I challenge atheists to present their moral structure in this thread – what principles their moral system is based on (if any), how they come to understand/decide what they “ought” to do; whether or not they are “obligated” to act morally, and if so, to whom/what is that obligation owed, and why anyone should care or act according to their moral system. Or, if their moral system doesn’t follow any of these conventions, then explain their moral system/views.
52 thoughts on “Challenge to Atheists: Morality”
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Easy. I follow the Golden Rule. Someone who doesn’t mind wasting time on such inane questions can probably provide the game theory / cooperation math that backs it up.
Structure? What structure?
Yeah, the golden rule to a large extend will suffice. Here, it comes down to the realization that I don’t want to suffer physically or mentally, and the understanding that others feel the same way.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do not do unto others what you would not have them do towards you.
I think children are mostly raised by their parents to understand how to relate and sympathize with each other. It’s part of upbringing to try to make sure children come to understand how to treat other people and why this is important both for others and themselves. Being a social species, large parts of this comes easy, it’s sort of hardwired.
They are. There are greyzones of course, the world is not so simple that you can unambigously state that you “should” do something specific in any and all circumstances. But in general yes, we hold people accountable for their (in)actions.
Their fellow human beings and themselves.
It’s in everyone’s best interest, because it contributes to an overall reduction in suffering and increase in well-being if you don’t have to run around in constant fear of having your food stolen, or be raped and killed. Most people, once they reach adulthood, have a pretty good understanding of these principles. We can see and understand how our actions affect others, and therefore in turn affect ourselves and the people we care about. Cooperation demonstrably works.
Morality being a set of standards by which one ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ behave?
There are two main parties (with sub-factions) involved in the determination of what I ought to do: ‘me’ and ‘everybody else’. And of course since I am a part of ‘everybody else’ to another individual, I might have a view on what they ought and ought not do. Whether I had legitimate grounds for doing anything more than tutting disapprovingly would depend on the extent of harm their actions might cause.
The fundamental driver for my personal ‘oughts’ is the extent to which they increase or decrease my personal sense of self-esteem. So the fundamental obligation is to myself (as, if they did but admit it, is the case for any theist trying to get the best outcome for their immortal soul). This is not the recipe for anarchy it may seem, however, since a significant part of human self-esteem is having a good standing in the eyes of others. Hence, this involves obligation to others; to attempt to be kind, polite, honest. It makes me feel good. I can model outcomes, and know that personal guilt would ensue upon my stealing, or murdering, while helping others produces a positive sensation.
I know that such a ‘subjective’ approach produces the vapours amongst the theist community. “What if it made someone feel good to kill?”. That such individuals exist is undeniable. But while the core of my morality is personal satisfaction, this does not mean that I consider everything that results in my personal satisfaction to be moral, and the same would be true of someone who enjoyed killing. Few would map their enjoyment entirely upon their system of ‘oughts’ – I enjoy cake, but don’t consider it a moral duty to eat it. If they insisted on calling it moral, I might suspect they believed they had access to an External Arbiter of morality who was whispering ‘kill’ in their ear. Either way, I could hardly stand idly by ruminating.
The source of my morality would be a combination of genetics, parents, school and community. Being a ‘good’ citizen (as judged by others), and a ‘good’ human being (as judged both by others and myself) is part innate, part learnt. The desire to be good in those terms is fundamentally human – as is frequent transgression.
“The only frame of mind which can provide direct support for moral commitment is what Josiah Royce called Loyalty, and what Christians call Love (Charity) [caritas, agape]. This is a commitment deeper than any commitment to abstract principle. It is this commitment to the well-being of our fellow man which stands to the justification of moral principles as the purpose of acquiring the ability to explain and predict stands to the justification of scientific theories. . . . the ability to love others for their own sake is as essential to a full life as the need to feel ourselves loved and appreciated for our own sake — unconditionally, and not as something turned on or off depending on what we do. This fact provides, for those who acknowledge it, a means-end relationship around which can be built practical reasoning which justifies a course of action designed to strengthen our ability to respond to the needs of others.” (W. Sellars, “Science and Ethics” (1960)
I´m very glad that aheist has a moral system based in the Golden rule becouse it is very helpfull in this World with an inusual increase of the proportion of atheist population. But if we have to talk about the rationality of the moral system I see some problems.
Well no, the Golden rule is too vague to be enough, you can do anything according to what you understand that is good. In a comment to another post I explained how Stalin and Pol Pot followed their interpretation of he golden rule. The problem of the interpretation of “good” according to this rule is because the rule alone lacks a goal. When you talk about morality you talk about what you “ought to”, and if you have to “ought to” you need to know the “in order to”, you need a goal. A logical morality is that allows you to reach your goal.
Here is the other problema with your oral system. Let aside thee demostrability of the cooperation works, the question is works for who? Moral systems are useful to solve moral conflicts, when my good it is not the good of others, so your moral system solves the conflict accepting less good for every one in order that everybody reaches more good than the situation in which the conflict is maintained. But how we reach a fear agreement? How is I feel that I´m loosing more that others.
The second problem with cooperation is who cares? Who care that everybody wins in a community if I´m strong enough to impose my will? Who cares if imposing my will I help my small community of friends? Why I powerfull should resign the good for my family in orthe to reach a well for all?
One word about the demostrability that cooperation works. All of you lives in a capitalistic society. The core of that society is the competition, take the more advantage you can and beat the competition. That society is far more better than the supposed society based in cooperation called communism. How you atheists, living in the cradle of the capitalism can say “Cooperation demonstrably Works”?
Splutter! If I may interject here, since the original comment was in response to me … well, no, I think ‘splutter’ just about covers it!
It’s really not that complicated. As a human being, I recognize that I am but one human being among many, and not that different from any of them. I can make no objective argument that my personal goals and wants are any more worthy, necessary, or vital than anyone else’s. I fortunately happen not to be a sociopath.
I also know that neither myself or any others of us could survive or prosper without the good will and assistance of many other humans, both known and unknown to me. Therefore, I have no good reason NOT to treat others and their goals, needs and desires as comparably worthy as my own. As many help me, I try to help others as well.
It doesn’t require threats, coercion, or bribery. It’s just something that humans do.
Blas,
Gibberish. There’s no way the golden rule can be bent to allow you to murder millions. Because, wait for it, you’d not want to be murdered yourself. The golden rule has to be categorically ignored to allow genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The basic moral principle I use is Kant’s Categorical Imperative, especially in the “formula of humanity” version:
I was introduced to the Kantian framework by reading Martin Buber’s unjustly neglected I and Thou. Central to Buber’s philosophy here is the distinction between the I-Thou relation and the I-It relation. Buber’s version of Kant would be, “never treat a Thou as an It”. (I also learned a lot from studying Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenology of morality, but that’s a hard slog for non-philosophers, whereas I and Thou is highly accessible.)
I use the Kantian/Buberian framework for sorting through what is genuinely moral as opposed to what is social convention, etiquette, or taboo. And in fact I think that a lot of what we think have traditionally regarded as “immoral” are just taboos, and not really immoral at all, because no one is being treated as a means only in the proscribed actions. On the other hand, I also think that a really consistent Kantianism leads to socialism, because capitalism is inherently exploitative, particularly with how a capitalist system requires that we turn ourselves into the means for someone else’s ends (or our own). One can get from Kant to Marx by thinking about capitalism roughly as Kant thought about masturbation — indeed, I think that that is basically what Marx himself did (see the 1844 Paris Manuscripts).
Now, being a Kantian/Buberian and being a non-theist is a tough sell, I’ll grant you that. But it’s worthwhile to notice the exact role that religious faith plays in both Kant and in Buber. In Kant’s system, religious faith is introduced in order to resolve the conflict between morality and happiness; in Buber’s vision, religious faith (what he calls “the eternal Thou”) is introduced in order to guarantee that the I-Thou relation will not be overwhelmed by the I-It relation. So being a Kantian/Buberian, and a non-theist, means that morality is fragile — there are no guarantees, and tragedy is a perennial possibility of human existence. (On the theme of tragedy in human life, there’s no one better than Nietzsche, but I’ve also learned a lot from reading Martha Nussbaum and Bernard Williams.)
Now, as for where this principle comes from: I think that the categorical imperative, like our epistemic and logical principles, is an explication of what is implicit in our practice of being in a moral community. Basically, the CI says what it is that one must do in order to count as a member of the moral community. So the question is, how did we become the kinds of beings capable of being in moral communities? And to that question, I think that Frans de Waal’s research on the evolutionary antecedents of morality in non-human primates is extremely helpful.
In a nutshell, I would say that morality is primate empathy and social cooperation plus rationality and imagination.
What rationality and imagination add to our primate inheritance here is this: non-human primates will engage in moral or proto-moral behaviors with members of their own social group, but the moral community stops with there. Whereas we human beings have the capacity to universalize the moral community — because we can imaginatively identify with people very different from us, and because we can systematically reflect on possible worlds in which everyone engaged in putatively moral (or immoral) behavior. (This is the key to the formula of universal law version of the categorical imperative — “act only according to that maxim which you can at the same time will be a universal law, or law of nature”.)
The moral community is potentially unbounded, and our moral progress over the centuries (to the extent there’s been any) consists in expanding the scope of the moral community — extending our sense of solidarity and fellow-feeling to inhabitants of other civilizations, to the disenfranchised, to traditionally under-privileged genders and races, and in our own time, to people with different sexual orientations.
Ok, I think that about covers it, for now.
At the end of the day, it’s not what you say – what you intellectually construct as being your “morality”, but rather it is how you actually act. In the thread you created, I stated simply that you plagiarized my thread – essentially, I accused you of doing something wrong against me – something immoral.
How did you react? You left your moral obligation up to this particular group’s consensus. If you were going to extend the “moral community” as much as possible based on empathy towards others, then what prevents you from empathizing with my sense of being wronged? Have you ever felt wronged? Is it okay for you to do a thing that makes someone else feel wronged as long as the consensus of the group thinks otherwise?
What would it cost you to extend your empathy to me, expand the local “moral community” to include me? Nothing. If you felt I had wronged you, what would you rather have occur; the majority of group telling you that your sense of being wronged is erroneous, or a simple, heartfelt apology from the person whom you felt had wronged you?
No, that’s not what you did. You said:
When you boil it down, how you actually act when it comes to morality is I’ll do whatever the group thinks is appropriate.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Quite so. You, WJM, made a false accusation of plagiarism. Is that a great example of your own moral behavior?
William J. Murray,
The question isn’t “is plagiarism wrong?” but “is my action a case of plagiarism?” That’s what I was submitting to the judgment of the community: whether or not what I did counted as a case of plagiarism — not whether or not it was wrong, if it was plagiarism.
Obviously, if it is plagiarism, then it is wrong. The question is, is it plagiarism just because you claim that it is? That’s what I was leaving open to the judgment of others. (It is a further question, however, whether plagiarism is immoral or some other kind of wrong. I’m not sure about that, though I can see compelling arguments both ways.)
Personally, I really don’t understand why you’re feeling so hurt by what I thought was a fairly harmless parody. But, the fact is, I have no reason to doubt your sincerity — if you say you were hurt by it, then I hereby apologize.
I want to be saved from bad people that exploit me and my friends. You see my onterpretatoon of the golden rule is differents from yours.
WJM rejects the jury system in this thread.
At the heart of plagiarism is a deception: dishonestly passing off someone else’s work as one’s own.
KN’s modified repetition of WJM’s passage obviously does not include that element, as it appeared directly above the model from which it borrows. There is no plausible interpretation that includes an intent to deceptively represent that passage as something he had authored. In fact, I’d wager that that it was KN’s intention that the reader immediately perceive that his passage nearly exactly duplicates WJM’s, and therefore recognize gander, goose, and sauce.
William, here’s the problem with the premise in your objection: you assume that KN (and others here for that matter) see you as a moral entity. On the contrary, most of us do not see you as very moral and see many of the other members of this group as much better indicators and judges of morality. As such, there is very little incentive to extend any empathy your way since it appears that you either can’t or refuse to extend empathy, nevermind trust, our way.
It’s pretty easy to determine when someone is being weasel, William. So, if you really want folks to extend empathy towards (which in the past you’ve declared you could care less about), you might try adjusting your behavior and seeing if our behavior adjusts accordingly.
This does not match the Golden Rule Blas, or at the very least it’s a ridiculously narrowly limited version that ultimately contradicts the GR. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make by raising an example that does not meet the OP requirements in spirit or intent.
For someone who makes up his own “reality” and believes whatever he wants to believe, William sure seems awfully thin-skinned about “morality.”
Why should he care what others think? He can just pretend they aren’t there; or that they are figments of his own imagination that he can just play with as “suits his purposes.”
Well, now that I’ve apologized, it’s up to Murray if he decides to accept my apology, and what sort of restitution he would like of me, if any.
I actually assumed, on seeing those two posts, that KN and WJM had come to some agreement in another thread to ask the same question symmetrically. It seemed a cool idea. But no, apparently it’s ‘plagiarism’, another feeble opportunity to have a jab at the morality of the non-believer.
… and, furthermore, I first read WJM’s ‘plagiarism’ comment as a bit of lighthearted banter. But apparently (on subsequent comments) not. My radar is well out of whack.
You seem to have missed the entire point of that comment.
I see. So how morally you act, and how much empathy you extend, depends on (1) how moral you believe someone else to be, and (2) what the group you are in thinks of the relative moral behavior of the person in question. So, if you consider me immoral, then you are free to treat me as less of a person than others you consider to be moral.
You sure you want to take that position?
Where did I say I was feeling hurt by it? I made that comment for the express purpose of allowing you to demonstrate exactly what you demonstrated – what your morality really boils down to, when given the opportunity to act morally.
In this case, it turns out that for all your posturing, your morality simply boils down to “whatever the consensus says”, whether that consensus is determining IF something is a case of plagiarism and therefore wrong, or IF the consensus is just determining if someone has, in some way, been wronged. I guess you would also leave Eugenics – sterilization of undesirables – and throwing imperfect babies off of cliffs up to consensus vote, right?
Do you truly not know if what you did was plagiarism until it is voted on? Do you truly not know if what you did was wrong until you get that vote talley in?
Pathetic.
William J. Murray,
I was attempting to be polite, but since you don’t seem to care about politeness, I shall cease wasting my efforts with you.
To be perfectly, completely, clear:
(1) In my judgment, my parody of your post does not count as plagiarism in any way;
(2) I submitted my judgment to the assessment of other people, because I rely on others to verify or check my judgments, because that’s what mature, intelligent human beings do;
(3) I was fully prepared to make restitution if others judged that I had been in the wrong;
(4) if I am pathetic, it is only because I allow myself to be drawn down to your level. Rest assured, I will not make that mistake again.
So, do you mean “treat others as we would wish to be treated”? Or do you mean, “treat others as they would wish to be treated”?
How does your “golden rule” morality handle those who do not have a golden rule morality?
(BTW, I don’t believe the golden rule is a good moral principle to operate from. At best it’s a passable general rule of thumb for the masses, but certainly not a solid, fundamental principle. It’s too problematic.)
If you see me doing something you consider so immoral that you feel compelled to act, what gives you the right to try to stop me, if it is in your power to do so?
Why is it important?
Or else what?
And if my morality doesn’t have anything to do with the “best interests” of others, how do we settle a moral dispute?
Yes, that’s why the world is a big happy pool of cooperation and consideration about how other people feel.
Except that time, right?
At last, a moral statement from an atheist that deserves some respect.
Unless, of course, that “good standing” is in the eyes of others is a gang like the Aryan Brotherhood or the Crips or La eMe (the Mexican Mafia), where your obligation your self esteem and “how other sees you” would be to be a hardass, vulgar, loyal to the crew and “honest” only insofar as it serves the gang’s interests …. right?
Well, that may be true for you, but using your self-esteem model of morality, someone raised up in one of those gangs would be behaving just as morally by murdering, stealing, and harming others, right? Surely you’re not saying that what personally gives you a sense of self-esteem is applicable to everyone and every culture?
Then why don’t you impress the heck out of me with some rational consistency and either tell me that yes, a person raised in such a gang and surrounded by such a gang would indeed be acting morally, by your definition, if it gave them a sense of self-esteem and the group a sense of respect towards him by murdering some innocent people in a drive by, or tell me what, in your self-esteem and group-esteem model, prevents that from being a perfectly acceptable form of morality.
Ehhh…not quite what I said. 1) My own concept morality and my moral actions therefrom have nothing to do with anyone’s moral actions. I think that’s true of other folks, but clearly there’s no way for me to know what there own behavior is based on. 2) Empathy is not quantifiable; there’s no volume or other dimensions to it. Empathy is about understanding how someone else feels in relation to stimuli. Given that you are demonstratably all over the map when it comes to how you feel with regard to how others treat you, and have stated on several occasions that you don’t care what other people think of you, and further, that you freely admit that you make up your beliefs about things on the fly, it’s kind of difficult to get a read on how you feel about anything, or whether you actually feel anything. However, given that it is obvious that you don’t have a lot, if any, empathy for anyone hereon, it’s reasonable to assess that perhaps you don’t feel much. Thus, my ability to empathize with you is limited to the extent that you don’t actually exhibit anything to empathize with.
This:
and this:
Sums up my point quite nicely. Thank you William.
I think the backpedaling hypocrisy and self-contradiction apparent in your posts sums it up nicely. You’ve never really thought about it; you’re just throwing stuff that sounds right to say out there; I caught you in some blatant problems caused by your ill-thought answers; and now you’re trying to cover up and shift attention.
Morality was invented by the haves as an excuse for hanging the have-nots;
Morality was invented by the powerful as an excuse for hanging the weak.
variations…
Morality was invented by the have-nots as an excuse for resenting/stealing from the haves.
Morality was invented by the weak as an excuse for resenting the powerful.
Gods were claimed/co-opted by humans who had no other way of forcing a morality down the throats of the uncooperative.
Well, if morality is just an invention of humans, then there’s nothing immoral about doing whatever one wants (including making up morality) in order to get what they want. Right?
As opposed to just changing whatever god you believe in until it and your beliefs are in accord? Seems to me you just made up a god that happens to be what you want it to be, you’ve not found god you’ve invented it.
And yet you claim that covering that up and saying “it’s objective” fools anybody? And you sneer at people who are honest enough to not play that game.
Well, it’s you that is in error but I don’t think you’ll ever see it. You objective morality is as subjective as everybody else’s, you just have a different name for it is all.
You and yours had the world in a theistic head lock for most of recorded history. So whatever the world is, you own much of that.
That wonderful weasel word “just”, beloved of quite a few at UD.
I don’t personally think “invention of humans” is the right way to put it, but anyhow your conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise.
And once again, you make a non-substantiated claim. Yawn. If you wish to be impressive, do point out this supposed “hypocrisy and self-contradiction”. It’s funny how when other people “catch [someone] in some blatant problems” they actually spend some time rebutting those supposed problems in order to defeat the argument. Merely declaring there are glaring holes isn’t all that damning.
Robin,
There’s no reason for me to point out or reiterate what is there for anyone to read.
That’s what Aardvark said – that morality is invented by people wanting to get their way. If that’s the sum of what morality is – an invention of humans to get their way, then doing so cannot be immoral, because those inventions are what define morality for those people at that time in those situations, because – according to Aardvark – that’s all morality is.
So yes, if morality is X (invention of rules to get what you want), then X cannot be immoral. X cannot both be moral and immoral – they are exclusive and contradictory domains.
Seeing as I’ve never claimed to have “found” god, and have stated flatly several times that I invented my own concept of god, I’m glad you finally got the postcard.
Actually William, I was being more flip than serious. Since I consider you a weasel I don’t know what the point is of giving you a serious answer but if you want one I’ll try to compose something I haven’t already seen anyone else write.
Incorrect. Morality, maintained by groups, does not give an individual free license.
Yet oddly, no one else has claimed hypocrisy and contradiction on my part. Thus I can only conclude that you are, as usual, just making it up.
How unexpected.
So in what sense is your morality “objective”?
Lizzie:
He gets it from the ether via his Libertarian Free Will!
eta:
I had snark brackets around that sentence but they didn’t appear in the comment. Re-adding them.
[snark]He gets it from the ether via his Libertarian Free Will![/snark]
also added for honest disclosure:
I self identify as Libertarian; yes, I drink the koolaid but I dilute it with chai first. 🙂
Well Robin then tell me Stalin
didn´t know the golden rule, understood the rule in a different way or didn´t want to follow the golden rule.
Well, since in my one comment I reported making two different and contradictory readings of yours, in at least one of those cases you could not but be right!
(“You seem to have missed the entire point of that comment”. Hmmm. Let’s take a wild stab in the dark: Was it to accuse KN of plagiarism? And impute immoral behaviour? I’m a bugger for only being able to read the words written, sorry.)