The Nazis were democratically elected. Indeed, one of the worst possible ideas is to legislate morality by popular edict. I don’t understand how a Catholic could support such a thing.
This just shifts the question. Now you have to discover which people are reasonable. Moreover, it is a false definition of natural law, as the Church teaches it.
Agreed.
I don’t think it’s nonsense. As an example, I think Martin Luther King Jr.'s conception of good is better than Hitler’s conception of good. Do you think that’s a nonsense statement? Because if you think it is, then it seems to follow that you think MLKJ and Hitler had morally equivalent conceptions of good. But I doubt you think that, so what am I missing?
Do you mean that MLKJ’s view, that racial equality is good, is not a good view in itself? And that Hitler’s view of racial supremacy is not bad in itself?
I don’t think that moral agents are the only things that can be good and bad.
I don’t think it’s trivial because I think one’s view of the goodness or badness of various moral theories has world-changing consequences, and I don’t think it’s nonsense because I think we can validly defend the view that Hitler’s morality was bad and that MLKJ’s is better. But that’s what I think. What do you think?
Okay. Let me number the steps for easier citation:
I think my explanation is different from and more defensible than this explanation.
I think we can verify that God’s will is goodness itself if we can verify that moral values exist. If I could formulate that as a logical argument, I think it would look like this:
Are you confusing the issue by deliberately saying I said something I didn’t say?The Nazis were democratically elected. Indeed, one of the worst possible ideas is to legislate morality by popular edict. I don’t understand how a Catholic could support such a thing.
You seem to be confusing morality with politics.
This just shifts the question. Now you have to discover which people are reasonable. Moreover, it is a false definition of natural law, as the Church teaches it.
Moral relativism is defined here:
"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires. The church must defend itself against threats such as “radical individualism” and “vague religious mysticism”. [emphasis added]"Are you confusing the issue by deliberately saying I said something I didn’t say?
Do you think I advocate Nazi morality?
To advocate majority rule is not to advocate Nazi morality. Yes, they were democratically elected, but not by the majority of reasonable people who tended to oppose them.
Read my post again and tell me I said Nazi morality should have been democratically elected, then get yourself another cup of coffee.
Natural law is planted in our hearts and can be discovered universally by the application OF RIGHT REASON.
That is not what the Church teaches?
Tell me what the Church teaches that contradicts what I have just said.
The good, old Nazi card. Hitler was hailed as a savior at the time of his election. The people were living through not only the Great Depression but the reparation demands of the Treaty of Versailles, which demanded a large compensation to the French caused by German military action there during World War 1. Hitler was against the Communists, which is why he committed his armed forces to defend against a possible Communist takeover of Spain in 1938. The Communists lost.Are you confusing the issue by deliberately saying I said something I didn’t say?
Do you think I advocate Nazi morality?
To advocate majority rule is not to advocate Nazi morality. Yes, they were democratically elected, but not by the majority of reasonable people who tended to oppose them.
Read my post again and tell me I said Nazi morality should have been democratically elected, then get yourself another cup of coffee.
Natural law is planted in our hearts and can be discovered universally by the application OF RIGHT REASON.
That is not what the Church teaches?
Tell me what the Church teaches that contradicts what I have just said.
Yes, we are being lied to, and that is what makes it difficult for reasonable men to be in the majority and rule. The unreasonable men rule and drag fellow unreasonable and reasonable men with them to perdition.
Generally speaking, reasonable people do not disagree. They agree that murder, rape, and theft are crimes. We are talking about moral axioms, not “if” propositions. The moral law is not relativistic, as so many in this thread have insisted. It is rooted in natural law, which, whether you are religious or not, is the discovery of truth by the natural light of reason that God gave us to do good and avoid evil.Then you said, “The question remains: what exactly is the natural law? It is whatever all reasonable men agree it is.” That’s not the Church’s teaching. The Church teaches that natural law is the way that nature reveals moral truths to human reason, unaided by revelation. Your definition leaves a huge hole, which you fill in by the phrase “reasonable people.” But, in ordinary parlance, it’s possible for reasonable people to disagree.
I know lots of thoughtful, reasonable people who believe things like the following:
I won’t name names, but a lot of Presidents were excellent performers as candidates, as well as other politicians. One American President who was linked to a crime, said, “I’m not a crook.” and resigned from the Presidency - in the last half of the 20th Century. Another said, “Read my lips. No new taxes.”
What I mean is that you cannot “step outside” of your own moral code and compare different moralities objectively. You are still evaluating them through the lens of your own morality. So when you say that MLK’s morality is better than Hitler’s, you’re really just saying that MLK’s more closely resembles your own.
I agree that the line between is and ought was crossed from 6 to 7. It seems that you went off on a tangent after 6, because the next step should answer why it matters that something is part of creation. If you don’t address that, then even if respect is indeed part of creation, it will be a non sequitur.
I’ll give you the chance to pick up where you left off and fill in the rest of the chain after step 6, but I think this was sufficient for making my point. It was a valiant effort, but notice that you still had to assume the moral value of creation in your argument. What this illustrates is that you can’t start with only “is” statements and derive “ought” conclusions. Facts alone can’t derive morals. To derive a moral, you must assume at least one from the outset–an axiom.
I would prefer to avoid metaphysics if possible, but if we must go that route, I’ll need your definition of “God” first. I ask because you’re trying to argue that God is maximally good, but often God is just assumed to be such. For example, most ontological arguments begin by defining God as “a being of which no greater can be conceived”, i.e., a perfect being. Now since a being would be better if it were maximally good than not, it follows very trivially from this definition that God must be maximally good. He is effectively defined as such.
A person can use reason reasonably or unreasonably. What the Church teaches is always reasonable. But we don’t have to cite Church authority to prove the unreasonableness of the six propositions you mentioned. All we have to use is reason. For example, one could cite both Plato and Aristotle against sodomy. They were not Catholics or Jews and in all probability never read the Old Testament, but still were able to see that sodomy is against our human nature and is therefore unreasonable. Again, abortion (until the perversions of moral relativism) was always regarded as repulsive by reasonable people.
If we cannot compare moralities objectively, why have police and the courts?
Let’s consider the job of a juror, for example. Their task is not to compare moralities, but simply to address the question “Is it highly probable that the defendant committed the offense?” The juror’s opinion of the morality of the offense, and even their opinion of whether or not it should be considered an offense is irrelevant. In fact, if a juror made it clear that their vote of guilty or not guilty will be motivated by ethical considerations of the law rather than just the preponderance of evidence in the case, they will be kicked off the jury.
They may or may not. I don’t think the assumption is necessary. For example, some laws are passed (or not passed) only because doing so is seen as pragmatic. These laws are enforced by the police and courts just as much as laws that are seen to carry moral weight, sometimes more so. Now perhaps you could argue that something can only be considered pragmatic if a moral view is already in place, but there certainly is not a one-to-one correspondence between morals and laws, unless you just define your morality to be “everything prohibited by law is evil”.
The fact that some laws contradict each other has nothing to do with whether some of these laws are objectively on target or somehow not objectively on target. The contradiction may well stem from the failure of the federal or state law to live up to what is objectively right or wrong. But differences in laws do not signify that there is no objective right or wrong. Before the Civil War there were some states where slavery was legal, and other states where it was not legal. Slavery was objectively wrong even in the states where it was legal. Today, abortion is morally wrong even when it is protected by Supreme Court decisions. Everywhere in the world you find people who realize objective right and wrong, and those who do not realize it. Burning a live man in a cage is wrong, regardless of one’s motive. Nuclear war would be wrong, even if the people at war think they are right to be nuking each other’s cities.
I agree, but the matter at hand is not about the objectivity of morality, but whether or not people who support a legal system need to believe in an objective morality. The idea that having a legal system implies assuming an objective morality was your claim, was it not?
Cognitive dissonance is another way of saying unreasonable behavior.
A reckoning to be feared or welcomed.