Morality

[lemonbeam]

What do you think of this argument from an atheist, that whatever causes suffering is immoral, and that’s where morality comes from. e.g. Raping someone causes suffering for the one being raped. Therefore rape is immoral.

What causes suffering is immoral.

 

[06convert]

Someone dying naturally causes suffering. A miscarriage causes suffering. There isn’t anything immoral there. The athiest is trying to show you he’s moral without the teachings that come from God and His Church. Which is contradictory to the truth.

 

[praise_Jesus_1]

Similarly to 06convert, imposing any type of punishment on a criminal would also be immoral as it would cause suffering.

 

[jamesmartyn]

what you think of your moral standard, there will be others who are just as adamant that it is flawed and theirs is better. Seems to be that the definition I provided is a general purpose definition that puts no right or wrong judgment on the specific morality, and recognizes that morality changes from one culture to another and from one age to another.

• God bless on this earth.

 

[Timbothefiveth]

Suppose someone is about to get shot in the head, and wouldn’t feel a thing. You’re sitting right there and could move the victim out of the way, but it would mean they hit their arm on a chair, and that might cause a slight amount of pain. Clearly, even though it would cause more suffering, you have a moral obligation to save the person from getting shot.

what you think of your moral standard, there will be others who are just as adamant that it is flawed and theirs is better.

Yes, and you hold to your moral standard as being superior. Show me why it is.

Seems to be that the definition I provided is a general purpose definition that puts no right or wrong judgment on the specific morality, and recognizes that morality changes from one culture to another and from one age to another.

“Morality changes from culture to culture” is self-contradictory. I say it doesn’t change and you say it does. If it really does change, then my definition would be as right as yours and it wouldn’t change and would change at the same time, which is of course impossible. See?

Morality changing from culture to culture also brings some unpleasant side-effects. Was racism moral in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1930s?

 

[imkingdad]

what you think of your moral standard, there will be others who are just as adamant that it is flawed and theirs is better. Seems to be that the definition I provided is a general purpose definition that puts no right or wrong judgment on the specific morality, and recognizes that morality changes from one culture to another and from one age to another.

• God bless on this earth.

Utter Balderdash! there are certain aspects of Morality that span across all cultural boundaries and that are universally accepted as bad/wrong/evil.

However all Morality was founded from a Faith based Tradition ( another common aspect, imagine that)

Judgment is an essential element of determining what Morality defines as good/accepted vs bad/rejected.

So Hence I reject your relativistic tripe

 

[anEvilAtheist]

I don’t think that grounding morality in suffering really works since I think there’s more to morality than just suffering. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this is to ask the atheist whether, if we can ever create a machine that we can hook our brains up to which will chemically induce the sensation of happiness for the rest of our lives and prevent us from ever suffering, we should do so. We would never again experience anything in the real world, or even have an interesting virtual world to explore. If morality is grounded in suffering, then we should have a moral obligation to hook everyone up to such a machine. But the atheist probably won’t think that it’s obviously true that we’d have such an obligation, which means that he doesn’t think that morality is really all about suffering. He instead probably just assumes that his moral intuitions are correct and then embraces whatever moral system he thinks matches his preconceived notions.

Someone dying naturally causes suffering. A miscarriage causes suffering. There isn’t anything immoral there. The athiest is trying to show you he’s moral without the teachings that come from God and His Church. Which is contradictory to the truth.

The atheist would probably clarify that morality only deals with the actions of conscious moral agents.

Similarly to 06convert, imposing any type of punishment on a criminal would also be immoral as it would cause suffering.

Punishment solely to get retribution for the crime would be immoral. But jailing a criminal would be perfectly acceptable if it prevented more suffering than it caused.

 

[Ron_Conte]

What do you think of this argument from an atheist, that whatever causes suffering is immoral, and that’s where morality comes from. e.g. Raping someone causes suffering for the one being raped. Therefore rape is immoral.

What causes suffering is immoral.

Intrinsically evil acts are always inherently directed at an evil moral object. Evil is a deprivation of good. What makes the moral object evil is some type of deprivation, such as harm or disorder. This harm or disorder is more broad that merely suffering. However, it is true that whenever an act is inherently directed toward harm or disorder, it is immoral. This is the second font of morality.

In the first font, to intend harm or disorder as an end is always an immoral intention.

In the third font, if the harm done by the chosen act outweighs the good done, then the act is immoral.

So the argument offered by that atheist is not far from the truth. Not suffering, but more broadly harm and disorder, are the basis for immorality.

[Romans]
{13:10} The love of neighbor does no harm. Therefore, love is the plenitude of the law.