…Church Was On the Wrong Side, As Usual
http://www.theguardian.com/global/live/2015/may/23/counting-underway-for-irelands-referendum-on-marriage-equality
Ireland becomes first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote
Irish voters have decisively voted in favour of marriage equality, making Ireland the first country to do so through the ballot box. Only one of the 43 constituencies voted against the proposal – Roscommon-South Leitrim – while the yes vote exceeded 70% in many parts of Dublin. The no campaigners have paid tribute to their opponents, and the archbishop of Dublin has said the result should be a wake-up call for the Catholic church in Ireland.
[title shortened by Lizzie]
Elizabeth,
It’s certainly an odd argument, if it turns on what one thinks. If one thinks one’s morality is God-given, that justifies it! If one thinks one’s moral opinions are genetically and/or culturally sourced, one can’t have any!
Easy enough to get round, of course. Turns out I am the source of Ultimate Objective Morality. You want a True Moral Opinion? Ask me. I’m far less shy of telling you than any gods. I’m never wrong, by definition.
EL said:
The question was:
Note the part in bold. In answer to the question, EL simply defies the norms of the culture in question (and the definitions of terms the norms produce, and how the norms frame the issue) and says “those norms are wrong! Mine are correct!” As if the definitional fiat in contradiction to the norms explains what gives her the authority to defy those norms. Definitions of terms are part of cultural norms, EL. Some alternate definition doesn’t give you the authority to defy a definitional norm because if norms define what is moral, then changing a definitional norm in defiance of the culture would be immoral by definition.
What gives EL the authority to change definitions, terms and how the morality issue is framed by the culture in question? It’s apparent that she’s asserting some form of definitional and framing absolutism – as if her way is the only proper way to define the terms “morality”, “harm”, “evil”, and “conscience”, and as if her way is the only proper way to frame morality.
But, that simply cannot be true, because if there is nothing, as KN says, that transcends norms and can be counted on to properly adjudicate them for “properness”, and if we have no means by which to access that transcendent commodity, then what can possibly give EL the authority to defy the cultural norms in question, including how it frames and defines morality, and insist on her own set of moral norms instead?
Allan said:
And Allan grasps at just-so evolutionary tales (“We may have ..”) made up to fit an answer to the problem. The problem with that is that evolution endorses all human behavior anyone considers “moral” because it can be said to equally generate them all if it generates any. Is rape moral because it’s a good evolutionary method for spreading one’s genes, and because in some groups it is acceptable? Of course not. And so, the just-so evolutionary explanation fails.
Allan said:
The validity of one’s thinking (logical coherence) indeed turns on what, and how, one thinks. That is entirely what my argument is about – the validity of materialist thinking wrt morality. What is odd is how you don’t seem to be able to understand that.
William J. Murray,
From the man who chooses to believe in Objective Morality because it solves his invented conundrum! Hahahahaha … [Wipes eyes and carries on …]
Nope. You completely misunderstand the genetic argument. No surprise there, of course. If we are genetically predisposed towards kindness as a consequence of Natural Selection, it simply does not follow that Natural Selection (or some twisted view of it) becomes our moral beacon, and therefore anything we do with the intention of increasing our genetic representation becomes ‘right’ – even unkind acts. I’m surprised I have to spell this out, though I should be used to it by now.
You created a false dichotomy – one’s ‘conscience’ is either mere opinion OR it’s God/NML talking (I wish he wouldn’t mumble so!). The genetic argument is something that bridges that dichotomy. You are surely not suggesting that “IT JUSTIFIES ANYTHING!!!” is a good argument against it, even if true, when your own philosophy reeks of the equivalent case – if one thinks that God/NML is guiding one’s actions, that pretty much justifies any action one thinks God/NML is guiding.
hotshoe_,
I’m not a fan of that trope either, but it quite often turns out to be the case…
In poor Randomnessdoesn’texist`s defense, I will note that he hasn`t spent quite as much time contemplating anal sex as it appears — he has, however, pasted (without attribution) the entirety of the WedMD article on anal sex into his post. He doesn`t know much about the epidemiology of STD’s.
Regarding your query about the 8% difference in reporting of heterosexual butt sex (44% of men but only 36% of women), I can think of a couple of possible explanations.
1) Reporting bias: although “Audio Computer-Assisted Self-Interviewing” yields “more complete reporting of sensitive behaviors” than other methods, there still may be a tendency for women to under-report, and/or men to over-report.
2) It’s real: the 36% of women who do may have a higher average number of (that kind of) partners than do the 44% of men.
I suspect both of these factors contribute to the discrepancy. To what extent, YMMV.
Whichever way you cut it, most of the anal sex happening is hetero, and STD’s are spread by promiscuity and failure to use barriers.
And there’s a reason why HIV epidemiology refers to “MSM”, and not “homosexual men”…
William J. Murray,
Hmmm. Strange that you fail to see how subjective your argument is.
Rumraket:
That would prove that sodomy is objectively wrong since the people that want to be penetrated already know that is bad and they even protest openly.
“sectretly i am a homo in a closet and i know that this is bad idea and i am speaking loudly for this”
hotshoe_
I said sodomy in general, gays at the age of 16-45 have sex at least 3 times a week, that’s 52.17 weeks X 3 days = 156.51 times IN A YEAR. According to the God of atheists, chance, something that happens more continuously it will create or spread a disease.
RandomnessdoesntExist,
Sex, in all but solitary forms, is unhygienic. One of the best protections against this unfortunate side-effect (next to celibacy) is the condom. Who opposes the condom? Why, only the bleedin’ Catholic Church!
Condom does not make it properly hygienic. It makes it sterile.
Erik,
1) Can it not be both?
2) Is the latter some kind of a problem?
Yes to both. The problem for the Catholic church is that, according to them, sex is for procreation, not recreation.
Erik,
Not sure about ‘yes’ as an answer to the first question (“can it not be both?” “Yes!”) As to the second, why is that a problem? I produce a couple of million sperm a day. Buggered if we can look after all the potential little blighters! Those sperm will get out, one way or another, and there is not a home for every one. My wife only drops one egg a month. Blame her!
You can interpret it as “Yes, English negation rules suck.” (Not my first language, btw. Not even second or third.)
There’s constant saliva formation too, but we don’t go spitting all over the place. The better manners we have, the more selective we are about our spitting. Same with sex.
End of the argument.
It is irrelevant what they are, since they are objectively real and discoverable, their ultimate source is besides the point. Believing god somehow designed our conscience, or whether it evolved doesn’t change anything about the contents of that conscience. It is an objectively real concrete fact that our conscience contains what it contains.
Welcome to “materalism”.
Erik,
We are talking of the difference between ‘spitting’ into a condom in a vagina and ‘spitting’ into the unprotected vagina. It is, I would suggest, good manners not to risk a lady’s pregnancy, assuming both parties are agreeable to the act itself.
Prove that there is even such a thing as sodomy.
Bad in what way? It isn’t “objectively wrong” just because it might carry with it a higher chance of transmitting STD’s.
You don’t know what “objectively wrong” means.
Motorcycling carries with it an objectively higher chance of death due to traffic accident, does that mean motorcycling is objectively wrong? Obviously not.
We’ve all met them, the prudes who are jealoux of people they secretly want to be like. Instead of coming out and being who they are, they are scared of it, and so instead out of frustration they try to fight it because their thoughts are filled with it all the time. It’s a kind of self-loathing. They hate what they are because what they are makes them feel bad about themselves because the surrounding culture they grew up in has brainwashed them to think their nature is a bad thing.
Usage does vary, and it seems to me its usually the opposite of your perception here (Note: This is not an agreement with William on any point)
People tend to act as if “morality” is the detail about what’s right and wrong, as in “That woman dresses like a slut, she has no morals”, while ethics seems more about the underlying principle.
Otherwise they do tend to get used interchangeably a lot, however, I feel pretty strongly that we’d be well-served by making a clear distinction between them.
It’s interesting that you perceive William as saying “objective morality” tends to apply more to the first, and I agree there — it’s the “ethics” side rather than the “morality” side, which tends towards the culturally defined details of what’s acceptable behaviour.
If “ethics” is what deals more with underlying principles, and if it’s rooted more in our fundamental humanity and our empathetic reactions to one another, then we’re more likely to find evidence of objectivity in ethics than we are in morality.
That might be the end of your argument but that’s just too bad because it failed to establish anything. You’re making a false equivocation between sex and manners.
They’re simply not the same.
Alan said:
I didn’t invent the conundrum – it’s existed for hundreds if not thousands of years with major philosophers offering countless arguments about it.
If you are going to use genetic predisposition as your “objective basis” for justifying a moral ought, you cannot later say that something else is used to arbit which genetic predisposition is a sound basis for morality, because then whatever you are using to arbit between genetic predispositions becomes the actual basis for justification. IOW, if “kindness” is how you choose between genetic predispositions, it is kindness, and not any “genetic predispositon”, that is the basis for your moral oughts. Thus, “genetic predisposition” is just more hand-waving on your part to give the imprimatur of “objectiveness” to your subjective preference.
Actually, the dichotomy is that it is either subjective or objective at its root, which is not a false dichotomy. That doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as “opinion” vs God/NML. God/NML, however, does provide a sufficient grounds for an objective morality that is logically consistent with our actual behavior.
As I just pointed out, the “genetic predisposition” argument is nothing but a proxy objectivism that hides an essentially subjective perspective – that kindness is the arbiter of correct moral behavior (and thus “valid” genetic predispositions that should be used to base one’s moral system on).
Once again, I don’t begin with the assumption that God/NML is guiding my actions. Nor do I claim that self-described materialist actually have a “anything goes” view of morality, or practice morality as if they can justify “anything”. In fact, my argument gains currency because that is not the case.
I expect that very few people even think about justifying their moral actions according to worldview premises, but rather simply assume that their moral behaviors and expectations can be logically justified according to their worldview.
The argument I present is not that any foundational basis of morality is not equally subject to bad moral views, or that a God/NML-based morality cannot, through human perception and interpretation, produce all of the same behaviors as subjective morality and justify it in some way. There is no guarantee that even my God/NML morality must produce a good moral system in everyone that makes that same primary assumption. Of course not. Humans are not perfect and can screw up anything.
The relevant point of my argument is not that God/NML necessarily produces a better, more accurate acutualized moral behavior or set of moral rules – only that it logically accounts for how people actually behave, argue, and implement their moral views and accounts for their implicit moral expectations, good or bad.
It’s perfectly possible that a moral subjectivist’s actual moral behavior is far more moral than a God/NML-ists actual moral behavior; the problem is that moral subjectivism cannot logically account for that behavior, while God/NML can. IOW, our actual moral behavior – good or bad, right or wrong – is simply not derivable from materialism. Why? Because we act, and must act, as if morality is objective in nature.
Which is why you and EL both scramble to find ways of making moral subjectivism somehow, some way, objective. Unfortunately, unless something transcends norms, is absolute and we have a means to access it, you cannot cudgel moral subjectivsm into an objective morality hole except through self-deception.
I’m probably influenced by the word as used in the term “ethics committee”! Which takes for granted the fact that we should act “morally” in research, and tries to figure out the “ethics” in any given circumstance.
As my mother, who was a medical ethicist, used to say: “ethics is about what to do when you don’t know what to do”.
William: what is objective about your method of figuring out what is the right thing to do?
You have absolutely no idea what my argument is even about, or else you’d realize the absurdity of this question.
Not everyone’s conscience senses the same things, William. One would think that an objective morality that depends on conscience would require an objective conscience.
Definitely results in overlap! My experience lies more in popular usage, which really does seem embedded in cultural mores, arbitrary as they are.
Lizzie’s not the only one. You seem very hard to pin down on specifics.
llanitedave said:
Objective morality doesn’t depend on our conscience; our ability to behave morally depends on two things, an ability to sense it (conscience) and a capacity to make valid logical inferences (reason) about what the conscience perceives. Acting in accordance with objective morality requires no more of an “objective” sensory capacity than acting in accordance with the physical landscape requires an “objective” sensory capacity. Some people are blind. Some people have no conscience. Some people are color blind. Some people have an impaired conscience.
Alan Fox said:
Not at all. I have been exceedingly specific. The problem is that some people want specifics for an argument I am not making.
Wrong. People have different consciences, as evidenced by the world at large. You’re assuming what you’d like to prove and then fudging how things work.
You have been completely uninformative about your source of “objective morality”.This is not, in any sense of the word “specific” (or indeed “exceedingly”), being “exceedingly specific”.
I have stated repeatedly that the source of objective morality under my view is a form of Natural Moral Law, which is an existential “goodness” that reflects the purpose of creation, which we can sense via conscience as a moral landscape much in the same way our other senses can percieve various aspects of the physical landscape.
How is that not specific?
The fact that you find the question absurd is germane to the problem with your argument.
If an “objective morality” doesn’t give you an objective means of telling right from wrong, it might as well not be objective.
It’s like having a brilliantly accurate watch, but which has no hands.
That parses as “whatever I choose”.
Richardthughes said:
You might have a point if I was attempting to prove that morality is objective, or if I was attempting to prove that conscience was the sensory capacity to perceive it. However, I’m not attempting to prove either of those things. Like EL and others here, except (so far) for KN, you apparently have no idea what my argument is even about.
Which is fine. And you can stop right there. We do not have to assume that it is…
…an existential “goodness” that reflects the purpose of creation
in order to discover, in ourselves, that we have the capacity to see the potential harm of our actions, and to seek to avoid conflicting such harm. Nor to explain why we have that capacity.
You’ve asserted without proof or evidence “objective morality under my view is a form of Natural Moral Law”
Your words 3 minutes before the above comment. DURP.
William J. Murray,
Which I am quite categorically NOT doing, so save your breath on the ‘thens and therefores’. The genetic argument refers to the source of the moral sense – that which you characterise as sensing some Divine Ought or other: conscience. It says nothing about what one OUGHT to do about the things one’s conscience tells one, it merely exposes the false dichotomy you presented, that conscience can ONLY be EITHER ‘mere preference’ OR supernatural in source.
Cue another lengthy post as you fail to grasp this simplest of points …
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
And as often as WJM says “you have no idea what I mean”, and as many different people as he says it to, I have to think that maybe what WJM has is a failure of a desire to communicate.
llanitedave,
It doesn’t matter. If history is our guide WJM will be embarrassed by and recant his current views.
EL said:
That might have weight if you knew what my argument is about. You most certainly do not, which your following comment clearly, unequivocally demonstrates:
The only thing the assumption of a transcendent, objective basis for morality and the assumption that conscience is a corresponding sensory capacity “gives you” is a sound basis and coherent rational framework that can logically explain your current behavior – i.e., acting as if what the conscience perceives has authority that transcends cultural norms and carries with it obligations that transcend personal preferences and even your own safety.
IOW, everything’s pretty much functionally the same, except after adopting God/NLM/conscience, your worldview logically supports your behavior and implicit expectations, whereas before it did not.
Is that what the Irish voters did, William?
Allan said:
I said it can only be subjective or objective in nature. Which is a valid dichotomy.
If your “objective source” of “conscience” is “genetic predisposition”, then all genetic “conscience” predispositions are by definition valid as moral guides – which means that if my “conscience” finds rape acceptable, then rape is morally good by definition for that person or group. If you agree to that, we have no quarrel. I agree that if one accepts whatever anyone’s conscience says as what is moral for that person, you have described a form of objective morality.
Unfortunately, no sane person actually lives as if that form of “objective morality” is true, and this is the point my argument addresses. Also, your argument equivocates the meaning of “objective”.Objective means having existence or being factual or true outside of any individual person’s mind/opinion/view. Just because materialism draws an equivalence between mind and matter in that mind is a pattern of matter and thus factually exists, the individual conscience would still be rightfully considered an individual perspective in the mind of that particular individual.
Thus, a genetically predisposed conscience would still render a subjective morality, even if it was shared by a large group. Just because a large group is predisposed to prefer the taste of vanilla over chocolate doesn’t mean vanilla is objectively better tasting than chocolate.
IMO, yes.
WIlliam’s “argument”, as I understand it, is analogous to saying that “unless there exists a Brilliantly Accurate Watch, then there is no such thing as time.”
He studiously, and I mean studiously, ignores the point that, given the absence of hands, he has no means whatsoever of accessing this BAW, nor of confirming its truly awesome accuracy.
Designer be praised.
Fine. You keep saying I don’t understand your argument, but that’s more or less what I thought you were saying.
Theism is, as you say, provides a viable explanation as to why we behave as though we have a conscience. Not only that, but it provides an incentive to do so (which I think is the other component of your argument).
But it isn’t the only explanation or incentive. You seem unaware that there are alternative explanations for why we “act as if what the conscience perceives has authority that transcends cultural norms and carries with it obligations that transcend personal preferences and even your own safety”. And that there are rational incentives (i.e. good reasons not to dismiss the prompting of conscience as an an irritating evolutionary spandrel) for doing so other than fear of “necessary consequences” as I believe you have referred to.
Richardthughes said:
ROFL!! Try again. I have argued that we must assume some form of objective morality in order to logically reconcile our behavior with our worldview, and I have argued that the best form of objective morality to fit that bill is a specific kind of natural law morality. I have never asserted that objective morality of any sort actually exists, and I have, in fact in this thread, specifically state I am not making such assertions.
Objective morality, natural law morality, and conscience as sensory capacity are all assumptions used to frame morality and explain it in a way that corresponds to how people actually behave; I never claimed the could be proven to exist.
This claim is a mere assertion. There is no difference between “having existence or being factual or true outside of any individual person’s mind/opinion/view” and “William Murray makes stuff up”.
There we go. William makes stuff up and calls it objective.
Precious! Morality fairy, Justice unicorn and Feelings weasel could also be assumptions, WJM. Making things up is FUN!
EL said:
I never said it was. I said the particular form of theistic natural law morality is the only explanation that is rationally consistent with and provides a sound basis for our behavior and implicit expectations, such as: considering conscience transcendent to (having authority over) cultural norms, without logically reducing the basis of morality to “because I feel like it”; or, reducing the logical justification for imposing our moral views on others to “because I/we can”.
I’m aware of many other alternative explanations, some of which you and others here have been advocating. Unfortunately, they are logically unsound – as I have explained.
Oh, I have no doubt that there are all sorts of rational incentives that are objectively quantifiable that can be derived from any number of moral premises. Unfortunately, none of that tells you which premise to go with in the first place, nor does it tell you if your worldview premises are rationally consistent with your behavior and implicit expectations.
Alan Fox said:
Uh, no. I make assumptions and call them assumptions.