I am an atheist. I reject objective morality, and see morality as a social construct relative to the time. I do not believe that morality can only be achieved through supernatural revelation. I have the same rights as everyone else does as administered and enforced by the law.
But you have no moral rights. Just the legal rights that the law gives you. Correct?
Why does being created in the image of God mean that a person is worthy of profound respect?
Is there some kind of illness going around? I never discounted the possibility of redemption for atheists. Why you think that i did is beyond me.
I sure do. Assumptions are powerless.
Do you have a Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition? If yes, please read the first sentence of paragraph 357. On the other hand, you should start by reading paragraph 355 and keep going through paragraph 421. The first sentence of paragraph 410 could possibly be considered as God’s reason why human beings are worthy of profound respect.
Welcome to CAF
The right to moral treatment, if that is what you mean by “moral rights”, belongs to each individual regardless. Not believing in Divine Revelation is a choice which does not change the Catholic belief that Jesus Christ hung bleeding on a cross for all, absolutely all, persons.
When you get a moment or two, please follow the suggestion in post 124.
“Redemption” is the chief moral right of all people.
I do have moral rights.
Not according to the existential consequences of your world view you don’t. You have legal rights.
The belief that one has moral rights is irrational if one rejects belief in objective moral values. You have no rights, accept the legalities the government gives to you. Might makes right. These are not “moral rights” in the same sense as objective moral truth. You have the right to be protected by law, not because your existence has intrinsic moral value, but rather because society and the state has seen it as advantages to enforce various laws on pragmatic grounds.
That is meaningless to me. Without objectivity, one mans morality is another mans oppression.
All this means is that people behave in a way that gives them the best chances of survival, relative to their desire to survive. In most cases its best to cooperate. But that isn’t always true; neither is it always true that the desire for survival or social popularity is always stronger than the desire to obtain pleasure. And in those cases where it is not true, there is no rational grounds to say that somebody is wrong for behaving in a harmful manner, and there is no rational grounds for virtue either.
That we benefit from particular kinds of behavior tells me nothing about my moral rights.
Could it be that you are confusing God’s plan for human nature with a human view of the world?
When it comes to moral rights, are you saying that human beliefs have power over God?
Pragmatic grounds as reason for good behavior does not lessen God’s plan for human life.
This is the same old, same old CAF problem regarding the difference between objective and subjective in relationship to relativism.
Rational grounds are – the human person is worthy of profound respect. This fact is an objective truth because it exists outside of our mind, emotions, memory, desires, etc. Of course one can respect other persons because of one’s personal or group desire for survival. That is life in the big city. Whatever the human process for choice is, it does not change the way God made human nature.
If you say so. However, whether you know something or nothing about moral rights does not alter the fact that you, as a human person, are worthy of profound respect.
I disagree. It is perfectly rational to live by morals. There are reasons why I don’t go around committing crimes. I have an empathy and respect for others - I would be going against my own beliefs to commit a crime. And secondly consequences dictate my course of action - If I do something wrong, I will be punished. I agree with most laws, but like most people I don’t agree with all laws, I make my own mind up about these matters, based on my own conclusions. I am simply examining their relative merit.
You’re appealing to consequence here. You’re concluding that subjective morality is false simply because it leads to undesirable consequences. Whether or not the consequences are desirable has nothing to do with the soundness of the premise.
Perhaps, but I would personally place my own survival before my desire to obtain pleasure, simply from a practical point of view. If someone is behaving harmfully, they are conflicting with my own moral beliefs.
I create my own meaning in life based on what I see to be reasonable. The fact that morality has evolutionary purposes simply supports my own views on the matter.
That is not the question. The question is, if atheism is true, do human beings have moral rights, by that i mean objective moral rights that are not dependent on the whim and fancy of human opinion.
Why do you have empathy, and does having empathy truly make you a good person?
Why do you have respect for others, and why does that mean that people should be respected?
Your beliefs are just moral fantasies that do not reflect objective reality.
That doesn’t make the belief that you have moral rights objectively “true”.
You agree with that which makes you feel good. What has that got to do with objective moral truth?
You reject the idea that its truly wrong to rape children.
We all know that objective moral law exists.
Personal Experience, and continuous activity in virtuous acts.
Subjective morality is false because it is objectively meaningless. There is either moral truth or there is not. Objective moral truth either exists or its doesn’t.
You have boundaries that you are not willing to cross.
You create fantasies because they help you to survive in a strange and meaningless world.
Human nature is *both *rational and corporeal. A person uses both reason and choice.
In regard to human nature and the right to profound respect, I acquire this objective knowledge by looking in the mirror and then looking at other people who are apparently basically the same nature as myself.
One is never too old to learn different names for common sense.
That is quite a stretch to bring in evolutionary purposes because science, by definition, remains in the material/physical world. Humans have intellective powers that are far beyond highly developed sentience of non-human material beings. Humans also are sentient; but the uniqueness of human nature makes humans different in kind from all other sentient species.
If morality has evolutionary purposes it existed prior to evolution!
The ability to understand morality and the ability to chose or not choose a specific thought-out action belong to the spiritual soul of human nature. The spiritual does not evolve in the traditional sense of evolution.
I share your view but Reivax obviously doesn’t!
Well to answer your question simply, lots of atheists don’t believe that humans have objective moral rights. There are however many atheists who believe in objective morality. Such as Ayn Rand, with her Objectivism, and even Buddhists. Buddhism is often regarded as an atheistic religion. I think this is important to note this in order to answer the OP to the best of my ability. I have been speaking from my own atheistic views, I do not speak for all atheists.
Empathy is something I would argue is a product of evolution. Why do I have it? Because empathy was a trait that was advantageous to the human species. Empathy is simply the ability to share emotions with one another.
Because I choose to. I came to this conclusion on a rational basis. It also ties into the part about empathy above.
That’s true. I am completely aware that they are completely non-objective.
Of course not.
That’s true, it has nothing to do with objective moral truth.
This is a very sensitive topic. The best way to understand it is like so: I don’t consider rape to be truly wrong, but with just as much conviction, I don’t consider rape to be truly right either. Think of it as amorality, rather than immorality. The common misunderstanding is that if you don’t think rape is wrong, well it must be right. Which is creating a false dilemma. In my view it’s essentially a neutral thing. But I have learned that rape is counterproductive and unreasonable. This sort of topic comes up frequently, and the following is another response which highlights the reasoning process that supports a subjective take on the issue:
asktheatheist.com/?tag=moral-relativism
I disagree.
Personal experience, in other words anecdotal experience is not ‘proof’ that objective morality exists.
You’re simply begging the question when you say ‘Subjective morality is false because it is objectively meaningless’. I agree with both of the statements following though.
And for good reason.
Correct. Morals are extremely useful, so I embrace them, perhaps with a similar conviction that you embrace your own? The world is indeed strange and I create my own subjective meaning, I don’t believe one can ever come to know or realize an objective meaning.
I disagree, I don’t think there is any reason to think that we have an immaterial soul. There is certainly no proof for one, because it would by definition be unobtainable by scientific means. This is certainly where we have to agree to disagree. My understanding is that religion and science are mutually exclusive and contradictory. Believing in God and an objective morality is a matter of faith. You would be doing yourself a disservice by trying to argue from a logical and scientific point of view for something that is by definition, not subject to the ‘rules’ of logic and science.
That’s a matter of faith.
I only believe in a material world. Evolution theory accounts for human intelligence, it is simply a product of time and random mutation. Consciousness is an emergent property.
I do consider myself spiritual, but my definition differs from most definitions as it does not require belief in immaterial things, it comes from the wonder I have when I observe a beautiful and mysterious universe. To acquire understanding of this concept, read about Spinozism and Pantheism, these are close approximations to my own spirituality, but I prefer not to use the term ‘God’.