Non-theistic foundation of morality?

[Charlemagne_III]

This was a very interesting post! You have a very thought provoking take on analogies and thought experiments!

Let me see if I got this right:

A moral man. Hungry. He wants to:

• eat a sandwich for nutrition only
• eat a turkey for nutrition only
• eat a baby for nutrition only

A moral man would NOT endorse this at all. Why?

Because he truly doesn’t believe that eating is for nutrition ONLY.

A moral man eats for nutrition only. The goal of eating is to satisfy hunger. There is no other goal to be achieved.

The method of eating is not a goal, whether or not it gives pleasure. Eating pizza, for example, is a pleasurable sensation that encourages the goal of satisfying hunger. But we can eat things that are not pleasurable (broccoli) and still satisfy our hunger.

Having sex is a pleasurable sensation that satisfies nature’s goal of having children. Sex is pleasurable, not because it is nature’s goal, but as a means to achieving nature’s goal. Not every act of sex will result in offspring, but every act of sex reinforces nature’s opportunities to achieve her goal of reproduction.

This is why the sane man despises the man who has sex only for pleasure, and not for the goal of satisfying a primal survival instinct. Sex for pleasure is not a goal. It is an activity only, and one that can be controlled. The person who cannot control it becomes promiscuous and even self destructive, such as male or female prostitutes.

 

[PRmerger]

A moral man eats for nutrition only. The goal of eating is to satisfy hunger. There is no other goal to be achieved.

No, C3. I don’t believe this to be the case.

Moral agents eat for nutrition, pleasure, companionship, social benefits.

It is when we attempt to divorce nutrition from the act of eating does it become disordered.

 

[Bradski]

This is why the sane man (and presumably woman) despises the man who has sex only for pleasure, and not for the goal of satisfying a primal survival instinct.

Gee, Charles. I bet you used to knock them dead when you were younger.

‘Florence, the way the moonlight sparkles in your eyes. That dress. Your perfume. You look…magnificent. Just being here with you makes me the luckiest man alive. Why don’t we finish the wine and perhaps go up to the room.’

‘Why, Charles. You mean…?’

Yes, yes, my dear. I have a primal survival instinct which I must satisfy’.

 

[Bradski]

It is when we attempt to divorce nutrition from the act of eating does it become disordered.

So I have literally just finished a bowl of chile for lunch (great that it always tastes better the following day).

Probably ate a little too much. Quite full. More nutrition than I really needed. But hang on…what’s that in the back of the fridge? Yeah, left over black sticky rice. But I don’t need any more food. Ah, what the hell. Add a small dollop of coconut ice cream and I’ll eat it just because it tastes good.

Hard to believe, eh? Someone doing something just because it feels great.

 

[inocente]

What “stuff” is that? Calling you out on misquotes? Factoid: Data stored on a hard drive is not “carved.” It’s magnetic.

I work in IT. Carved in hard disc = carved in stone updated. From file carving.

I’ll travail once again to do the forensics on just this last one of your many misquotes (I have a life). You claim on this misquote, “As always I quoted you verbatim. “ You might look up the word “verbatim” because, as shown below, you apparently have not grasped the meaning.

Misquote means “a passage or remark quoted inaccurately”. In the posts you selected I quoted you verbatim. In the first post you recognized the principle of minimum force affects choice of weapon but chose not to use it, so ensuring your bomb was indiscriminate. In the second post you said “I get it now” and I took you at your word. No misquotes, just following the logic of what you wrote. You accuse two posters of misquoting you, and have provided no evidence that either of us have. What you appear to mean is not misquote but misinterpret. A defensive person will jump to the conclusion that others are dishonestly twisting his intent, while an assertive person will say it again to ensure he’s understood. As for the last few lines of your post, did Jesus ever moralize condescendingly? Whatever, off-topic, see you around.

 

[inocente]

I wouldn’t call it relativism.

If one of those asexual beings visited us and saw how we live, s/he would surely see the importance that moral considerations concerning sex have for our social interactions. Perhaps s/he would even realize what we should do and what we should avoid in that respect. But it would not make sense if s/he tried to establish the same attitudes and behaviors in the universe where s/he belongs.

Similarly, attitudes and behaviors related to the conservation of life would not exist in a universe where all living beings were immortal. So, their morality would not concern any of those attitudes and behaviors. Nevertheless, if one of those immortal beings visited us and realized that we are not immortal, he would probably see how important it is for us to have moral considerations in this respect.

There would not be a contradiction between the rules which apply in those different worlds and those which apply in ours, but some of the rules which are not needed in one world would be needed in the other.

A relativistic stance would be that for which, given the set of conditions that define the morality of a determined human act, it is good for subject A and bad for subject B, and it is not good nor bad independently of those subjects.

I am not a relativist if when someone asks me “does water boil at 100 degrees Celsius?” I respond: “it depends on certain conditions”.

Ah but your temperature scale is an invention - other scales are available. In that sense the scale is relative. You could remove any trace of invention by asking a more fundamental question such as “is there an objective measure of heat in molecules?”.

By comparison, “Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material” sounds like an invention - other laws are available. You could remove any trace of invention as Jesus does when he asks "What is written in the Law? How do you read it?”, and is given the more fundamental answer "‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”.

Now the asexual being may or may not have a law about wearing mixed cloth, but wouldn’t have a law about condoms, it’s not relevant to he/she/it. But presumably if from a social species, would see the relevance of ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ (if not from a social species, even that wouldn’t be part of his/her/its morality, if morality makes sense for a non-social species).

So I think on one world a specific law might be good for A but not B, on another good for B but not A, on others good for both or bad for both or irrelevant. Implying we cannot devise any specific laws and hope they are absolute across all possible worlds.

But we could ask, as Jesus does, what is the fundamental law behind all the others, and we may agree with the answer He is given. However, that doesn’t give us any specific answers about mixed cloth or condoms.

 

[o_mlly]

… Misquote means “a passage or remark quoted inaccurately”. In the posts you selected I quoted you verbatim.

You didn’t look up “verbatim.” Try again.

In the first post you recognized the principle of minimum force affects choice of weapon but chose not to use it, so ensuring your bomb was indiscriminate.

What? Did you read the post? Up late? On meds?

In the second post you said “I get it now” and I took you at your word.

Really? Here’s the post you reference. It is not the second post. It’s not even in the list of posts shown to evidence your misquote. However, It is your admission that you misquote me because you believe what I say doesn’t matter. At last some honesty and I reply sadly that now I understand why you are so loose with the truth.

Doesn’t matter what you say,
o_mlly;14042686:

Ahhh, there’s the rub. I get it now.

No misquotes, just following the logic of what you wrote. You accuse two posters of misquoting you, and have provided no evidence that either of us have. What you appear to mean is not misquote but misinterpret. A defensive person will jump to the conclusion that others are dishonestly twisting his intent, while an assertive person will say it again to ensure he’s understood. As for the last few lines of your post, did Jesus ever moralize condescendingly? Whatever, off-topic, see you around.

A new low on this post. Verbatim quotes? Honest misinterpretation? I think not. Not even clever but an inane attempt to dodge the obvious. Excommunication, a medicinal treatment, is required so I won’t be seeing you around.

 

[PRmerger]

You seem to not understand that that statement is a description of harm that is relative in itself.

Is harm morally acceptable?
It depends. Who is being harmed?
A child.
It still depends. How is the child being harmed?
By having needles stuck into her.
It still depends. Does she consent?
No.
It still depends. What is the reasons for this happening?
To prevent and/or to cure illness.

There we have harm being caused, but for a good reason. We discover this by investigating the conditions under which it occurs. The conditions relative to the act. So ithe act is, without any shadow of a doubt, morally relative.

Right.

You can change the conditions and it obviously changes the morality of the act relative to those conditions. In fact, change the last statement to ‘just because it gives me pleasure’ and the act becomes morally unacceptable. Relative to the new conditions.

True.

But what you want to do is call the first one relative and the second absolute. When ALL you are doing is changing the conditions relative to the act.

LOL!

Yes, “ALL” I have done is change the conditions relative to the act.

So an act like sticking a child with needles may be good, or it may be bad.

The conditions determine this.

And there is NO CONDITION in which it would be permissible to stick needles into this baby for fun.

You can’t name a single condition in which this would be moral, therefore you believe in…

MORAL ABSOLUTES.

Literally everything comes down to the question of harm. To determine the morality of an act, you have to break it down and examine all the conditions relative to the act to be able to do so. Again, there is no act that stands alone whereby you cannot do this. Whereby you HAVE to do this to make the determination.

Sure. You have to examine the situation.

And there is NO SITUATION in which it would be permissible to torture a baby for fun.

Therefore…

you cannot disagree with this statement, "It is a moral absolute that one should NEVER torture a baby for fun."

QED

 

[PRmerger]

So I have literally just finished a bowl of chile for lunch (great that it always tastes better the following day).

Probably ate a little too much. Quite full. More nutrition than I really needed. But hang on…what’s that in the back of the fridge? Yeah, left over black sticky rice. But I don’t need any more food. Ah, what the hell. Add a small dollop of coconut ice cream and I’ll eat it just because it tastes good.

Hard to believe, eh? Someone doing something just because it feels great.

Now, you go to the bathroom, stick your finger down your throat because you wish to divorce yourself from the nutrition that you get from this ice cream…and…what happens?

What do we call this?

An eating…disorder, yeah?

And I am still hoping to hear confirmation that you understand that sex cannot be ONLY for enjoyment OR confirmation that you’d have no problem accepting that your wife had sex with her high school crush since, hey, it was for enjoyment only.

 

[PRmerger]

Hard to believe, eh? Someone doing something just because it feels great.

Now, I just want to make it clear that there’s no need to assert (again!) this fundamentalist ONLY here.

The Catholic Both/And is (again!) so formidable.

There is no need to say “If sex isn’t for enjoyment ONLY, then all things can’t be for enjoyment ONLY”

Here’s a list of things I can do for enjoyment ONLY:
-watch Arrested Development
-look at pictures of my babies when they were wee ones
-walk on the beach
-scratch an itch
-kiss my honey
-call my girlfriend
-shop
-play Ruzzle (just try to beat me!)
-scroll through Facebook

 

[Peter_Plato]

So I have literally just finished a bowl of chile for lunch (great that it always tastes better the following day).

Probably ate a little too much. Quite full. More nutrition than I really needed. But hang on…what’s that in the back of the fridge? Yeah, left over black sticky rice. But I don’t need any more food. Ah, what the hell. Add a small dollop of coconut ice cream and I’ll eat it just because it tastes good.

Hard to believe, eh? Someone doing something just because it feels great.

And keep eating things “just because it feels great” and see where that gets you. We will hardly recognize you in a few months.

“Because it feels great” cannot be the principle of governance for any sane human being. The principle of governance has to be well-being and harm, not simply pleasure and pain. The extent to which pleasure and pain signal or indicate well-being and harm is the extent to which they might be useful, but it is pretty clear that appetites and emotions often go out of whack.

If you are trying to claim that the means of governing pleasure is simply with more powerful pleasures (or pains), then perhaps it follows that the governance of pain should be the inflicting of stronger pains (or pleasures.) I pity the resulting being.

Nothing to do with the completely different recourse to ordering by reason and consequences, then?

 

[Peter_Plato]

You seem to not understand that that statement is a description of harm that is relative in itself.

Is harm morally acceptable?
It depends. Who is being harmed?
A child.
It still depends. How is the child being harmed?
By having needles stuck into her.

Whoa! Back up the wagon.

It isn’t clear that the child is “harmed” by “having needles stuck into her.” Sure, she might be pained by having that done, but whether or not she is harmed is what is being determined by the insertion of needles. The whole point, some would claim, of putting needles into her is that those needles will greatly benefit her by saving her from great harm.

The needles might cause great benefit rather than any harm whatsoever. The entire question of whether sticking needles into the child is permissible resolves itself by whether, in the end, the child will be benefited or harmed, not by whether she will be pleasured or pained.

Again, there seems a confusion on your part between pain and harm, pleasure and well-being.

 

[e_c]

Yes, “ALL” I have done is change the conditions relative to the act.

So an act like sticking a child with needles may be good, or it may be bad.

The conditions determine this.

And there is NO CONDITION in which it would be permissible to stick needles into this baby for fun.

You can’t name a single condition in which this would be moral, therefore you believe in…

MORAL ABSOLUTES.

Sure. You have to examine the situation.

And there is NO SITUATION in which it would be permissible to torture a baby for fun.

Therefore…

you cannot disagree with this statement, "It is a moral absolute that one should NEVER torture a baby for fun."

QED

This argument is less about acts, more about intentions. Which is interesting. I wonder if B will consider intentions to be “situations”? But for him it is all about empathy anyway, and his empathy surely will protect the baby in this case. Now, I’ve asked him several times about how we know which empathy is the right kind, but no response. Just like no response to my short exposition of natural law.

Inocente - A bombing anywhere is indiscriminate in some degree. The virtue required here is prudence… you need to be careful to maintain the correct circumstances that allow for the explosion to pass the PDE test.

Sex for pleasure only - PR has a good point, but the subtlety need not be subtle: it is for a certain KIND of pleasure, which is “pleasure with me only”… There was equivocation going on between the act in general and in practice.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Sex for pleasure only - PR has a good point, but the subtlety need not be subtle: it is for a certain KIND of pleasure, which is “pleasure with me only”… There was equivocation going on between the act in general and in practice.

Nature made sex pleasurable not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end … the survival of the species.

It is because so many hedonists have lost sight of this that marriages fail and promiscuity abounds. Hardly the end toward which nature is driving us, unless one wants to argue that nature is driving us to self annihilation.

As in the case of all those lovely diseases that follow in the wake of pleasurable promiscuity.

I prefer to think there is a devil in all those promiscuous details.

 

[PumpkinCookie]

Ok…

How does one eat pizza and broccoli for nutrition only?

How does a hungry person eat without satisfying the pleasurable sensation of satiety?

Huh? How about that it’s wrong to kill a human being?

Then what would that reason be, PC?

Egg-zactly. It is wrong for the wife to have sex with the pool boy and/or concession stand operator not because sex is NOT for enjoyment only, but because it involves infidelity/adultery/breach of contract.

It is wrong for the hungry man to eat a baby not because eating is NOT for nutrition only, but because it involves murder/infanticide.

That said, I do agree that enjoyment is not the exclusive purpose of sex. The enjoyment is clearly an inducement provided by nature to ensure reproduction.

I also think the pleasure involved in eating is an inducement provided by nature to ensure survival as well.

 

[PumpkinCookie]

Gee, Charles. I bet you used to knock them dead when you were younger.

‘Florence, the way the moonlight sparkles in your eyes. That dress. Your perfume. You look…magnificent. Just being here with you makes me the luckiest man alive. Why don’t we finish the wine and perhaps go up to the room.’

‘Why, Charles. You mean…?’

Yes, yes, my dear. I have a primal survival instinct which I must satisfy’.

 

[Aloysium]

How does one talk about sex in the abstract? Give yourself over to it one hundred percent and you will know no greater disappointment. Fact is that promiscuity is a defence against intimacy, while your soul is screaming out for that very thing. With commitment there opens a never-ending depth of wonder in knowing another. It won’t be pretty, and what is that craziness that grasps each of us when all we want is love. But, called upon, in the giving, love will heal all wounds, reconcile differences, bring not only peace but joy and new life.

 

[Bradski]

With commitment there opens a never-ending depth of wonder in knowing another.

No argument there. I’m not sure why people are associating promiscuity with the fact that we often indulge in sex just because it feels good. Just because it feels good doesn’t mean that you are free to do it with anyone at all.

I’m bemused by that connection.

 

[Peter_Plato]

No argument there. I’m not sure why people are associating promiscuity with the fact that we often indulge in sex just because it feels good. Just because it feels good doesn’t mean that you are free to do it with anyone at all.

I’m bemused by that connection.

Perhaps the misunderstanding is the result of your phrasing.

You say: “… we often indulge in sex just because it feels good,” but then you add “…doesn’t mean that you are free to do it with anyone at all.”

Doesn’t the condition of “doesn’t mean that you are free to do it with anyone” a limiting condition of “indulging …**just because **it feels good?” It isn’t, then, “just because it feels good” but “just because…” given the following conditions."

 

[PRmerger]

Egg-zactly. It is wrong for the wife to have sex with the pool boy and/or concession stand operator not because sex is NOT for enjoyment only, but because it involves infidelity/adultery/breach of contract.

LOL!

Why would that be a breach of contract but eating lunch with him wouldn’t?

Why is that, PC?

Think about it.

It is wrong for the hungry man to eat a baby not because eating is NOT for nutrition only, but because it involves murder/infanticide.

Ok…

That said, I do agree that enjoyment is not the exclusive purpose of sex. The enjoyment is clearly an inducement provided by nature to ensure reproduction.

And, again, no moral person views sex for ENJOYMENT ONLY.

If that were so, you’d permit your wife to have some enjoyment ONLY with the pool boy.

QED

I also think the pleasure involved in eating is an inducement provided by nature to ensure survival as well.

Sure. It’s only when you divorce it from its natural purpose that you have a disorder.