I don’t think that science has disproven, nor even suggests, that it is unlikely that an Intelligent Designer was responsible for the world, and intended it to come into existence.
I don’t think that science has, nor even can, prove that divine and/or miraculous intervention is impossible.
I don’t think that the fact that we can make good predictive models of the world (and we can) in any way demonstrates that how the world has observedly panned out was not entirely foreseen and intended by some deity.
I think the world has properties that make it perfectly possible for an Intelligent Deity to “reach in” and tweak things to her liking – and that even if it didn’t, it would still be perfectly possible, given Omnipotence, just as a computer programmer can reach in and tweak the Matrix.
I don’t think that science falsifies the idea of an omnipotent,omniscient deity – at all.
I think that only rarely has this even been claimed by scientists, and, of those, most of them were claiming that science has falsified specific claims about a specific deity, not the idea in principle of a deity.
I do think that the world is such that IF there is an omnipotent, omniscient deity, EITHER that deity does not have human welfare as a high priority OR she has very different ideas about what constitutes human welfare from the ones that most people hold (and as are exemplified, for example, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), OR she has deliberately chosen to let the laws of her created world play out according to her ordained rules, regardless of the effects of those laws on the welfare of human beings, perhaps trusting that we would value a comprehensible world more than one with major causal glitches. In my case, her trust was well-placed.
I do think that the evidence we have is far more consistent with the idea that life and its origins are the result of processes consistent with others we see acting in the world, and not a result of some extraordinary intervention or series of extraordinary interventions, regardless of any question as to whether a benign or otherwise deity designed those processes with the expectation that life would be a probable or inevitable result.
I don’t think that it follows that, were we to find incontrovertible evidence of a Intelligent Creator (for instance, an unambiguous message in English configured in a nebula in some remote region of space, or on the DNA of an ant encased in amber millions of years ago) that that would mandate us in any way to worship that designer. On the basis of her human rights record I’d be more inclined to summon her to The Hague.
I think that certain theological concepts regarding a benevolent deity useful, inspiring, entirely consistent with science, and may reflect reality.
I don’t myself, any more, believe in some external disembodied intelligent and volitional deity, simply because I am no longer persuaded that either intelligence or volition are possible in the absence of a material substrate. But I do understand why people think this is false, and that consciousness, intelligence and volition are impossible, even in principle, to account for in terms of material/energetic processes, and I also understand that, although I think, for reasons that satisfy myself, that they are mistaken, the case is not an easy one to articulate, not least because of the intrinsically reflexive nature of cogitating on cogitation.
I think that “free will” is an ultimately incoherent concept; I think that the question “do we have free will?” is ill-posed, and ultimately meaningless. I think the better question is: Do I have the ability to make informed choices for which I am morally responsible?” and I think the answer is clearly yes.
Anyone else want to unload?
Here William says:
It seems that William does not claim objective reality exists and can be accessed; he just believes it.
Insofar as I have any handle on what WJM has been claiming, it amounts to the following:
(1) any conception of morality that is not “objective” in the requisite sense can avoid collapsing into might-makes-right, and hence cannot properly be regarded as morality at all.
(2) one is rationally entitled to call a conception of morality “objective” only if believes both that
(a) there are self-evidently moral truths from which other moral truths can be derived;
and
(b) there are necessary consequences to morality, even if one takes it to be unknowable whether or not there are, in fact, any such necessary consequences.
I’ve argued that (1), (2a), and (2b) are all false, but to those arguments WJM has refused to engage in any counter-argument; accusing me of “sophistry” is enough for him. (Gregory engages in the same tactic.)
Pro-tip: if someone takes your arguments seriously enough to offer a counter-argument, and your response to those counter-argument is to accuse your interlocutor of “sophistry,” then you are the sophist.
Jesus!
It hardly matters to me at all. I was just somewhat curious as to what you mean by your “natural law model”. I assume from your response that I quote that you have a different “natural law model” to those suggested at Wikipedia. Would you like to drop a hint about some aspects of your “natural law model”? Do we need to consider disambiguation?
Hints? I’ve explained it explicitly in this thread.
Because we appear to have misunderstood your answer, please answer again keiths’ question:
Or, if you prefer:
Suppose that you did not believe that there is an objective moral standard that entails necessary adverse consequences for those who indulge in gratuitous child torture. Would you still consider it to be immoral?
Sorry to be obtuse but could you link to the relevant comment? Though I too would ask if you could respond to Keiths’ question or as paraphrased by Lizzie.
I’ve had a read through the thread and I can find this, this and this as candidates for a description of your soi-disant “natural law model”. Am I warm?
(1) Gratuitous child torture is self-evidently immoral.
(2) In my view, it is self-evidently immoral because it directly contradicts the purpose of creation, even if we don’t know what that is, sewn into the fabric of our existence. We know it is there even if we don’t know exactly what it is, like a blind man running into a brick wall.
(3) That which functionally and directly subverts or contradicts the purpose of existence necessarily generates negative consequences (like throwing a hammer into a blender and turning the blender on).
(4) Therefore, there’s no such thing as an “immoral act that carries with it no necessary consequences” just as there is no such thing as “an omnipotent god that can (or cannot) make a rock so heavy he cannot lift it, because god’s omnipotence (and other characteristics) (IMO) is also necessarily constrained by logic;
(5) Which renders the question “would X still be immoral if there were no consequences” as absurd a question as “if god was not bound by logical constraints, could he make a rock so heavy he couldn’t lift it?” If god isn’t bound by logical constraints, we cannot make any meaningful arguments or assertions about god whatsoever; if morality doesn’t refer to that which carries with it necessary consequences, there is no reason to debate it or call it “morality”.
William,
You are conflating two kinds of “necessary consequence”. Throwing a hammer into a running blender obviously has “necessary consequences” for the blender, just as torturing a child obviously has necessary consequences for the child.
The question is whether those acts have “necessary consequences” for the perpetrators.
If gratuitous child torture had no “necessary consequences” for the torturer, would you still consider it to be immoral? Yes or no?
William J. Murray,
Let me see:
There are acts that are self-evidently immoral.
Acts could only be self-evidently moral if reality was such that it would be damaged by such acts.
Therefore reality must be such that it would be damaged by such acts.
If I’ve got this right, your conclusion is crucially dependent on your two premises, although the argument itself seems valid. I’m happy to grant the second for now, but the first seems dodgy to me:
How do you support your claim that there are acts that are self-evidently immoral? Other than appealing to the fact that most people agree?
How would you test a statement for “self-evident-ness”?
My version of natural law morality is that god is a certain way – has certain characteristics. One of those innate characteristics is “goodness” (others are: mathematical relationships, geometric relationships, logic). God cannot change this quality about its nature, and whatever god creates is necessarily imbued with and structured around and has the purpose of serving that good. God can similarly not make 1+1=30, nor can god make a 4-sided triangle. God also cannot make a rock so big he cannot lift it, nor can god make something immoral that has no necessary consequences.
Thus, morality is not arbitrary, but rather natural – a fundamental property of mind, like gravity or entropy in the physical universe. God cannot and does not “command” what is good – what is good is an intrinsic aspect of being that cannot be changed.
Any sane/relatively normal human can experience the moral landscape of the mind with their conscience. That raw experience can be misinterpreted as we humans fallibly and subjectively interact with it, which is why we should use logic to reason from self-evidently true moral statements.
The case I’m making is not that this is true, but rather that it is a more useful model than any subjectivism-based model because those models are invariably hypocritical and/or fatally repulsive and/or logically incoherent and/or do not reflect how we actually act in the world.
I’m sort of seeing William’s argument that if there were certain things that we could say were blindingly obviously immoral, the very existence of that blindingly obviousness, in the absence of any apparent reason for it (why would we not do something we would enjoy?) implies our innate awareness of morality, and therefore that it must exist “out there” independent of us, just as the fact that we can see the stars is evidence for a universe in which there are really are stars.
And just as the existence of stars tells us something about the nature of space-time, so the existence of self-evident moral truths tells us about the moral curvature of the universe..
And that in turn implies (as stars imply galaxies and gravity and stuff, if you add a bit of math) that something in the universe tilts us away from torturing children for our own amusement, and therefore that doing so is going against the gradient, as it were.
Am I at all warm here, William?
But if so, your crucial first premise seems to rest on the very consensus you reject. We can regard child-torture-for-pleasure as self-evidently immoral because we all agree that it is (even those who do it, I suspect, hence the fig-leaf of justification child-abusers so often trot out in defense of their actions).
So what alternative criterion (other than consensus) do you have for self-evidentness?
Now the first problem with this is that I can simply counter this (as I have done previously) with the observation that people make stuff up about gods. And what they make up varies from person to person, culture to culture. I don’t say “don’t believe it” as it is your choice (insofar as anyone is able to choose what to believe -it’s a mental trick that is beyond me). So right there, objectivity and self-evidence go right out of the window.
I disagree as I don’t accept that gods are a reality. I consider them to be human constructs.
I don’t think you could make a self-evident statement about the real world.
Usefulness is a concept I appreciate. If your own “natural law concept” gets you through the day, then all well and good. Your sweeping claim about other models is an unsupported assertion.
So tell me how you set about deciding that a moral statement is self-evidently true, and not, for example, something that seems blindingly obvious to you, but might not be blindingly obvious to someone else.
In the first place, they wouldn’t be “self evident” if you had to argue, test or support them. That question is an absurd non-sequitur.
In the second place, since I’m not arguing that morality is in fact objectively existent, I have no need to support the idea that self-evidently true moral statements actually exist. They are part of a model not claimed to be true, but rather claimed only be more rationally consistent, less hypocritical, less repulsive and more resistant to blatant abuse and misguided application than the subjectivist or the command authority models.
Third, if you’re willing to say that gratuitously torturing children isn’t self-evidently immoral, and that the morality of such an act depends on what the culture or individual believes about it, I’m happy to leave that admitted aspect of subjective morality stand on its own without rebuttal.
I am sure that an overwhelming proportion of people we could ask would agree that torturing and murdering infants is totally and utterly immoral. I certainly agree. You could get me to agree that all sorts of selfish and oppressive acts against others were also immoral. What you can”t convince me of is the self-evidence.
Self-evident is not the same as “obvious”. Some self-evidently true statements are not obvious at all. If one doesn’t understand what a “child” is or means, or they do not understand what “torture” is or means, or what “gratuitous” means, the statement wouldn’t be self-evidently true to that person. However, upon being informed on what those terms mean, any sane person immediately recognizes, without knowing what individual, or what culture, or what time frame, or any other circumstances – without any further information, evidence or argument – that the statement is true.
That is a self-evident truth – or, at least, the kind of “self-evident” truth appropriate to my argument here.
If all I have to ask is, “Is torturing a child for for fun immoral” and you immediately say “yes” without asking me “what culture? who is doing it? when was it done?”, you have already committed to the fact that it is a self-evidently true statement you hold as objectively binding on all cultures and individuals.
So criminals, like two ten-year old boys who tortured and killed a toddler apparently for amusement and curiosity, are invariably insane?
If all I have to ask is, “Is torturing a child for for fun immoral” and you immediately say “yes” without asking me “what culture? who is doing it? what do they believe? when was it done?”, you have already committed to the fact that it is a self-evidently true statement you hold as objectively binding on all cultures and individuals.
William J. Murray,
Is that directed at me? Because I agree that I can conceive of no circumstances where torturing and killing infants could be considered moral. My response is indeed visceral, emotional but it doesn’t make the statement any more self-evident.
From what I can tell of WJM’s epistemology, there’s no need to test for the self-evidence of a statement, because it is self-evident that the statement is self-evident.
On his view, remember, we have libertarian freedom — which means that we have the freedom to deny even that which is really self-evident. So if anyone denies that a statement is self-evidence, it doesn’t mean that the statement really isn’t self-evident — it just means that they are exercising their libertarian freedom to deny it. Hence nothing can show that a putative self-evident truth really is (or is not) self-evident — it’s simply self-evident that it is self-evident.
As usual, WJM balances out unconditional freedom with necessary constraints in order to give his model a degree of approximation to actual experience. Since he thinks it is mere “sophistry” to account for norm-governed agency and responsibility in any other way, I’ve stopped trying.
Well, “sane” was an abbreviation for what is probably a more complex subject to explore. I think that they might be biological automatons, or evil, or sociopathic, or psychopathic … but I lump all those together into “not sane”, so yes, they are insane. They might be treatable back towards sanity, but no 10 yr old who is reasonably sane tortures and kills a toddler for his or her amusement & curiosity.
BTW my example was not hypotheical. Link
I don’t know what you think “self-evdent” means, but accepting a statement as true without any other information, evidence or argument is what “self-evident” means. Your acceptance of a statement as true without requiring further information or evidence is what makes the statement “self-evident”. To accept the statement as true at face value and then deny it is self-evidently true is a self-contradiction. You either accept it as self-evident, or you require additional evidence and argument.
William J. Murray,
I’m agreeing that the statement is likely to be true for the overwhelming majority but not true for some people, Robert Thomson and Jon Venables, for instance and thus not universally self-evident.
Self-evident implies true to any rational person regardless of background, education and training.
I worked for seven years in children’s protective services, and I can say with some authority and experience that the immorality of, or revulsion at, torturing babies is not self-evident. It is the majority view, and the view of the law, but it is not universal.
It is an emotional stance, not a reasoned one.
Whether or not a majority finds the statement true is entirely irrelevant to whether or not it is self-evidently true. “Universally accepted” is not a part of any definition of what any version of “self-evidently true” means. It does not mean “universally accepted”, “universally recognizable”, “obvious”, or even that a majority of people agree with it.
You (personally) have accepted that the statement is self-evidently true by definition by the fact that you (personally) require no additional evidence or argument to agree that the statement is true.
It may imply that to someone who doesn’t know what “self-evident” means. That’s not, however, what it means.
William J. Murray,
Ah but my reaction against the idea of torturing infants is emotional. I suspect it is hard-wired due to heritable traits beneficial in child rearing which might also be an explanation why some people lack the emotional response that would inhibit them from harming their own or unrelated children. Just because I respond emotionally in a certain way does not make the response due to self-evidence.
It’s self-evident, Lizzie. It doesn’t need to be ‘tested’ for ‘self-evidence’, because you can just see that it is!
The wrongness of torturing an infant for fun is patently not self-evident in the way WJM claims, because it depends on prior beliefs. WJM reasonably defines “self-evident” as being understood to be true based on understanding the meaning of the words alone, without requiring any other evidence, arguments, or, importantly, prior beliefs. By child we mean, “a human during the earliest stage of its life”. By torture we mean, “purposely inflicting great pain,” etc. To get from the meaning of the words in the sentence to a belief in the wrongness of the act is to have prior beliefs, such as about the inherent value, integrity, or rights of humans, or about the innocence of infants, etc. The need for prior beliefs precludes the possibility of self-evidence. However, if WJM wants to build the prior beliefs into the definition of infant, as he suggested earlier in the thread, then the statement becomes an analytic one (essentially, “torturing beings that it is wrong to torture is wrong”), and thus is only self-evident in a trivial way.
Lizzie,
William goes much further than that. He says that unless there are “necessary consequences” for the perpetrator, morality cannot be meaninfgul:
:
Thus he is still trapped:
William:
In our hypothetical scenario, under objective morality, morality is not “arrived at” by reason, but rather arbited by reason.
Since God cannot be immoral,contrary to His nature, and the nature if God is based on assumption, then morality seems to be based on your subjective assumption as well. Does reason determine your choice of the particular nature of God which you subjectively assume? If not reason, what?
Conscience is the sense by which we navigate the objective moral landscape; reason is what we use to arbit what our conscience finds there – to help us not misinterpret it.
Is not conscience tied to morality which is tied to one’s concept of God, they are intertwined.
The landscape is not something god makes up arbitrarily; it is an intrinsic aspect of universal mind. God cannot change what is “good”.
But man can change the nature of God,since He is based on an unreasoned (?) subjective assumption which in turn would change what is Good since when one changes the other must follow suit.
Cubist: It’s self-evident, Lizzie. It doesn’t need to be ‘tested’ for ‘self-evidence’, because you can just see that it is!
Add it to the list of consciousness, intelligence, and design
No, it isn’t.
You are, weirdly enough, confusing subjective and objective here.
We all find some statements to be self-evidently true.
Of these, some are testable objectively, and some are not.
Of those that are not, as you seem to be claiming “torturing children for pleasure is wrong” is not, some find them “self-evident”, others don’t.
So my question is far from absurd. Let’s take three moral statements, all of which some people find “self-evident”:
Torturing children for pleasure is wrong
Homosexual sex is wrong
Beating disobedient children is right.
How do you tell which of these statements, all of which some people claim are “self-evident” is, for really real, “self-evident”?
Then please state, clearly, how you, William J Murray, are defining “self-evident”.
i.e. what exactly do you say that it means?
ETA: I see that you have tried to do this.
OK, but then whether a statement is self-evidently true will vary from person to person.
You are simply stuck here, William. If “self-evident” varies from person to person, then there are no truths that are objectively self-evident.
And if there aren’t, your reasoning from self-evident truths system will be entirely dependent on what a given person finds self-evident.
Which makes any morality based on your system, entirely subjective!
Try writing in the active voice. There is a reason why the US declaration of independence begins with the personal pronoun “we”.
William J. Murray:
Attempting to unpack your definition:
This actually doesn’t parse properly – you have defined a property of a statement (being self-evident) as the action of a person (accepting a statement).
It could be amended to say:
“accepting a statement as true without any other information, evidence or argument is what “finding something to be self-evident” means”.
or
“If X accepts as a statement as true without any other information, evidence or argument that statement is “self-evident” to X”
William: if neither of my emendations is what you meant, please supply one that parses properly and is what you mean.
Both the ones I have provided treat self-evidentness as a property of the way in which someone holds a statement to be true, not as a property of the statement itself.
This was William to me:
Perhaps my saying that I couldn’t conceive of a situation where “torturing and killing babies for pleasure” (the “for pleasure” element is important here, at least to me, which is why I consider my response emotional rather than logical) could be considered a moral act is akin to agreeing that it is, for me, self-evident. WJM goes on to assert that anyone “torturing and killing babies for pleasure” would have to be insane. I tend to think of insanity as a disability (set of disabilities?) that mitigates responsibility for criminal actions rather than being an explanation for that action.
I wish I could dismiss the instances where babies, infants and toddlers are abused and tortured but as, judging by news reports, cases still happen rarely but regularly I can’t. I don’t envy the various agencies charged with prevention and especially dealing with the aftermath. That said I can’t extrapolate from that to being able to derive an objective morality. It just seems a non sequitur.
ETA
I see you already picked up on WJM’s definition. I was writing this but was distracted by a couple of phone calls.
Thanks, Allan! I must have scrolled past William’s definition.
He really needs to sort that definition out.
Eh? You use the same quote in your preceding comment!
Alan not Allan. Allan is the guy who can’t spell his name right. 🙂
Might be off-topic but I was pointing out to William that fairness is an important aspect in how societies generally function and this may well have evolutionary origins. On looking for stuff that might relate to such a conjecture I came across several studies on primates and lots of media and blog comment. Here for instance.
ETA repetition
Yeah, that was after I’d found it!
damn crossposting
oops 😮
Yup. “Cheater detection” seems to be a Thing, as my son would say.
“self-evident” is not the same as “blindingly, obviously”. Self-evident means nothing more than “If I understand the terms and what they mean, that is all I need to judge if the statement is true or not.” It has nothing to do if it is obvious or not – even blindingly so. I have more on that later in this post.
Not “it must”, but rather “is usefully described by the model”
Well, by the real meaning of “self-evident”, not by your incorrect version.
Cheating on your taxes might be “going against the gradient”; torturing children for fun is smacking into the brick wall. That’s why I use it as the example.
You’re warm.
No, it doesn’t.
I’ve rejected “consensus” as having anything to do with “self-evident” for as long as I’ve been posting here. It definitionally has nothing to do with “consensus”. Also, to ask for evidence or support for a self-evident truth is absurd.
But, I did think of another way to bring light to this part of the debate for reasonable onlookers.
“Oughts” only exist in relation to a purpose. If morality refers to a subjective commodity, then those purposes are subjective (from individual to individual, or from group to group). It is the purpose, then, that arbits whether or not one ought to commit the act, not the act itself. The act itself is just a brute fact; whether or not it serves one’s subjective purpose depends on the purpose.
Simplified version: if my purpose is to make a frozen margarita, then putting ice in the blender is what I ought do. If my purpose is to make some fresh peanut butter, then I ought not put ice in the blender.
IOW, the statement “I should put ice in the blender” is not self-evidently true because there is more information anyone would need to assess the rightness of that should, like “what drink are you making?” The “should” depends on the purpose of the individual/group. If the purpose is subjective, the same act could be a should or a should not – it depends on the individual/group and the situation.
IOW, if one was a real subjectivist – actually lived as if morality was a set of subjective preferences, the question “should I torture children” is a question only the individual can answer, because it depends on their subjective purpose (if subjective morality is true). If that person finds it to be fun, then in light of their purpose – to enjoy the gratification torturing children gives them, yes, he should do so.
By definition – matching an act to a subjective purpose for the individual – it would necessarily be morally good. If we assume that the person does enjoy torturing children, and all other considerations are secondary to him having fun, and we assume he has the most fun by torturing children, it’s virtually tautological that it is morally good for him to torture children for fun, because there is a 1 to 1 mapping between the action and the purpose it serves. He ought (morally good) torture children for fun because it is fun for him to torture children and all other considerations are unimportant to him.
What anyone else thinks is irrelevant to the morality, because morality is only determined (under subjectivism) by mapping an individual’s act to their subjective purpose.
There’s a reason that I worded that moral question the way I did: it exposes the hypocrisy or self-deception of those that answer it honestly. Is it moral for a person to torture children for fun? Explicit in that question is both the act (torturing children) and the subjective purpose (for fun); implicit in that question is that the person does, indeed, enjoy torturing children. The question carries with it a subjective, 1 to 1 mapping of an act that serves the subjective purpose of the individual.
The only correct way for a subjectivist to answer that question if they accept the implicit agreement that the person in question in fact enjoys the act is “yes, it is moral”. Only Robin answered the question this way.
Yet, no subjectivist here said “I don’t know, I need more information”; nobody asked about his culture or beliefs; nobody asked if he enjoyed torturing children. Nobody asked any of the questions one would need to ask if they actually lived as if morality was subjective. All anyone needed was the face value of that statement to agree it was immoral, when in fact from a subjectivist perspective it is tautologically moral because the act directly serves the subjective purpose of the individual committing the act.
This same logic extends to groups and societies.
Nobody reacted as if I had asked, “should I use a blender to make my favorite drink?” (subjective purpose, requires more evidence/information). You reacted as if whatever my favorite drink is (whatever my idea of fun is) nobody should use a blender (torture children) to make it. You reacted as if it was objectively true and as if it was self-evidently immoral to torture children for fun without even asking about what the individual or group believed about it, ignoring the implicit tautological nature of the question entirely (tautological from a theoretical subjectivist perspective).
It is self-evidently true to all of you that it is wrong to torture children for fun even if the subjective purpose of that torturing was to have fun by someone who already knows he has fun doing it. Even if it is presented as a tautologically true subjective morality statement, you still agree it is wrong – that the individual ought not torture children for fun even if his subjective purpose was to have fun torturing children.
This demonstrates that (1) you hold the moral statement (“it is immoral to torture children for fun”) to be self-evidently true (you require no further argument/evidence to accept that the statement is true), and that (2) you act and think as if it the act refers to an objective commodity that supercedes the individual’s (or society’s) subjective purpose because you deny the validity of a tautologically true subjectivist statement even where an act explicitly and implicitly serves the purpose of the individual, and you don’t care what other significant subjective factors are involved – like how the person feels about it.
The moral statement is self-evidently true to you, and you react to it as if it refers to an objective (in the absolute sense) commodity that supercedes the individuals preferences and purposes.
Your answers directly contradict any subjectivist moral model.
.
Even if so, that is irrelevant to the argument here which is about a specific statement and those here who have agreed that it is true without needing further argument/evidence.
Please point to where I have said that there are truths that are objectively self-evident.
You are stubbornly insisting that I mean something that I have neither said nor implied. I don’t know what you mean by “really real”. A statement is either accepted as true at face value or it is not. If a person accepts it as true at face value, without requiring any additional evidence/argument, they have done something in that particular instance, with that particular statement, that has necessary logical ramifications whether or not the statement is actually, objectively true.
Your statements are not logically derivable from the subjective model. The fact that you and others here can unequivocally answer “no” the question “is it moral for joe to torture children for fun” even in contradiction to the implied valid, subjective moral tautology (mapping act to subjective purpose) and without asking any questions about joe’s purpose or culture demonstrates that you are not treating the question as if it was entirely subjective (mapping an act to the individual’s subjective purpose), such as “should i put ice in the blender to make my favorite drink, a frozen margarita?”
Even if you don’t like frozen margaritas, even if you hate frozen margaritas, should Joe put ice in the blender (torture children) to make his favorite drink, a frozen margarita (his personal enjoyment)? If that’s Joe’s favorite drink, and that’s how joe likes to make his favorite drink, then the only answer is that Joe ought to put ice in the blender (torture children) to make his favorite drink (personal enjoyment).
What you personally think about blenders, ice, and frozen margaritas or people that enjoy them is entirely irrelevant to the mapping of action to the subjective purpose if morality is in fact entirely subjective.
But you don’t answer that way; you don’t act that way; you don’t live that way. You live, act and answer as if nobody should use a blender to blend the ice and enjoy a frozen margarita. Nobody. In any culture, anywhere, at any time. If you could snap your fingers and stop everyone on the planet from blending ice and drinking frozen margaritas, you would. You wouldn’t hesitate; you wouldn’t care what their culture said.
Many of you would ridicule any “omnipotent” god that presumably had the power to snap his fingers and take blended, frozen margaritas off the menu and didn’t.
And you would believe that you not only had the right, but the obligation to do so had you the power, as if there is an absolute, universal, unequivocally valid purpose for everyone and everything that blending margaritas violated to the core. You find it laughable that people believe in a god that can, but will not, stop people from blending and drinking frozen margaritas. In fact, it may be so profound and deep a conviction that for some of you, that’s why you stopped believing in god.
Whether or not morality in fact refers to an objective purpose, you and others here (with the possible exception of Robin) act and answer as if it does. I suggest you cannot act otherwise. You cannot act as if morality only refers, and can only be determined, by mapping individual acts against that individual’s subjective purpose.
Just leave out the “really’ real”, then. Editing it out, the question becomes:
OK?
Alan,
There are different kinds of self-evident truths. I am using the most simple, innocuous version in this argument; if you or I find any of the above statements to be true without further argument/evidence, they are self-evidently true to us. It doesn’t matter if the statements are objectively true. It doesn’t matter which of the statements we agree to. It doesn’t matter if anyone else agrees with us. It doesn’t matter if they are “blindingly obvious”.
All that matters is that I can say “X is immoral” and you (or anyone I debate) agree that X is immoral, as stated, no further evidence or argument required. That’s not a commitment on your part per se that X is objectively true; it’s only a commitment on your part that you don’t need any further argument or evidence to consider it true.
In and of itself, that trivially true agreement, without a per se commitment that it is objectively true, still damns the subjectivist model and outs you and others as closet moral objectivists as I have argued in prior posts. You personally do not require any additional evidence/argument, nor do you care, personally, that the moral challenge (torturing children for fun), under subjectivism, is necessarily, tautologically valid (as argued in prior posts). I’d bet any amount that, if you could, you’d snap your fingers and end all torturing of children for fun, for everyone, in every culture. I’d also bet you’d find it morally reprehensible if any entity had that power but refused to do it.
If you were a logically consistent moral subjectivist, the mapping of Joe’s act to Joe’s subjective purpose is the only arbiter of whether or not any act of Joe’s is moral and would logically compel you to answer: “No, it’s not immoral.” It may be immoral for you to torture children for pleasure, but if Joe enjoys it, it is by definition moral for joe to do it. Your only available, rationally consistent answer is that if Joe enjoys it, and wants to enjoy it again, it is morally good (ought towards purpose) for Joe to torture children
Still unwilling to answer the question, William?
Keiths,
Do you still beat your wife? Yes or no?
If there is an omnipotent god, could it make a rock so heavy he cannot lift it? Yes or no?