Imagine my surprise when I heard that atheism was based on a search for truth. We all know that’s false.
Let’s examine a couple recent examples.
Patrick claimed that I did not provide any links.
You’ll note the complete absence of any links…
I provided links. Patrick lied.
KN claimed that Immanuel Kant was an atheist philosopher.
KN lied,
Patrick demands morals of others while denying that there are any objective moral obligations.
Why do atheists care about what is true and what is immoral?
Why do atheists attack the object of their ignorance?
William J. Murray,
Serious question: are you familiar with the term “transcendental argument”?
I ask because the philosophers I read who make transcendental arguments for moral realism — and there are many, including Putnam, Habermas, McDowell, and Pihlström — all make arguments that seem to me to be very similar to yours. I’m reading Pihlström’s work now. It’s quite excellent.
“Love – love is strange
Lot of people take it for a game
Once you get it – you’re in an awful fix
After you’ve had it – you never want to quit
Many people don’t understand, no no
They think lovin’, yeah yeah – is money in the hand
Your sweet lovin’ – is better than a kiss, yeah yeah
When you leave me – sweet kisses I miss”
What’s the difference between eternal damnation and infinite eternal punishment?
Pedant:
Eternal damnation is spending eternity in hell. Infinite eternal punishment is spending eternity in heaven, listening to fifth prattle on about revelation.
There are tons of differences.
For starters eternal damnation says nothing at all about the extent of the punishment except that you won’t ever be eligible for parole.
besides that It’s not even logically possible for a finite being to suffer infinite punishment.
peace
So it’s all falling apart already.
When so many people are confused about the argument you are making ever stop to consider the problem is with you?
William J. Murray,
Can I be the first to welcome Mr Hitler to the thread? Take a seat, Adolf. You know everyone, right?
Yes, I’ve made that crack before. But then, you’ve made that crack before.
2 does not entail moral relativism. Whatever gives you that idea?
Round and round the carousel goes. I get on for a few spins, I get off …
William J. Murray,
If the ‘self-evident truth’ is not even accepted by the other party, it is not a ‘self-evident truth’ and cannot sensibly be used to ground any argument. If your argument fails at the premise stage, things are not looking good for it. Yes, I know it convinces you. But (and I am no philosopher, insert snark here), it looks like poor argumentation to me.
William makes much the same points on the thread at UD I linked to. Apparently we can say nothing either way about the Nazi’s because we don’t agree with William’s purely logical argument.
Odd the consequences of this logical argument seem to be as if it’s not really just about a logical series of statements….
William @ UD
Yes, according to William I must concede what the Nazis did was morally good. This one is no philosopher…
When you were an atheist William, did you think what the Nazi’s had done was morally good? If not, why not?
The rejection of 2 on relativist grounds shows a poor grasp of the distinction from 1 and 3.
Here it is again:
The only difference from 3 is that part in bold. In 3, substitute arising from an external natural law or deity. But the reader (WJM) has turned over 2 pages there, and read 2 as endorsing all behaviours equally. He appears to have read 2 as 1. It isn’t, any more than regarding a definition as a purely human endeavour endorses all translations of a word equally.
We learn a moral vocabulary the way we learn a verbal one. Indeed, the two go hand in hand. If someone considers it a moral good to kill … ooh, I dunno, taking an example completely out of thin air, let’s say ‘Jews’ … they are not using the term ‘moral good’ correctly – ‘correctly’ being, ‘according to the convention’.
Moral goods are universally defined as encompassing such qualitites as kindness, honesty, integrity, neighbourliness, and moral ills cruelty, dishonesty, ill-will. Nazis, like most people, grew up in a culture that valued the first and deplored the second. Rather than regarding killing Jews as a moral good, they regarded it as a ‘necessary evil’. As, indeed, we did, in killing them.
But, these trains of thought do not render 2) an illogical moral stance. If-it-is-the-case that morality is externally adjudicated (with all the bizarre accounting that that entails), then we can add “X really was wrong” – not according to the norms of a set of people, but according to some norm that sits outside them. Which, I have to say, I greet with a big fat shrug.
After all … this is a ‘logical‘ argument, isn’t it? I’m not seeing the logical necessity of positing ‘really, truly, wrong’ in place of ‘abhorred by most people’. The latter has the advantage of being capable of discussion and amendment, in light of the basic moral frameworks of positives and negatives. After all, it’s us, not some goddamned imaginary deity/law, that has to live with the consequences.
When I was an atheist, my opinion was that it wasn’t good or bad. It was just what some people did to some other people to further their desires. I dispensed with morality when I was an atheist. Why should I have to internally justify anything I did according to some arbitrary rules or some subjective psychological/emotional inclination?
William J. Murray,
A view held by many thinking adults is that doing things one finds repugnant, because one does not think anything ‘out there’ finds it repugnant, is rather dumb.
Allan attempts to avoid the logically necessary concequences of his moral subjectivism by appealing to ad hoc “universal moral definitions” which, conveniently, precisely allow Allan to avoid those consequences:
If “a complex of senses of approval and disapproval of the behaviours of self and others arising from a combination of genetics and culture” gives rise to a hypothetical culture that finds “extermination of the Jews” a good thing as they define good, in terms of how such behavior is “experienced by the individual as a real (introspectively-perceived) incentive or restraint on behaviour, or remorse/satisfaction after the fact, then exterminating the Jews is the morally good thing for that hypothetical society to do.
Did the Nazis think that what they were doing was good? Do the radical Islamists? Of course they did and do, and Allan’s convenient appeal to “universal definitions” contradict his own explicit subjectivist framework in #2, by claiming that what the particular “combination of genetics and culture” produces in terms of defining what is good is subordinate to some universal definition of what is good. Allan wants to definitionally exclude things he doesn’t want to admit as valid subjective goods from the category of moral goods; unfortunately, he doesn’t get to put such limitations on what genetics and culture actually produces as the definition of “what is good” for any particular group.
IF by genetics and culture a group considers it a moral good to exterminate Jews or torture babies; THEN Allan is logically bound to agree that by his definition of what actually produces “moral good”” for any group, the act of that group exterminating Jews or torturing babies is a moral good. There is no escaping the logic.
Allan said:
If that repugnance is keeping one from achieving things they would otherwise like to achieve, and doing the repugnant thing is the most direct and sure route to achieving such a thing, then without necessary negative consequences for doing that repugnant thing, there is no reason not to break down that repugnance.
People suffer from all sorts of psychological inhibitions and repugnancies they pay a lot of money to overcome. As an atheist, why should I consider morality anything other than a psychological disability or a bothersome inhibition?
Allan said:
Any argument depends on agreed-upon premises. If we don’t agree on the premises, that alone doesn’t make the argument a “poor argument”. It just means we don’t agree on the premises.
Nope, you are just confusing explanation with obligation. There is no obligation attaching to a recognition of the source of morality within genetics and culture. Language reflects our internal sense. It does not dictate it. Culture shapes it more, but hardly automatically. It is perfectly possible, and entirely logically acceptable, to regard morality as ultimately sourced from genetics and culture combined, while still disapproving of the behaviour of someone with whom one shares both, or anyone else for that matter.
If, as we learn the language (and, simultaneously, norms), we learn that ‘good’ attaches to behaviours we recognise (non-verbally) as equating to general attributes of honesty, kindness, etc, those facts of internal recognition do not change because some fictitious group (which does not even include actual Nazis) has, in your fiction, determined that the term ‘moral good’ now extends to killing Jews. “Are you sure that killing is morally good mummy? This does not equate with everything else I have learnt about ‘good’ and ‘bad'”.
There are two errors here (apart from the usual is-ought), one that doing something someone considers ‘bad’ automatically makes it ‘good’ to the actor, and the other that common linguistic usage somehow would constrain our ability to experience approval/disapproval, rather than simply providing words to describe the concepts.
If someone says ‘killing is morally good’, I disagree in much the same sense that I’d disagree when they say ‘bananas are a kind of rock’. eta – but not, it should hardly be necessary to point out, in every last respect.
William J. Murray,
We don’t agree on the premises and it’s a poor argument.
William J. Murray,
Up to you, really, innit? If WJM-logic led you to poke yourself repeatedly in the eye, I expect you’d do it. Most people aren’t that dumb.
I’m pretty sure those are not atheists or moral subjectivists.
It may come as a bit of a shock, but different tempora did indeed have different mores. I disapprove of some, and approve of others. Not on a whim, but not entirely programmed either.
I don’t see any grounds for this being logically inferior to attempting to reflect the views of some imagined entity waiting for me with a cattle prod if I make too many false moves.
I hadn’t heard about it until you mentioned it. I read some about it this morning. It is pretty similar to my how I structure my arguments. My arguments differ (from the little I read) from the forms of Transcendental Argument I read about in that my arguments only seek to establish a logically-incontrovertible practicality. IOW, one should believe in objective morality not because it has been shown to be factually true, and not because it is rationally necessary (it isn’t; amorality is just as rational), but because it is necessary in a practical sense. I make the same kind of case for acausal free will.
IOW, it doesn’t matter (to the argument) if these things actually exist or not, in order to live as a rationally moral sentient entity, one must act as if morality is objective and as if they have acausal free will; and if one must act thusly, it is a matter of practicality to believe accordingly. Otherwise, one’s behavior and arguments are hypocritical with respect to their beliefs and their beliefs are irrational wrt their behavior.
The fact is, we do not know if morality is objective or if we have acausal free will, so it’s not as if such beliefs would violate factual knowledge (and thus themselves be impractical). IMO, atheists/physicalists twist themselves into intellectual knots trying to justify these impractical beliefs because of an a priori commitment to a worldview that they think is undermined if they adopt these beliefs.
William J. Murray,
Not because they think the argument is a crap one, then?
It is certainly a really good thing that objective morality most strongly favours the mores of white, conservative, theistic 21st Century Americans. We’d hate to think there was any cultural element to all this – that way lies relativism!
Allan said:
Your disapproval is irrelevant wrt the logic that necessitates you admit that for the Nazis, exterminating Jews was a moral good.
First, you do not know if it includes the actual Nazis or not. You are conveniently presenting a narrative that it doesn’t. I disagree with your narrative, but it is irrelevant to the argument. Second, your particular genetic and cultural “moral knowledge” cannot be used to judge the moral quality of any other group because the morality quality of their acts entirely depends on their particular genetics and culture, because that is what you have established as the cause of morality and the source of what defines it. When you pin moral quality on the genetics and culture of groups, then however any group defines morality and however they fulfill that morality is what their moral good is.
Logically, you do not get to appeal to “universals” that would definitionally override that group’s definition because you have established group (or even individual) definitions as the determiner of the actuality of moral good.
Thus, if a group feels like it is a moral good to exterminate Jews, then your “disapproval” is misplaced and irrational because logically, by your own standard, they are behaving morally when exterminating Jews.
No. What makes it good is if the actor believes it is good via genetics and culture (according to your premise).
Your sensation of disapproval has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the other group is behaving morally according to your own premise of what generates “moral good” for a group. Just because you feel disapproval doesn’t mean that disapproval is rationally consistent with the logical consequences of your worldview. Your disapproval doesn’t make someone else’s actions immoral.
Unless you believe that whether or not bananas are actually a kind of rock is entirely dependent on our genetics and culture, I don’t see how you can rationally say you disagree “in the same sense”. It doesn’t matter what culture you grew up in or what genetics you have, bananas are not a kind of rock. Similarly, it doesn’t matter what genetics you have or culture you grew up in, cruelty is wrong and love is good.
Yeah. Logic is racist. Love being good and cruelty being wrong are racist ideas. Wow.
Command Authority objective morality is just as bad as moral subjectivism.
Allan:
From your perspective, if Joe believes X is moral, and you consider it immoral for Joe to do X, what reasoning logically justifies that view?
If morality is a matter of genetics and culture, didn’t genetics and culture produce Joe’s moral view, one way or another? By what measure then can you rationally assert that Joe’s view is immoral?
Alan said:
Right. You’re not obligated to recognize what you yourself have said factually makes a group’s behavior moral or immoral in determining whether or not you find that group’s behavior moral or immoral.
That’s the same as claiming that what factually makes a rectangle a rectangle are X qualities, and then saying you are under no obligation to recognize those qualities when determining if something is rectangular.
William J. Murray,
Not everything done by everyone is regarded, even by them, as a ‘moral good’.
That’s not its job. It is explanatory, not prescriptive.
Yet again, confusing an explanatory framework with a prescriptive one. This is getting tiresome.
From my position as, inevitably, a child of my time, I have certain norms. If I lived in another time, I would probably have other norms. And so would you. You’d be a Koran-basher if you lived elsewhere. Where does that get us? But we are also human. We have shared genetic heritage, and our cultures tend to share common factors as well. These are universals in the human species. I am perfectly entitled to appeal to them as explanatory factors. Logically.
No they aren’t. My standard is not ‘what did the GroupThink?’, regardless whatever and whenever group that might happen to be.
Genetics and culture do not make something good. My particular culture defines ‘good’ in terms of qualities such as those I repeatedly trot out. It means we can understand each other when we talk of such things. If another culture had different norms (guess what – they do, to a point) then I would obviously have absorbed those norms. As would you. But using the norms I have, I am able to judge other norms. There is no logical contradiction here.
I don’t know how many times I can say this is not a method for evaluating moral good before it sinks in. Forever, I suspect. I evaluate moral good according to my norms, which reflect my environment to some extent. How can I do that and be a relativist? Why, by contrast, must I ‘logically’ be a relativist and not judge?
Nothing does, in a categorical sense. Imaginary laws don’t count.
These agree with the kinds of quality that I have already said ‘universally’ attach to moral ills and moral goods, among all cultures. Yet, when I said it, you seemed to think I was not entitled to it.
You do realise humans are genetically closely related, don’t you? It is no surprise that we share some things at a very fundamental level.
William J. Murray,
Did I say that? Wow indeed.
William J. Murray,
I don’t know why you are asking me these questions, when you respond to them with a shrug. You don’t judge Joe. So let’s say I don’t either.
William J. Murray,
If I find a group’s behaviour objectionable but they don’t, I see no contradiction there at all.
I think you are profoundly misunderstanding what I say. I put it down to those theistic worldview blinders.
Allan said:
Of course I judge Joe. If Joe is putting a cigarette out on his young child’s face, I judge the act immoral and am obligated to intervene.
I realize you don’t see a contradiction. That’s what I’m attempting to reveal to you and why I asked the questions above.
If by “objectionable” you mean “morally objectionable”, and if by “morally objectionable” you mean “morally wrong”, you have yet to show any rational justification for your judgement that their behavior is morally wrong because the explanation you offer for that judgement (an appeal to a universal moral perspective) logically contradicts what you said factually verifies behavior as moral – their particular genetics and culture.
If by “objectionable” you do not mean “morally wrong”, your “objection” is irrelevant to the argument. We are arguing what makes a thing morally right or wrong under your premise and how that judgement is justified as right or wrong. If “genetics and culture” justifies behavior as moral, then if a group believes killing Jews is a moral good, you are logically bound to agree that it is a moral good whether or not you personally find it “objectionable”.
Isn’t God the ultimate moral authority according to you? How is your position not “Command Authority” objective moralist?
William J. Murray,
Nope. I see no contradiction because there is none. My judgement on whether another group’s behaviour is ‘wrong’ does not depend on what they think. It is not whatever-the-group-thinks-is-right-is-right. But my view is, of course, informed by my own culture’s norms. You really think yours isn’t? No, you don’t.
I have categorically denied that this is how I judge their behaviour – against their norms. But out it trots, that same lame horse.
And you regard ‘my imaginary friend/invisible force thinks it wrong’ as a clincher, in this hypothetical scenario?
Does objective morality transcend species?
Because under the version of objective natural law morality I would argue in favor of, god doesn’t command what is moral. What is moral is necessarily moral because it is an unchanging aspect of the ground of existence – god’s nature. What is good is unalterably good; god cannot command you to do something immoral and by that command the act becomes moral.
The current form of the majority of Islamic views is that god (Allah) makes a thing moral simply by commanding you to do it. So, if Allah (supposedly) commands one to cut off a child’s head, it is (in their belief) factually moral to do so.
Allan said:
If you judge it according to their norms,then you agree that their behavior is moral?
For some philosophers, transcendental arguments are supposed to establish rational necessities. That’s why most pragmatists reject them. But there is a small group of pragmatists who use transcendental arguments as arguments for practical indispensability of concepts that explicate the human point of view, rather from the point of view of nowhere. In particular, some pragmatists construct transcendental arguments for the practical indispensability of objectively valid moral norms (Frederick Will, Hilary Putnam, and Sami Pihlström). Pihlström in particular I find quite fascinating. He argues that we must accept that moral truths are objectively valid in order for us to understand what it is to be ethical beings. I think that’s correct.
However, Pihlström is more careful about how far transcendental arguments can go towards an ontology of values. I do not think he would say that transcendental argument for moral realism can establish that the kind of reality that moral values have is a ‘fundamental to the structure of the world’ kind of reality. As a pragmatist, rather, all ontological claims are real-to-us sort of claims; all objectivity is objectivity-as-far-as-we-are-concerned.
For those reasons, I doubt that Pihlström’s transcendental argument for moral realism would support any kind of theism. I also doubt that his argument could support acausal free will — not because freedom isn’t real, but because acausal free will is too ontologically demanding to make sense of the kind of pragmatic freedom that actually makes a difference in moral life.
Allan said:
No, the objective view argument is that it is due to the nature of the ground of all existence, it is wrong (a form of natural law) in an objctive/absolute sense, thus providing the logical premise necessary to justify judging the behavior of others wrong regardless of their genetics and culture and regardless of what they personally or culturally believe is moral granting me the authority and obligation to intervene in their immoral behavior (stopping Joe from putting his cigarette out on a child’s face) or attempting to overthrow regimes or ideologies that treat women and children or people of another race as property.
William J. Murray,
Hmmm. I spy a tasty lure. Chomp!
I recognise that, for them, this hypothetical behaviour could conceivably fall within their definition of ‘moral’. Might even be objectively moral, for them. Neither case precludes me from offering my own judgement. Which, let’s face it, is all you’d be doing as well.
Allan:
I’m beginning to think that William is incapable of grasping that, no matter how many times it is explained to him. It’s been years, already.
He simply cannot separate moral subjectivism from moral relativism in his mind. The reasoning is too difficult for him.
William J. Murray,
Why do theists feel the need to have authority for getting all judge-y anyway? Especially when they could be completely wrong, even if their ‘logical premise’ itself were true?
I think ’tis often forgotten that morality starts with oneself.
Nor can he separate moral objectivism from moral absolutism. That’s the basis of all my criticisms of his view.
I appreciate the answer, but unfortunately it seems you are drawing an imaginary, semantic line that has no logical significance in your moral worldview. “For them” is the only kind of moral good that exists under your premises. In your moral system you must logically admit that if a group finds exterminating Jews morally good, then it is a moral good. Period.
Adding the “for them” only grants you an invalid conceptual distinction. Every moral good is only good “for them”. Belaboring that point because you happen to dislike their moral good doesn’t change the fact that their moral good is as good, and as justified, as any other.
So then we come to moral authority. I’m assuming you also would intervene if someone was putting a cigarette out on a child’s face. Since you must logically admit that such an act could be every bit as moral as your own actions (for you, for them), what in your system of morality justifies such an intervention?
KN said:
If you’re going to continue to comment wrt something I write, then I will respond and I will respond from my philosophical perspective. You don’t get a free pass to criticize me and then complain about “oppressive normative violence” when you know that if I respond, it will be from the perspective of an assumed foundationalist/justificationist framework. I have a moral obligation to not unnecessarily harm you, but as I have said, I’m not that moral of a person.
So, if you don’t want to be subjected to my oppressive normative violence, stop criticizing my arguments. I’ll be happy to engage in a non-argumentative discussion with you, but I’m not going to let your criticisms pass by any more without a response.
I can certainly separate moral objectivism from moral absolutism, but in order to respond further, you’ll be normatively assaulted. You decide which you’d prefer.
I am willing to risk it, go ahead please.
I think I’d have stopped him just to get some distance from that dangling participle (or whatever the hell is going on in that “sentence”).
You’re a braver soul than I am, Newton.
KN said:
The “fundamental structure of the world” natural law argument I make characterizing what grounds absolute morality is not substantively part of the “we should accept that morality is absolute” argument from rational and behavioral pragmatism.
First, one establishes the argument for a pragmatic belief in absolute morality. Then comes the question, what is the nature of that absolute morality? This is an eliminative argument that shows that there can only be one practically useful and morally acceptable form of objective morality. Now, one might object that the latter is an argument from consequence; but I’m not claiming that objective morality is real. I’m claiming that if you’re going to adopt a belief in an objective morality based on a transcendental argument from pragmatism, my particular brand of natural law morality is the most practical and intellectually acceptable way to go when further developing that belief structure into an intellectually satisfying, fuller model. It is efficient, practical, and doesn’t suffer from any of the very disturbing inconsistencies and unacceptable logical consequences of other moral structures (moral relativism, moral subjectivism, definitional morality, command authority morality, etc.)
I think it’s a pretty flawless morality. It 100% corresponds to actual behavior and justifies it; it doesn’t commit anyone to any specific set of rules or tenets and holds them only as obliged to do the best the can via conscience and reason; it avoids the pitfalls of other moralities (some of which are very, very bad), and provides a means of finding common grounds with others and a justification for moral obligations, responsibilities and, when necessary, interventions.
Instead of me criticizing the morality of others, I’d like it if someone offered an intelligent, informed criticism of my moral model. Is it impractical in some way? Do you see any serious logical problems? Does it not correspond to how we actually think and behave in some way?
I mean, if you’re willing.