Brent, at Uncommon Descent, asked:
Is rape morally wrong because society says so?
Or:
Does society say rape is wrong because morality says so?
I answered:
I’m going to annoy you, I’m afraid, Brent, in my answer, but in for a penny…
“Morality” doesn’t “say” anything. People do. Collectively, people form a society, so it is reasonable to say that “society” says something – if that something is the collective mores, or precepts of a society.
So I’d say that people in a society collectively construct a shared system of moral precepts and those precepts include, in most societies, the precept that rape is wrong.
This seems to be fairly universal, probably because most societies develop a system that places a taboo on one person exploiting another for personal benefit. This is not surprising given that we are a social species and do better when we cooperate with each other than when we act individualistically.
So my answer is “closer to that first thing”, because the second doesn’t really make sense.
However, I would phrase it as:
In most societies, rape is regarded as morally wrong, because it violates the principle that underpins the continuation of a society that has potential net benefits for all.
He replied:
Sorry to take the last bit first, but . . .
However, I would phrase it as:
In most societies, rape is regarded as morally wrong, because it violates the principle that underpins the continuation of a society that has potential net benefits for all.
I’m surprised you would say this, not that it is inconsistent with your own beliefs on the matter, but that it leaves you completely open to, and obviously guilty of, WJM’s charges that a Darwinist system (system consistent with “Darwinism”) cannot condemn rape.
And the first bit last . . .
“Morality” doesn’t “say” anything. People do. Collectively, people form a society, so it is reasonable to say that “society” says something – if that something is the collective mores, or precepts of a society.
So I’d say that people in a society collectively construct a shared system of moral precepts and those precepts include, in most societies, the precept that rape is wrong.
This seems to be fairly universal, probably because most societies develop a system that places a taboo on one person exploiting another for personal benefit. This is not surprising given that we are a social species and do better when we cooperate with each other than when we act individualistically.
So my answer is “closer to that first thing”, because the second doesn’t really make sense.
Which all means that my original challenge to your system of morality, in fact, is correct and undermines it completely; there is no actual morality whatsoever.
If people of a society are the source of morality, then people of a society govern morality, and morality doesn’t govern people of a society.
And I invited him to continue the conversation here.
What Brent seems to be saying is that a morality – a system of oughts and ought nots – somehow doesn’t count as “morality” if it is constructed by a socciety of human beings.
My response to Brent is to ask: what morality can he name that is not constructed by a society of human beings?
Pretty much true. So what?
For the record, I’ve not once said that I, or anyone, needs to believe in God to understand, know, and live by a true morality. But don’t let that stop the strawman party.
Edit: I had said earlier when asked on what basis I condemned rape, “On the basis that God doesn’t take advantage of people for His own pleasure, so much less do I have an excuse to.”
But that only means that that is how I have come to explain why I believe it is wrong, ultimately, but not to say that everyone has to have that understanding to feel that rape is wrong, and condemn it.
Thank you for making that clear, Brent. I appreciate it.
Actually you are quite wrong.
Although you never explain what your concept of morality is, you don’t need to.
It pervades every word you write, every interpretation of another’s words, each argument that you advance, every counter argument you ignore, the company you keep, every fact you’ve mangled in service to your agenda.
You wear your morality on your sleeve and it seems the only person not aware of it is you, William J.Murray. And now you’ve got your soapbox you can tell the world what your message is.
I look forwards to seeing how far it gets. To seeing exactly how good you actually are.
Scream at me that chocolate is better than vanilla while I’m eating my ice cream and see if I stop. In a materialistic world, scream at me that torturing my “friend” just for fun isn’t as good as not doing so and see if I stop. And more, do you have the moral high ground to make me stop? You don’t.
I don’t need the moral high ground*. I only need a 2×4 and the desire to use it.
*Well, the high ground is useful when wielding a 2×4.
That’s a good description of Intelligent Design!
No facts. No research. And it’s history!
This looks like a pretty good description of a sociopath that requires the terror of a scary deity in the sky to control his behavior. No empathy and no identification with other members of the human race or other creatures on this planet will ever be able to control it.
That may indeed be the only practical justification for a fundamentalist religion; but unfortunately the sociopathic behavior simply breaks out in other ways. Then secular laws are required to step in and restrain behavior.
Yes, I noticed that, too, and it’s been bothering me. Thank you for pointing this out.
And now, just wait, Brent is going to scream at you that your moraity is “might makes right”.
As if xis vaunted christian morality has ever had any other methods besides violence and torture to enforce their morality on humans.
Witch burning? Christian morality. Cross-Atlantic slave trade? Christian morality. Hitler’s death camps? Christian morality. Corrective rape of lesbians? Christian morality. Matthew Shephard? Christian morality.
Honestly, I’d prefer the 2×4 to Brent’s methods.
It has been adequately addressed. Personally I like my response, but I think Faded Glory provided the best articulation here:
Not just what was beneficial for society, but also what was beneficial to the most members of a society.
This is a strange approach to the issue from my perspective Brent. Activities and behaviors that were good for society were quite measurable: things that increased safety, things that increased feeling of well-being, things that increased productivity, things that increased altruism, etc. The underlying “things” then became codified as moral principles. Morality itself is meaningless without actual behaviors.
Ok. And…so…?
This is silly Brent. It’s a variation on an Argument from the Beard. Just because morality could have been different doesn’t invalidate our current morality. Indeed, at one point in a given place, people thought it was moral to own slaves and at another point in another place it was moral to kill Jews. Does that somehow invalidate our current societal moral basis against those behaviors? No, it doesn’t. The fact that our current moral thinking is arbitrary is not, in and of itself, a refutation of the basis of morality. You may think it’s weak, but who cares? It is still the basis and it still provides a basis to decide your question to Lizzie was over the top. Now, you are free to think differently, but in this society (that is TSZ), you’d still be morally condemned.
And that’s the whole point. Morals themselves have NEVER made anyone do anything; they are, by and large, a check that societies use to praise/exalt or shame/punish, or exalt those who either exceed expectations or who refuse to toe the line. After they have become ingrained as mores, taboos, and cultural underpinnings, people in general respect the morals themselves, but prior to that they have to be established through consequences, even if the consequence is just empathetic. Without that connection, morals mean nothing.
Sure, but if you lived in a society that held for 200 years that chocolate was evil, I guarantee you’d feel qualms about eating it in front of your neighbors…
Robin,
Beautifully put, Robin.
Repost with (I hope) the guanofied bits removed:
It’s almost certain that Brent is closely related to a rape victim. The odds of a person being raped in their lifetime are so huge that it almost certainly has happened to at least one person Brent is related to. And yet, Brent somehow coud not resist using their real pain as a cheap shot in this game he’s playing.
Winning is important! God wants Brent to win! God will forgive no matter who else Brent harms in the process, as long as xe’s fighting for God’s side.
And yeah, it’s almost certain that Brent identifies as male. I’ve never seen anyone identify as a woman and jack off to the kind of “questions” Brent has.
I hope you are not one of the many people Brent is harming with his game here. Safe internet hugs for you if you like.
Well, done, hotshoe, you are getting the hang of it 🙂
Sorta.
Brent, WJM;
Who or what is the “true” source of Islamic, Mormon, and/or Sikh moral code?
And remember that you made that bit about God up, as shown by the fact that you admitted that you couldn’t provide any evidence for it.
You probably missed how I addressed your statement because of the nesting upthread. I’ll repost it:
This is a false dichotomy. What is happening in reality is not either/or, but a process of mutual interaction and influencing. We enter the world with our own distinct personalities, but as we grow up we are shaped by our environment and life’s experiences to become the persons we are. Our morality is no only governed by our character but undoubtedly also by these external factors which include the prevailing moral concepts around us. So in this way, morality governs people.
On the other hand, once we are grown up and make a mark on the world around us, we do influence its concepts of morality. For most of us in tiny, imperceptable ways, for a few in dramatic ways, but either way, our moral concepts influence society around us and we are part in bringing about the changes in morality that we observe over the centuries. So in this way, people govern morality.
This is not black and white, either-or. This is a continuous process of mutual influencing at various scales. I am surprised you seem to be unable to recognise that this is how these things work.
So yes, we can have it both ways.
————————-
What is inadequate about the above?
fG
I find that conversations like this one tend to go back-and-forth in predictable and ultimately sterile ways, each side accusing the other of begging the question and so forth. There are probably many reasons why this is so, some unique to the limitations of the trying to do philosophy on the Internet.
One problem, though, worthy of specific comment is that there is an equivocation at work in Big Words like “grounding”.* Sometimes it means “cause” or “explanation,” and sometimes it means “justification.” One salient feature of liberal naturalism is that it puts a bright line between “the space of reasons” and “the space of empirical descriptions” (Sellars’ terms), or alternatively, between “the space of reasons” and “the realm of law” (John McDowell) or “the domain of justifications” and “the domain of causes” (Richard Rorty). The basic idea is that there’s a difference in kind between what we’re doing when we offer (and criticize) reasons for judgments and what we’re doing when we offer (and criticize) explanations for phenomena.
I say this because “we naturalists” (taking ‘naturalism’ as a Big Tent that includes both scientific naturalists and liberal naturalists) push explanations and justifications further apart than do our theistic interlocutors. For us, I think, the question, “what justifies this particular judgment or action?” is a very different question than, “what motivates someone to act morally (or not)?” and also very different from, “how should conflicts between competing moral frameworks be resolved?” and also from “how might we explain where morality came from, as a natural phenomenon?”
And I think that we appear to be inconsistent we treat these as very different kinds of question, whereas theists — whether divine command theorists, natural law theorists, or otherwise — are operating within an intellectual space that sees the answers to these questions as grouped together much more tightly than they are for naturalists.
* Ever wonder why we use the same word for ‘what we walk on’ and ‘providing an intellectual scaffolding’? In the mid 18th-century, German philosophers wanted to start writing philosophy in German instead of Latin. They chose ‘Grund’ — ‘ground’ — as the German term for the Latin ‘ratio’, ‘reason’, which in turn was the Latin term for Greek ‘logos’. So there’s ambiguity in our use of “ground” because “ratio” and “logos” are similarly ambiguous.
Sorry about the nesting problems, but I think this will work better in the long run. Right now, for this thread, the links in the Recent Posts sidebar don’t seem to link to the post, but I’m hoping that will come right in new threads.
But the system was already broken by my sending some nested posts to Guano, which seemed to upset the post ordering, so I’m hoping people can manually negotiate there way to recent posts for this thread. Clicking on the post itself seems to do it.
I suspect that there’s cached data in a database somewhere, that might need rebuilding.
Substitute pork for chocolate and see how far your argument goes.
Exactly Petrushka! Brent can believe what he wants about people governing morality and whether that ultimately leads to a moral basis that governs people, but all I know is that I have very liberal Jewish friends who really do not observe kosher practices and do not much care about temple, but they will still provide a slightly guilty joke or two to me whenever they eat bacon or lasagna. The fact is, some cultural morals are ingrained really deep no matter where they originally came from.
As best I can tell, that is, indeed, the state of affairs which obtains in the RealWorld. And..?
[shrug] Whatever, Brent. If it’s a problem, it’s a problem—but regardless of whether or not it actually is a problem, it does seem to be true, as best I can tell.
Again: This does, indeed, seem to be the actual state of affairs which obtains in the RealWorld. What’s your point (if any)?
Once upon a time, slavery was a Good and Right thing which God Himself approved of. Now… not so much. So which position is Absolutely And Objectively Correct, Brent? Is it the position that Slavery Is Bad, or is it the position that Slavery Is Good?
Slavery. Good or Bad, Brent?
Thanks! I was going to pull my hair out . . . if I had any.
And yet, I’m the only one, besides Mung and WJM, that is actually condemning it. Funny, that.
It seems that Brent has disqualified anyone else’s condemnation as not-a-real-condemnation.
I’d like to know more about how these alleged “necessary and inescapable consequences” of (im)moral behaviour work. Of course any sort of behaviour has consequences, but the universally-recognized consequences of an act are not connected to the morality/immorality of the act. So the “consequences” of WJM’s account seem to be something different, something quite mysterious.
Moreover, he seems to think that such “necessary and inescapable consequences”, associated with the morality of an act, are themselves a necessary feature of any objective morality. That’s a new one to me. Surely it would be possible (without internal contradiction) to agree that there is an objective morality without believing that the universe imposes such karmic consequences.
I’d really like some clarification here.
rhampton,
I’ll answer my own question from a typical Christian’s point of view: Man is the true moral source for the aforementioned religions. However, since men wrongly believe that God is the source, these theists are indeed governed by morality.
More broadly stated; IF a people believe their moral system can not be changed, then they are governed by morality, else they govern it. Most commonly the source for this kind of moral reverence comes from religion, but any reason that would bind a people so would be valid.
Thus theism/religion is a logical means to attain a binding relationship to morality argued by WJM and Brent, but only a means, not the means. Additionally, theism/religion (or any other means) is not guaranteed – logically or historically – to invoke a sustained moral reverence by a people, especially across generations.
Obviously the non-absolutists intend to condemn it as well. What we’re arguing about is whether the non-absolutists are rationally consistent in doing so. But whether the non-absolutists are fully successful in condemning it without inconsistency is irrelevant to the point I want to make.
The point I want to make is that it’s a gendered example, because many women have a fear of rape that most men know nothing of. So it’s an example that generates different affective responses in male and female participants in the conversation, but that difference adds no intellectual substance to the discussion. It’s gratuitous, and it runs a real risk of alienating female participants.
If you want to continue the discussion with a non-gendered example, torture would work, I suppose.
Bad move, Brent. Do you think we can’t read up in the thread (nested problems or not) and see what people really said?
You were the one who could not restrain yourself from using a question about rape as the rhetorical football of your arguing – and you could not resist gaming it even though the thought crossed your mind that you were doing actual harm to actual rape survivors here.
Then when I gave you hell for your immoral gamesmanship, you complained that my reaction was “too over the top”. And now you try to pretend that you ever condemned playing games with rape? Much less that you’re the only one who did? No. Don’t pretend. I condemn in the strongest possible terms your willingness to risk doing harm to living people here by playing rhetorical games with rape And I’m not the only one.
You know, your god supposedly had something to say about the whopper you just told. What did it say? Oh yeah, it said:
Ring any bells for you, Brent?
Actually this isn’t the case . . . sort of. I believe and understand everyone’s condemnation of rape as very, very real, and with teeth actually. It is you guys who have a worldview that undermines any coherent way to ground your condemnation. Your morals and condemnation isn’t wrong, your materialistic and naturalistic view of the world is.
Okay!?
Cue the rabid oh-so-we-have-to-believe-in-your-God-to-be-moral crowd . . .
So what is the proper response when a holier-than-thou blowhard does make the “we-have-to-believe-in-his-God-to-be-moral” claim?
Well, we agree that everything that has been said, but not moved to, what, Guano?, is here fore all to see. Everything else, not so much.
Until you can show me that you are not an obvious troll, willing to twist my words into something other than what they clearly meant and how they were used, just realize I’m skipping your posts. I disagree still with petrushka and kantian about the use of rape as an example of a morally reprehensible act as a means to getting at a better understanding of our thinking, and rationality for that thinking, of what morality is, but nonetheless appreciate greatly their more moderated approach to condemning my question in keeping with how I asked it and what I was clearly getting at. You have a much better example in them, so please consider it.
I don’t know. Go find such a blow-hard and experiment.
Experiment #1.
Why is your particular God better than all the others?
Thank you for your thoughts. As I mentioned above to hotshoe, I appreciate your more level-headed response. I especially agree with your first part above concerning the absolutist/non-absolutist position, in keeping with what I just posted above. It is real condemnation on both sides, for sure. It is the underlying rationality for our condemnation that is in question.
But about the second part, it seems that rape is used in these sorts of discussions rather often, and I was just following what had been said already at UD. How that got started there is, I think, going to be indiscernible, as it probably was carried over from yet earlier discussions. At any rate, yes, I suppose that torture would have done just as well. I guess that rape is used in these discussions for the very reason that it is such a real problem, one which cannot be brushed off as, “well, that really isn’t a big problem and you’re just being unrealistic about how the world is”, or some such thing.
He isn’t better than all the others. There are no others. I thought you would have known that.
Experiment #2.
You know that for a fact exactly…how? What about Zeus, Viracocha, Odin, and Quetzalcoatl?
I’m sorry for not replying to you directly. I’ll try to later.
Brent:
petrushka:
petrushka declines this opportunity to condemn it, while claiming that I and WJM are delusional because we do.
go figure.
I still fail to understand what it takes to be a “skeptic” here at “The Skeptical Zone.”
Not much, I suspect.
Nope, you’re wrong as usual. We don’t have a problem, all you christians do. Tell us again how you’re going to “coherently” condemn your god when it tells you – just like it told the Israelites – to murder all the men and mothers in town, then take the virgin girls to rape as “wives”.
How are you planning to say “No” to that? Or are you planning to say “Yes, lord, anything you want, lord”?
No christian has the faintest clue how to behave coherently morally if their god actually exists. If you do, you’ll be the first in 2000 years!
No problem Brent, take your time.
I have another question that I would be interested in hearing your answer to.
Some hundreds of years ago, slavery was considered morally acceptable by large numbers of people in many societies. Under your absolute moral concepts, were these people right or wrong to accept slavery?
Thanks,
fG
This really doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
You can easily Google “number of denominations or sects” in any of the religions you can name.
You can Google “number of deities in the world” and find something like 2,500 of them.
On planet Earth there are literally thousands of religions. Not only do the major religions have many denominations and sects, many of these sects don’t particularly like each other.
There are something like 40,000 denominations within just Christianity alone; not to mention all the sects within Islam and Judaism.
Then there are the deities of the Native Americans and the deities of the hundreds of other religions of various tribes throughout the world.
There are the Norse gods, the Greek gods, the Roman gods, and all the deities of ancient civilizations.
The problem with many of the fundamentalist religions its that the members of these sects believe they have exclusive access to and favoritism from a deity of some sort; and such exclusivity therefore allows them to look down on everyone else as being “less moral.”
This appears to be the problem you are having.
They were right, of course, the bible says so.
Christians started the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Christians owned the ships which transported the slaves from Africa; christians owned the slave markets in the Caribbean and US; christians owned the sugar mills and rum distilleries which they founded on cane raised by slave labor; christians owned the cotton mills and shirt factories which they founded on cotton raised by slave labor. God obviously smiled on their enterprise. God made the christian Yankees and Europeans fabulously rich with profits based ultimately on enslaved Africans. There is no record of any christian anywhere turning down a cup of rum because it was made with slave labor, much less of any christian turning down a chance to sell a shipload of rum in Bristol because it was an “immoral” result of slave labor.
Christians who did not personally own slaves defended the god-given right of their fellow christians to own Africans. They did not think it was evil to own African descendants – they thought it was a positive good as this typical quote shows:
And who can say they were wrong to think so? The christian bible says they were right. The christian bible specifically endorses slavery and counsels slaves to obey their masters.
Why do today’s christians think they know better than the word of their god and their own bible instructions as to the proper ways to keep slaves?
Who do they think they are, to set themselves up as better than their own god?
I don’t understand what you are saying here, Brent. You agree that everyone here condemns rape.
So what is the problem with the “materialistic and naturalistic view of the world” some of us hold? It does not prevent us from condemning actions as wrong. It does not prevent us from voting for laws that make it illegal. It does not prevent us from expressing our condemnation of those who rape, or of teaching our sons that it is harmful. It does not prevent us from setting up Rape Crisis centres to help people who have been raped. It does not prevent us from demanding that institutions who have failed to prevent regular rape from occurring, including, of course, religious institutions, face up to the problem and try to bring the perpetrators to justice.
So where is the problem?
I see less of a problem for us materialists to “ground” our condemnation of rape in the straightforward context of socially constructed rules that help society function than I do grounding it in a religion, for instance, whose sacred text includes stories of divine command to rape.
There are lots of different issues going on here, and I worry that they’re going to be mixed up with each other.
(1) should we be moral absolutists at all?
(2) what exactly does moral absolutism consist of and entail? [I think that this hasn’t been addressed at all]
(3) is moral absolutism consistent with naturalism? (Some people assume that it isn’t, but I haven’t seen any argument for this.)
(4) should the non-absolutist hold that moral rules are social constructions? (Social construction-talk is fraught with pitfalls)
I also think it would be helpful to focus on just where the objections to absolutism have their bite. Now, I can’t speak for anyone else here (obviously), but one often sees a line of objection to moral absolutes which says, in effect, that the conviction that oneself is already in firm possession of the absolutely correct moral doctrines has legitimized oppression, violence, imperialism, colonialism, misogyny, discrimination and violence against LBGT folks, ethnic cleansing, and so. (I want to focus on moral absolutism itself, and put aside whether the absolutes in question are cashed out in theistic terms or non-theistic terms. I take it that no one would seriously question that Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, etc were non-Christian moral absolutists.)
So one way of seeing the issue here would be by posing, can moral absolutism be disentangled from this relationship with violence? And here I think that the answer is clearly “yes”, both in theory and in practice. So I think it’s unfair to accuse the moral absolutist of being an apologist for oppression and violence just as such, even though many of them are.
I also think that there are subtle gradations of moral absolutism that haven’t been explored sufficiently (at least, not here). For example, there would seem to be an important difference between
and
Now, I’ve deliberately made the first version — “strong absolutism” — as strong as possible, and the second version — “weak absolutism” — as weak as possible. And clearly there’s a wide range of various degrees between them.
As for social constructionism, I’ll say that only that social constructionism is not an attractive view for anyone who thinks of normativity (moral and otherwise) as a biological phenomenon.
This brings up something I have been seeing. People use the word “moral” and “morality” to mean different things:
1: I make private personal judgments as to what is right, and I usually try to follow the dictates of those personal judgments. I guess we could call that “personal morality”.
2: I discuss moral questions, perhaps online or perhaps with friends. It is usually in the form of giving opinions, or answering a “do you think that is right” kind of question. We could call that “social morality”.
3: I occasionally engage in public debate over questions such as whether abortion should be legal or whether gay marriage should be allowed. I suppose we can call that “legality.”
My point is that these are all different. My standards for personal morality (which I apply only to myself) are stricter than my standards for social morality. And my view of legality is that its restrictions should be as limited as social cohesion can allow.
Using that terminology, I don’t see how personal morality can be anything but subjective. Social morality is perhaps closer to being culturally relative. And, in a sense, legality is an attempt to establish an absolute.
Another related point. Someone raised the question of rape in a society that was permissive with respect to rape. And I think that kind of question also leads to confusion. I such a society, relations between the sexes would be very different from what they are here. So even if that society used the word “rape”, it would probably be a very different concept. So cross-cultural comparisons perhaps don’t tell us all that much, because the examples used refer to things that are conceptually different in the cultures being compared.
Thanks for your patience.
I think I’ve really understood this idea from the beginning. Within the system you propose there is a sort of coherence, but I think it breaks down on several fronts.
First, it does nothing to make morality non-arbitrary. I don’t recall if it was you also, but many here just shrugged when I said that the naturalist’s view of morality was arbitrary, and said, “yeah, so . . .”. Well, it is hard to see how you can get an ought from anything that is arbitrary. And the reason it is hard to see is, simply, because it is impossible. I thought it was the materialists that were fond of saying that you can’t get an ought from an is. It sure seems like they really would like to sometimes though. Lizzie said quite clearly that morality is about “ought”, so unless everyone here feels differently, an arbitrary view of morality is definitely a problem. You either lose the “ought” or lose the naturalist view of morality, that it isn’t absolute and objective (right/wrong independently of what anyone thinks).
Another problem is just where you later asked me to comment about changes in morality over the centuries.
It has been asked in various ways by several people throughout this thread. First, because you asked me a direct yes/no question, and I HATE giving political answers: yes, they were wrong. But that doesn’t mean nearly as much as you may think. According to the absolutist position, it wasn’t morality that changed at all, but our understanding of how morality applied to a certain situation. There were people on both sides of the issue, those who said slavery wasn’t immoral and those who said it was, but it wasn’t because their idea of morality was even different, which should give you a shock. It was because some people really believed that other people were inferior. It wasn’t their understanding of morality that needed changing, but their understanding of facts.
It is just like today with the abortion debate. Nobody (practically . . . there are some wackaloons out there of course) says it is alright to kill a baby. So it isn’t over morality that the argument wages, but about facts; i.e., when is a baby a living person?
So, first, your example of “changing” morality isn’t showing morality changing, but a change in people’s understanding of morality.
But there are at least two more problems with this. You and I both agree (I hope) that there was a real advancement in the shift in understanding in how morality applied to the issue of slavery. This is no problem for my concept of morality. But for yours, you cannot say it is an advancement, or that it’s better, without appealing to something outside, an actual standard, by which to judge between the two — the old view that slavery wasn’t immoral, and the new view that it was. So, you need an objective standard by which to make your judgment, but none is supposedly available in your system of ethics. Of course it really does exist, but you are denying it with your mouth while affirming it in your belief that the proposition that slavery is moral, is better than the proposition that slavery is immoral.
And the other problem is the Reformers Dilemma, which I laid out above (somewhere). If society has deemed something immoral, X, then that has to be the end of the story. For any moral reformer to come on the scene with a different standard from X, he is by definition an immoral person, and cannot be listened to to affect change of the moral code. But, in actual experience, we do have moral reformers and changes in what is seen as moral, and we know and affirm that the changes have been for the better (often). On the non-absolutist view, this is impossible. Yet, this is a cornerstone of your explanation of how morality came into existence, that people matured and realized that some practice wasn’t decent and influenced others to change their views.
There is yet another problem with your view, and one that has been prominently featured here already: how to condemn those of a society whose morals differ from yours. By your account, the person of a society that said he must kill is under an obligation to kill. How can you say he is wrong and he is doing his moral duty at the same time? He actually meets your criteria of a moral person. It is mighty strange to be in the position of having to condemn the actions of a man that you also say is obliged morally to do the actions you are condemning.
These are several of the reasons why I don’t think your position is coherent or rational.
The absolutists keep implying (without admitting it) that a list of moral and immoral actions can be made, or that every action can absolutely be classified as moral, immoral, or neutral.
This is particularly true of Murray, who says that failure to assume an objective standard of morality will cause culture and society to degrade. I assume that other absolutists have similar concerns: moral relativism means societal degeneration.
I think it is fair to point out that the century of rising secularism has also been the century in which slavery and Jim Crow have been abolished or diminished, the century in which most of the world’s women ceased being chattel, and the century in which most of the world’s governments became (on paper) constitutional democracies.
It is quite easy to point out atrocities, but if one wants to focus on Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, it is fair to point out that all of them are dead, along with the worst practices of their regimes. The mass murderers of the 21st century appear to be motivated mostly by religion. If there’s a lesson in this it is that bad people in power do bad things and justify their actions with some prevailing moral philosophy.
I find it interesting that most people go about their daily lives not killing, raping or stealing, while most atrocities are committed by people having “objective” moral philosophies. In fact, I would place money on a bet that the nicest people in the world are less likely to have a clear and consistent moral philosophy than are the meanest. I would bet that the insistence on objectivity in morality is a prop for a deficiency in compassion and empathy.
Perhaps we need some objective rules to constrain people who are not self-constrained. Not surprisingly, we have such “objective” rules. They’re called the law.
You too, Lizzie?
You don’t have a problem with believing things that aren’t true? I guess not, though, since you would say the Bible commands rape.
I told you before, Lizzie, and I’m having trouble believing you really don’t get it, that the moral beliefs don’t have to be derived from a belief in God. Did you really think I “started” this thread so that I could get you guys to live morally? No, I was and always have been about challenging your understanding of morality and the way the world really is and must necessarily be.
So with that hopefully clearing some cobwebs, I’ll offer an analogy here that I’ve offered other places in hopes of clarifying things:
Three Men Walking
Now, when I and others say you (a naturalist/materialist) have no grounding for a binding morality, you think we are claiming that you are the second guy. “But”, you say, “Look! I can jump just as well as you!”, and you can.
But I am not claiming you are the second guy at all. I’m claiming that you’re the third guy. You are grounded, and can jump as well as anyone. It’s not your grounding that’s the problem in the physical or practical sense, it’s your thinking about the ground that is wrong. Your thinking is irrational and incoherent on this point. You are denying the ground from which you can, still, jump.
You can jump from now until the cows come home, but until your thinking about the ground changes, you’ll never have correct understanding of an obvious fact.
You can, and do, have correct and binding morals, just as the third man can jump, but your thinking, also just like the third man, is simply incorrect.