Non-theistic foundation of morality?

[PRmerger]

NFP is periodic abstinence, nothing more.

Well, if you want to be fundamentalist about it, then you will have to say that you, too, have embraced the Catholic ideal that abstinence is necessary if you don’t want to procreate.

For clearly, you engage in “periodic abstinence” as well.

How very Catholic of you!

 

[IWantGod]

I’ve often heard it said that while you can be good whether you believe in God or not, God offers the only possibility of a foundation for morality. Supposedly, in the absence of God morality is reduced to mere opinion that is not sufficient to justify judging any act as good or evil.

I think there can be a non-theistic ground for objective morality. Morality is rooted in our human need to trust each other and thereby facilitate closer cooperation and greater achievements than we could gain by ourselves. Someone who treated morality as mere opinion (and used that for selfish advantage in every situation) would be too changeable to be trustworthy, and wouldn’t receive cooperation, losing out on the gains from said cooperation.

This idea supplies the benefits of positing God as the source of morality (unchanging and negative consequences for failure to act well) without positing a transcendent entity or realm whose mysterious existence is the source of morality.

Thoughts?

The question is: When i say that something is wrong is that statement true. People are not merely coerced to do the right thing although that is true in some cases. Sometimes people do the right thing because they really believe that it is truly the right thing. If moral statements have no moral objective standard of truth, then it is always irrational to feel morally guilty about your behavior or morally condemning of other peoples behavior as it relates to truth because there is no such thing as moral truth. There are only practical values and practical solutions which are dependent upon a desire for survival and an agreement between people on what constitutes survival. In that case the might of the people and the ideas that have the most influence makes right. There is no good or bad and nobody is truly bound by the law accept by coercion of some kind.

You can say that one has broken a civil contract, but you cannot say that somebody has done wrong or evil or acted selfishly, because these words and their connotations are meaningless if there is no objective moral law.

 

[Pallas_Athene]

Well, if you want to be fundamentalist about it, then you will have to say that you, too, have embraced the Catholic ideal that abstinence is necessary if you don’t want to procreate.

I prefer my own methods to avoid procreation. And they have nothing to do with abstinence.

With an atheistic framework, their arguments that rape is the equivalent of spicy food becomes the ONLY logical conclusion.

Sorry, your “logic” is incorrect. I will say it again: “not all preferences are equivalent!”. To equate the preference against rape to the preference against okra only shows that you have no idea what you are talking about.

Your stubborn repetition of “rape = okra” reminds me of someone who asserted that the chance of winning the jackpot on Powerball is 50%… because you either win it, or you don’t. His ignorance of mathematics was pretty much equal to your ignorance about atheistic value systems.

One more final time: not all preferences are equivalent!

 

[IWantGod]

One more final time: not all preferences are equivalent!

By what standard are they not equivalent?

 

[Pallas_Athene]

By what standard are they not equivalent?

Biology.

 

[inocente]

So your claim is that there never could be a war where there is an objectively right side? That God could never take one side over the other, regardless of what “everyone” claims about God being on their side?

Clearly, on the micro scale of injustices being committed by individuals, it would appear that you would likewise insist God could never declare one of the parties “right” and the other “wrong,” even if both parties claim God is on their side. So much for justice, then!

Your objection is mere deflection. Clearly, you didn’t understand the point of the analogy in the first place, which explains why you are harping on an irrelevancy – you don’t even get that your point is irrelevant.

Your “rewriting” also serves to muddle the point completely, which is, it appears, precisely your intention - not to achieve clarity, but to sidetrack and obfuscate.

Never made any such claim. Your analogy is flawed, it doesn’t work.

As for your personal remarks, I already asked you to use the third person in your hypotheticals, rather than making up insinuations about me. I’m none of the things you keep insinuating. Seems like every time we meet I have to remind you to stick to the subject. Personal remarks usually signal someone who is out of his depth or evading.

Anyway, back on the topic, you forgot to answer my question. For the third time, in the lifeboat dilemma, is having the faith to leave it to the will of God evil, compared with throwing someone overboard?

 

[PRmerger]

Biology.

LOL!

Biology would dictate that the strongest squash the weakest.

Your moral framework is sounding viler and more horrific the more you try to defend it.

 

[PRmerger]

Please don’t take what I said out of context. I was referring to personal obligations to one’s own morality. If I personally think that something is right, then I personally should do it. It doesn’t mean that anyone else has to.

Fair enough.

Then you are impotent to tell someone that raping is wrong.

For you are saying that he has no obligation to conform to any objective moral code.

#monstrousmoralcode

 

[PRmerger]

Sorry to push in again, but Bradski really is right in a sense.

Well, yeah. We have all agreed that Bradski is right in a sense.

Unless the issue is specifically moral theology, then simply invoking God isn’t going to help anything, because we don’t have access to the divine intellect any more than we have access to creatures.

Firstly, no Believer here is “simply invoking God”.

Secondly, we actually do have access to the divine intellect. That divine intellect, the Eternal Logos incarnated 2000 years ago.

Now we have been given, once for all, all that we require.

 

[o_mlly]

…
This idea supplies the benefits of positing God as the source of morality (unchanging and negative consequences for failure to act well) without positing a transcendent entity or realm whose mysterious existence is the source of morality.

Thoughts?

A non-theist ethic, consequentialism, holds:

Consequentialism says that right or wrong depend on the consequences of an act, and that the more good consequences are produced, the better the act.

bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduction/consequentialism_1.shtml
*Results-based ethics produces this important conclusion for ethical thinking:

No type of act is inherently wrong - not even murder - it depends on the result of the act

This far-fetched example may make things clearer:

Suppose that by killing X, an entirely innocent person, we can save the lives of 10 other innocent people
A consequentialist would say that killing X is justified because it would result in only 1 person dying, rather than 10 people dying
A non-consequentialist would say it is inherently wrong to murder people and refuse to kill X, even though not killing X leads to the death of 9 more people than killing X

*​

Does the BBC have the consequentialist ethic correct? Are there no inherently evil acts?

In Catholic morality, all 10 must die. CCC #1753 … Thus the condemnation of an innocent person cannot be justified as a legitimate means of saving the nation.

 

[inocente]

Sorry to push in again, but Bradski really is right in a sense. Unless the issue is specifically moral theology, then simply invoking God isn’t going to help anything, because we don’t have access to the divine intellect any more than we have access to creatures. Natural reason does not apprehend God directly. Thus, we find out morality, if at all, through nature. Traditionally, the Catholic intellectual tradition has understood this to be natural law and virtue ethics, which is simply the full development of realizing that nature is teleological. Now, it is surely granted that such teleology is eventually grounded in the divine intellect (a la Leah Libresco), but again, we only have access to that to begin with inasmuch as we know God through creatures. We don’t appeal to the divine intellect to get answers to moral dilemmas. We appeal to morality to get answers to moral dilemmas; and only appeal to the divine intellect in these situations to get answers as to where and how morality is grounded.

Pushing the same point, it’s not merely that we know morality through natural law, but it is in fact natural law that determines morality. Teleology functions differently in reference to different natures. If God created different natures, you have different teleology, and therefore different natural law/virtue ethics. (Of course there are going to be constants no matter how much things are changed up, since we would always be dealing with rational creatures.) While “should” and “ought” are grounded eventually in God because teleology is grounded in God, moral obligations and permissions, but especially virtue, are grounded in natural law, and so they do not require any immediate recourse to God; for it is precisely natural law that God uses to determine morality for creatures. We might say that natural law is the moral lawgiver, even if God is the giver of natural law. An atheist could say with certainty that natural law determines contraception to be a seriously immoral act. There’s no contradiction, because there’s no proximate reference to God. Would he be inconsistent on account of teleology itself? Sure, we could grant that, but that’s another matter altogether. The point is that invoking God in rational discourse does not resolve moral dilemmas; it resolves being inconsistent about what you think is the grounding point for objective morality. But it is the objective morality itself that resolves moral dilemmas.

Of course, an atheist might not appeal to natural law at all, but if he appeals to a valid moral point demonstrated by reason, he would effectively be appealing to natural law under a different name and application. What else is there?

Fair point, but which version of natural law? I guess you’d say Thomas Aquinas. His version uses a catalog of goods, and when procreation is included as a good, artificial contraception and equal marriage thereby are deemed immoral, whereas they become moral if procreation isn’t included. So the weak point in his version is how to decide what is and isn’t in the catalog.

Others might favor the very different Hobbs version of natural law, or some another. Still others may exclude natural law or use it only on occasion, or talk of it as a generalization. There are also fundamental questions such as whether there is even a human nature. Seems there are as many views on what natural law means as there are about what theistic morality might be.

Or perhaps the natural law written on our hearts is simply the will to be moral agents, “their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them”. (Romans 2)

 

[PRmerger]

Did I say that? Well, no I didn’t.

Moral decisions that I make are not binding on anyone else. But I and everyone else are accountable to the decisions each of us makes.

Accountable to whom? Ourselves, society and God. Well, two out of three in my case.

What you are really saying is that we are obligated to follow our conscience.

Good. Very good.

That, too, is another step closer to an intellectual assent to the existence of God.

You need to ask yourself the question: what binds you to absolutely obeying your conscience?

As an atheist, you have no answer. Why must you do this absolutely? Are you absolute?

If you say, “I demand of myself that I am obligated to obey my conscience” what prevents you from saying, “Now I release myself of this demand”?

 

[inocente]

Does the BBC have the consequentialist ethic correct? Are there no inherently evil acts?

Correct, only the consequences count.

iep.utm.edu/conseque/
plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/

In Catholic morality, all 10 must die. CCC #1753 … Thus the condemnation of an innocent person cannot be justified as a legitimate means of saving the nation.

In Thomas’ version of natural law, there is a “catalog of goods” which drives decisions about the morality of actions. One of the goods he includes is life itself. At that point my knowledge runs out, perhaps an expert can post what his natural law theory makes of the dilemma.

 

[PRmerger]

Ergo, it will come down to sheer force and that with absolutely no underlying principle to guide it. Totalitarianism here we come.

Indeed. And that was proposed just a few pages ago as a solution.

To wit:

Then I will gather more people who agree with me, and beat the living daylight out of you. When push comes to shove, the strongest bully on the block with have his own way. The law of the jungle prevails. If I cannot, I will go underground and bide my time. Guerilla warfare is very effective.

Monstrous. Simply monstrous.

 

[PRmerger]

That is wonderful. No more burning the heretics at the stake? No more prisons for homosexuals? In Russia it is still the accepted method to deal with homosexuals.

I can tell you with great assurance that I haven’t burned a single heretic nor imprisoned a single homosexual.

Nope. Not a one.



And if you could offer some documents from the Church which commanded such a thing, we can chat about this.

And I have seen quite a few people in this board who were applauding to the Russian system.

If you say so.

And with your atheistic framework all you can do is say: well, to each his own.

And you hope that “talking” to the rapists will have any effect on them?

I always have hope that people will have a conversion to Truth after being presented to it.

You don’t?

Oh, right. You prefer to appeal to beating the living daylight out of them. And guerilla warfare. And going underground. Allegorically.

Birth control is now acceptable? NFP is periodic abstinence, nothing more.

Not to cause a tributary on this thread, but I wanted to say, since you brought it up, that the above is a perfect example of my endorsing a morality that is certainly NOT my preference.

It would certainly be my preference to take a pill so I don’t get pregnant.

But my preference is subverted by the actual truth of our sexual natures.

 

[PRmerger]

Well, I already explained a few times. The people, whose “preference” is against raping do the following:

1. establish a society
2. create a legal system with laws against rape
3. create a police force to maintain those laws
4. catch the rapists and put them into prisons

Ah. I see then. That’s what you meant by “beating the living daylight out of someone”.

Okey-dokey.

That is a profoundly ridiculous way of trying to make “beating the living daylight out of someone” palatable, but there you go.

Also, does “guerilla warfare” belong in the above euphemism, too?

How does that appeal to “guerilla warfare” fit in to your tasteful and refined version?

Here’s your quote again as a reference, with my bold:

Then I will gather more people who agree with me, and beat the living daylight out of you. When push comes to shove, the strongest bully on the block with have his own way. The law of the jungle prevails. If I cannot, I will go underground and bide my time. **Guerilla warfare **is very effective.

Also, is the scenario, #1-4 an example of the “law of the jungle”?

Because I really don’t understand. You initially proposed a very violent, animalistic form of morality…

*then *said it was allegorical, offering the “beating the living daylight” explanation as really meaning the very civilized, “We recognize your rights as a human person and will, after a trial, imprison you if you are found guilty”…

But I’m still confused as to how this is “the law of the jungle” and “guerilla warfare”.

Could you please x-plain?

 

[PRmerger]

Sorry, your “logic” is incorrect. I will say it again: “not all preferences are equivalent!”.

Ok.

Tell me: which is greater (or better? or more moral?):

“I prefer okra.”

Or

“I prefer turnips.”

Or…are they equivalent?

Because they are simply…

personal preferences?

Yes?

So you can see, I think, how having no objecting right or wrong means, necessarily, that there is NO WAY to judge whether one preference is NOT equivalent to another.

It’s simply…“I like spicy foods. You don’t. To each his own”.

To equate the preference against rape to the preference against okra only shows that you have no idea what you are talking about.

Again, not my argument, but that of Christian apologists.

And I’m glad you recognize its absurdity.

That’s what happens when you are a moral relativist.

Your stubborn repetition of “rape = okra” reminds me of someone who asserted that the chance of winning the jackpot on Powerball is 50%… because you either win it, or you don’t. His ignorance of mathematics was pretty much equal to your ignorance about atheistic value systems.

Yeah. That person certainly has an impoverished understanding of truth.

I’m glad you can see that there are objective truths and that some people can be wrong about them.

One more final time: not all preferences are equivalent!

I prefer brides to wear white.
In China, brides prefer to wear red.

Which is better?

 

[IWantGod]

Indeed. And that was proposed just a few pages ago as a solution.

To wit:

Monstrous. Simply monstrous.

He really does believe in objective moral law. Otherwise it would not upset him so much.

 

[PRmerger]

He really does believe in objective moral law. Otherwise it would not upset him so much.

Oh, yes.

Anyone who comes here and argues for his position being correct believes in an objective moral law.

Otherwise, it’s as otiose as going to a forum and arguing whether it’s wrong to have okra be your favorite vegetable.

When there’s no right or wrong (for example, in the world of favorite vegetables), no one argues–at least not for 35 pages–about whether it’s right or wrong to like okra.

But when someone actually believes that [A] is wrong–objectively wrong–he may spend 35 pages arguing his point.

 

[o_mlly]

…
A consequentialist would say that killing X is justified because it would result in only 1 person dying, rather than 10 people dying
…

Correct, only the consequences count…

Then I must retract post #140 as the consequentialists following this thread would not agree with my post:

While all, I think, would agree that plunging a knife into the heart of a survivor before pushing him/her overboard (to mitigate the thrashing and screaming) is evil and never permissible, …