Inherent Value of life (secular)

[HarryStotle]

To me it got better. You talk to a slave owner after the Civil War, you would probably get a different answer.

So by “got better,” what do you mean, exactly? Do you mean merely that there is no standard for good or better but only that to YOU [whatever YOU happen to be] some chemical response in your brain causes you to think in positive terms about it? Not that there is anything objectively morally better about slavery not being permitted, but that you just happen to have a positive response to the change? That is all you mean by “better?”

How do we adjudicate between your feelings about slavery and the slave owner’s feelings if there is no objective standard by which to assess which is actually “better,” slavery or no slavery?

Surely it cannot be merely that someone has positive or negative feelings about the thing? On what grounds do we decide whether those feelings tell us anything objectively true about the world? Merely the existence of positive feelings or thoughts?

The slave owner has positive feelings one way and you have the other way. No way to adjudicate? None?

What does “To me it got better” actually imply?

What do others who are not YOU to make of that statement? Anything more than niceatheist has nice feelings? It only tells us about you, then? Something like: niceatheist has an itch about slavery?

 

[Gingersnaps4]

Yes. This is why trying to explain the inherent value of life of the unborn to an atheist is fruitless. Because to them there cannot be inherent value, and if they individually value it, they most likely wouldn’t be willing to pass any law with regard to it. It’s a mystery why it’s ok to most atheists that there are laws against the killing of already-born people, but I guess that’s another issue altogether.

 

[PRmerger]

A sapient blob of cells. Which makes me a human person…

But you still haven’t answered why sapience makes an organism a human person?

Also, since dolphins, rats, dogs are sapient, does that make them persons?

I don’t. There are many instances when you need to choose between two options. So finding the better option is important. Missing mass for some frivolous reason is a “mortal sin”. Mowing down people with a machine gun is also a “mortal sin”. If you can prevent one, but not both, you need to choose which one to prevent.

Ok…so I would have to choose between telling someone not to use artificial birth control or getting an abortion? Is this the scenario you’re trying to present? #confused

 

[HarryStotle]

PRmerger:

You do realize that you, too, are “just a blob of cells”, right?

A sapient blob of cells. Which makes me a human person…

Would it matter on the quality of “sapience?”

Dictionary definition:

sapience - ability to apply knowledge or experience or understanding or common sense and insight

So would someone with a higher capacity to apply knowledge, understanding or insight be more valuable than someone with a lower capacity?

Einstein more valuable – i.e., more of a person – than Larry, Moe or Curly Joe?

Why wouldn’t he be if sapience is the significant quality that bestows the right to life?

And if raw sapience is the determiner of an entity’s right to life, then wouldn’t a brilliant genius who was morally corrupt have more of a right to life than a low-IQ moral innocent?

Would adult human beings have more of a right to life than children or toddlers whose “sapience” is very limited?

 

[niceatheist]

There was no objective standard to ending of slavery. There was an application (or, if you will, a re-application) of an older stream of Christian thought. But it demonstrates the fluidity of social mores. The slave owners thought they had an objective standard, the abolitionists thought they had an objective standard. In the end, in the US, what counted was the force of arms. In England, it was a different path, in no small part because slavery as such had never been a large part of English society, and public opinion on the matter slowly but steadily changed to an anti-slavery stance.

And really, “God says so” is no more objective than “I think so”. It’s just more the application of an appeal to authority. If the only way human dignity exists is because your version of God’s commandments says slavery is bad, then we are all at the whims of current scriptural interpretation. And of course, the Bible does not say slavery is bad, and simply says treating slaves badly is wrong, and slaves disobeying their masters is also wrong. In the end, even the Abolitionists were tapping in to an older tradition, but one that had no meaningful Scriptural backing, but was rather an expression of their own ethical standards.

 

[PRmerger]

Because sapience or “wisdom” is what we define as a sign of personhood.

Well, this ^^ is just circular. “You’re a human when you’re sapient because humans are sapient”.

Tell us why sapience is what makes someone a person.

A chimpanzee or bonobo can function on the same level as young human child does, so they would be an excellent candidate for “personhood”.

Ok…so are they persons, since they are sapient?

Close. I wanted to point out that successful birth control removes the need for abortion. To remove the birth control from the list of the “mortal” sins and placing it into the list of “venial” sins would make a difference.

Again, I’m all for moral means of preventing abortions.

And don’t forget, not even Catholics follow the principle “total abstinence until you are ready for procreation”.

Irrelevant. Not even teenagers follow the principle “when you have sex, wear a condom”. Yet I presume you still think it’s judicious to keep proclaiming this dogma?

 

[HarryStotle]

There was no objective standard to ending of slavery.

That is really a bizarre claim when you think about it.

There is NO OBJECTIVE STANDARD regarding the enslavement of other human beings?

It appears you will go to any means to justify your basic position.

To punt the reason for abolishing slavery to a “re-application of an older stream of Christian thought,” is to imply that the mere “fluidity of social mores” is all there is.

In which case, the Nazi Holocaust of the Jewish people is merely a reflection of the fact that social mores in Germany were “fluid.”

If that is all, then any change is welcome because evolution MERELY implies change.

But why is change and fluidity a “good” thing? Why not just retain the status quo and keep slavery if neither slavery nor the abolition of it is in any real terms better than the other?

Why are change and fluidity a good thing?

Because “it is 2019,” or some such foolishness?

Why can’t social mores just consist of always retaining the status quo if no qualitative difference separates any one change from another, and neither from stasis?

 

[HarryStotle]

PRmerger:

But you still haven’t answered why sapience makes an organism a human person?

Because sapience or “wisdom” is what we define as a sign of personhood.

Very convenient for you, who supposedly have sapience.

I smell a conflict of interest here.

YOU defining the right to life of other human beings based upon some quality that YOU believe that YOU have in spades.

Some might claim that you, with your “higher capacity to apply knowledge, understanding or insight” might be skewing the balance just slightly in your own favour, and depriving those less endowed than you to an unfair fate.

Didn’t slave masters claim the slaves they owned were “less human” than they were so they could be owned by those who were “more human?”

Seems contrived for your own advantage.

 

[HarryStotle]

PRmerger:

Well, this ^^ is just circular. “You’re a human when you’re sapient because humans are sapient”.

No, not circular, it is just the definition. You are welcome to suggest a different one, and we can see if it will be accepted.

This, too, is circular, because you are presuming that moral determinations are a matter of consensus (“if … accepted”) among human beings. Who had conceded that point to you before moving on?

You are just assuming it, aren’t you?

Would you consider your opinion on this matter to be wrong if the opposing view was “accepted?”

I don’t believe you would. And if you did that would demonstrate that your opinion is frivolous to begin with since you seem ready to abandon your cherished beliefs merely based upon groupthink. What kind of standard is that?

(The definition of a circle is: “all those points on a plane, which are at the same distance from the central point.” You can ask “but WHY is this the definition?”)

And the definition of a circle is certainly not dependent upon how many in the general population accept the definition, is it? The definition has an objective basis and only those who understand geometry can grasp it.

Yet, you pretend with moral issues that the correctness of a moral belief is just “open” to anyone – regardless of their grasp of morality – to decide.

Wouldn’t we, if your argument is correct, just leave the definition of a circle to “what most people believe,” regardless of the outcome?

Seems just a tad tenuous.

Yet here you are arguing that what “most Catholics do” ought to define Catholic doctrine and dogma as if THAT was ever the standard that guided Catholicism.

You need to read your Bible, especially the story of that little episode at Mt. Sinai where the opinions of the masses weren’t the deciding factor.

 

[PRmerger]

That would require a consensus about “what is moral”. And since there are several ethical systems, and the same act could be considered “moral” in some of them, and “not moral” in other ones, we seem to have an unsolvable problem.

Why would a consensus be required about morality? #confused

Also, could you answer the question about whether dolphins, rats, dogs and cats are persons, since they have the criterion you’ve asserted is required for personhood?

My opinion does not count. I merely wish to point out that if you cannot convince your own folks about your preferred solution, you will not be successful in convincing others.

There is no disagreement here.

And the aim is still there: “remove or minimize abortions”. I suggested one solution, which can work. You have not - so far.

I have also suggested a solution. Please re-read our discourse.

 

[niceatheist]

For nearly two thousand years Jews were persecuted to one degree or another by Christians. There were pogroms throughout Europe, and I’d say anti semitism was in Christendom’s dna. I’m sure most Christians of previous eras would have found the Holocaust horrific, but not all historical Christians. If Ferdinand and Isabella had had Zyklon B at their disposal, the Reconquista might have had a very different history. So even the murder of Jews for the crime of being Jewish is not a stain pre-Nazi Europe was free of. Which goes to show you just how fluid morals are.

 

[niceatheist]

Social norms are what society say they are. It’s that simple. If enough people decide some action is moral, then that becomes moral. The best objective standard there is really boils down to Bentham’s utilitarianism. If we start from a basic premise (admittedly subjective itself) that everyone has certain essential and inalieable rights and an essential dignity, then we can hope to construct a productive and lasting society. But that’s not the only formulation. Certainly others have been tried, and not necessarily without success. The Spartans were, for a time, the most powerful nation in the Mediterranean, and some of their methods were viewed even by their fellow Greeks as pretty appalling. But they had an orderly society built on martial tradition that created one of the great military forces of the Ancient World, and one that has been emulated, in one form or another, by just about every military since, and certainly endured itself to the Romans and later nations.

 

[PRmerger]

Because morality is contingent upon the ethical system one subscribes to. To agree on the morality of act, first we would have to agree on the ethical system to use.

So…a father who kills his daughter for getting gang raped…this is moral, if he believes it to be consonant with his ethical system?

And a father who kills his son because he is gay…this is moral, if he believes it to be consonant with his ethical system?

I answered that chimpanzees and bonobos exhibit behavior on about the same level as a very young child. The behavior of “dolphins, rats, dogs and cats” is on an even lower level, so they are not candidates for personhood, even though they have some personality traits. But their sapience is far too low to consider them persons.

And yet you said that a 9 week old fetus is a person? Do you think the sapience of a 9 week old fetus is greater than that of a dolphin?

What you suggested does not work. Do you have something else in mind, something that actually WORKS?

Of course it works. It works for millions of people who have conformed their views to truth.

Your solution is mildly better, statistically, but is still encumbered by the fact that millions of teenagers aren’t going to follow your dogma.

Now what???

 

[niceatheist]

Honor killings are considered moral in a number of societies, so we seem to have an issue where you can declare those societies immoral, and yet they have quite a different standard.

 

[PRmerger]

Honor killings are considered moral in a number of societies, so we seem to have an issue where you can declare those societies immoral, and yet they have quite a different standard.

But are they moral?

If you claim that they are moral, because the actor thinks they are moral, then you are useless in a world that wants to promote social justice. You will simply have to watch impassively as a society kills women, homosexuals, and anyone else that they feel they have the right to kill.

Utterly useless.

 

[niceatheist]

I’d say they are immoral, by my standards. But their society says otherwise. Heck, a form of honor killing, called a “crime of passion” has been a defense for murdering one’s wife in more than one Western jurisdiction. In some jurisdictions, it’s still at least a means to reduce the sentence.

 

[PRmerger]

I’d say they are immoral, by my standards. But their society says otherwise. Heck, a form of honor killing, called a “crime of passion” has been a defense for murdering one’s wife in more than one Western jurisdiction. In some jurisdictions, it’s still at least a means to reduce the sentence.

Well if it’s objectively immoral, then you can work to stop it…just like you could work to stop anyone from saying that Djibouti doesn’t exist. It objectively does. And anyone who says it doesn’t…is just wrong.

But if it’s just a subjective thing…you can only shrug and say, “Well, I guess it was moral for that father…because he thought that was the right thing to do.”

 

[niceatheist]

I disagree. Just because morality may fundamentally be subjective does not mean one cannot work to see one’s own morality take sway over society. But there are historically only two methods that ever seem to work; one is to convince people that what they’re doing is wrong and seek a societal shift, and the other is to use the sword to beat those you view as being immoral in to the ground. Slavery didn’t end in the United States through appeals to slave owners, it ended because the Free States won a brutal war. Slavery ended in Britain a good deal more peacefully. I like the latter rather than the former.

But appealing to some higher power, and then your opponents appealing to their higher power, doesn’t seem nearly as successful. One of the reasons Christianity took hold over the paganism of the Roman world was largely because Roman paganism was, how shall I say, largely unproductive. While it would be unfair to say that pagan temples didn’t do some charity, the more notable examples of that seemed to occur in the dying days of Roman paganism in response to Christian works. So therein lies the secret in my view. Unless you plan on wielding the sword to enforce your morality (as the British did in India to end the practice of Sati), there’s something to be said of spreading faith through works.

But I’m not under any misapprehension that “God says so” has ever been that sure an enforcer of morals, but then again, I don’t think humans are just savages bound in to civilized living by fear of Hellfire. Humans are social animals, and what seems to count is that we have rules (whether legally or socially enforced), the particular nature of those rules is a matter of shared ethics and tradition. The Early Christians understood that fairly well, and the early missions in the post-Roman period were a marvelous example of synthesizing Christian ethics and morals with the local laws and traditions of the various pagan tribes and nations those early Christian missionaries sought to convert. The Jesuits tried something similar in Japan, until rival orders mucked the whole thing up.

 

[PRmerger]

I disagree. Just because morality may fundamentally be subjective does not mean one cannot work to see one’s own morality take sway over society. But there are historically only two methods that ever seem to work; one is to convince people that what they’re doing is wrong and seek a societal shift, and the other is to use the sword to beat those you view as being immoral in to the ground. Slavery didn’t end in the United States through appeals to slave owners, it ended because the Free States won a brutal war. Slavery ended in Britain a good deal more peacefully. I like the latter rather than the former.

But appealing to some higher power, and then your opponents appealing to their higher power, doesn’t seem nearly as successful. One of the reasons Christianity took hold over the paganism of the Roman world was largely because Roman paganism was, how shall I say, largely unproductive. While it would be unfair to say that pagan temples didn’t do some charity, the more notable examples of that seemed to occur in the dying days of Roman paganism in response too Christianity. So therein lies the secret in my view. Unless you plan on wielding the sword to enforce your morality (as the British did in India to end the practice of Sati), there’s something to be said of spreading faith through works.

But I’m not under any misapprehension that “God says so” has ever been that sure an enforcer of morals, but then again, I don’t think humans are just savages bound in to civilized living by fear of Hellfire. Humans are social animals, and what seems to count is that we have rules (whether legally or socially enforced), the particular nature of those rules is a matter of shared ethics and tradition. The Early Christians understood that fairly well, and the early missions in the post-Roman period were a marvelous example of synthesizing Christian ethics and morals with the local laws and traditions of the various pagan tribes and nations those early Christian missionaries sought to convert. The Jesuits tried something similar in Japan, until rival orders mucked the whole thing up.

Right. No one should ever be proposing “God says so” as any apologia.

 

[niceatheist]

Right. No one should ever be proposing “God says so” as any apologia.

But therein lies the problem. If we both agree “God says so”, or some more complex and nuanced variant, isn’t the way to convince me of an objective moral standard, then the next step will be to pull God out, and replace it with Natural Law. And then I’ll respond much the same, so we reach an impasse.