I very much agree with the evaluation that philosopher/biographer James Harris concludes with here: it is easy and extremely common to misunderstand Hume as a Moral Anti-realist or as a Moral Subjectivist.
Reading David Hume's arguments concerning our ability to locate the source of morals convinced me of Moral Realism and Moral Objectivity and is what ended all of my opposition to Christianity. I explain Hume's perspective here: http://liamk.org/is-love-real/
Religion just like everything else is a tool for survival, nothing more. Many religions revolve around disciplinary structures; if you don't do what is "right", it's typically viewed as not optimal for survival in this world or what they may view as an afterworld. You seem to put these emotive features of love, beauty and whatever tickles your fancy as above all when there'd be none of those observed without the survival of an observer; the Machiavellian means of survival does have moral validity whether you see it or not.
You generalize atheists and atheism so much as to dilute your target, a common and cheap practice in debate. Atheism is already diluted enough because it's a non-belief, nothing else, so there's little target for generalization there even though you love to employ it in a desperate attempt to find something to latch on to and debate. And the atheists I know, most are relative moralists. That doesn't mean they don't think humanity doesn't have a moral compass, in general, but they tend to mean that there's no facts to demonstrate moral code, as you just said in your link. There's so much wrong with your arguments there, I don't know where to start.
Let me put it in simple terms, moral code tends to be derived from a variable mix of reason and emotion for us. Because pain tends to make us withdraw from the situation that entices it, we conclude that pain is not something we want, ie, "bad". No one knows ultimately why we receive negative/positive stimuli for certain situations but the best we can conclude, morality can be derived from reason and emotion. If you're assuming morality isn't tied to either and rather derived from the illogical, mystical, magical, whatever it is you're implying, then it would be a fool's errand because you can't use logic to debate illogic. But anyone can claim their moral code or gods are beyond logic but in this world, to be of value, you need it backed by something more substantive. Basing your life on that which is beyond logic is a dangerous game and I'd conclude not morally optimal.
I'd recommend you looking at life more in a thermodynamic fashion. It's simple, elegant and you have no magical and mystical unproven qualities that need reconciliation. From thermodynamics, you can learn theorize better to why life behaves as it does and helps take the mystery out of a lot of it. I'd argue morality is a thermodynamic function, even. Morality being derived from pain/pleasure senses, which derive from chemical processes, etc but of course, no one ultimately knows. But to me, saying "definitions of right and wrong are not based on the relations of objects nor can be perceived by reason" is false. Many people who convert to a religion do so because that religion may make some sort of sense to them. That's one of the reasons I became a christian early on, because it made some sort of logical sense. Not much but just enough to lure me in. You can use that tactic with people for all kinds of uses, to tell just enough truth to get them to believe you and if they like it enough, you can get away with falsehoods. Many use reason to justify their statements about how their gods or moral codes don't have to abide by reason, ironically.
No one is foolish enough to deny that various societies develop moral codes, generally based on their experiences (eg, pain). The question is whether moral statements (eg, "Humans should not murder") are objective and Real (they refer to some objective Moral Fact) or whether this was just a delusion we invented and used to survive.
>>but the best we can conclude, morality can be derived from reason and emotion
No. This is the entire Is-Ought argument. Saying "Hume is wrong" does not refute Hume. You would need to give a reason.
>>looking at life more in a thermodynamic fashion
Materialism cannot point to a source of objective moral values. Period.
>>But to me, saying…is false.
As expected, that's not a refutation.
>>That's one of the reasons I became a christian early on
In my opinion, based on your given conceptions of metaethics, rather than dismiss this avenue of inquiry with the reasoning "it made some sort of logical sense [but not enough]" you could likely have explored the concept further.
You capitalize "truth" in other comments and say we should seek it yet you don't realize this endeavor is also prone to the is-ought problem. Because man seeks truth, does that mean he should morally seek it? The principle you adhere to destroys itself with even the faintest intellectual rigor. The more you try to make logic of illogic, religion, the more it waters down your version of truth. It happened to me also. What I then believed as a Christian became so watered down that it was far and away anything resembling Christianity.
>>Materialism cannot point to a source of objective moral values. Period.
Yes, it can. Whatever the material is derived from, it's chained to a more objective link. So yes, you can use relative morality to argue that it, in itself, has objectivity. For example, someone higher in rank says Saturday is a day off yet he gives the order to his inferior that he can then order that Saturday can be either. You have relative order coming from objective order.
>>In my opinion, based on your given conceptions of metaethics, rather than dismiss this avenue of inquiry with the reasoning "it made some sort of logical sense [but not enough]" you could likely have explored the concept further.
Ah, the old 'because you don't believe, you haven't been spending enough decades of your life exploring the religion I want you to believe in'. Meanwhile, hundreds of other religious people want me to explore their hundreds of gods and hundreds of interpretations through hundreds of years of philosophical wankery. I just could as well say you haven't explored atheism enough and that's why you haven't arrived to it.
>You capitalize "truth" in other comments and say we should seek it yet you don't realize this endeavor is also prone to the is-ought problem. Because man seeks truth, does that mean he should morally seek it?
You're right that if the reasoning given for seeking, knowing, or relying on truth was "because man seeks truth" this would be an invalid reason, subject to the Is-Ought problem. But that's not the reason I encourage you to know truth.
>The more you try to make logic of illogic…
As far as Christianity, there seems to be sort of a divide between a Western tradition that intended to show Christianity as ultimately reasonable (ie, scholasticism in the Church of Rome, the Church of England, many Protestant denominations) and groups that sort of just admit the system is fundamentally unreasonable and mystical such as the Orthodox, Roman mystics like John of Ruusbroec, Baptists, and Pentecostals. I sort of side with the latter.
Assigning value to yourself where there may be none for the purpose of having value is a possible symptom of "self-important". Your jump from "morals cannot exist without a higher power" to "the christian god is that higher power" is a huge leap.
"We make nothing of religion if we do not make heart-work of it. The only thing that you cannot be in Christianity is self-righteous/self-justified and self-important/self-reliant."
Morals can be created and defined to help humans run effective societies and decide the way we interact with and expand the definition of life.
>"Morals can be created and defined to help humans [X]"
No one is foolish enough to deny that human societies can employ ethical codes and that doing so can help a society survive or thrive. But what is debated is if there exists Objective standards (or not) and from that, what that means for us. Drawing from an earlier comment addressing this, while both humans and animals may practice empathy, cooperation, or other behaviors that help them as individuals or groups to survive or thrive, this falls short of 'morality'.
Morality is positions about what one should do: eg "one should not murder humans for sport". Hume's observation of the Is-Ought problem shows us that we cannot reason "humans practice X therefore humans should practice X" as we similarly cannot reason "humans believe X therefore X is objectively the case".
Saying that animals or humans practice empathy is merely observing something they do, the "Is". We can't say "humans sometimes practice empathy therefore humans should practice empathy" like we can't say "humans sometimes practice violence therefore humans should practice violence".
You could add a condition, such as "If humans do not want to be put in jail by society, then they should not murder (or at least get caught having murdered)". But this is known as Hypothetical Morality, and with dependence on the conditions it becomes merely advice about cause and effect and is to be ignored by those who don't find the conditions compelling.
You seem to reason that only theism holds a monopoly on morality in that it links to a higher order but atheism just as well can be linked to a moral higher order. I get what you're saying, I've been there also but I also realized the error of my ways. I'll give my own link as well that vaguely covers this. I will admit I'm not very well versed in theology, but not for lack of interest but I've never come across any argument that could successfully refute atheism's moral or philosophical validity. 0134340.blogspot.com/2016/05/machiavellian-musings.html
Maybe, but if an Atheist is to propose/claim an Objective "moral higher order" they do so with an acceptance of a standard just as outside of Empiricism as the Theist's.
Or they could create a testable hypothesis like "acting in this way increases the sickness of those in this world" and test if an action moves in that direction. It would be objective based on the available data.
And yes - the main difference being a thiest position posits the existence of something else (that could be moral (Allah/David's God) or immoral (David's God) or amoral (Vishnu/Z eus)) as part of its model outside of empiricism beyond morality.
A goal which isn't chosen to achieve some higher-level goal.
Taking a sports analogy, you can have the goal of winning a game, so that you get nearer the goal of winning the championship. "Winning the game" is a subgoal.
A top goal would be something that doesn't have an ulterior goal justifying it, you want to achieve it for itself.
I know what you think a "top goal" is and that somehow it is different from a "sub goal". What I'm saying is that there are only goals, they are all the same and you stop at some point only because you decided to.
Why can't I try to win a game just to win it? the answer is of course I can. So at that moment has the goal changed its nature? of course not.
This is the same argument as with "micro" and "macro" evolution. There are no two different evolutions, there is just evolution.
You do it the same way you decide between everything else, you ask a question, collect the data, and then make your decision.
'Should I win the game? every time I don't win I feel bad, but when I win I feel good. I choose to win the game. My objective is just to win the game.'
Ah, but your monologue shows that your goal of winning the game is actually evaluated relatively to another goal, of feeling good. How did you empirically get to that goal?
Yes, you have to choose the end goal but then you can use rationality.
I'm not sure how you choose a good endpoint. Maybe "life is good" and therefore "expand life". This could lead in many ways though - from fascism to reversing entropy to human experimentation.
It seems most morality for all humans comes down to "what is best for my in group" and then a selectively defined endgroup.
There may be an argument for objective morality being based on expanding knowledge of the universe to the point where we may discover morality? We have very little accurate data on the universe and life in the universe to draw on - maybe as we gain a more accurate and useful model of reality morals will come out of the"woodwork" like writing allowed us to begin pontification on them across generations.
But that's the point; if the endpoint is subjective, all rules derived from it, even if you use an objective system for doing so, are necessarily subjective.
maybe as we gain a more accurate and useful model of reality morals will come out of the"woodwork" like writing allowed us to begin pontification on them across generations.
Maybe it has already happened and we were unable to identify it. How would we distinguish it from all the other theories of rational ethics that come up from time to time?
You've underestimated the reach of the Is-Ought problem. Again, we can't say "humans sometimes practice empathy therefore humans should practice empathy". You, like Sam Harris, start by ignoring the Is-Ought problem and proceed with an assumption "sickness"/pain/suffering is The Objective Negative Standard (says who?) which falls far short of approaching a refutation of Hume's observation. Here is his observation: there is a gap between Facts (that which Is--like "sickness") and Values (moral commands--that which we Ought to do) and this fundamental difference remains.
Ultimately I believe my position is as knowable as many things. But as you notice, the wider point is that anytime we believe that humans have objective value or that it is objectively wrong to, say, murder a human, we have departed from strict Empiricism (and like Sagan and Hitchens said "that which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence"). Regardless, humans of all beliefs and backgrounds, including Atheist Secular Humanists, ignore this and make the departure whether they will admit to doing so or not. Believing and declaring that humans have value when we have no scientifically-accepted empirical evidence that humans actually do is part of the beauty of humanity.
You keep saying, in many different ways, that you can prove your hypothesis that morality is objective by inserting a god into the argument, followed by asserting the relativity of your position. I don't know how you are missing that.
The argument isn't to "prove...that morality is objective" or, for that matter, to prove God exists. It is just an observation that "For morality to be Objective, this is the necessary dependency: God".
It's not saying much more. Even when we understand and acknowledge Hume's observation, morality may or may not be Objective, God may or may not exist.
But if God does not exist, morals are not Objective. Just our inventions, along with God and we used both for our comfort/survival/thriving. And what's fascinating is that in such a world, all those times Theists (and Atheist Humanists) proclaimed that humans had value without scientifically-accepted empirical evidence they would not have been acting Immorally/Wrong.
>> The argument isn't to "prove...that morality is objective" or, for that matter, to prove God exists. It is just an observation that "For morality to be Objective, this is the necessary dependency: God".
The argument is that for morality to be objective, something external must be the source. You are making a huge jump by calling it god, and then you go even further and claim it's the christian god.
>> But if God does not exist, morals are not Objective. Just our inventions, along with God and we used both for our comfort/survival/thriving.
If god does not exists is health an invention? Science has liberated us from attributing health to gods, I suspect the same will be true of morality. To me it already is more moral to care for someone just because they are a fellow human being than to do it because some ancient manuscript may have commanded it by fear of ironically, itself immoral and eternal torture.
>> And what's fascinating is that in such a world, all those times Theists (and Atheist Humanists) proclaimed that humans had value without scientifically-accepted empirical evidence they would not have been acting Immorally/Wrong.
>>The argument is that for morality to be objective, something external must be the source.
This is what Hume shows. Can you refute his observation by providing a source of objective morality that is Empirical/not external/not supramundane? (You can't. There is none.)
>>If god does not exists is health an invention?
No and by volunteering a metaphor that compares the existence of objective moral facts (Values/Ought) with empirical facts like health (Facts/Is) you betray a laughable lack of understanding of the Is-Ought gap.
>>Science has liberated us from attributing health to gods, I suspect the same will be true of morality.
The question at hand is whether we do so tenably.
>>because some ancient manuscript
In the case of Christianity the attempt is to follow the instructions of an actual Person and the central feature of Christianity that distinguishes it from perhaps all other religions is that actions must lack self-interest, ruling out actions based on fear as Tim Keller explains http://subspla.sh/8149923
No, that's what I meant. If morality does not truly exist, it was not morally 'wrong' anytime humans proclaimed it truly did. We remember the realization of the Marquis de Sade that if God does not exist then everything that is, is Right; but further, if the unempirical does not exist, then proclaiming it does is not wrong. In the words of philosopher Thomas Nagel: "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either". Fun.
>> In the case of Christianity the attempt is to follow the instructions of an actual Person and the central feature of Christianity that distinguishes it from perhaps all other religions is that actions must lack self-interest, ruling out actions based on fear as Tim Keller explains http://subspla.sh/8149923
Every major religion claims a lack in self-interest. Almost all of them offer torture as dissuasion.
>> This is what Hume shows. Can you refute his observation by providing a source of objective morality that is Empirical/not external/not supramundane? (You can't. There is none.)
That is not what he shows, no one has been able to show this external source. That is what he postulates. And I think he is wrong.
>> No and by volunteering a metaphor that compares the existence of objective moral facts (Values/Ought) with empirical facts like health (Facts/Is) you betray a laughable lack of understanding of the Is-Ought gap.
What you don’t understand is that you only called them values because you have no explaination for them. Is-Ought is only a problem if you chain yourself to the baseless idea that Oughts have to be supramundane(??). Science can tell, empirically, what ought to be, and it already has in many many cases; it tells us with a very broad body of evidence that women are not inferior to men, thus we ought to treat them equally. Is that objective? it is objective enough at least in the same sense that medicine tells us objectibly that we ought not to vomit every day. That is why the analogy works.
Your argument fails because at the end of the day it is nothing more than the god of the gaps argument: You don’t know were morality came from, therefore god.
>>no one has been able to show this external source.
For a start, look up Nihilism on Wikipedia or Moral Anti-realism on the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: this is why people are Nihilists and Anti-realists.
>>And I think he is wrong.
No surprise, you can't provide a source of objective morality that is Empirical/mundane/"scientifically-verifiable". You give no reason why Hume is wrong because you seem to still not grasp the reach of what he "postulates".
>>Is-Ought is only a problem if you chain yourself to the baseless idea…
Dismissing it while unable to give a coherent refutation shows it not to be baseless but painful perhaps.
>>Science can tell, empirically, what ought to be…it tells us with…evidence that [X: empirical fact]…thus we ought to [Y: behavior].
This presumes we ought to treat men a certain way. On what grounds should a human not murder another human? Because society will inflict a certain consequence? That's called Hypothetical Morality, and it falls under Moral Nonrealism. It can be ignored if one is willing to accept the consequence or can evade the consequence. Just because a neurobiologist says something on stage at TED does not make it the case. Though the Sam Harris fan club is often not capable of being persuaded otherwise.
>>medicine tells us objectibly that we ought not to vomit every day
Here you presume human health to be an ultimate good. We (hopefully obviously) can't reason "Humans like to practice violence therefore humans should continue to practice violence" and likewise we can't reason "Humans like to avoid vomiting therefore humans should avoid vomiting" as strange as that can at first sound.
>>You don’t know were morality came from, therefore god.
It's more an observation that our only options are
#1 Moral Realism (cannot be shown Empirically) / "Theism"/departure from Empiricism
#2 Moral Nonrealism / Atheism / Empiricism / Materialism
You have chosen the second camp and seem to dislike the logical conclusions that camp is forced with, namely in such a world nothing is truly Moral or Immoral. How anyone is unfamiliar with this very real dichotomy this far away from 1738 is a puzzle. And you are without grounds to declare that those who proclaim camp #1 are truly acting Immorally.
What you (and Hume, but he has the weight of being a product of his time) don't understand is the reach of science, experience and empirical testing. Morality is a product of evolution, and by understanding it through science (in the broad sense) we have made incredible moral progress.
Nihilism is a problem that is not solved by postulating a god, doing so doesn't get you any further. It is useless. You don't get meaning from anything by adding a god to it.
I don't presume human healt to be an ultimate good, experience has shown that it is an ultimate good, or as ultimate as a goal can be. Of course health nihilism is also a thing, but is also not gonna get solved by postulating an invisible, undetectable agent, even if you call that agent god.
I have not chosen a camp. You have provided no evidence for your position, and even gotten as far as claiming you don't need it, how convenient, and have dismissed offhand every argument against it in this thread simply because you don't understand that the "is-ought" problem is not as complicated as you make it sound.
I don't dislike the conclusion of my position, I'm fine either way, ultimate objective morality to me is just as irrelevant as ultimate objective medicine. What you want is to ground morality to something so objective in a perfect sense, to which no other human developed idea has or can be.
Why you want so bad for morality to be grounded on a god, and one of the worst if not the worst as the christian god is beyond me.
>>What you and Hume…don't understand is the reach of science, experience and empirical testing
I'm familiar with Sam Harris' argument. We have measured levels of health, pain response, serotonin, dopamine, and various other yardsticks with new technology. Harris argues that assuming our goal is to maximize happiness and reduce pain, these technologies can help us track our progress. He's right. But this assumed suggested first principle of human empathy isn't novel. Hume in 1738 was very familiar with the concept of human empathy. It was not enough then to tell us how to act and never can be.
>>I don't presume human healt to be an ultimate good, experience has shown that it is an ultimate good, or as ultimate as a goal can be.
Being only a subjective human, your personal opinion about health, which is all this is, is not infallible and is validly rejected.
>>I have not chosen a camp...ultimate objective morality to me is just as irrelevant as ultimate objective medicine.
This is a real dichotomy, not a false dichotomy: moral statements refer to objective moral facts (Moral Realism) or they do not (Moral Nonrealism). You do not currently believe moral statements refer to objective moral facts, correct? That's one of the two camps. There is no neutral position, you have chosen.
>>we have made incredible moral progress
In your camp, Moral Nonrealism, morals (statements about what humans should do) don't refer to objective moral facts. Instead they are subjective whims and invented delusions we use to help us survive and thrive and to give us comfort. Just as one subjective moral opinion in America today cannot be objectively better than a differing subjective moral opinion in Brazil today, subjective opinions that differ across time also cannot be said to be better or worse than any other. Thus, while change occurs "progress" never does.
>>one of the worst if not the worst as the christian god
A common response to a proposed Upside-Down Kingdom, where the currently first will later be last.
Perhaps I don't completely understand your argument, but I don't really see how 'morals are not objective' and 'we act as if they are' is much of a problem.
Most people I know also accept that humans are highly irrational in most areas of life, and yet at the same time are capable of rational thinking (and using science as a tool for this) and understanding these irrational processes.
It always struck me a bit as 'begging the question' when Christians I talked to pointed out the inconsistency of 'not believing in objective morality' and yet 'holding strong moral viewpoints', because this very need for consistency kind of assumes that there should be such a consistency. Perhaps this is is a justifiable thought if you assume that there's a God who created things in an orderly fashion. But that's a premise many people don't share.
While you might not be making this exact argument, my point is that if you can accept the, in my opinion, overwhelming evidence we are not very sensical creatures living in a not very sensical world, the problem you point out isn't really a problem.
We have evolved to act as if there are moral absolutes, just as we perhaps have evolved to dress up our need to copulate, procreate, and combat loneliness as 'romantic love'. I can believe the latter and still be a romantic without any problems.
True, it's unavoidable some humans are always going to be wrong. But, in the same vein as earlier, we can't reason that because (some) humans don't care about what is true, humans should continue to not care about what is true.
As far as others suggesting you resolve inconsistencies and hold logically consistent conclusions: yes, to arrive at Truth by examining what logically follows from true and sound reasoning you are going to have to first adopt the 'dependency' of Western logic. But, indeed, you only need do this if you care to know Truth. Many humans reject the use of Western logic (eg, the New Age community) and prefer vague, unexamined existence but I agree this ultimately is each individual's prerogative.
Your perspective seems to be "humans often hold untenable positions and Earth has not yet been destroyed because of this (or apparently impacted in any significant way from it) therefore I may (without impact) hold untenable positions", a position I and your Christian interlocutors I think unsurprisingly reject. My most sincere advice to you and to all everywhere is found in Rousseau's echo of Juvenal's motto "Vitam impendre vero"—you must stake your life on Truth.
Re: your ability to be a romantic you'll note that the conclusion in Vladimir Solovyov's truncated syllogism "Man is descended from the apes; therefore we must love one another" does not follow. Materialists can practice what looks like romance but cannot be romantics in any meaningful sense of the word.
> Materialists can practice what looks like romance but cannot be romantics in any meaningful sense of the word.
I must say I really enjoy reading about your position in this and, to be honest, would wish nothing more than to be in agreement with it. I was a devout Christian for much of my life and I still feel the loss. But my reason for quitting this search and need for capital-T truth was that the Christian version of it (as well as the few others I explored) just wasn't convincing. It felt like a convenient lie to give meaning to my life rather than some Truth I happened to have figured out.
But all this doesn't mean that I now spend my life an exhausted nihilist. There's plenty of room for values and truth in a world-view that holds that ultimately the Objective nature of these things is probably unknowable. By the standards I used to hold as a devout Christian, I'm quite possible a better Christian now than I was back then. Plus I'm happier.
Anyways. I see your point, and I respect it for the most part, but I think it's a bit overreaching and arrogant to argue that a materialist cannot be a romantic in any meaningful sense. By my definition of meaningful, my romantic relationships are very meaningful. And practically speaking, I'm pretty sure my experience of romance is not so different from that of a Christian anyways.
I grew up Christian (of sorts) and drifted away from the belief. Like you write, it felt like a convenient lie. I was convinced it was a myth invented by humans to bring themselves comfort. Observing human suffering seemed to me to be proof of no God. I heard of the Buddha who declared both that there was no creator God and that life was suffering, and based on what I had seen of poverty, disease, and war this seemed to be the case. For me, I saw my rejection of Christian claims as a very element of my personal need for 'capital-T truth'. I embraced that motto of Rousseau and Juvenal and began studying every -ism and theory apart from Christianity.
Eventually, I would run into a philosophy B.A. who was also a Christian. I constantly pressed them for justification of their belief and their main response was this quote by Kierkegaard: "If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?" -- If there were no God, life would be despair (and Siddhartha would be right) so we believe. This line of thought upset me. What I wanted was to know what was actually the case, how the world actually was and not how we might like it to be. Truth at any cost no matter how inconvenient, bewildering, or painful.
I studied Buddhism and Eastern philosophies (which are basically methods of coming to terms with and accepting nihilism). But I retained an idea that human suffering was bad and humans somehow had value. Reading Hume is what changed me. Unless an outside rubric existed that would declare human suffering bad, human suffering never actually had been bad at all. But I believed internally stronger than any other belief that somehow it truly was bad and this instinct seemed to be a self-evident truth. What Hume shows is that this instinct that we feel is either placed in us in relation to a Supreme Being and its existence functions as a unit of evidence called natural revelation or it is a strange delusion we invent and we delude ourselves that human suffering matters.
A liberating realisation was that, in light of this, if the second scenario were the case, it was also not morally 'wrong' anytime humans proclaimed suffering was wrong, one would have merely paid the universe a compliment it would not have deserved. If the unempirical does not exist, then proclaiming it does is not wrong. In the words of philosopher Thomas Nagel: "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either".
As far as quitting the search and holding logically untenable positions, I suggest this remark by Walker Percy: "This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him." He portrays a worldview known as the supernatural existential, desiderium naturale, or Man as Wayfarer in his book The Moviegoer explained here: http://liamk.org/moviegoer/
Hume had a tendency to seek truth but does that mean Hume should've seeked it? Hume is also susceptible to his own problem as you are.
>>What Hume shows is that this instinct that we feel is either placed in us in relation to a Supreme Being
You seem lost in that you think what atheists I doesn't come from something more despite us not having a name for it. You may call it a god, Yahweh, etc, I call it a feeling of existential validity. I believe also that my instinctual feelings come from something beyond, something greater, a higher order, whatever you want to call it but it's far beyond what we have knowledge of and so far from Christian mythology that I refuse to call it "god" or "gods". I prefer not to be linked to that.
And your mentioning of suffering, beauty, love, etc over and over makes it seem to me that you're coming from an emotional point, not a logical one. Not all love is good. Sometimes doing without love makes us stronger. Sometimes suffering is good, it builds strength and character. Sometimes feeling "bad" is "good", sometimes the opposite. You'll never find real logical truth when you base it on such ambiguities. Life is way too complex to just say 'I like love, therefore god".
If life is good and meant to be, then that which nurtures and perpetuates it is good. Sometimes it's suffering to strengthen oneself, sometimes it's suffering to strengthen humanity and weed out the weak so that in the end, we have left ones who don't suffer so much. Love for oneself and humanity is an emotion that in itself, can be a weakness. Too much and you have vanity and pride, which can be a weakness of successful living and leadership. If love is mercy and tolerance, sometimes what's needed for living isn't mercy and tolerance. You seem to praise certain emotions and instincts as if they're infallible. Believing in gods is also a weakness when you count on those gods to look out for you when you should be looking out for yourself. Some don't care what we do to the Earth because they count on their gods to save them or about space travel because they rely too much on their gods not throwing balls of fire at us, or they pray to their gods to save them from medical illness. All this is predicated on the presupposed notion of life being good so we should perpetuate it. And it takes your love of love, beauty, suffering, etc out for a proverbial spin because life sometimes needs needs what it doesn't wish for, for it to flourish.
Hume had a tendency to seek truth but does that mean Hume should've seeked it? Hume is also susceptible to his own problem as you are.
>>What Hume shows is that this instinct that we feel is either placed in us in relation to a Supreme Being
You seem lost in that you think what atheists reason about the universe doesn't come from something more despite us not having a name for it. You may call it a god, Yahweh, etc, I call it a feeling of existential validity. I believe also that my instinctual feelings come from something beyond, something greater, a higher order, whatever you want to call it but it's far beyond what we have knowledge of and so far from Christian mythology that I refuse to call it "god" or "gods". I prefer not to be linked to that.
And your mentioning of suffering, beauty, love, etc over and over makes it seem to me that you're coming from an emotional point, not a logical one. Not all love is good. Sometimes doing without love makes us stronger. Sometimes suffering is good, it builds strength and character. Sometimes feeling "bad" is "good", sometimes the opposite. You'll never find real logical truth when you base it on such ambiguities. Life is way too complex to just say 'I like love, therefore god".
If life is good and meant to be, then that which nurtures and perpetuates it is good. Sometimes it's suffering to strengthen oneself, sometimes it's suffering to strengthen humanity and weed out the weak so that in the end, we have left ones who don't suffer so much. Love for oneself and humanity is an emotion that in itself, can be a weakness. Too much and you have vanity and pride, which can be a weakness of successful living and leadership. If love is mercy and tolerance, sometimes what's needed for living isn't mercy and tolerance as they can disintegrate the core foundations of the merciful and tolerant. You seem to praise certain emotions and instincts as if they're infallible. Believing in gods is also a weakness when you count on those gods to look out for you when you should be looking out for yourself. Some don't care what we do to the Earth because they count on their gods to save them or about space travel because they rely too much on their gods not throwing balls of fire at us, or they pray to their gods to save them from medical illness. All this is predicated on the presupposed notion of life being good so we should perpetuate it. And it takes your love of love, beauty, suffering, etc out for a proverbial spin because life sometimes needs what it doesn't wish for, for it to flourish.
I'm a lurker, not used to commenting so I don't know why but I can't edit comments.
If one gave as one's reason for seeking truth "humans sometimes happen to seek truth" you are correct, this would be an invalid reason because of the Is-Ought limitation. That cannot be the reason one seeks truth.
>you think what atheists reason about the universe doesn't come from something more...I call it a feeling of existential validity. I believe also that my instinctual feelings come from something beyond, something greater, a higher order, whatever you want to call it but it's far beyond what we have knowledge of
Discussing this issue is tricky because ultimately, being a Christian, I don't disagree with your experience in which you intuit something greater or with Hume's pinning of essences on a Supreme Being or with almost every person of every belief system I have ever met who feels very deeply something is actually going on here and I might refer to this universal experience as the supernatural existential or desiderium naturale. Ultimately I am not arguing against morals actually existing and so don't mean to put down this feeling you have, only let you know what is required for such a feeling to not to be dismissed as delusion. Strict Empiricism cannot account for it and must reject it but you, I, and even Sam Harris (cf. http://www.newsweek.com/rationalist-sam-harris-believes-god-... ) seem to reject this Empiricism. The Empiricist says your feelings here are a delusion but I'm saying they are not--quite the opposite.
>mentioning of suffering, beauty, love
The inclusion of terms like beauty and love is not at all illogical. What the "Is-Ought" Facts-Values gap shows us is that nothing is truly Immoral unless it holds such a quality objectively. In other words, unless murder objectively holds the quality:'immoral', when an individual says "Murder is Wrong" the meaning of that sentence is nothing more than "I dislike murder" -- a subjective opinion. The limitation is extended not only to 'shoulds' but to values generally. That is, we see the difficulty in locating 'beauty'. A sunset is not truly beautiful unless something about it objectively holds the quality:'beautiful'. If this is not the case, when an individual says "that sunset is beautiful"—even if 99% of humans agree with him (ad populum)—the meaning of that sentence is nothing more than "I like this sunset" -- another subjective opinion. In subjectivism, no one can ever be truly wrong about any value statement (what is moral, what has beauty, what deserves value/love) and so a sunset carries the same objectively neutral quality as excrement. Only if conditions are endowed with objective/mind-independent values, which cannot be located using empiricism, can something be understood to truly be beautiful or worth loving.
>If life is good and meant to be
A oft-assumed contingent that Empiricists do not have evidence for. And that pure Reason does not insist upon. As Hume writes "It is not contrary to Reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger".
I think what you are trying to say, or what you want to believe, is that for morality to be objective it needs a coercive power behind it. I'm surprised no one has brought up law as an analogy.
There is seemingly no reason for many laws to exist other than the fact that historically it was what humans believed in the past to be right or wrong (eg. sodomy laws). Laws exist because most people agree to abide by them for the most part, because kings or parliament have codified them, and because they are enforced with coercive power. The reason morals exist is because people agreed with them, priests codified them and they are enforced with coercive power (not so much in modern secular society, but softer coercion such as shaming and shunning still exist).
Laws are a social contract enforced with coercive power, I don't see how morals are much different. If you're arguing against those who can't see the gap between Is and Ought, that is fine, but I suspect most people have accepted and moved on from there once they realise it, and yet they still behave in moral ways for the most part.
Morality is the differentiation of actions proper and improper; generally defined 'morals' is that language that contains imperatives: what humans should do (as sentences, called 'norms').
When we wonder why there seems to be a lack of behavior that follows these morals in the world, we approach the concept of morality from a descriptive sense (we observe that human behavior has changed). Increased insight in this pursuit is found when we examine how humans themselves have approached morality from a normative sense (what is actually proper and improper). When humans have considered morality they have come to understand that the morals humans proclaim—again, language that contains imperatives—either correspond to real, objective moral facts ("Moral Realism") or are merely invented delusions expressing human emotions ("Moral Nonrealism").
Prior to the Enlightenment, there was a category of accepted knowledge outside of empirically observed nature (e.g., the non-natural, supramundane, supernatural, etc). The Enlightenment itself was a shift in human thinking that rejected this category as invalid, switching our criteria of acceptable knowledge to the material, to the empirically observed.
The shift in thinking did not happen all at once. Certain beliefs remained, held over from earlier times—somewhat as dependencies—until they could be examined and dismantled individually if they lacked empiric evidence. Western society's assumption that objective Moral Facts existed in a material universe remained for some time until examined by David Hume in 1738 in his A Treatise of Human Nature. Here Hume observed the difficult reality of the relationship between facts (that which is) and values (that which we claim ought to be), concluding that we cannot assert prescriptive or normative values based on descriptive facts.
Hume's Is-Ought observation upset the world, and has resulted in our modern condition. If empirical observation is categorically never able to locate oughts, a world that accepts Empiricism alone is one forced from Moral Realism to Moral Nonrealism: morals no longer correspond to Objective Facts, but can only be understood as invented whims and emotions, which—apart from society's ability to enforce or inflict punishment for as a conditional consequence (what Kant termed 'hypothetical morality')—can be ignored without consequence.
The transition from a society whose intellectuals and leaders held Moral Realism (viz, Christendom) to one where artists, philosophers, and intelligentsia hold Moral Nonrealism (the Modern West) has been a long, painful process since 1738. The Marquis de Sade astutely summed up the painful condition of man following Hume's revolution in thought saying "If there is no God, then everything that Is, is Right" and the majority of Western thought since then has either been in reaction against this belief (i.e., revivals of Evangelical Christianity) or experiments exploring this accepted world (e.g., Surrealism, Dada, Modern Art, Existentialism, Egoism/Individualism/Anarchism, Deconstructionism, Postmodernism, etc).
From the introduction to Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor by the American Heidegger-scholar and philosopher Charles Guignon:
Briefly put, the issue is this. Either God exists or He does not exist...if God does not exist, then the picture of the universe formulated by mechanistic materialism must be true. But, in this case, given the point of view of modern science (what Ivan calls "Euclidean reason"), the universe consists of nothing but meaningless material objects in causal interaction, effects follows cause according to the laws of physics, people are determined to do what they do, no one is guilty of anything, and so there are no such things as right or wrong, good or bad. Or, more precisely, the ideals of justice, goodness, benevolence, dignity, and so on turn out to be purely human inventions, the results of projecting our needs and wishes onto bru...
Both Atheists and Theists sometimes act in accordance with various suggested Norms and sometimes do not. However, the observation is that if Atheism is true this has implications for morality, namely moral facts do not actually exist.
Atheism, in itself, makes no claim about "moral facts". It's the lack of belief in deities. If your whole premise of the article is based on squeezing lemonade from apples, or implying more about atheism other than what it's not, it won't be true because atheism is nothing other than lack of belief in deities.
You can be an atheist and still believe morality can be derived from something other than a devised deity. I feel you'd be better off if you just went back to the drawing board; you seem confused by this whole 'atheism has no moral validation' notion. There's many other theories of universal creation other than what we typically think of as gods and those theories can just as well be used to justify personal moral code. I don't think you've had much experience with atheists, willfully or not, who've cared to clear you up on your delusions about it.
Atheism is true and moral facts do exist. They exist because there are universal and fundamental structures to decision-making processes, and we have a moral obligation to engage them, because they are necessary for moral reasoning. Which in turn is just a special kind of general reasoning, which is necessitated by our very existance.
If moral reasoning is simply a necessity of our very existence, then anything we decide to do is necessarily moral, no? If otherwise our existence only necessitates some general reasoning, but not necessarily that special case, then why should we reason morally? Why shouldn't we avoid that special case?
>>They exist because there are universal and fundamental structures...
This is what Is-Ought is negating. We can't observe a Fact ("Is") and conclude a Value/Moral Fact ("Ought"). Your observance of structures falls under "Is".
In my opinion this kind of gets to the heart of the (mutual?) confusion here. The person you respond to also wrote:
> which is necessitated by our very existance.
...which strikes me as very much accepting that this entire line of reasoning falls under 'Is'. If the premise is that we are compelled to do things because we happen to be creatures evolved that way, the 'Ought' just doesn't become relevant.
Perhaps your view of 'Ought' is just very different from an atheist's view of 'Ought' (or at least mine). My 'Ought' is really just a dresses up 'Is', from your point of view, but the difference is that I'm okay with that. Most atheists that I know are.
Retra, paraphrased, reasons "Moral facts exist because decision-making structures exist which are necessary for moral reasoning and this reasoning in turn is necessitated for our very existence".
This, shorter, amounts to "Moral facts exist because humans employ moral language and must to survive".
That humans happen to employ decision-making structures, employ moral language, tell themselves morals exist, or even need moral language and norms to survive/thrive/be happy/be comfortable does not tell us if moral facts actually exist.
It only tells us that humans happen to employ morals and happen to need morals to exist. As amazing and insane as it sounds, what Hume shows us is that we cannot even assume human continued existence is necessary to reason. Reason is, as Richard Dawkins notes, cold and indifferent to human existence. At this "necessitated by our existence" is exactly what Retra's argument improperly assumes and hinges on. As Hume writes "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." The same logic that prevents us from decreeing whether Hume ought to scratch his finger based on any observed 'Is' likewise prevents us from decreeing whether Hume should destroy the whole world.
> As amazing and insane as it sounds, what Hume shows us is that we cannot even assume human continued existence is necessary to reason
I'm losing you from this point on. Could you elaborate? Because to me it sounds pretty much right on the money that reason is basically necessitated by our existence.
It's a layer on top of an experienced reality that may or may not be Objective in nature, whatever that would mean exactly, and without us, or other creatures capable of 'constructing' this layer, it doesn't really exist.
Ah, whoops. Humans having/employing cognition and reasoning are likely necessitated by us existing.
What Hume/Dawkins/I are saying is that human survival/existence is not necessitated by Reason, which is cold and indifferent. As Dawkins says Reason inside the bounds of Empiricism shows us only "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference".
Right, that makes more sense to me. But with that clarification, I don't understand your argument against "Moral facts exist because humans employ moral language and must to survive".
I'm assuming 'must', here, is not some kind of moral imperative (that would be circular reasoning I think), but rather more of an observation: without moral language we'd be a great deal worse at surviving, and one of the reasons we're doing so 'well' is that we have moral language.
Using cold Reason to examine what is actually True in the universe, we cannot tenably begin by assuming we must survive.
In short, Moral Realism holds that moral properties exist mind-independently and Moral Anti-Realism denies this saying they're all just subjective inventions in our head. Empiricists, if they are to hold logically consistent conceptions about the universe, must hold some form of Moral Anti-realism because they lack evidence of mind-independent moral properties (though taking the comments on this story as an indicator they are generally unaware of this).
Hume goes beyond the moral nihilism of Empiricism by saying (1) given that humans insist and are positive moral properties exist and (2) given that Empiricism shows us no evidence of mind-independent moral properties existing and never can due to Is-Ought then (3) the only way that these moral properties actually meaningfully exist is if they were based on a Supreme Being, not subject to dismissal by Empiricism. Otherwise they don't exist at all. From this a lot of people (like Marquis de Sade and his Sadism) took that they didn't exist at all and this is the primary subject human art, culture, and politics has been interacting with since then.
Thanks for the elaboration I get the impression that we're pretty much in agreement, but my use of words is a bit sloppier (my apologies, I'm working on it).
Based on how you use the term 'meaningful', I think you're right in your conclusion. I don't see a problem there myself, because from my (current) perspective nothing is meaningful in any kind of objective sense (I'm pretty much as zen buddhist, or well on my way), but I've had many discussions with non-religious people / atheists who seem inconsistent in this regard. So I get what you're doing here.
Either way, discussing this has piqued my interest in the topic again. Thanks for that.
As I mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810561 I'm very familiar with the Zen perspective, holding it for about 8 years (brought on by the invasion of Iraq actually). Encountering suffering made me believe that 'life was suffering'. But what brought me out of it was understanding (from Hume) that without a supernatural/supramundane explanation, right/wrong not only could not be located but could not exist, and that same 'suffering' that had troubled me could not be understood to be truly bad.
Additionally helpful was learning, as Edward Leen puts it, that "the chief cause of unhappiness is not suffering". Instead, as Augustine writes, "Happiness is to rejoice in you and for you and because of you. This is happiness and there is no other. Those who think that there is another kind of happiness look for joy elsewhere, but theirs is not true joy." Life often is suffering, but this is not the cause of unhappiness. Unhappiness is caused by not knowing God. As Tozer writes of the supernatural existential "There is a restlessness within us that cannot be satisfied until we rest fully in God."
Humanity really only has two belief systems to choose from: nihilism or the Nazarene, as Carl F. H. Henry puts it. Often, those who most honestly approach the world come to find these two choices and it is not unusual for one to abandon the first for the latter. As former Zen Nihilist and radical convert to Eastern Orthodoxy Seraphim Rose describes it: "Atheism, true 'existential' atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God Whose ways are so inexplicable even to the most believing of men, and it has more than once been known to end in a blinding vision of Him Whom the real atheist truly seeks. It is Christ Who works in these souls. The Antichrist is not to be found primarily in the great deniers, but in the small affirmers, whose Christ is only on the lips. Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ…"
Either way, I am glad to hear of your interest in the topic and I sincerely wish you well on your continued exploration.
> But what brought me out of it was understanding (from Hume) that without a supernatural/supramundane explanation, right/wrong not only could not be located but could not exist, and that same 'suffering' that had troubled me could not be understood to be truly bad.
I think this is really where we fundamentally diverge on the whole matter. Perhaps I'm interpreting you incorrectly, but you seem to have found and then left zen buddhism because it's central argument is that suffering is bad in some kind of Objective way. As in: there's an 'ought' in the story there.
What appeals to me is that, as I interpret it, zen buddhism makes no such claims. It primarily argues that suffering sucks, by its very nature, and we seem to be driven to try and avoid it, so we might as well find the most effective ways to do so.
It then offers some kind of metaphysical framework to understand this (with nihilism at its root), but ultimately focuses on practical approaches to deal with this suffering. Some approaches (perhaps most) even make a constant point of not getting hung up on the metaphysics of it all, because that in itself is considered part of the root problem.
I like all this precisely because I arrived at the conclusion that there's very little evidence or use for 'oughts', or any other statements that claim to be Objectively true. And this troubled me for years until I found zen buddhism to provide me with a practical way to deal with this, and some degree of metaphysics and theory (theology, even) to satiate my desire for theory.
So we're both in agreement with Hume, I guess (interestingly, I've found that this is one thing that Christians and nihilist ex-Christians often have in common).
All that said, to make things practical: could you point me in the direction of thinkers or thoughts that might persuade me that there is such a thing as Objective truth, and that there are Oughts?
That wasn't why I left and I agree that Buddhism does not argue that suffering is bad. After being asked about monks ignoring Precepts like the first one a Zen priest is said to have said to Gary Snyder "A Zen man should be able to eat dog shit and drink kerosene". I remember when I first heard the teaching "one should be as happy to eat dog shit as chocolate cake", part of the 'everything is one reality and there is no differentiation' over-arching theme, I loved it and embraced it. "Simply do not differentiate and you will see that everything is good, just as it is."
Eventually though I was stuck by the reasoning in the joke "I used to be a nihilist but then I thought, what's the point?"
If Nihilism/Zen were true, it would not be wrong to think more positively and to deny Nihilism. CS Lewis noted that if one denied nihilism and was wrong the only thing that would have happened would be that one would have paid the universe a compliment it did not deserve. Or as Tim Keller puts it "Aim at heaven, get earth thrown in. Aim at earth, get neither." And I realised my Buddhist/Vedanta aunt and uncle were just driving around in their Prius from satsang to satsang hugging and laughing with Hollywood celebrities and the 1% while my Evangelical friends were reading books to children with cancer at Children's Hospital.
For a direction, Hume is who persuaded me (like the original article notes, he was not an Anti-Realist) and a nice tool for his writings is the versions found at Early Modern Texts. Another useful direction would be the films of Terrence Malick or the polemics of Martin Luther King Jr. Primarily though I recommend the perspective of Erwin McManus (who you can see speak in Los Angeles, on that video at the end of the essay, or from his podcast) who is pursuing things in the footsteps of mystics like Tozer, Murray, Mueller, Francis, and Jesus. For another thinker who is good at explaining things you should listen to Tim Keller's talks available in the Redeemer app at http://www.redeemer.com/r/get_the_redeemer_app -- regardless of what you believe, Keller's frequent and glowingly respectful citations of thinkers like Shakespeare, Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Marx and others and his references to all elements of culture, from ancient operas to obscure art films is an amazing breadth that always starts conversations between camps who disagree and leaves any listener, spiritually-inclined or not, with more knowledge than they came in with.
Thanks! I think I've read something by Tim Keller in my evangelical days and I quite enjoyed it.
It's interesting that your experience with zen buddhism is exactly the primary 'fear' I have when it comes to the next step of joining a 'community'. So far my indirect experiences have not been positive, and after having wandered outside of (my particular) Christian community for close to a decade I really miss the 'reading books to children with cancer at Children's Hospital' component that was so integral to it all. That's not to say that non-Christians don't engage in this, but just that it feels different. More diffuse and conveniently opt-in. It's one of the reasons I've even considered 'joining the flock' again despite my intellectual issues with the whole thing.
What I was trying to say is that moral facts exist because our behavior is bound by certain 'themes', and that those themes only exist do to moral reasoning (that we may not actually control.) That is, there is no 'maximally objective' vantage point from which a human can base their reasoning in such a way that it will be free from any morality. There are moral conclusions that are simply primitive logical constructs, and the only way to reject them would be to reject reasoning altogether. (For example, you have a moral obligation to think. If you choose not to think, then you certainly can't be thinking with any kind of amoral objectivity. You're not reasoning anything anymore.)
>This, shorter, amounts to "Moral facts exist because humans employ moral language and must to survive".
I would have said "Moral facts exist because humans fundamentally cannot reason or survive without employing moral language." This isn't a coincidence, either. We don't 'happen' to employ morals, we think, therefore we think morally.
>As Hume writes "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
Hume is wrong. Any mind which could make such an assertion implicitly assumes there is value in making such a statement, and thus implicitly assumes whatever existential values are necessary to support a world where such assertions are possible. To do otherwise is self-contradictory, and not a good basis for a convincing arguments.
>Any mind which could make such an assertion implicitly assumes there is value in making such a statement, and thus implicitly assumes whatever existential values are necessary to support a world where such assertions are possible.
Is-Ought shows us that Facts can't give us Values. Like you note, any human talking about any of this first "implicitly assumes there is value in making such a statement". More indication Moral Realism is the case and that values exist objectively. This is also why Christians likewise laugh at Nihilists/Empiricists. As CS Lewis put it "if the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning".
>moral facts exist because our behavior is bound by certain 'themes'...humans fundamentally cannot reason or survive without employing moral language
Nothing inside strict Empiricism or cold Reason indicates that humans must survive. Humans can insist they as a species are important and that humankind must survive until they are blue in the face and it wouldn't make it so. They can write book after book declaring that they have value but that wouldn't tell us they actually have value. However, if there were a book that declared that humans had value, that each and every human retained a non-subjective/mind-independent/objective and priceless value called imago dei and that their existence was deemed objectively good and in fact this book was the work of a non-subjective authority then this would change things.
>Is-Ought shows us that Facts can't give us Values.
Is-Ought is us claiming that facts can't produce values. And we can be wrong about it just fine.
Some facts can give us values. For instance, the fact that we can choose our own values gives us values. The fact that we have to make decisions means that we value those things which are necessary to make decisions.
>Nothing inside strict Empiricism or cold Reason indicates that humans must survive.
I didn't say we must survive. I said we cannot survive without moral reasoning.
Humans who make moral decisions implicitly establish moral value for their decision making abilities. This means that if you go around saying "do X", then you must also support the claim "saying 'do X' is morally correct (in certain situations.)" Which means that you must also support the claim "making moral decisions is correct," which necessitates that you value the ability to make decisions. So long as you wish for logical consistency. (This is not unlike asserting that "'P is true' is true" for all P is a necessary structural property of truth.)
Now, if you want turn around and say "we should all just be dead", then you're making a moral decision that invalidates those values. It is self contradictory. If you think you should be dead, doing anything but dying is a contradiction. Unless you're being non-general: "We should all be dead, except for just for a little while while we all prepare to deal with this revelation." I don't see how you can argue that this can be a convincing argument to consider, even hypothetically.
>For instance, the fact that we can choose our own values gives us values.
When examining what is actually the case rather than only observing what humans happen to think, observations like this aren't able to assist us in making a determination. Just as we can't reason "Humans believe and act like God exists therefore God exists" (here I imagine you concur) we likewise can't reason "Humans believe they have value therefore humans do have value".
You could make the completely uncontested point "Humans believe they have value therefore humans believe they have value" but it would be an unhelpful tautology.
>which necessitates that you value the ability to make decisions
Like I mentioned before, we agree in our rejection of moral nihilism: any human talking about any of this first "implicitly assumes there is value in making such a statement" and this serves as more indication Moral Realism is the case and that values exist objectively.
>I don't see how you can argue that this can be a convincing argument to consider, even hypothetically
I'm suggesting people will benefit from adopting logically consistent viewpoints.
- Empiricism with Moral Nonrealism/Nihilism: logically consistent
- Non-Empiricism with Moral Realism: logically consistent
- Empiricism with Moral Realism: logically inconsistent, untenable
The issue with moral absolutes is the fact that these absolutes can only be derived for a given context (e.g. human, american, mother, christian, etc). There is no objective means to state the primacy of a given context over any others.
That being said, since you have to define what "good" means, and what the role/fundamental characteristic of various contexts is, I think any attempt at a completely rational morality is quite doomed.
A context-independent rational morality might be doomed, but we actually do live in a specific context, and you can be arbitrarily rational with respect to that context.
And regardless, you have to value those things which promote decision-making capability, since you'll end up a non-moral corpse without it, and sacrifice whatever local good you're trying to save in the process. So there are very large contexts with clear moral foundations that you are a part of.
Falling back on religion doesn't get you anywhere. Which religion, and which timeframe? Is it the Christianity of late 19th century America, where homosexuality and sex outside marriage were considered mortal sins? Or is it something more like Unitarian Universalism in the early 2000s? Or is it the extremist branch of Islam preached by outfits like ISIS? You are going to have to decide. And to do that, you're going to have to use the lump of gray matter in your skull.
>It is the only way to understand statements about morality as objective and real rather than as invented delusions that can be ignored.
Not necessary. There is an alternative route through game theory and the notion of an evolutionarily stable strategy. See, e.g., http://www.saet.uiowa.edu/papers/2015/alger%20weibull%20npla.... Put concisely, the argument is that morality is adaptive. In that way morality can be said to be real and not arbitrary.
Nope. From the abstract "What preferences or moral values should one expect evolution to favor?…We show that certain moral preferences…are evolutionarily stable. In particular, selfishness is evolutionarily unstable…We also establish that evolutionarily stable strategies are the same as those played in equilibrium by rational individuals with evolutionarily stable moral preferences."
This is just a big observation of what humans do. To be clear, what is not in contention: does obeying a society's established norms help one survive/thrive. The question we're looking for is: Does the moral language humans employ ("Humans should not murder") refer to objective moral facts (Moral Realism) or is the moral language humans employ just an expression of invented whims that humans use for surviving/thriving/comfort.
In the same way that we cannot validly reason "(1) Humans happen to practice violence therefore (2) humans should practice violence" we cannot validly reason "(1) Humans happen to practice nonviolence therefore (2) humans should practice nonviolence" (as seemingly benevolent and attractive as that reasoning may be).
Your comment to which I responded with mine suggests a dichotomy between morality being "objective and real" through religion and it being "invented delusions that can be ignored". What I was pointing out was that if the evolutionary argument holds true all morality can't simply be ignored in absence of religion: the bloodlines of those who do die out. This evolved morality does not amount only to following your society's agreed upon norms and neither does it derive from them; rather, only those societies whose norms follow the evolved morality thrive and others wither.
The obvious comparison here is to divine retribution. You can borrow a turn of phrase from the Declaration of Independence and say that the punishment comes from Nature/Nature's God. It is encoded in physics itself. If you take the form of moral realism where morality exists in the mind of a god (though not quite the God of Christianity and absent an afterlife affected by your earthly decisions) the parallel seems clear to me.
There is a real dichotomy between morality being either "objective and real" (this in metaethics is termed Moral Realism) or "invented delusions that can be ignored" (this is termed Moral Nonrealism).
Inside Moral Nonrealism the invented opinions can be followed or ignored and doing either will (obviously) have consequences. But this is only Hypothetical Morality -- everything is contingent on what outcome one prefers. Even with the researchers' observation that certain codes lead to societal success, we would not be able to say those codes should be followed without first declaring 'whatever leads to societal success is what we should do' which as Hume shows, however attractive and easy, remains only an assumed human opinion.
And indeed, as far as your observation of it being a fundamental structure and encoded in physics itself, Christians term this 'clear parallel' natural revelation and cite it as evidence for God.
Morality existed for millions of years before religion. It exists because humans are a social species and we need ways to cooperate. Morality doesn't need a justification any more than objects falling downward needs a justification. It comes from the structure of human nature.
What can't be justified from nature is the many arbitrary rules religionists came up with, like treating cows as holy, not eating pork or shellfish, wearing tassels on your clothing or funny hats, etc. etc.
This is quite literally nothing more than the age old 'there cannot be an objective morality without a higher power <giant leap> therefore Christianity".
The challenge, though, really is not if something is 'objectively right'. That's not the question you want to ask, or the conclusion you really want. You want to know 'is x religion the one true religion?'. We can answer that.
A religion, like anything making a claim, is actually falsifiable. The added challenge with a religion is that the religion has to be 100% right, all the time, or it is not right at all. Said another way, if a religion is ever wrong, it is not true and we can move on from it. This is where religion /always/ gets into trouble. Christianity is no different than any other religion here. It makes claims or assertions and if any of those are shown to be wrong, oops, the religion is not true.
So, when the bible states slavery is fine, rape is fine, beating your wife is fine, it has to be 100% right on these or the religion is null and void. Unlike the global flood (which is obviously not true), you cannot slip up and say "just kidding, metaphor or allegory" in these cases. Making a claim about what is good/bad is something we can judge, particularly as society advances. It doesn't actually matter if those are "objectively right or wrong" for it to make the religion not true, either. That's a trap. You can try and argue that slavery, per the bible, is ok. You can try. You won't win any favor with anyone these days. We've moved past owning people as a concept. It's unacceptable. Our modern moral code, subjective or objective, is "better" than that described in the bible, therefore, the bible is wrong, therefore, christianity is wrong.
One could try and argue that slavery is actually objectively ok, therefore inline with the bible, and some do try this approach and have used it to justify slavery centuries ago. But you can't do that today and be considered a rational human being. It's not acceptable. We know this. It's undisputed fact that owning people is wrong. Therefore, again, our modern moral code demonstrates a higher/better/whatever moral code than christianity in the bible, therefore christianity is wrong and we move on. If a religion were true, society should NEVER be more advanced morally/ethically than the religious standard. This simply cannot be with what the religion is claiming to be.
So, as I stated earlier, the question isn't objective or subjective morality. The question is "is x religion true" (unlike "is there a god?" which really isn't answerable at the moment, maybe ever). We can answer the questions if certain religions are true. To this end, we know the answers on all religions that make positive and exclusive claims...all have fallen short.
>>This is quite literally nothing more than the age old 'there cannot be an objective morality without a higher power
Indeed, the argument is quite storied. Since Hume's observation in 1738, it has never been refuted. Following Hume's observation that we are unable to derive morals from observations of Empirical facts, the concept of Moral Nonrealism—that moral statements are merely delusions we told ourselves to help/comfort us—seized humanity and led to a variety of interesting reactions including Surrealism, Dada, Egoism, Existentialism, modern art, postmodernism, et al.
>>[Sam Harris presenting Utilitarianism at TED]
Seen it. Hilarious. Sam Harris has heard of Is-Ought and begins by acknowledging it is the barrier to secular realism. His answer is to pretend it doesn't exist and move on with his talk. See this comment, #99, for more: https://web.archive.org/web/20150302143837/http://www.projec...
>>slavery is fine, rape is fine, beating your wife is fine
Jesus in Matthew 5:21-22 explains that calling someone a 'fool' is equivalent to murder relative to the /actual standard/ so slavery, rape, beating, &c. are going to be hard to explain. For more on this type of perspective you can look into Anabaptist theology.
>>Making a claim about what is good/bad is something we can judge, particularly as society advances.
What is moral doesn't change, or you would have Relativism.
>>Our modern moral code, subjective or objective, is "better"
This society did not spring from a vacuum. Then Wesleyan theologians led Abolitionist efforts; now we "know" slavery is wrong. Like the Personalist Project puts it "Those who repudiate God cannot preserve the personalist affirmation of the incomparable worth of each person, though they may for a time live by the light of a setting sun."
>>We know this. It's undisputed fact that owning people is wrong.
Indeed. This type of knowledge falls under self-evident truth, the same way we know that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That we universally, inherently are positive about these natural revelations either points to something or they are collective delusions.
>>the question isn't objective or subjective morality.
To believe in objective morality you've departed from the realm of Empiricism. Perhaps you won't and will choose subjective morality but then you'll be unable to provide evidence your whims/wishes aren't disposable opinions.
>>>>slavery is fine, rape is fine, beating your wife is fine
>>Jesus in Matthew 5:21-22 explains that calling someone a 'fool' is equivalent to murder relative to the /actual standard/ so slavery, rape, beating, &c. are going to be hard to explain. For more on this type of perspective you can look into Anabaptist theology.
This does nothing to resolve the simple questions: is slavery, rape, beating your wife wrong? It's a simple societal question these days, but when the bible was being written, the authors went to great lengths to describe the systems and rules around which all of those were indeed acceptable. To our eyes and ears that is ridiculous! There is no system or rules for owning people; it's just wrong. Doesn't matter if you marry the person you rape, it's still wrong.
So, again, religion, in this particular case Christianity, regardless if we ever get to the question of objective v subjective morality, has a problem. It has clear and demonstrated instances where it is on the wrong side of the moral debate which inherently makes the religion objectively wrong. Any purported religion designed by a higher power whose purpose is to set guiding principles and rules by which our lives are to be lived, governed and judged has to be, by definition, never worse/lower than the society. It always has to outpace the moral landscape of society. By definition and, you know, common sense.
>>>>Making a claim about what is good/bad is something we can judge, particularly as society advances.
>>What is moral doesn't change, or you would have Relativism.
So, stating it another way. Is slavery ok, objectively? You have a problem if it isn't. It means Christianity is wrong. If you say it is, you have an entirely different problem because we as a society have moved beyond this concept.
>>>>Our modern moral code, subjective or objective, is "better"
>>This society did not spring from a vacuum. Then Wesleyan theologians led Abolitionist efforts; now we "know" slavery is wrong. Like the Personalist Project puts it "Those who repudiate God cannot preserve the personalist affirmation of the incomparable worth of each person, though they may for a time live by the light of a setting sun."
Skirts the issue entirely. Is slavery wrong? Has it always been wrong?
>>>>We know this. It's undisputed fact that owning people is wrong.
>>Indeed. This type of knowledge falls under self-evident truth, the same way we know that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That we universally, inherently are positive about these natural revelations either points to something or they are collective delusions.
Again, skirts the issue. Is slavery wrong? Has it always been wrong?
Not at all my intent to skirt the issue. Slavery is objectively wrong and has always been wrong. The entire Christian reason is human freedom and liberty to captives.
Christianity is what ended slavery and additionally, without it or apart from it, slavery would not be wrong (if you have reasoning otherwise, let's hear it).
If we agree that most of the wars and immoral things are done in the name of god, I think being theist or not is irrelevant to posses moral values.
I don't think it is in princible impossible to find objective moral values hardwired in our brains that makes us uncomfortable when we do things that is not good for ourselves, or our families, or society.
Last few centuries helped us to trash so many believes that were basically wrong (and amazingly it was even trashing itself every decade now thanks to scientific methods), I don't see any reason that is also not possible for morality, which My gut feeling says is probably a mental optical illusion like thinking the world is flat.
I don't think it is in princible impossible to find objective moral values hardwired in our brains that makes us uncomfortable when we do things that is not good for ourselves, or our families, or society.
But if it's a mechanism of our bodies, while it might be "objective" in the sense that it's a physical thing, it's still relative to each human. Just like someone is born tall or bow-legged, one might be born with 'wires' that make them uncomfortable with different things. If they act accordingly, are they moral? Even if what they do makes most others uncomfortable?
It will be indeed as "objective" as what medicine/biology defines someone "healthy". That being said, we already define certain categories when it comes to disabilities, and with very few disputes. Moral values could also be like that, and indeed its like that for who are legally called psychopaths and such.
Anyway, I think the author of the article linked in the root comment is looking for something more divine for moral values, but as a disappointment, just repeats the same rituals of thousand year old fallacies like as if theist believes have objective basis from which other objective basis can be inferred.
I agree with your assessment of the article, I just don't think taking the average of relative moralities makes for an objective morality, at least as the word is used in this context.
This is the classic "I want it to be true, therefore it's true" non-argument. It should be obvious to anyone with some knowledge of history and modern homo sapiens cultures that there is no such thing as "Moral Objectivity". Morality (as in, what is considered culturally acceptable) varies greatly across time, cultures and individuals. Morals that seem more universal than others may very well be biologically hardwired or selected by virtue of helping the cultures who carry them prosper (not unlike genes).
>>It should be obvious to anyone with some knowledge of history and modern homo sapiens cultures that there is no such thing as "Moral Objectivity"
Actually observing what humans do (history, culture) as you propose would be absolutely insufficient for determining if Moral Statements refer to Objective Moral Facts or are just invented delusions that were useful. We can't merely observe what humans happen to think or happen to do to tell. We can't reason "Humans happen to believe X therefore X is the case/exists" which is the sense of what we seek in metaethics. The sense of what you propose is akin to reasoning "Humans practice X therefore humans practice X" but similar tautologies are not very useful.
>>Morality (as in, what is considered culturally acceptable) varies greatly across time, cultures and individuals.
No one denies this: human behavior changes. But that's not the question at hand.
>>Morals that seem more universal than others may very well be biologically hardwired or selected by virtue of helping the cultures who carry them prosper (not unlike genes).
This is yet another Fact and fails to escape the limitations observed by Is-Ought.
>>This is the classic "I want it to be true, therefore it's true" non-argument.
The argument isn't to prove that morality is objective or to prove God exists. It is just an observation that "For morality to be Objective, this is the necessary dependency: God" and a suggestion that we understand moral language accordingly. As the Marquis de Sade roughly put it "If God does not exist, everything that Is, is Right". Moral statements are either real (Moral Realism) which requires a departure from strict Empiricism or they are invented opinions (Moral Anti-realism) a position consistent with Empiricism/Atheism/Materialism. The actual instance of "I want it to be true, therefore it's true" occurs when soi disant Empiricists think they can logically hold Moral Realism (often Secular Humanists who've overlooked these implications.)
Your language is incredibly disingenuous. Another phrasing might be, "useful social constructs." "Delusion" doesn't really make sense as a descriptor of subjective morality since there's no claim that they are objective in the first place. Namely, your description of those who disagree with you presupposes that your view is correct. In particular, it feels like this is just an outright lie:
> The argument isn't to prove that morality is objective or to prove God exists. It is just an observation [...]
If it were "just an observation," your language wouldn't be laced with the presupposition that Moral Realism is the "correct" philosophy.
>Another phrasing might be, 'useful social constructs.'…there's no claim that they are objective
You can call the social constructs whatever you like and no one is foolish enough to deny their utility. But as you note, they are not claimed to be objective; it is admitted that they are nothing more than (subjective) opinions. In trying to learn what they really are Chris Hitchens and Carl Sagan teach us how to approach invented opinions with Empiricism's perspective: "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence".
>just an observation
That's really all Hume did with a single paragraph known as Is-Ought. But it has frightful consequences, showing subjective morality to no more than a disposable invention in light of reason and logic. This line of thought from the 1700s that without God morals were made up gave us Surrealism, Dada, modern art, postmodernism, the thought of Max Stirner, Nietzche, Hobbes, Satre, Camus, Marx, Dostoevsky, Bukowski, et al ad nauseum and continues to this day.
>presupposes that your view is correct
If my view is not correct, it should be easy for you to refute Is-Ought. You can't and won't.
I'm not trying to debate your view (we disagree on too much for that to be fruitful, subjective morality doesn't require one to disprove is/ought), I'm calling into question your tactics. You're saying one thing and doing another. It's dishonest.
Generally, to the theist, terms like "moral" or "ought" are tightly coupled with the Nature of God (or "God's Commands", etc). More often than not, those terms actually refer explicitly to God's Nature or commands.
On that understanding, this phrase is true: "Objective morality cannot exist if theism is false." Or in other words.. "God's Nature cannot exist, if theism is false."
Duh. So what?
A moral-realist atheist is generally going to rely on some (theorized) universally shared value/desire as the starting point for a moral framework. To such a person, moral statements take the form, "Since you value you X, you should do Y" (where Y is the optimal way to reach the desired state of affairs, X).
There's no is-ought problem when moral statements have that form, there's only the problem of demonstrating or proving that such universal shared values/desires exist at all.
A significant point is that starting with values, as you propose, is a departure from Empiricism. We have no scientifically-accepted evidence such a theorized value exists and (as you know) what Hume shows with his Facts-Values gap is that we can never use data we observe empirically to arrive at values.
You could admit you are starting with a Value but your personal opinion of what value to begin with would always remain a subjective whim in a mundane, materialist universe. This is why Hume understood our deepest convictions of our conscience could only be explained in a supramundane world, concluding they must be impressions sourced to the Supreme Being.
Again, you can't simply start with a Value and declare you have escaped subjectivity. Being subjective, your morality remains conditional and hypothetical. One's declaration becomes "If you begin by first valuing—as I do—that animals should not be killed, you should be a vegetarian" -- supposing one does not share this first (theorized) value regarding animals the sentence is dismissed as any other subjective moral claim. You speculate this subjectivity could be answered if you could demonstrate such a value had actually been what you term a "universal shared value" but this can never be done. Even if 99% of humans or life in the universe held the value "animals should not be killed" we could not declare that value a moral fact. A majority believing something is never able to tell us what is actually the case (ad populum). We remain unable to reason "99% of life in the universe desires not to kill animals therefore no one should ever kill animals" - the data (Is) cannot transcend and provide an objective should (Ought).
Whether or not sentient things tend to have some shared core values or goals is a question that can, in principle, be investigated empirically. We can look at facts about people, and the world, and corroborate or disprove that hypothesis.
You go on to say, if I'm understanding you correctly, that the atheist-moral-realist is still mired in subjectivity because the existence of any such shared goals/values could never truly be demonstrated. It could never be demonstrated, since no matter how far and wide you look, there could be a counter-example lurking around the next corner.
But thats simply the predicament of any theory or observation about the real world. As Sagan said, "we reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth". We could find a counter-example to the law of thermodynamics tomorrow... but currently, according to the best knowledge we have, the law appears factually true, and that's how we treat it. And its worth pointing out, this line of conversation is more about limitations in our knowledge about learning moral facts, not whether said facts (or the underlying ontology, etc) are actually true or false.
This sort of thing is a challenge for everyone, no matter theist, atheist, pantheist, or pastafarian. Limited access to moral facts are a given. For everybody. We all have to cope with the fact that our moral knowledge is imperfect and probably supported by quite a few subjective factors.
If disagreement over moral facts is evidence against atheist moral realism, its an equally powerful (if not moreso) argument against theism-based moral realism.
Sentient things happening to hold values cannot tell us if these values are objectively the case.
>It could never be demonstrated, since no matter how far and wide you look, there could be a counter-example lurking
No. It could be shown that 99% of humans hold the value 'cows should never be killed'. It is not the 1% that dissent that invalidates this datapoint from being able to tell us if this held belief refers/corresponds to an objective value.
>If disagreement over moral facts is evidence against atheist moral realism
Again, that humans disagree is not being given as reason atheist moral realism is untenable. That humans disagree or agree or have any opinion about anything has zero impact on whether moral properties refer to mind-independent objective facts. Zero. Consider reading the linked essay in the original comment or browsing the rest of the comments to better understand what is being put forward to show that combination of beliefs is untenable.
>its an equally powerful (if not moreso) argument against theism-based moral realism.
That people disagree over what is true is not at all an indication that truth itself does not exist or cannot be found.
> Sentient things happening to hold values cannot tell us if these values are objectively the case.
Here's how I'm understanding you... what you are pointing out is that even if all human beings valued, say human flourishing, with no exceptions, that there's still yet no factual purchase from which to say they SHOULD value human flourishing rather than something else.
Well... as they do, goal-based meta-ethical theories are generally going to point to something like that kind of (hypothetical) shared, innate orientation towards "human flourishing" AS the metaphysical bottom rung. It IS the purchase from which moral statements gain any sort of coherent meaning at all (Since you value X, therefore you should Y). You can always keep asking, "But why is THAT Good?" questions, but it just doesn't make sense too.
Maybe this can help illustrate the point.
I could similarly ask, "Whats so good about God's Nature"? Within typical theist meta-ethical frameworks, those words basically parse as, "What's so good about good?" or "Whats so God's Nature about God's Nature?"
"Since you value human flourishing above all, you ought to value human flourishing above all".
Those are just syntax errors. :)
The overall point is this... IF it is true that there's some hypothetical, universal goal X, then statements such as, "Since X, you should Y" can be factually, universally, objectively true.
"You value human flourishing, so you should help your neighbor", etc.
Not only is there no is-ought problem in such frameworks, "ought" DEPENDS on "is".
>there's still yet no factual…from which they should
Exactly, except not 'factual' but no valid reasoning to do so. From the essay:
"For there is no such Finis Ultimus [utmost aim] nor Summum Bonum [greatest good] as is spoken of in the books of the old Moral Philosophers." —Thomas Hobbes
"It [is] extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values… It is nowhere written that “the good” exists…" —Jean-Paul Sartre
"It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." —David Hume
>It IS the purchase from which moral statements gain any sort of coherent meaning at all (Since you value X, therefore you should Y).
No one is denying that humans use moral statements. It can be the meaning in Moral Nonrealism. It cannot be the meaning in Moral Realism. Here is why, again from the essay:
"In suggested approaches to morality, I am surprised to find authors moving from propositions with the usual copula ‘is’ (or ‘is not’) to ones that are connected by ‘ought’ (or ‘ought not’). This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the greatest consequence. For as this ‘ought’ (or ‘ought not’) expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be pointed out and explained; and at the same time a reason should be given, for how this new relation can be—inconceivably—a deduction from others that are entirely different from it. I am persuaded, that attention to this one small matter will let us see that the definitions of right and wrong are not based on the relations of objects nor can be perceived by reason." —David Hume
>I could similarly ask, "Whats so good about God's Nature"?
The limitation applies to a non supernatural/supramundane universe. Hence Hume declares the only possibility "The standard of Sentiments [Values] is ultimately derived from that Supreme Being, which bestowed on each being its peculiar nature, and arranged the several classes and orders of existence."
"...the existence of the self, a subject that’s still scientifically unsettled."
Shit like this, philosophers, is why scientists don't (and can't, and shouldn't) engage. The words to use are "scientifically undefined", not "scientifically unsettled" - you can't just argue over definitions for centuries and then blame science for that fact that none of you can agree on what you're talking about, if anything.
You enter the realm of science when you have a testable hypothesis, not just some vague idea that reeks of dualism that you can't conceive of not being a "real thing", like consciousness or self.
I would attribute the (mis)use of that word a little bit more to the author of the article, and a little bit less to 'centuries of philosophers' - many of whom were scientists.
Hume, along with the Ancient Roman Stoics and some Taoism, have a good deal in common (and complement each other where answers may be lacking). They are very rewarding, read together.
What is disturbing about this is that Hume or any other philosopher is popular because people today agree with him. There were other philosophers who lived during Hume's lifetime, but they are not popular. Why? Because people today don't agree with them. So, what is popular from the past are things or philosophers that have similar views of people today.
Basically, we like Hume, because he confirms what we already believe.
If Christianity was very dominant, then Hume would not be as popular.
What this shows you is that idols are not chosen by looking whether they have anything insightful or true to say, but how well they conform to current dogmas.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadReading David Hume's arguments concerning our ability to locate the source of morals convinced me of Moral Realism and Moral Objectivity and is what ended all of my opposition to Christianity. I explain Hume's perspective here: http://liamk.org/is-love-real/
You generalize atheists and atheism so much as to dilute your target, a common and cheap practice in debate. Atheism is already diluted enough because it's a non-belief, nothing else, so there's little target for generalization there even though you love to employ it in a desperate attempt to find something to latch on to and debate. And the atheists I know, most are relative moralists. That doesn't mean they don't think humanity doesn't have a moral compass, in general, but they tend to mean that there's no facts to demonstrate moral code, as you just said in your link. There's so much wrong with your arguments there, I don't know where to start.
I'd recommend you looking at life more in a thermodynamic fashion. It's simple, elegant and you have no magical and mystical unproven qualities that need reconciliation. From thermodynamics, you can learn theorize better to why life behaves as it does and helps take the mystery out of a lot of it. I'd argue morality is a thermodynamic function, even. Morality being derived from pain/pleasure senses, which derive from chemical processes, etc but of course, no one ultimately knows. But to me, saying "definitions of right and wrong are not based on the relations of objects nor can be perceived by reason" is false. Many people who convert to a religion do so because that religion may make some sort of sense to them. That's one of the reasons I became a christian early on, because it made some sort of logical sense. Not much but just enough to lure me in. You can use that tactic with people for all kinds of uses, to tell just enough truth to get them to believe you and if they like it enough, you can get away with falsehoods. Many use reason to justify their statements about how their gods or moral codes don't have to abide by reason, ironically.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory...
No one is foolish enough to deny that various societies develop moral codes, generally based on their experiences (eg, pain). The question is whether moral statements (eg, "Humans should not murder") are objective and Real (they refer to some objective Moral Fact) or whether this was just a delusion we invented and used to survive.
>>but the best we can conclude, morality can be derived from reason and emotion
No. This is the entire Is-Ought argument. Saying "Hume is wrong" does not refute Hume. You would need to give a reason.
>>looking at life more in a thermodynamic fashion
Materialism cannot point to a source of objective moral values. Period.
>>But to me, saying…is false.
As expected, that's not a refutation.
>>That's one of the reasons I became a christian early on
In my opinion, based on your given conceptions of metaethics, rather than dismiss this avenue of inquiry with the reasoning "it made some sort of logical sense [but not enough]" you could likely have explored the concept further.
>>Materialism cannot point to a source of objective moral values. Period.
Yes, it can. Whatever the material is derived from, it's chained to a more objective link. So yes, you can use relative morality to argue that it, in itself, has objectivity. For example, someone higher in rank says Saturday is a day off yet he gives the order to his inferior that he can then order that Saturday can be either. You have relative order coming from objective order.
>>In my opinion, based on your given conceptions of metaethics, rather than dismiss this avenue of inquiry with the reasoning "it made some sort of logical sense [but not enough]" you could likely have explored the concept further.
Ah, the old 'because you don't believe, you haven't been spending enough decades of your life exploring the religion I want you to believe in'. Meanwhile, hundreds of other religious people want me to explore their hundreds of gods and hundreds of interpretations through hundreds of years of philosophical wankery. I just could as well say you haven't explored atheism enough and that's why you haven't arrived to it.
You're right that if the reasoning given for seeking, knowing, or relying on truth was "because man seeks truth" this would be an invalid reason, subject to the Is-Ought problem. But that's not the reason I encourage you to know truth.
>The more you try to make logic of illogic…
As far as Christianity, there seems to be sort of a divide between a Western tradition that intended to show Christianity as ultimately reasonable (ie, scholasticism in the Church of Rome, the Church of England, many Protestant denominations) and groups that sort of just admit the system is fundamentally unreasonable and mystical such as the Orthodox, Roman mystics like John of Ruusbroec, Baptists, and Pentecostals. I sort of side with the latter.
>Yes, it can.…
It metaethics, an individual human's decree/decision is subjective. Maybe start by looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism
>I just could as well say you haven't explored atheism enough and that's why you haven't arrived to it.
"I used to be a nihilist but then I thought, what's the point?"
"We make nothing of religion if we do not make heart-work of it. The only thing that you cannot be in Christianity is self-righteous/self-justified and self-important/self-reliant."
Morals can be created and defined to help humans run effective societies and decide the way we interact with and expand the definition of life.
No one is foolish enough to deny that human societies can employ ethical codes and that doing so can help a society survive or thrive. But what is debated is if there exists Objective standards (or not) and from that, what that means for us. Drawing from an earlier comment addressing this, while both humans and animals may practice empathy, cooperation, or other behaviors that help them as individuals or groups to survive or thrive, this falls short of 'morality'.
Morality is positions about what one should do: eg "one should not murder humans for sport". Hume's observation of the Is-Ought problem shows us that we cannot reason "humans practice X therefore humans should practice X" as we similarly cannot reason "humans believe X therefore X is objectively the case".
Saying that animals or humans practice empathy is merely observing something they do, the "Is". We can't say "humans sometimes practice empathy therefore humans should practice empathy" like we can't say "humans sometimes practice violence therefore humans should practice violence".
You could add a condition, such as "If humans do not want to be put in jail by society, then they should not murder (or at least get caught having murdered)". But this is known as Hypothetical Morality, and with dependence on the conditions it becomes merely advice about cause and effect and is to be ignored by those who don't find the conditions compelling.
And yes - the main difference being a thiest position posits the existence of something else (that could be moral (Allah/David's God) or immoral (David's God) or amoral (Vishnu/Z eus)) as part of its model outside of empiricism beyond morality.
Taking a sports analogy, you can have the goal of winning a game, so that you get nearer the goal of winning the championship. "Winning the game" is a subgoal.
A top goal would be something that doesn't have an ulterior goal justifying it, you want to achieve it for itself.
Why can't I try to win a game just to win it? the answer is of course I can. So at that moment has the goal changed its nature? of course not.
This is the same argument as with "micro" and "macro" evolution. There are no two different evolutions, there is just evolution.
You can choose to win a game just to win it. What I don't see is how you can empirically choose to win a game just to win it.
'Should I win the game? every time I don't win I feel bad, but when I win I feel good. I choose to win the game. My objective is just to win the game.'
I'm not sure how you choose a good endpoint. Maybe "life is good" and therefore "expand life". This could lead in many ways though - from fascism to reversing entropy to human experimentation.
It seems most morality for all humans comes down to "what is best for my in group" and then a selectively defined endgroup.
There may be an argument for objective morality being based on expanding knowledge of the universe to the point where we may discover morality? We have very little accurate data on the universe and life in the universe to draw on - maybe as we gain a more accurate and useful model of reality morals will come out of the"woodwork" like writing allowed us to begin pontification on them across generations.
maybe as we gain a more accurate and useful model of reality morals will come out of the"woodwork" like writing allowed us to begin pontification on them across generations.
Maybe it has already happened and we were unable to identify it. How would we distinguish it from all the other theories of rational ethics that come up from time to time?
It's not saying much more. Even when we understand and acknowledge Hume's observation, morality may or may not be Objective, God may or may not exist.
But if God does not exist, morals are not Objective. Just our inventions, along with God and we used both for our comfort/survival/thriving. And what's fascinating is that in such a world, all those times Theists (and Atheist Humanists) proclaimed that humans had value without scientifically-accepted empirical evidence they would not have been acting Immorally/Wrong.
The argument is that for morality to be objective, something external must be the source. You are making a huge jump by calling it god, and then you go even further and claim it's the christian god.
>> But if God does not exist, morals are not Objective. Just our inventions, along with God and we used both for our comfort/survival/thriving.
If god does not exists is health an invention? Science has liberated us from attributing health to gods, I suspect the same will be true of morality. To me it already is more moral to care for someone just because they are a fellow human being than to do it because some ancient manuscript may have commanded it by fear of ironically, itself immoral and eternal torture.
>> And what's fascinating is that in such a world, all those times Theists (and Atheist Humanists) proclaimed that humans had value without scientifically-accepted empirical evidence they would not have been acting Immorally/Wrong.
I'm assuming you mean 'humans had no value'?
This is what Hume shows. Can you refute his observation by providing a source of objective morality that is Empirical/not external/not supramundane? (You can't. There is none.)
>>If god does not exists is health an invention?
No and by volunteering a metaphor that compares the existence of objective moral facts (Values/Ought) with empirical facts like health (Facts/Is) you betray a laughable lack of understanding of the Is-Ought gap.
>>Science has liberated us from attributing health to gods, I suspect the same will be true of morality.
The question at hand is whether we do so tenably.
>>because some ancient manuscript
In the case of Christianity the attempt is to follow the instructions of an actual Person and the central feature of Christianity that distinguishes it from perhaps all other religions is that actions must lack self-interest, ruling out actions based on fear as Tim Keller explains http://subspla.sh/8149923
>>immoral and eternal torture
Conditional immortality is an area of exploration, cf. http://jewishnotgreek.com/
>>I'm assuming you mean 'humans had no value'?
No, that's what I meant. If morality does not truly exist, it was not morally 'wrong' anytime humans proclaimed it truly did. We remember the realization of the Marquis de Sade that if God does not exist then everything that is, is Right; but further, if the unempirical does not exist, then proclaiming it does is not wrong. In the words of philosopher Thomas Nagel: "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either". Fun.
Every major religion claims a lack in self-interest. Almost all of them offer torture as dissuasion.
>> This is what Hume shows. Can you refute his observation by providing a source of objective morality that is Empirical/not external/not supramundane? (You can't. There is none.)
That is not what he shows, no one has been able to show this external source. That is what he postulates. And I think he is wrong.
>> No and by volunteering a metaphor that compares the existence of objective moral facts (Values/Ought) with empirical facts like health (Facts/Is) you betray a laughable lack of understanding of the Is-Ought gap.
What you don’t understand is that you only called them values because you have no explaination for them. Is-Ought is only a problem if you chain yourself to the baseless idea that Oughts have to be supramundane(??). Science can tell, empirically, what ought to be, and it already has in many many cases; it tells us with a very broad body of evidence that women are not inferior to men, thus we ought to treat them equally. Is that objective? it is objective enough at least in the same sense that medicine tells us objectibly that we ought not to vomit every day. That is why the analogy works.
Your argument fails because at the end of the day it is nothing more than the god of the gaps argument: You don’t know were morality came from, therefore god.
For a start, look up Nihilism on Wikipedia or Moral Anti-realism on the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: this is why people are Nihilists and Anti-realists.
>>And I think he is wrong.
No surprise, you can't provide a source of objective morality that is Empirical/mundane/"scientifically-verifiable". You give no reason why Hume is wrong because you seem to still not grasp the reach of what he "postulates".
>>Is-Ought is only a problem if you chain yourself to the baseless idea…
Dismissing it while unable to give a coherent refutation shows it not to be baseless but painful perhaps.
>>Science can tell, empirically, what ought to be…it tells us with…evidence that [X: empirical fact]…thus we ought to [Y: behavior].
This presumes we ought to treat men a certain way. On what grounds should a human not murder another human? Because society will inflict a certain consequence? That's called Hypothetical Morality, and it falls under Moral Nonrealism. It can be ignored if one is willing to accept the consequence or can evade the consequence. Just because a neurobiologist says something on stage at TED does not make it the case. Though the Sam Harris fan club is often not capable of being persuaded otherwise.
>>medicine tells us objectibly that we ought not to vomit every day
Here you presume human health to be an ultimate good. We (hopefully obviously) can't reason "Humans like to practice violence therefore humans should continue to practice violence" and likewise we can't reason "Humans like to avoid vomiting therefore humans should avoid vomiting" as strange as that can at first sound.
>>You don’t know were morality came from, therefore god.
It's more an observation that our only options are
You have chosen the second camp and seem to dislike the logical conclusions that camp is forced with, namely in such a world nothing is truly Moral or Immoral. How anyone is unfamiliar with this very real dichotomy this far away from 1738 is a puzzle. And you are without grounds to declare that those who proclaim camp #1 are truly acting Immorally.Nihilism is a problem that is not solved by postulating a god, doing so doesn't get you any further. It is useless. You don't get meaning from anything by adding a god to it.
I don't presume human healt to be an ultimate good, experience has shown that it is an ultimate good, or as ultimate as a goal can be. Of course health nihilism is also a thing, but is also not gonna get solved by postulating an invisible, undetectable agent, even if you call that agent god.
I have not chosen a camp. You have provided no evidence for your position, and even gotten as far as claiming you don't need it, how convenient, and have dismissed offhand every argument against it in this thread simply because you don't understand that the "is-ought" problem is not as complicated as you make it sound.
I don't dislike the conclusion of my position, I'm fine either way, ultimate objective morality to me is just as irrelevant as ultimate objective medicine. What you want is to ground morality to something so objective in a perfect sense, to which no other human developed idea has or can be.
Why you want so bad for morality to be grounded on a god, and one of the worst if not the worst as the christian god is beyond me.
What you need is evidence but you have none.
I'm familiar with Sam Harris' argument. We have measured levels of health, pain response, serotonin, dopamine, and various other yardsticks with new technology. Harris argues that assuming our goal is to maximize happiness and reduce pain, these technologies can help us track our progress. He's right. But this assumed suggested first principle of human empathy isn't novel. Hume in 1738 was very familiar with the concept of human empathy. It was not enough then to tell us how to act and never can be.
>>I don't presume human healt to be an ultimate good, experience has shown that it is an ultimate good, or as ultimate as a goal can be.
Being only a subjective human, your personal opinion about health, which is all this is, is not infallible and is validly rejected.
>>I have not chosen a camp...ultimate objective morality to me is just as irrelevant as ultimate objective medicine.
This is a real dichotomy, not a false dichotomy: moral statements refer to objective moral facts (Moral Realism) or they do not (Moral Nonrealism). You do not currently believe moral statements refer to objective moral facts, correct? That's one of the two camps. There is no neutral position, you have chosen.
>>we have made incredible moral progress
In your camp, Moral Nonrealism, morals (statements about what humans should do) don't refer to objective moral facts. Instead they are subjective whims and invented delusions we use to help us survive and thrive and to give us comfort. Just as one subjective moral opinion in America today cannot be objectively better than a differing subjective moral opinion in Brazil today, subjective opinions that differ across time also cannot be said to be better or worse than any other. Thus, while change occurs "progress" never does.
>>one of the worst if not the worst as the christian god
A common response to a proposed Upside-Down Kingdom, where the currently first will later be last.
>>What you need is evidence but you have none.
Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism
Most people I know also accept that humans are highly irrational in most areas of life, and yet at the same time are capable of rational thinking (and using science as a tool for this) and understanding these irrational processes.
It always struck me a bit as 'begging the question' when Christians I talked to pointed out the inconsistency of 'not believing in objective morality' and yet 'holding strong moral viewpoints', because this very need for consistency kind of assumes that there should be such a consistency. Perhaps this is is a justifiable thought if you assume that there's a God who created things in an orderly fashion. But that's a premise many people don't share.
While you might not be making this exact argument, my point is that if you can accept the, in my opinion, overwhelming evidence we are not very sensical creatures living in a not very sensical world, the problem you point out isn't really a problem.
We have evolved to act as if there are moral absolutes, just as we perhaps have evolved to dress up our need to copulate, procreate, and combat loneliness as 'romantic love'. I can believe the latter and still be a romantic without any problems.
As far as others suggesting you resolve inconsistencies and hold logically consistent conclusions: yes, to arrive at Truth by examining what logically follows from true and sound reasoning you are going to have to first adopt the 'dependency' of Western logic. But, indeed, you only need do this if you care to know Truth. Many humans reject the use of Western logic (eg, the New Age community) and prefer vague, unexamined existence but I agree this ultimately is each individual's prerogative.
Your perspective seems to be "humans often hold untenable positions and Earth has not yet been destroyed because of this (or apparently impacted in any significant way from it) therefore I may (without impact) hold untenable positions", a position I and your Christian interlocutors I think unsurprisingly reject. My most sincere advice to you and to all everywhere is found in Rousseau's echo of Juvenal's motto "Vitam impendre vero"—you must stake your life on Truth.
Re: your ability to be a romantic you'll note that the conclusion in Vladimir Solovyov's truncated syllogism "Man is descended from the apes; therefore we must love one another" does not follow. Materialists can practice what looks like romance but cannot be romantics in any meaningful sense of the word.
I must say I really enjoy reading about your position in this and, to be honest, would wish nothing more than to be in agreement with it. I was a devout Christian for much of my life and I still feel the loss. But my reason for quitting this search and need for capital-T truth was that the Christian version of it (as well as the few others I explored) just wasn't convincing. It felt like a convenient lie to give meaning to my life rather than some Truth I happened to have figured out.
But all this doesn't mean that I now spend my life an exhausted nihilist. There's plenty of room for values and truth in a world-view that holds that ultimately the Objective nature of these things is probably unknowable. By the standards I used to hold as a devout Christian, I'm quite possible a better Christian now than I was back then. Plus I'm happier.
Anyways. I see your point, and I respect it for the most part, but I think it's a bit overreaching and arrogant to argue that a materialist cannot be a romantic in any meaningful sense. By my definition of meaningful, my romantic relationships are very meaningful. And practically speaking, I'm pretty sure my experience of romance is not so different from that of a Christian anyways.
Eventually, I would run into a philosophy B.A. who was also a Christian. I constantly pressed them for justification of their belief and their main response was this quote by Kierkegaard: "If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?" -- If there were no God, life would be despair (and Siddhartha would be right) so we believe. This line of thought upset me. What I wanted was to know what was actually the case, how the world actually was and not how we might like it to be. Truth at any cost no matter how inconvenient, bewildering, or painful.
I studied Buddhism and Eastern philosophies (which are basically methods of coming to terms with and accepting nihilism). But I retained an idea that human suffering was bad and humans somehow had value. Reading Hume is what changed me. Unless an outside rubric existed that would declare human suffering bad, human suffering never actually had been bad at all. But I believed internally stronger than any other belief that somehow it truly was bad and this instinct seemed to be a self-evident truth. What Hume shows is that this instinct that we feel is either placed in us in relation to a Supreme Being and its existence functions as a unit of evidence called natural revelation or it is a strange delusion we invent and we delude ourselves that human suffering matters.
A liberating realisation was that, in light of this, if the second scenario were the case, it was also not morally 'wrong' anytime humans proclaimed suffering was wrong, one would have merely paid the universe a compliment it would not have deserved. If the unempirical does not exist, then proclaiming it does is not wrong. In the words of philosopher Thomas Nagel: "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either".
As far as quitting the search and holding logically untenable positions, I suggest this remark by Walker Percy: "This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him." He portrays a worldview known as the supernatural existential, desiderium naturale, or Man as Wayfarer in his book The Moviegoer explained here: http://liamk.org/moviegoer/
>>What Hume shows is that this instinct that we feel is either placed in us in relation to a Supreme Being
You seem lost in that you think what atheists I doesn't come from something more despite us not having a name for it. You may call it a god, Yahweh, etc, I call it a feeling of existential validity. I believe also that my instinctual feelings come from something beyond, something greater, a higher order, whatever you want to call it but it's far beyond what we have knowledge of and so far from Christian mythology that I refuse to call it "god" or "gods". I prefer not to be linked to that.
And your mentioning of suffering, beauty, love, etc over and over makes it seem to me that you're coming from an emotional point, not a logical one. Not all love is good. Sometimes doing without love makes us stronger. Sometimes suffering is good, it builds strength and character. Sometimes feeling "bad" is "good", sometimes the opposite. You'll never find real logical truth when you base it on such ambiguities. Life is way too complex to just say 'I like love, therefore god".
If life is good and meant to be, then that which nurtures and perpetuates it is good. Sometimes it's suffering to strengthen oneself, sometimes it's suffering to strengthen humanity and weed out the weak so that in the end, we have left ones who don't suffer so much. Love for oneself and humanity is an emotion that in itself, can be a weakness. Too much and you have vanity and pride, which can be a weakness of successful living and leadership. If love is mercy and tolerance, sometimes what's needed for living isn't mercy and tolerance. You seem to praise certain emotions and instincts as if they're infallible. Believing in gods is also a weakness when you count on those gods to look out for you when you should be looking out for yourself. Some don't care what we do to the Earth because they count on their gods to save them or about space travel because they rely too much on their gods not throwing balls of fire at us, or they pray to their gods to save them from medical illness. All this is predicated on the presupposed notion of life being good so we should perpetuate it. And it takes your love of love, beauty, suffering, etc out for a proverbial spin because life sometimes needs needs what it doesn't wish for, for it to flourish.
>>What Hume shows is that this instinct that we feel is either placed in us in relation to a Supreme Being
You seem lost in that you think what atheists reason about the universe doesn't come from something more despite us not having a name for it. You may call it a god, Yahweh, etc, I call it a feeling of existential validity. I believe also that my instinctual feelings come from something beyond, something greater, a higher order, whatever you want to call it but it's far beyond what we have knowledge of and so far from Christian mythology that I refuse to call it "god" or "gods". I prefer not to be linked to that.
And your mentioning of suffering, beauty, love, etc over and over makes it seem to me that you're coming from an emotional point, not a logical one. Not all love is good. Sometimes doing without love makes us stronger. Sometimes suffering is good, it builds strength and character. Sometimes feeling "bad" is "good", sometimes the opposite. You'll never find real logical truth when you base it on such ambiguities. Life is way too complex to just say 'I like love, therefore god".
If life is good and meant to be, then that which nurtures and perpetuates it is good. Sometimes it's suffering to strengthen oneself, sometimes it's suffering to strengthen humanity and weed out the weak so that in the end, we have left ones who don't suffer so much. Love for oneself and humanity is an emotion that in itself, can be a weakness. Too much and you have vanity and pride, which can be a weakness of successful living and leadership. If love is mercy and tolerance, sometimes what's needed for living isn't mercy and tolerance as they can disintegrate the core foundations of the merciful and tolerant. You seem to praise certain emotions and instincts as if they're infallible. Believing in gods is also a weakness when you count on those gods to look out for you when you should be looking out for yourself. Some don't care what we do to the Earth because they count on their gods to save them or about space travel because they rely too much on their gods not throwing balls of fire at us, or they pray to their gods to save them from medical illness. All this is predicated on the presupposed notion of life being good so we should perpetuate it. And it takes your love of love, beauty, suffering, etc out for a proverbial spin because life sometimes needs what it doesn't wish for, for it to flourish.
I'm a lurker, not used to commenting so I don't know why but I can't edit comments.
If one gave as one's reason for seeking truth "humans sometimes happen to seek truth" you are correct, this would be an invalid reason because of the Is-Ought limitation. That cannot be the reason one seeks truth.
>you think what atheists reason about the universe doesn't come from something more...I call it a feeling of existential validity. I believe also that my instinctual feelings come from something beyond, something greater, a higher order, whatever you want to call it but it's far beyond what we have knowledge of
Discussing this issue is tricky because ultimately, being a Christian, I don't disagree with your experience in which you intuit something greater or with Hume's pinning of essences on a Supreme Being or with almost every person of every belief system I have ever met who feels very deeply something is actually going on here and I might refer to this universal experience as the supernatural existential or desiderium naturale. Ultimately I am not arguing against morals actually existing and so don't mean to put down this feeling you have, only let you know what is required for such a feeling to not to be dismissed as delusion. Strict Empiricism cannot account for it and must reject it but you, I, and even Sam Harris (cf. http://www.newsweek.com/rationalist-sam-harris-believes-god-... ) seem to reject this Empiricism. The Empiricist says your feelings here are a delusion but I'm saying they are not--quite the opposite.
>mentioning of suffering, beauty, love
The inclusion of terms like beauty and love is not at all illogical. What the "Is-Ought" Facts-Values gap shows us is that nothing is truly Immoral unless it holds such a quality objectively. In other words, unless murder objectively holds the quality:'immoral', when an individual says "Murder is Wrong" the meaning of that sentence is nothing more than "I dislike murder" -- a subjective opinion. The limitation is extended not only to 'shoulds' but to values generally. That is, we see the difficulty in locating 'beauty'. A sunset is not truly beautiful unless something about it objectively holds the quality:'beautiful'. If this is not the case, when an individual says "that sunset is beautiful"—even if 99% of humans agree with him (ad populum)—the meaning of that sentence is nothing more than "I like this sunset" -- another subjective opinion. In subjectivism, no one can ever be truly wrong about any value statement (what is moral, what has beauty, what deserves value/love) and so a sunset carries the same objectively neutral quality as excrement. Only if conditions are endowed with objective/mind-independent values, which cannot be located using empiricism, can something be understood to truly be beautiful or worth loving.
>If life is good and meant to be
A oft-assumed contingent that Empiricists do not have evidence for. And that pure Reason does not insist upon. As Hume writes "It is not contrary to Reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger".
There is seemingly no reason for many laws to exist other than the fact that historically it was what humans believed in the past to be right or wrong (eg. sodomy laws). Laws exist because most people agree to abide by them for the most part, because kings or parliament have codified them, and because they are enforced with coercive power. The reason morals exist is because people agreed with them, priests codified them and they are enforced with coercive power (not so much in modern secular society, but softer coercion such as shaming and shunning still exist).
Laws are a social contract enforced with coercive power, I don't see how morals are much different. If you're arguing against those who can't see the gap between Is and Ought, that is fine, but I suspect most people have accepted and moved on from there once they realise it, and yet they still behave in moral ways for the most part.
When we wonder why there seems to be a lack of behavior that follows these morals in the world, we approach the concept of morality from a descriptive sense (we observe that human behavior has changed). Increased insight in this pursuit is found when we examine how humans themselves have approached morality from a normative sense (what is actually proper and improper). When humans have considered morality they have come to understand that the morals humans proclaim—again, language that contains imperatives—either correspond to real, objective moral facts ("Moral Realism") or are merely invented delusions expressing human emotions ("Moral Nonrealism").
Prior to the Enlightenment, there was a category of accepted knowledge outside of empirically observed nature (e.g., the non-natural, supramundane, supernatural, etc). The Enlightenment itself was a shift in human thinking that rejected this category as invalid, switching our criteria of acceptable knowledge to the material, to the empirically observed.
The shift in thinking did not happen all at once. Certain beliefs remained, held over from earlier times—somewhat as dependencies—until they could be examined and dismantled individually if they lacked empiric evidence. Western society's assumption that objective Moral Facts existed in a material universe remained for some time until examined by David Hume in 1738 in his A Treatise of Human Nature. Here Hume observed the difficult reality of the relationship between facts (that which is) and values (that which we claim ought to be), concluding that we cannot assert prescriptive or normative values based on descriptive facts.
Hume's Is-Ought observation upset the world, and has resulted in our modern condition. If empirical observation is categorically never able to locate oughts, a world that accepts Empiricism alone is one forced from Moral Realism to Moral Nonrealism: morals no longer correspond to Objective Facts, but can only be understood as invented whims and emotions, which—apart from society's ability to enforce or inflict punishment for as a conditional consequence (what Kant termed 'hypothetical morality')—can be ignored without consequence.
The transition from a society whose intellectuals and leaders held Moral Realism (viz, Christendom) to one where artists, philosophers, and intelligentsia hold Moral Nonrealism (the Modern West) has been a long, painful process since 1738. The Marquis de Sade astutely summed up the painful condition of man following Hume's revolution in thought saying "If there is no God, then everything that Is, is Right" and the majority of Western thought since then has either been in reaction against this belief (i.e., revivals of Evangelical Christianity) or experiments exploring this accepted world (e.g., Surrealism, Dada, Modern Art, Existentialism, Egoism/Individualism/Anarchism, Deconstructionism, Postmodernism, etc).
From the introduction to Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor by the American Heidegger-scholar and philosopher Charles Guignon:
Briefly put, the issue is this. Either God exists or He does not exist...if God does not exist, then the picture of the universe formulated by mechanistic materialism must be true. But, in this case, given the point of view of modern science (what Ivan calls "Euclidean reason"), the universe consists of nothing but meaningless material objects in causal interaction, effects follows cause according to the laws of physics, people are determined to do what they do, no one is guilty of anything, and so there are no such things as right or wrong, good or bad. Or, more precisely, the ideals of justice, goodness, benevolence, dignity, and so on turn out to be purely human inventions, the results of projecting our needs and wishes onto bru...
I explain more of what the debate is and has been in this comment from a few weeks ago that might clarify: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646701
You can be an atheist and still believe morality can be derived from something other than a devised deity. I feel you'd be better off if you just went back to the drawing board; you seem confused by this whole 'atheism has no moral validation' notion. There's many other theories of universal creation other than what we typically think of as gods and those theories can just as well be used to justify personal moral code. I don't think you've had much experience with atheists, willfully or not, who've cared to clear you up on your delusions about it.
Health is a necessity of our existence, but not all the things we do are healthy. Why then should we practice a healthy lifestyle?
This is what Is-Ought is negating. We can't observe a Fact ("Is") and conclude a Value/Moral Fact ("Ought"). Your observance of structures falls under "Is".
> which is necessitated by our very existance.
...which strikes me as very much accepting that this entire line of reasoning falls under 'Is'. If the premise is that we are compelled to do things because we happen to be creatures evolved that way, the 'Ought' just doesn't become relevant.
Perhaps your view of 'Ought' is just very different from an atheist's view of 'Ought' (or at least mine). My 'Ought' is really just a dresses up 'Is', from your point of view, but the difference is that I'm okay with that. Most atheists that I know are.
This, shorter, amounts to "Moral facts exist because humans employ moral language and must to survive".
That humans happen to employ decision-making structures, employ moral language, tell themselves morals exist, or even need moral language and norms to survive/thrive/be happy/be comfortable does not tell us if moral facts actually exist.
It only tells us that humans happen to employ morals and happen to need morals to exist. As amazing and insane as it sounds, what Hume shows us is that we cannot even assume human continued existence is necessary to reason. Reason is, as Richard Dawkins notes, cold and indifferent to human existence. At this "necessitated by our existence" is exactly what Retra's argument improperly assumes and hinges on. As Hume writes "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." The same logic that prevents us from decreeing whether Hume ought to scratch his finger based on any observed 'Is' likewise prevents us from decreeing whether Hume should destroy the whole world.
I'm losing you from this point on. Could you elaborate? Because to me it sounds pretty much right on the money that reason is basically necessitated by our existence.
It's a layer on top of an experienced reality that may or may not be Objective in nature, whatever that would mean exactly, and without us, or other creatures capable of 'constructing' this layer, it doesn't really exist.
What Hume/Dawkins/I are saying is that human survival/existence is not necessitated by Reason, which is cold and indifferent. As Dawkins says Reason inside the bounds of Empiricism shows us only "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference".
I'm assuming 'must', here, is not some kind of moral imperative (that would be circular reasoning I think), but rather more of an observation: without moral language we'd be a great deal worse at surviving, and one of the reasons we're doing so 'well' is that we have moral language.
So what's the problem there?
In short, Moral Realism holds that moral properties exist mind-independently and Moral Anti-Realism denies this saying they're all just subjective inventions in our head. Empiricists, if they are to hold logically consistent conceptions about the universe, must hold some form of Moral Anti-realism because they lack evidence of mind-independent moral properties (though taking the comments on this story as an indicator they are generally unaware of this).
Hume goes beyond the moral nihilism of Empiricism by saying (1) given that humans insist and are positive moral properties exist and (2) given that Empiricism shows us no evidence of mind-independent moral properties existing and never can due to Is-Ought then (3) the only way that these moral properties actually meaningfully exist is if they were based on a Supreme Being, not subject to dismissal by Empiricism. Otherwise they don't exist at all. From this a lot of people (like Marquis de Sade and his Sadism) took that they didn't exist at all and this is the primary subject human art, culture, and politics has been interacting with since then.
Based on how you use the term 'meaningful', I think you're right in your conclusion. I don't see a problem there myself, because from my (current) perspective nothing is meaningful in any kind of objective sense (I'm pretty much as zen buddhist, or well on my way), but I've had many discussions with non-religious people / atheists who seem inconsistent in this regard. So I get what you're doing here.
Either way, discussing this has piqued my interest in the topic again. Thanks for that.
Additionally helpful was learning, as Edward Leen puts it, that "the chief cause of unhappiness is not suffering". Instead, as Augustine writes, "Happiness is to rejoice in you and for you and because of you. This is happiness and there is no other. Those who think that there is another kind of happiness look for joy elsewhere, but theirs is not true joy." Life often is suffering, but this is not the cause of unhappiness. Unhappiness is caused by not knowing God. As Tozer writes of the supernatural existential "There is a restlessness within us that cannot be satisfied until we rest fully in God."
Humanity really only has two belief systems to choose from: nihilism or the Nazarene, as Carl F. H. Henry puts it. Often, those who most honestly approach the world come to find these two choices and it is not unusual for one to abandon the first for the latter. As former Zen Nihilist and radical convert to Eastern Orthodoxy Seraphim Rose describes it: "Atheism, true 'existential' atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God Whose ways are so inexplicable even to the most believing of men, and it has more than once been known to end in a blinding vision of Him Whom the real atheist truly seeks. It is Christ Who works in these souls. The Antichrist is not to be found primarily in the great deniers, but in the small affirmers, whose Christ is only on the lips. Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ…"
Either way, I am glad to hear of your interest in the topic and I sincerely wish you well on your continued exploration.
I think this is really where we fundamentally diverge on the whole matter. Perhaps I'm interpreting you incorrectly, but you seem to have found and then left zen buddhism because it's central argument is that suffering is bad in some kind of Objective way. As in: there's an 'ought' in the story there.
What appeals to me is that, as I interpret it, zen buddhism makes no such claims. It primarily argues that suffering sucks, by its very nature, and we seem to be driven to try and avoid it, so we might as well find the most effective ways to do so.
It then offers some kind of metaphysical framework to understand this (with nihilism at its root), but ultimately focuses on practical approaches to deal with this suffering. Some approaches (perhaps most) even make a constant point of not getting hung up on the metaphysics of it all, because that in itself is considered part of the root problem.
I like all this precisely because I arrived at the conclusion that there's very little evidence or use for 'oughts', or any other statements that claim to be Objectively true. And this troubled me for years until I found zen buddhism to provide me with a practical way to deal with this, and some degree of metaphysics and theory (theology, even) to satiate my desire for theory.
So we're both in agreement with Hume, I guess (interestingly, I've found that this is one thing that Christians and nihilist ex-Christians often have in common).
All that said, to make things practical: could you point me in the direction of thinkers or thoughts that might persuade me that there is such a thing as Objective truth, and that there are Oughts?
Eventually though I was stuck by the reasoning in the joke "I used to be a nihilist but then I thought, what's the point?"
If Nihilism/Zen were true, it would not be wrong to think more positively and to deny Nihilism. CS Lewis noted that if one denied nihilism and was wrong the only thing that would have happened would be that one would have paid the universe a compliment it did not deserve. Or as Tim Keller puts it "Aim at heaven, get earth thrown in. Aim at earth, get neither." And I realised my Buddhist/Vedanta aunt and uncle were just driving around in their Prius from satsang to satsang hugging and laughing with Hollywood celebrities and the 1% while my Evangelical friends were reading books to children with cancer at Children's Hospital.
For a direction, Hume is who persuaded me (like the original article notes, he was not an Anti-Realist) and a nice tool for his writings is the versions found at Early Modern Texts. Another useful direction would be the films of Terrence Malick or the polemics of Martin Luther King Jr. Primarily though I recommend the perspective of Erwin McManus (who you can see speak in Los Angeles, on that video at the end of the essay, or from his podcast) who is pursuing things in the footsteps of mystics like Tozer, Murray, Mueller, Francis, and Jesus. For another thinker who is good at explaining things you should listen to Tim Keller's talks available in the Redeemer app at http://www.redeemer.com/r/get_the_redeemer_app -- regardless of what you believe, Keller's frequent and glowingly respectful citations of thinkers like Shakespeare, Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Marx and others and his references to all elements of culture, from ancient operas to obscure art films is an amazing breadth that always starts conversations between camps who disagree and leaves any listener, spiritually-inclined or not, with more knowledge than they came in with.
It's interesting that your experience with zen buddhism is exactly the primary 'fear' I have when it comes to the next step of joining a 'community'. So far my indirect experiences have not been positive, and after having wandered outside of (my particular) Christian community for close to a decade I really miss the 'reading books to children with cancer at Children's Hospital' component that was so integral to it all. That's not to say that non-Christians don't engage in this, but just that it feels different. More diffuse and conveniently opt-in. It's one of the reasons I've even considered 'joining the flock' again despite my intellectual issues with the whole thing.
Food for thought, thanks again.
>This, shorter, amounts to "Moral facts exist because humans employ moral language and must to survive".
I would have said "Moral facts exist because humans fundamentally cannot reason or survive without employing moral language." This isn't a coincidence, either. We don't 'happen' to employ morals, we think, therefore we think morally.
>As Hume writes "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
Hume is wrong. Any mind which could make such an assertion implicitly assumes there is value in making such a statement, and thus implicitly assumes whatever existential values are necessary to support a world where such assertions are possible. To do otherwise is self-contradictory, and not a good basis for a convincing arguments.
Is-Ought shows us that Facts can't give us Values. Like you note, any human talking about any of this first "implicitly assumes there is value in making such a statement". More indication Moral Realism is the case and that values exist objectively. This is also why Christians likewise laugh at Nihilists/Empiricists. As CS Lewis put it "if the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning".
>moral facts exist because our behavior is bound by certain 'themes'...humans fundamentally cannot reason or survive without employing moral language
Nothing inside strict Empiricism or cold Reason indicates that humans must survive. Humans can insist they as a species are important and that humankind must survive until they are blue in the face and it wouldn't make it so. They can write book after book declaring that they have value but that wouldn't tell us they actually have value. However, if there were a book that declared that humans had value, that each and every human retained a non-subjective/mind-independent/objective and priceless value called imago dei and that their existence was deemed objectively good and in fact this book was the work of a non-subjective authority then this would change things.
Is-Ought is us claiming that facts can't produce values. And we can be wrong about it just fine.
Some facts can give us values. For instance, the fact that we can choose our own values gives us values. The fact that we have to make decisions means that we value those things which are necessary to make decisions.
>Nothing inside strict Empiricism or cold Reason indicates that humans must survive.
I didn't say we must survive. I said we cannot survive without moral reasoning.
Humans who make moral decisions implicitly establish moral value for their decision making abilities. This means that if you go around saying "do X", then you must also support the claim "saying 'do X' is morally correct (in certain situations.)" Which means that you must also support the claim "making moral decisions is correct," which necessitates that you value the ability to make decisions. So long as you wish for logical consistency. (This is not unlike asserting that "'P is true' is true" for all P is a necessary structural property of truth.)
Now, if you want turn around and say "we should all just be dead", then you're making a moral decision that invalidates those values. It is self contradictory. If you think you should be dead, doing anything but dying is a contradiction. Unless you're being non-general: "We should all be dead, except for just for a little while while we all prepare to deal with this revelation." I don't see how you can argue that this can be a convincing argument to consider, even hypothetically.
When examining what is actually the case rather than only observing what humans happen to think, observations like this aren't able to assist us in making a determination. Just as we can't reason "Humans believe and act like God exists therefore God exists" (here I imagine you concur) we likewise can't reason "Humans believe they have value therefore humans do have value".
You could make the completely uncontested point "Humans believe they have value therefore humans believe they have value" but it would be an unhelpful tautology.
>which necessitates that you value the ability to make decisions
Like I mentioned before, we agree in our rejection of moral nihilism: any human talking about any of this first "implicitly assumes there is value in making such a statement" and this serves as more indication Moral Realism is the case and that values exist objectively.
>I don't see how you can argue that this can be a convincing argument to consider, even hypothetically
I'm suggesting people will benefit from adopting logically consistent viewpoints.
Only true if you define morality by requiring a god.
That being said, since you have to define what "good" means, and what the role/fundamental characteristic of various contexts is, I think any attempt at a completely rational morality is quite doomed.
And regardless, you have to value those things which promote decision-making capability, since you'll end up a non-moral corpse without it, and sacrifice whatever local good you're trying to save in the process. So there are very large contexts with clear moral foundations that you are a part of.
It is the only way to understand statements about morality as objective and real rather than as invented delusions that can be ignored.
>>Which religion, and which timeframe?
This is now the work of Theology.
>>you're going to have to use the lump of gray matter in your skull
Absolutely.
Not necessary. There is an alternative route through game theory and the notion of an evolutionarily stable strategy. See, e.g., http://www.saet.uiowa.edu/papers/2015/alger%20weibull%20npla.... Put concisely, the argument is that morality is adaptive. In that way morality can be said to be real and not arbitrary.
This is just a big observation of what humans do. To be clear, what is not in contention: does obeying a society's established norms help one survive/thrive. The question we're looking for is: Does the moral language humans employ ("Humans should not murder") refer to objective moral facts (Moral Realism) or is the moral language humans employ just an expression of invented whims that humans use for surviving/thriving/comfort.
In the same way that we cannot validly reason "(1) Humans happen to practice violence therefore (2) humans should practice violence" we cannot validly reason "(1) Humans happen to practice nonviolence therefore (2) humans should practice nonviolence" (as seemingly benevolent and attractive as that reasoning may be).
The obvious comparison here is to divine retribution. You can borrow a turn of phrase from the Declaration of Independence and say that the punishment comes from Nature/Nature's God. It is encoded in physics itself. If you take the form of moral realism where morality exists in the mind of a god (though not quite the God of Christianity and absent an afterlife affected by your earthly decisions) the parallel seems clear to me.
Inside Moral Nonrealism the invented opinions can be followed or ignored and doing either will (obviously) have consequences. But this is only Hypothetical Morality -- everything is contingent on what outcome one prefers. Even with the researchers' observation that certain codes lead to societal success, we would not be able to say those codes should be followed without first declaring 'whatever leads to societal success is what we should do' which as Hume shows, however attractive and easy, remains only an assumed human opinion.
And indeed, as far as your observation of it being a fundamental structure and encoded in physics itself, Christians term this 'clear parallel' natural revelation and cite it as evidence for God.
What can't be justified from nature is the many arbitrary rules religionists came up with, like treating cows as holy, not eating pork or shellfish, wearing tassels on your clothing or funny hats, etc. etc.
You also might want to check this out: https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s...
The challenge, though, really is not if something is 'objectively right'. That's not the question you want to ask, or the conclusion you really want. You want to know 'is x religion the one true religion?'. We can answer that.
A religion, like anything making a claim, is actually falsifiable. The added challenge with a religion is that the religion has to be 100% right, all the time, or it is not right at all. Said another way, if a religion is ever wrong, it is not true and we can move on from it. This is where religion /always/ gets into trouble. Christianity is no different than any other religion here. It makes claims or assertions and if any of those are shown to be wrong, oops, the religion is not true.
So, when the bible states slavery is fine, rape is fine, beating your wife is fine, it has to be 100% right on these or the religion is null and void. Unlike the global flood (which is obviously not true), you cannot slip up and say "just kidding, metaphor or allegory" in these cases. Making a claim about what is good/bad is something we can judge, particularly as society advances. It doesn't actually matter if those are "objectively right or wrong" for it to make the religion not true, either. That's a trap. You can try and argue that slavery, per the bible, is ok. You can try. You won't win any favor with anyone these days. We've moved past owning people as a concept. It's unacceptable. Our modern moral code, subjective or objective, is "better" than that described in the bible, therefore, the bible is wrong, therefore, christianity is wrong.
One could try and argue that slavery is actually objectively ok, therefore inline with the bible, and some do try this approach and have used it to justify slavery centuries ago. But you can't do that today and be considered a rational human being. It's not acceptable. We know this. It's undisputed fact that owning people is wrong. Therefore, again, our modern moral code demonstrates a higher/better/whatever moral code than christianity in the bible, therefore christianity is wrong and we move on. If a religion were true, society should NEVER be more advanced morally/ethically than the religious standard. This simply cannot be with what the religion is claiming to be.
So, as I stated earlier, the question isn't objective or subjective morality. The question is "is x religion true" (unlike "is there a god?" which really isn't answerable at the moment, maybe ever). We can answer the questions if certain religions are true. To this end, we know the answers on all religions that make positive and exclusive claims...all have fallen short.
Indeed, the argument is quite storied. Since Hume's observation in 1738, it has never been refuted. Following Hume's observation that we are unable to derive morals from observations of Empirical facts, the concept of Moral Nonrealism—that moral statements are merely delusions we told ourselves to help/comfort us—seized humanity and led to a variety of interesting reactions including Surrealism, Dada, Egoism, Existentialism, modern art, postmodernism, et al.
>>[Sam Harris presenting Utilitarianism at TED]
Seen it. Hilarious. Sam Harris has heard of Is-Ought and begins by acknowledging it is the barrier to secular realism. His answer is to pretend it doesn't exist and move on with his talk. See this comment, #99, for more: https://web.archive.org/web/20150302143837/http://www.projec...
>>slavery is fine, rape is fine, beating your wife is fine
Jesus in Matthew 5:21-22 explains that calling someone a 'fool' is equivalent to murder relative to the /actual standard/ so slavery, rape, beating, &c. are going to be hard to explain. For more on this type of perspective you can look into Anabaptist theology.
>>Making a claim about what is good/bad is something we can judge, particularly as society advances.
What is moral doesn't change, or you would have Relativism.
>>Our modern moral code, subjective or objective, is "better"
This society did not spring from a vacuum. Then Wesleyan theologians led Abolitionist efforts; now we "know" slavery is wrong. Like the Personalist Project puts it "Those who repudiate God cannot preserve the personalist affirmation of the incomparable worth of each person, though they may for a time live by the light of a setting sun."
>>We know this. It's undisputed fact that owning people is wrong.
Indeed. This type of knowledge falls under self-evident truth, the same way we know that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That we universally, inherently are positive about these natural revelations either points to something or they are collective delusions.
>>the question isn't objective or subjective morality.
To believe in objective morality you've departed from the realm of Empiricism. Perhaps you won't and will choose subjective morality but then you'll be unable to provide evidence your whims/wishes aren't disposable opinions.
>>all have fallen short
ha, great reference :)
>>Jesus in Matthew 5:21-22 explains that calling someone a 'fool' is equivalent to murder relative to the /actual standard/ so slavery, rape, beating, &c. are going to be hard to explain. For more on this type of perspective you can look into Anabaptist theology.
This does nothing to resolve the simple questions: is slavery, rape, beating your wife wrong? It's a simple societal question these days, but when the bible was being written, the authors went to great lengths to describe the systems and rules around which all of those were indeed acceptable. To our eyes and ears that is ridiculous! There is no system or rules for owning people; it's just wrong. Doesn't matter if you marry the person you rape, it's still wrong.
So, again, religion, in this particular case Christianity, regardless if we ever get to the question of objective v subjective morality, has a problem. It has clear and demonstrated instances where it is on the wrong side of the moral debate which inherently makes the religion objectively wrong. Any purported religion designed by a higher power whose purpose is to set guiding principles and rules by which our lives are to be lived, governed and judged has to be, by definition, never worse/lower than the society. It always has to outpace the moral landscape of society. By definition and, you know, common sense.
>>>>Making a claim about what is good/bad is something we can judge, particularly as society advances.
>>What is moral doesn't change, or you would have Relativism.
So, stating it another way. Is slavery ok, objectively? You have a problem if it isn't. It means Christianity is wrong. If you say it is, you have an entirely different problem because we as a society have moved beyond this concept.
>>>>Our modern moral code, subjective or objective, is "better"
>>This society did not spring from a vacuum. Then Wesleyan theologians led Abolitionist efforts; now we "know" slavery is wrong. Like the Personalist Project puts it "Those who repudiate God cannot preserve the personalist affirmation of the incomparable worth of each person, though they may for a time live by the light of a setting sun."
Skirts the issue entirely. Is slavery wrong? Has it always been wrong?
>>>>We know this. It's undisputed fact that owning people is wrong.
>>Indeed. This type of knowledge falls under self-evident truth, the same way we know that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That we universally, inherently are positive about these natural revelations either points to something or they are collective delusions.
Again, skirts the issue. Is slavery wrong? Has it always been wrong?
Christianity is what ended slavery and additionally, without it or apart from it, slavery would not be wrong (if you have reasoning otherwise, let's hear it).
One could argue that by appealing to the supernatural one has also departed from the realm of Empiricism.
I don't think it is in princible impossible to find objective moral values hardwired in our brains that makes us uncomfortable when we do things that is not good for ourselves, or our families, or society.
Last few centuries helped us to trash so many believes that were basically wrong (and amazingly it was even trashing itself every decade now thanks to scientific methods), I don't see any reason that is also not possible for morality, which My gut feeling says is probably a mental optical illusion like thinking the world is flat.
But if it's a mechanism of our bodies, while it might be "objective" in the sense that it's a physical thing, it's still relative to each human. Just like someone is born tall or bow-legged, one might be born with 'wires' that make them uncomfortable with different things. If they act accordingly, are they moral? Even if what they do makes most others uncomfortable?
Anyway, I think the author of the article linked in the root comment is looking for something more divine for moral values, but as a disappointment, just repeats the same rituals of thousand year old fallacies like as if theist believes have objective basis from which other objective basis can be inferred.
Actually observing what humans do (history, culture) as you propose would be absolutely insufficient for determining if Moral Statements refer to Objective Moral Facts or are just invented delusions that were useful. We can't merely observe what humans happen to think or happen to do to tell. We can't reason "Humans happen to believe X therefore X is the case/exists" which is the sense of what we seek in metaethics. The sense of what you propose is akin to reasoning "Humans practice X therefore humans practice X" but similar tautologies are not very useful.
>>Morality (as in, what is considered culturally acceptable) varies greatly across time, cultures and individuals.
No one denies this: human behavior changes. But that's not the question at hand.
>>Morals that seem more universal than others may very well be biologically hardwired or selected by virtue of helping the cultures who carry them prosper (not unlike genes).
This is yet another Fact and fails to escape the limitations observed by Is-Ought.
>>This is the classic "I want it to be true, therefore it's true" non-argument.
The argument isn't to prove that morality is objective or to prove God exists. It is just an observation that "For morality to be Objective, this is the necessary dependency: God" and a suggestion that we understand moral language accordingly. As the Marquis de Sade roughly put it "If God does not exist, everything that Is, is Right". Moral statements are either real (Moral Realism) which requires a departure from strict Empiricism or they are invented opinions (Moral Anti-realism) a position consistent with Empiricism/Atheism/Materialism. The actual instance of "I want it to be true, therefore it's true" occurs when soi disant Empiricists think they can logically hold Moral Realism (often Secular Humanists who've overlooked these implications.)
Your language is incredibly disingenuous. Another phrasing might be, "useful social constructs." "Delusion" doesn't really make sense as a descriptor of subjective morality since there's no claim that they are objective in the first place. Namely, your description of those who disagree with you presupposes that your view is correct. In particular, it feels like this is just an outright lie:
> The argument isn't to prove that morality is objective or to prove God exists. It is just an observation [...]
If it were "just an observation," your language wouldn't be laced with the presupposition that Moral Realism is the "correct" philosophy.
You can call the social constructs whatever you like and no one is foolish enough to deny their utility. But as you note, they are not claimed to be objective; it is admitted that they are nothing more than (subjective) opinions. In trying to learn what they really are Chris Hitchens and Carl Sagan teach us how to approach invented opinions with Empiricism's perspective: "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence".
>just an observation
That's really all Hume did with a single paragraph known as Is-Ought. But it has frightful consequences, showing subjective morality to no more than a disposable invention in light of reason and logic. This line of thought from the 1700s that without God morals were made up gave us Surrealism, Dada, modern art, postmodernism, the thought of Max Stirner, Nietzche, Hobbes, Satre, Camus, Marx, Dostoevsky, Bukowski, et al ad nauseum and continues to this day.
>presupposes that your view is correct
If my view is not correct, it should be easy for you to refute Is-Ought. You can't and won't.
On that understanding, this phrase is true: "Objective morality cannot exist if theism is false." Or in other words.. "God's Nature cannot exist, if theism is false."
Duh. So what?
A moral-realist atheist is generally going to rely on some (theorized) universally shared value/desire as the starting point for a moral framework. To such a person, moral statements take the form, "Since you value you X, you should do Y" (where Y is the optimal way to reach the desired state of affairs, X).
There's no is-ought problem when moral statements have that form, there's only the problem of demonstrating or proving that such universal shared values/desires exist at all.
You could admit you are starting with a Value but your personal opinion of what value to begin with would always remain a subjective whim in a mundane, materialist universe. This is why Hume understood our deepest convictions of our conscience could only be explained in a supramundane world, concluding they must be impressions sourced to the Supreme Being.
Again, you can't simply start with a Value and declare you have escaped subjectivity. Being subjective, your morality remains conditional and hypothetical. One's declaration becomes "If you begin by first valuing—as I do—that animals should not be killed, you should be a vegetarian" -- supposing one does not share this first (theorized) value regarding animals the sentence is dismissed as any other subjective moral claim. You speculate this subjectivity could be answered if you could demonstrate such a value had actually been what you term a "universal shared value" but this can never be done. Even if 99% of humans or life in the universe held the value "animals should not be killed" we could not declare that value a moral fact. A majority believing something is never able to tell us what is actually the case (ad populum). We remain unable to reason "99% of life in the universe desires not to kill animals therefore no one should ever kill animals" - the data (Is) cannot transcend and provide an objective should (Ought).
You go on to say, if I'm understanding you correctly, that the atheist-moral-realist is still mired in subjectivity because the existence of any such shared goals/values could never truly be demonstrated. It could never be demonstrated, since no matter how far and wide you look, there could be a counter-example lurking around the next corner.
But thats simply the predicament of any theory or observation about the real world. As Sagan said, "we reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth". We could find a counter-example to the law of thermodynamics tomorrow... but currently, according to the best knowledge we have, the law appears factually true, and that's how we treat it. And its worth pointing out, this line of conversation is more about limitations in our knowledge about learning moral facts, not whether said facts (or the underlying ontology, etc) are actually true or false.
This sort of thing is a challenge for everyone, no matter theist, atheist, pantheist, or pastafarian. Limited access to moral facts are a given. For everybody. We all have to cope with the fact that our moral knowledge is imperfect and probably supported by quite a few subjective factors.
If disagreement over moral facts is evidence against atheist moral realism, its an equally powerful (if not moreso) argument against theism-based moral realism.
Sentient things happening to hold values cannot tell us if these values are objectively the case.
>It could never be demonstrated, since no matter how far and wide you look, there could be a counter-example lurking
No. It could be shown that 99% of humans hold the value 'cows should never be killed'. It is not the 1% that dissent that invalidates this datapoint from being able to tell us if this held belief refers/corresponds to an objective value.
>If disagreement over moral facts is evidence against atheist moral realism
Again, that humans disagree is not being given as reason atheist moral realism is untenable. That humans disagree or agree or have any opinion about anything has zero impact on whether moral properties refer to mind-independent objective facts. Zero. Consider reading the linked essay in the original comment or browsing the rest of the comments to better understand what is being put forward to show that combination of beliefs is untenable.
>its an equally powerful (if not moreso) argument against theism-based moral realism.
That people disagree over what is true is not at all an indication that truth itself does not exist or cannot be found.
Here's how I'm understanding you... what you are pointing out is that even if all human beings valued, say human flourishing, with no exceptions, that there's still yet no factual purchase from which to say they SHOULD value human flourishing rather than something else.
Well... as they do, goal-based meta-ethical theories are generally going to point to something like that kind of (hypothetical) shared, innate orientation towards "human flourishing" AS the metaphysical bottom rung. It IS the purchase from which moral statements gain any sort of coherent meaning at all (Since you value X, therefore you should Y). You can always keep asking, "But why is THAT Good?" questions, but it just doesn't make sense too.
Maybe this can help illustrate the point.
I could similarly ask, "Whats so good about God's Nature"? Within typical theist meta-ethical frameworks, those words basically parse as, "What's so good about good?" or "Whats so God's Nature about God's Nature?"
"Since you value human flourishing above all, you ought to value human flourishing above all".
Those are just syntax errors. :)
The overall point is this... IF it is true that there's some hypothetical, universal goal X, then statements such as, "Since X, you should Y" can be factually, universally, objectively true.
"You value human flourishing, so you should help your neighbor", etc.
Not only is there no is-ought problem in such frameworks, "ought" DEPENDS on "is".
Exactly, except not 'factual' but no valid reasoning to do so. From the essay:
"For there is no such Finis Ultimus [utmost aim] nor Summum Bonum [greatest good] as is spoken of in the books of the old Moral Philosophers." —Thomas Hobbes
"It [is] extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values… It is nowhere written that “the good” exists…" —Jean-Paul Sartre
"It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." —David Hume
>It IS the purchase from which moral statements gain any sort of coherent meaning at all (Since you value X, therefore you should Y).
No one is denying that humans use moral statements. It can be the meaning in Moral Nonrealism. It cannot be the meaning in Moral Realism. Here is why, again from the essay:
"In suggested approaches to morality, I am surprised to find authors moving from propositions with the usual copula ‘is’ (or ‘is not’) to ones that are connected by ‘ought’ (or ‘ought not’). This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the greatest consequence. For as this ‘ought’ (or ‘ought not’) expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be pointed out and explained; and at the same time a reason should be given, for how this new relation can be—inconceivably—a deduction from others that are entirely different from it. I am persuaded, that attention to this one small matter will let us see that the definitions of right and wrong are not based on the relations of objects nor can be perceived by reason." —David Hume
>I could similarly ask, "Whats so good about God's Nature"?
The limitation applies to a non supernatural/supramundane universe. Hence Hume declares the only possibility "The standard of Sentiments [Values] is ultimately derived from that Supreme Being, which bestowed on each being its peculiar nature, and arranged the several classes and orders of existence."
Some goals/desires, in and of themselves, ARE the rational reasons to act one way vs another.
> The limitation applies to a non supernatural/supramundane universe.
Where's the limitation exactly?
Shit like this, philosophers, is why scientists don't (and can't, and shouldn't) engage. The words to use are "scientifically undefined", not "scientifically unsettled" - you can't just argue over definitions for centuries and then blame science for that fact that none of you can agree on what you're talking about, if anything.
You enter the realm of science when you have a testable hypothesis, not just some vague idea that reeks of dualism that you can't conceive of not being a "real thing", like consciousness or self.
By using the scientific method, scientists are taking a strong philosophical stance (and certainly not a universal one) whether they like it or not.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/how-davi...
Hume, along with the Ancient Roman Stoics and some Taoism, have a good deal in common (and complement each other where answers may be lacking). They are very rewarding, read together.
Basically, we like Hume, because he confirms what we already believe.
If Christianity was very dominant, then Hume would not be as popular.
What this shows you is that idols are not chosen by looking whether they have anything insightful or true to say, but how well they conform to current dogmas.