_Saint]

I have to point out, again, that atheism *qua *atheism offers no positive arguments on this at all. As a concept, it is just the denial of gods. But secular humanism is a different matter (not all atheists are secular humanists!) and here, you may be right, although I think the differences you point out between “their” version and mine may be more semantic than substantive.

No. Yours reflects a degree of intelligence. Theirs does not.

My only problem with you is that you are still indulging in politics. Which is why I stopped my last debate with you. Philosophical truth has no interest in politics or yearning for any reason that a particular truth be given entitlement.

 

[Touchstone]

If someone had suggested that right and wrong had meaning to a lion, your above quotation would not be a non sequitur.

The non-sequitur obtained from connecting it human faculties and capacities for meaning. Man has meta-representational faculties of mind that are capable and effective in processing such concepts. Lions, best we can tell, aren’t. Ergo, parallel you drew breaks down, and breaks down badly. It understands man in terms of lions, cognitively.

Why? That is the constantly unanswered question.

As I said, man has adapted to the environment via a big huge cerebral cortex in his skull, and the kind of neuronal plasticity that goes with it that is amenable to meta-representational cognition. That means that man has evolved capabilities the lion (and other animals) don’t have, and these unique features are what support the cognitive processing of concepts like “right” and “wrong”. For example, man sports a “theory of mind” that is far advanced over any other animal, so far as we can tell, and “theory of mind” is a predicate for meaning in any moral calculus. That right there is a sufficient explanation for your question.

“but no less sourced in”…do you mean to say “they have their source in”? Soon I will decide you are not writing to be understood.

I think it was more precise to my intent the way I phrased it.

And, if you mean to say “our ethical meanings are sourced in our shared history with animals” then, apparently, you are saying: “our ethical meanings come from the source without any potential for ethical meanings”.

Obviously, it did/does have the potential for ethical meanings, as here we are talking about morals and ethics! Where did you pull “the source without any potential for ethical meanings” from, may I ask? It seems to me one looks at the outcomes and determines from that what the potentials might have been, particularly if the mechanisms and processes are only partially understood. Does hydrogen have the potential to become “wet”, would you say? How would you establish that, if so?

Really, really needlessly abstruse.

It’s really not that hard. As a Christian for decades, the “abstrusiveness” was really more grounded in my unwillingness to listen and understand ideas that discomfitted by worldview.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

No. Yours reflects a degree of intelligence. Theirs does not.

My only problem with you is that you are still indulging in politics. Which is why I stopped my last debate with you.

All right, then, we will continue on our separate ways!

-TS

 

[AntiTheist]

May I kill a human being if I wish to?

This is presuming that I have done an analysis on the situation and I have determined that, for me, it is the best course of action and accomplishes my goals.

“May,” to me, only means the ability to do something. I don’t believe in morality, so I don’t believe in the need to justify actions according to any sort of “moral code” whatsoever.

If you think it’s in your interest to kill someone – or heck, if you just feel like killing someone because your values are such that you love the idea of murder – and you have the ability to do so, then obviously you could do it. The only thing that’s going to stop you is the will of some other person or the will of society.

Now, if you’ll allow me to interject my own values here, I personally would find your eagerness to take another life monstrous. I would find it monstrous not because I think it is “wrong” or because it violates some moral principle that I expect everyone to follow – I would find it monstrous because my values lead me to find the act of murder monstrous in most circumstances. I would thus try to prevent you from committing this murder (if it is in my power to do so), and I would certainly approve of efforts to apprehend and punish you after the deed.

So maybe you will be able to commit that murder, but you’ll have to pay for it by being punished at the hands of society.

Is that clear? I understand that it’s probably difficult for you to get your mind around a worldview where “may” doesn’t have a meaning other than “ability.”

 

[ipwnuathalo]

Actually, I think you have radically misunderstood “may”.

You answer is overwhelmingly that I “can” but I “may” not.

Why not simplify (see “abstruse” above) and tell me that I “may not”? If I am to be punished for it, I most certainly “may not”.

Back to you, although there may be no purpose. Anyone who claims to have no morals but promises to attempt to stop a murder on the grounds that it is monstrous is more than a little confused or radically inconsistent.

 

[AntiTheist]

Actually, I think you have radically misunderstood “may”.

You answer is overwhelmingly that I “can” but I “may” not.

No, I didn’t “radically [misunderstand] ‘may’” – I was trying to explain that I don’t have a concept of “may” in the sense that you mean. I’m not telling you that you “may not” murder. I’m telling you that your taking that action is going to have certain consequences.

In my view, there is only what you do and how people react to what you do, both motivated by values. There is no “should” in some abstract sense.

There is nothing objectively “wrong” about any action – actions only have meaning in relation to values and circumstances, which is where the motivation to act comes from.

Remember how this thread began: you were looking for the “source” of “ethical truths” for atheists, and I’m telling you that I don’t need a source because I don’t have any ethical truths. I have my values and the way that my values interact with the values of others.