There are a number of professed atheists in this forum. I was curious as to what sort of moral imperative atheists are beholden to when presumably no one is looking. Speaking as a theist, I am constantly cognizant that there is a God who considers what I do and is aware of what I do, even though that awareness on my part may not always result in the moral behavior which I aspire to. But let’s take a fairly mundane example — say theft. We’re talking about blatant theft in a context where one could plausibly or even likely get away with it. I affirm to you that as a Christian, or more relevantly possibly, as a theist, I would never do that. Possibly it has just as much to do with my consideration for the feelings and rights of some other individual, who has “legal” possession of said items, as it has to do with my awareness of an omniscient creator who is aware of what I’m doing and who would presumably not bless me if I violated his laws. I mean, I care about the rights of other people. And, considering other moral tableaus, those of a sexual nature for example — I would personally never consider going to a prostitute for example, in that I feel empathy for that person, and how they are degrading themselves in the sight of God, and how I would not want to contribute to their degradation, so that my own human lust would never result in me victimizing another human being in that way. So in summary, there are all sorts of constraints on my personal behavior that stem directly from my belief in God, and I am honestly curious about the inner life of professed atheists in such matters. In other words, do atheists for example, in such junctures of moral decision, only consider whether they can get away with it, i.e escape the detection of human authorities? I am just honestly curious about the inner life of atheists in such matters.
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Now there’s a plot twist one might not have predicted.
Appropriately enough, Game of Thrones premieres today.
Bruce,
I’m an equal opportunity arguer. 🙂
Yes, that’s why those Muslims are mistaken about the very concept of moral norms.
If, on the other hand, they thought that submitting to the will of Allah was necessary and sufficient to promote human flourishing, they would have a correct grasp of moral norms, but a faulty understanding how to specify and assess them.
KN,
I think that a rule about how we ought to behave qualifies as a moral norm. Muslim morality may be repugnant to us, but it’s still a morality.
OK, now back to disagreeing with William.
keiths:
William:
“That depends” does not answer the question. I asked for your criteria.
You evidently had second thoughts after that outburst, because you proceeded to answer the question:
Thank you for answering the question.
The problem is that your criterion doesn’t work. The fact that you feel that gratuitous child torture (GCT) is self-evidently, objectively wrong does not make it so. “Self-evident” is just shorthand for “I feel strongly that X is true, and I can’t imagine how it might be false.” It’s subjective.
And, as you’ve already pointed out, our near-universal agreement on the wrongness of GCT does not make it objectively so.
For an action X, you have no reliable way of determining whether it is objectively moral or immoral. You can consult your conscience, but you’ve already conceded that your conscience is fallible. If you don’t know when it’s right and when it’s wrong, you can’t determine whether a specific moral judgment is objectively correct.
No matter what X is, your “system” can’t tell you whether it is objectively moral!
You claim to care whether your actions are objectively moral, yet you are settling for a system that can’t tell you anything at all about objective morality.
This is why I argued early on that secular is gradually replacing morality.
And without having any absolute reason for doing so, I applaud the change.
I do not like everything about governments and law — in fact I hate large chunks of it — but it has the advbantage of being grounded in consensus, and it can change and adapt.
petrushka, you write, “This is why I argued early on that secular is gradually replacing morality.”
Should we take this to imply that you believe, not that consensus is the basis for morality (as the contractarians might), but that it (“the secular”) is more of a wholesale replacement, which leaves everybody with no strictly ethical constraints?
Yes – Dr. Liddle attempted this same argument by definition. IOW, you define your particular norm (human flourishing, or in Dr. Liddle’s case, “social productivity and happiness) as “what morality means”. I guess if you redefine morality to mean what your particular norm thinks morality means, you get to hide from yourself the fact that you’re treating your norm as the definitional, arbiting meta-norm.
Morality, by general definition, is a description of how people should behave. There are many categorical views on how humans should behave, ranging form survival of the fittest to kill ourselves off to save nature to whatever it says in a book that god wants us to do to whatever produces the most happiness and the least unhappiness to human flourishing.
To select yours and imperiously claim it is the definitional basis of morality itself my provide you with internal plausible deniability (wrt a meta-norm), but it’s obvious you’re using it as a meta-norm. A rose by any other name.
I didn’t say it was a feeling of mine. That is where you keep making your error. You keep inserting “feeling” where I never mention it.
I think most people are constrained by an inborn aversion to hurting other people. This is trained and reinforced by mothering. Some stray bits and pieces are constrained by social pressure. Shunning –both formal and informal.
The rest is dealt with by law.
My bottom line is the prosperity of the species. It’s the only thing that offers any assurance that my own genes will survive. And I;ve invested my life in that.
This does not lead to absolute rules of behavior. It cannot, because survival is contingent on countles unpredictable things. The specific rules of behavior, whether enforced by law or conscience, will evolve over time. Hot button issues like abortion and capital punishment will change over time.I simply don’t worry about politics. I hate politics, but it’s what we’ve got. As an individual I can neiter influence it nor completely ignore it. So I live with it.
keiths:
William:
What is it, then? It certainly isn’t knowledge.
Here’s the rest of my comment:
It’s worth mentioning that gratuitous child torture is not universally seen as immoral.
Many Christians (and other theists, too, I’m afraid) think that GCT is just fine when God does it (or orders it).
Examples:
Here’s what my former church, the appalling Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, says about it:
So God will torture children forever for something completely outside their control: the fact that their unbelieving parents neglected to baptize them.
You’re in big trouble when your theism causes you to believe that gratuitous child torture is moral.
Ok, fair enough. I’d still stick to my guns and say that it is an unreasonable one, because it does not promote human flourishing, given what we know about what does.
I wold disagree. Moral and ethical systems are functional in the environment that produced them. But physical and social environments are changing so rapidly that some systems have become counterproductive. This is one reason why the quest for absolutes is unhealthy.
Since I agree with those claims — as I’m sure you would expect by now, given how I think about such matters — I’m puzzled as to why you think that raising them here amounts to a disagreement with my claim.
KN,
It’s unreasonable if you think that human flourishing is a moral imperative. If you don’t, then it’s perfectly reasonable.
The claim that human flourishing is morally important is a subjective moral norm, one that I happen to share, but it isn’t universal. You subjectively select that goal, then you ask about the objectively best ways of achieving it.
William J. Murray,
Any open-minded observers care to chip in at this point?
Is it moral or immoral for a scab to cross a picket line?
Since I am an atheist who does not accept moral relativism, I am not sure if I qualify as open minded.
Here is my answer for the whole thread, not just the WJM/KS exchange.
Some exchanges are, some are not.
Which ones are worthwhile? The ones that meet my norms for principled discussion.
I realize other people or cultures might have other such norms, but they are wrong.
Recognizing a self-evident truth is, in my system of thought, a valid means of acquiring knowledge. In fact, recognizing self-evidently true statements is one of the fundamental requirements of my knowledge-building process.
William,
This is one of your “get out of jail free” cards: the claim that I can’t even frame an argument in your terms if I don’t share your “worldview”.
That’s obviously false. For example:
1. You say that use your conscience to “sense” objective morality.
2. You say that your conscience is fallible.
3. You say that
In other words, if you can say that something is self-evidently, universally immoral, then you regard it as objectively immoral.
However, you believe that your conscience is fallible, by #2. If so, then how do you know you are correct when you assert that something is “self-evidently”, and therefore objectively, immoral? Are you using something other than your conscience to make that determination? If so, then what are you using? If not, then how do you make the leap from “seems self-evident to me” to “it’s objectively immoral”?
Notice that I framed that entire argument in terms of your assumptions, not mine. Your position is inconsistent on its own terms.
My criticisms apply. Instead of pretending that they don’t, see if you can actually answer them.
You claim to want a moral system that gives you “an intellectually satisfying sense of being a good person.” Are you “intellectually satisfied” with a logically inconsistent system?
William,
Yet you acknowledge that your conscience is fallible. How do you recognize a “self-evident” moral truth, if not via your conscience? How do you know that you are correct when you think you’ve recognized a “self-evident” moral truth?
keiths said:
You can characterize it however you wish. When you frame erroneous arguments, I will tell you that you have framed erroneous arguments. I’m not going to stop telling you when you have done so just because you have characterized my doing that in a way that makes it appear I am doing something else.
Of course it is. Every aspect of my cognition and sentience is fallible.
It is through my conscience.
No method of sensing data or organizing it into systems of thought – including science and logic – is mistake-proof or immune to the various fallibility of human perception and reason. I know I am correct the same way I know I am correct about anything else I know I am correct about; imperfectly, to the best of my ability.
Please stop attempting to put what I say “in other words”. It’s only disrupting the conversation. That’s not what I said nor is it even close to what I meant.
BruceS,
Well, I’m damned sure no-one would accuse me of an open mind!
The fundamental point coming across to me is that, if one has to import an entity that doesn’t have to exist in order to circumvent an assumed ‘logical’ difficulty, there is a fair chance that the problem actually resides in the reasoning!
WJM has described nothing in his’ model’ that would be at odds with a genetic/environmental cause for the moral sense. It seems based entirely upon subjective assessment, apart from the bit that appeals to consensus! He reports the same feelings as others, but denies that they are feelings.
Subjectivity does not force relativism – anything does not go. One does not have to accept another’s moral system ‘as good as’ one’s own, simply because they have similar causes. It’s better for them, but that doesn’t influence my choices. People happen to converge on similar ground for the ‘big stuff’, because we are the same species. But the bin marked ‘morality’ contains many chambers. Not all would agree on whether X is even a moral question, let alone whether one ought or ought not do it. Speeding, queue-jumping, litter, fibs, gossip, smoking, drinking, gambling, masturbation, homosexuality … where one stands on these matters is a complex resultant of constitution, upbringing, peer pressure.
The reality of morality is nuanced. What I rarely see from the theistic argumenters on this topic is any appreciation of this. It’s either subjective (and so one is told one can never say ‘wrong’, nor come to agreement other than through ‘might’) or not (in which case there is Right and there is Wrong).
It can with many Xs. Self-evidently true moral statements to start with, and moral statements that are necessarily true when properly inferred from self-evidently true moral statements. As much as I can know anything, I can know those statements are objectively true.
Bruce S said:
What feelings have I reported?
William,
If you acknowledge that you might be mistaken in recognizing so-called “self-evident” moral truths, then you don’t know that they are objective moral truths.
How could you confirm that they really are objective? Unlike science, which has multiple ways of confirming a hypothesis, you are stuck with only one — your fallible conscience.
keiths:
William:
If your conscience is fallible, and you have no other way of checking the objective truth of your moral intuitions, then you don’t know that the “self-evident moral truths” are objectively true. If they aren’t true, then any “truths” inferred from them are also unreliable.
No, there are many things you can know far better than that. For example, that the lines in the the Müller-Lyer illusion are the same length:
Knowledge is not the same as certainty, keiths.
Every aspect of my capacity to receive information via the senses and interpret it is fallible. As far as I know, science has not been demonstrated infallible, nor has it been demonstrated that when people receive scientific information and interpret it that such interpretations are infallible.
The course of history is one of paradigms of knowledge rising and falling. In any event, in my worldview, reality is not confined to or defined by that which is subject to “multiple means of testing”.
keiths,
Interestingly, there’s actually some cultural variability in susceptibility to the Muller-Lyer illusion; see here.
I didn’t say anything about abortions. Let’s use my actual example.
It is my view that every sane, intelligent and sincere person immediately knows, upon hearing the moral statement (and understanding the terminology) “It is immoral to torture children for personal pleasure”, that it is true.
The fact that they need no convincing or proof at all to know it, means that it is more certain, as far as knowledge can reach certainty, than having to measure the lines of an optical illusion to make one’s case.
More certainly than I know there is a monitor in front of me, I know it is immoral to torture children for personal pleasure.
KN,
Yes, but the crucial fact is not that every sane person sees the illusion, but that every sane person agrees that it is an illusion. They can do this because there are various ways to compare the actual lengths of the two lines.
There is no analogous way to decide whether one of William’s “self-evident” moral axioms is actually a moral illusion — that is, that it isn’t objectively true.
Omagain said:
Well, wouldn’t that just ruin my day!
William,
No, you don’t. There are many ways to check whether your monitor is in front of you. You can look at it, feel it, listen for it, take a photo of it and examine the photo, use scientific instruments to detect it, etc.
What can you do to “detect” that GCT is objectively immoral? You’ve told us that consensus isn’t a criterion for you. That leaves your conscience, and you’ve already told us that your conscience is fallible.
How do you know that what your conscience is telling you about GCT isn’t a moral illusion? How can you double-check the accuracy of your conscience?
Also, it’s telling that you always return to the GCT example. I’d love to see a longer list of “self-evident moral truths” sometime. Do you have others?
If GCT is the only thing you “know” is objectively immoral, then your system is pretty useless.
That was Alan Miller that said that, not me, although his whole comment was addressed to me.
William,
That’s pretty funny, coming from someone who wrote this:
Have you changed your mind? Is “consensuality” suddenly a criterion after all?
keiths
Well, if you say so 🙂
When you get a chance, just write up a short list of what I know and don’t know, and how i know and don’t know it, so I can provide those answers when you ask to avoid all the time we waste on me trying to come up with my own responses.
Yeah, it’s telling you that that one is all I need to offer an example or make a point.
I didn’t use it as criteria. I used it as an example.
William:
keiths:
William:
I explained why you don’t:
Are you claiming that your conscience alone is more accurate with respect to the GCT question than the combined application of sight, smell, hearing, touch, cameras, and scientific instruments are with respect to the existence of your monitor?
Could I have an argument with that assertion?
William,
Okay, then according to you it’s irrelevant that other people think GCT is immoral.
Then you are trusting your conscience alone to tell you that GCT is objectively immoral.
Yet you claim that this is more certain than the existence of your monitor, despite the fact that you’ve told us that your conscience is fallible.
How did you determine that your faillible conscience, by itself, is more trustworthy with respect to GCT than all of your senses combined, plus a camera, plus a range of scientific instruments are with respect to your monitor? Please be specific.
William,
I repeat:
On that much we definitely agree! I see this as an instance of Wittgenstein’s “private language argument”, which generalizes nicely to a ‘private normativity argument’. A purely subjective norm isn’t really a norm at all, because there’s no genuine constraint on what behaviors count as following it. If any behavior can be interpreted as being in accord with it, then it isn’t transgressable, and a norm that can’t be transgressed is no norm at all.
keiths:
KN:
That’s good. Alas, I can’t agree with the rest of your comment 🙁 :
The norm isn’t private. William is able to express his view that GCT is morally wrong, we are able to understand him, and all of us are able to judge whether an action violates the norm.
The problem is not that the norm is private, it’s that there is no way, other than by consulting his conscience, for William to decide that it is objectively moral. He’s got nothing to cross-check his conscience against, and he’s already conceded that it is fallible. How fallible? He doesn’t know. What’s the probability that a given moral intuition is wrong? He doesn’t know.
What’s the probability that his conscience is correct, and that GCT is objectively immoral? He has no idea, although he claims with no justification that he is more certain of it than he is of the existence of his monitor.
He doesn’t have to explain his right, he merely has to explain the validity of his argument. You have exactly the same right and need.
As an atheist, I would say there has never been a genuine basis for morality other than those various cultures, groups and individuals have constructed for themselves.(That some are so certain of these convictions that they feel enabled to impose those moral inventions on everyone else and why this can be a successful strategy that may result in a group flourishing is a problem perhaps for another thread)
And ethics do not need a religious basis. You can go a long way in developing a code of ethics merely by assuming a few principles, like fairness, right to free thought and expression, right to be free from oppression and so on.
Human society is a lot older than the current established religions.
The only snag to this human flourishing is it’s too damn successful! 7.2 billion and rising!
William J. Murray,
That it is wrong to torture children. But of course, as you deny it’s a feeling, you are unaware that this is what you report. And at this point you say ‘but that is begging the question’. Evidently, I can no more prove to you that it is a feeling than you can prove to me it is the sensation that results from tapping into Objective Morality.
“You know nothing, William Murray.”
[/Game of Thrones]
I see no way past this impasse. WJM wants to maintain the claim that he can infer (though not derive) necessarily true moral statements from self-evidently true moral statements. It is clear to me (though I can’t be absolutely certain) that WJM cannot support this assertion to anyone else’s satisfaction.
Other than GCT, we don’t seem to have much idea of what these moral statements are. As a pragmatist, I really don’t need to worry whether a particular moral statement is absolute, objective or whatever (i e claimed to exist outside human invention), if it is novel and appropriately useful, why not assess it on its merits?
Does WJM have any moral statements that are novel and that he thinks might work better than the evolving mess of pluralities that we find spread across human cultures?
From reading your comments in this thread, Keith, I am not clear on what you mean by “my morality is subjective”. Does it mean you are a non-cognitivist, a moral relativist, both, or something else entirely?
If you are not a moral relativist, I’d be interested in understanding why.