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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I am not aware of any studies on BDSM and religious affiliation. Certainly I don’t see any validity in your presumption that kinkiness is an atheist thing. BDSM communities are probably like most of the rest of the internet: dominated by Americans, the majority of whom are Christians.
I don’t share your attitudes on kinkiness (or drugs, for that matter) either. Some people are adventurous, some are not.
Frank discussion of the possibilities for human sexuality is surely healthy. People have been kinky for a long long time, I suspect.
The problem is not thesimplicity or not of Ethics, the point is that behind the math there are a rationale,a logic. And behind Ethics not. If you are an atheist, there is no way you can build a logic for morality. Because there is no ought to, because in your universe thereis no goal.
I’m not interested in Plato’s answer, I’m interested in yours.Why are you avoiding answering?
Why do you cite the dilemma of Plato and not his answer?
I thought that darwinism explains that life tend to diversity.
You feel bind to opinions?
Do you think that God is the old man sitting on a cloud that met Homer Simpson? Well, that it is not God. Goddo not have opinions.
This is simply ridiculous. Ethics is an ancient branch of philosophy.
Yah. But we are a species.
(In fact, you don’t need any theory to observe that life is diverse, but that is irrelevant to my point. Darwin gave part of the explanation of *why* life is diverse rather than pointing out that it is. )
Blas,
Do you believe God wants you to do some things, and not others? (Rhetorical question; you obviously do.)
Suppose that God wants you to do X, and Stephen Colbert wants you not to do X. Why is God’s desire binding on you, if Stephen Colbert’s isn’t?
Because I’m assuming that “atheism” possibly encompasses a widely divergent array of of fundamental motivations and attitudes, e.g. for some “atheists” it might be associated with a generally pervasive amoralism on their part, or a laissez-faire detached attitude towards morals, or extreme relativism on the matter or whatever. Whereas for other atheists, that may not be the case. Some of them may just be rejecting the idea of a preexisting anthropomophic deity (e.g. maybe with a white beard, etc) who created the world as an idiosyncratic design project. But such “atheists” may still have a deeply entrenched morality on a personal level, which perhaps they justify on various esoteric or nuanced grounds, considering they’re on record as being atheists.
davehooke,
I wasn’t assuming that all atheists had libertarian attitudes about sex. Hotshoe evidently does. I asked the question whether she was typical of atheists.
hotshoe,
consensual domination/submission, costume play, anal stimulation for a person of any gender/orientation, toe sucking, orgasm control, body modification … which of these is the least bit problematic if practiced by consenting adults in a private space?
What’s your hangup about private spaces,anyway? Dogs or other animals don’t care about privacy. Its educational probably for kids to see animals doing it. Why is it different for people. For that matter, the gay-pride parades in San Francisco and other places are notorious and very non-private. Simulated gay sex acts and nearly nude, humping and grinding, S and M gear, etc. all on the parade route. just google it on youtube. I’m assuming that maybe lots of atheists are offended by that.
And from my vantage point, I look at gays carrying on like that in those parades, and I feel bad for them, that they are degrading themselves in the sight of God. They are degrading themselves as human beings.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Brandom in light of Nietzsche, as it bears on the question, “what does it mean to say that God is dead?” (A brief moment’s reflection indicates that “God is dead” and “God doesn’t exist” do not mean anywhere close to the same thing, and its the former assertion, not the latter, which interests me.)
Pretty clearly, our lives are ‘fraught with ought’, in Sellars’s happy phrase. There are not only ethical oughts but also epistemic oughts (what we ought to believe, assert, etc. — e.g. “one ought not commit oneself to both p and ~p“). These norms function as the ground of our judgments and actions. And so long as we never confront the fact of pluralism, or never reflect on our norms, the question of their adequacy never arises.
But as soon as that question does arise, as it first did in the West with Socrates/Plato, the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Because now the question arises, “what grounds the norms themselves?” And thus it comes to seem like an intellectual obligation to show where there are meta-norms — the norms that ground the norms.
And since the meta-norms would be just as vulnerable to critique as our merely contingent norms are if they were contingent, they must be necessary. And now it seems as if the question, “which norms should we have?” requires an answer that goes, “we should have only those norms that comply with the meta-norms.” Hence our norms lose their sense of contingency or arbitrariness because the meta-norms are necessary, and our norms are grounded in the meta-norms, and that closes the door against the nihilism that threatened once we realized that our norms are contingent.
The deepest and most interesting (to me, anyway) significance of “God is dead” has nothing to do with the reasonableness of any theological assertion. Rather, it means there are no meta-norms. But that opens the door to nihilism — as Nietzsche realized with complete clarity — if one also insists that our norms can’t really function as norms unless they are grounded in meta-norms. The step beyond nihilism consists in letting go, or overcoming, the assumption that our norms can’t be norms unless there are meta-norms, or that groundless grounds aren’t really grounds at all.
If the true cultural-political significance of atheism involves accepting that there are no meta-norms (and not wanting there to be any), then there have been very few, if any, true atheists. Most people who reject specifically religious claims find all sorts of God-substitutes: Reason, the Nation, Culture, Nature, History, the Party, Human Nature, Self-Consciousness, Science. (I’m now reading Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God which is, among other things, a catalog of God-substitutes over the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries; a very fair and balanced review is here.)
Now, recognizing that there are no meta-norms does not mean that we cannot explain how we arrived at the norms we have. Sketching that account will involve both biological and cultural history, and would tell us how we got from the apes to the Enlightenment (and beyond). But explaining how we arrived at those norms will not dispel their contingency, because explanations are not justifications.
“God is dead”: there are no meta-norms, and though there are indeed grounds for our action and judgment, there is no ground beneath those grounds; recognizing that groundless grounds are still perfectly serviceable as grounds, and that Plato’s entire quest, however admirable, is hopelessly misguided, is precisely what a genuine atheism requires.
I know the BTK Killer was a church-going man (deacon as I recall), and thus presumably not an atheist. Just throwing that out there.
Survey reveals only .02% of prisoners identify as atheists
ETA: The article title is wrong. The correct figure is .07%, according to Hemant Mehta’s calculations.
“libertarian” is a red herring. You are constructing an implied narrative that there is an increasing cultural focus on lust and kink driven by free willed choice to turn away from Judeo-Christian values. Your assumptions are many, and evidence or thorough argument to back them up might make them less than meaningless.
It would be interesting to see if there’s any significant correlation between one’s approval or disapproval of non-traditional sexual behaviors (e.g. anything other than heterosexual, “vanilla” sex) and one’s religious identity (or lack thereof).
I would tend to doubt that there’s much of a correlation there, but what do I know?
For what little it’s worth, I also have pretty liberal attitudes towards sex — but the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”!
If only Frank was still around to sort them out.
A friend told me a pertinent story the other day. He was walking through an estate (or “housing development”/”subdivision”) when a woman started shouting “Look at that guy wanking up there in the window. Sixth floor. It’s disgusting. Look!!! Look at him! Look!”
I’m sorry Blas, maybe I am missing it, but as best I can see you are just making a bald assertion without argument for what you are saying or counter-argument to what I have said, which already has addressed your last sentence.
So I am going to bow out now.
Do you mean what people publicly or privately approve of? (grin).
Seriously, with regard to your more substantive (and welcomed) post above, when you say
does “explain” include justifying their use in moral reasoning, or does that justification require something more.
This applies much better to Christians. Most Christians, not belonging to a church, are “self-professed”. What makes an atheist is a lot less controversial or complex than what makes a Christian. An atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in gods. There is no need for any adjective unless you are talking about particular brands of atheism which have additional features, such as humanism or a general concern for social justice issues.
That was precisely Nietzsche’s point but, like the existentialists, he somewhat neglected our biological heritage. My point exactly about humans not being blank slates. Our grounds may be groundless in a strict philosophical sense, but they are not truly groundless. While I don’t agree with Sam Harris on the ought/is distinction, his emphasis on science informing morality is the important thing to take away. I don’t see that as replacing God with a substitute. It is ignoring the false and concentrating on reality.
For you, it may provide no advantage. For me, it puts morality in a whole different conceptual perspective. One of the reasons I became an atheist in the first place is because I couldn’t accept command-authority morality as being moral. For a while I believed in karma, but I couldn’t see the justice in a system that delivered the consequences to someone who doesn’t even know what is going on. I found the arbitrary nature of consequences under atheism (and the “all things are permissable nature of it) to be unacceptable.
How can anyone feel like they are a good person when “what good is” is totally arbitrary and subjective? How can one intervene when I child is being harmed without apply the same “might makes right” privilege that justifies the child abuser himself?
Those considerations may not bother you, but they bothered me. Natural Law morality solves these dilemmas philosophically.
It “gets me somewhere” because it organizes morality in my mind in a way that is self-consistent with my necessary behavior (wrt morality) anyway, provides a solid, meaningful way for me to be a “good” person, motivates me to be at least “good enough”, and removes from me the responsibility to try and make others behave morally.
IOW, whether or not my premise of “natural law morality” is true, it is effective as a conceptual framework which helps to naturally organize my thoughts and behavior in ways that provide me with a sense of being a good person in a satisfying and logically consistent manner. IOW, I found a way to be an intellectually satisfied “good person” that wasn’t available under atheism or prior forms of theistic spirituality.
It also directly corresponds to what I call the self-evident truths about my existence and dovetails with my actual experience. Plus, it seems to be working.
I rather see the deeply embedded mistake we make is when we think of ourselves as isolated minds. That explanations are not justifications becomes much less of a stumbling block in that light.
I think there are relevant passages in “Twilight of The Idols” and “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, but I will need to put it all together.
Been busy for a while, a quick skim … Heavens, kinkiness, now? Atheists are more likely to be kinky? Is that an admission that the theist raising the issue would go for more kinkiness if God wasn’t watching? Ah well. Just don’t fancy it myself. Not keen on porn either. Though I’m a sucker for a pretty girl in short skirt and tight top. Guess I need help.
Why The Arbiter, or Objective Morality, should give two hoots about how I achieve orgasm in a private consensual (or solo) setting is beyond me, however.
Made by theist phylosopers.
Are ou pulling my led or are you truly asking that?
I have a slightly different reading of Nietzsche, which is in his favor. The existentialists (esp. Sartre) were explicit in saying that biology didn’t matter at all to our understanding of human existence. Sartre is most explicit about this in “Existentialism is a Humanism”, where he makes clear the unbridgeable gulf between being-in-itself (stuff, objects) and being-for-itself (self-consciousness).
Nietzsche, by contrast, thought that biology was highly relevant to human existence — the problem with Nietzsche is that the biological theories he relied on were superseded by the Darwinian revolution in biology. Also, Nietzsche had a misleading and superficial understanding of Darwin because Nietzsche read Darwin through the lens of Herbert Spencer and through philosophical interpretations heavily influenced by neo-Hegelianism and neo-Kantianism.
On the notion of “grounds”: this is a rich and complicated philosophical concept. Certainly our norms are “grounded” in the sense of having a causal history, and all sorts of sciences are relevant here — neuroscience, evolutionary theory, ecology, sociology, and so on. But that’s not “grounding” in the sense that I meant. Darwinism is not an answer to Plato’s questions, but a refusal to answer to them.
That sounds logic.Squizite darwinistic logic.
Blas:
I am truly asking. What are your reasons for regarding God’s desires as binding, if Stephen Colbert’s are not?
Is it because you believe that God created you, and Colbert didn’t? Is it because God is more powerful than Colbert? Something else?
Please be specific.
To darwinists I will put three moral problems and I would like if they can say what they “ought to do” and the rationale.
1) Suppose the Malaysia Fly 370 crushed near a small desert island. There are two survivors in perfect health butas there is no food in the island they are starving. It is moral that one of them kill the other and eat it?
2) Suppose there is only one survivor, but the island is reached by a rafting chimpanzee. It is moral for the man kill the chimpnzee and eat it?
3) Suppose that the island is reached by a rafting gorila. It is moral that the gorila kill the human and eat it?
Hangup? Oh, my dear, do you have any manners? Do you have any concept that some of us may choose not to flash our genitals to quite-possibly unwilling witnesses, choose not to spill every detail about last night’s sex to our modest aunts, not to talk loudly on our phones in public, because, basic good manners?
Actually, it can be seen as a moral question of consent, as well. You didn’t consent to having to overhear me on my phone just because you chose to stand in line at Starbucks — it may be somewhat unavoidable in our modern world, but a good person like me will try to avoid stepping over your boundaries. Good manners and attention to consent. Not a “hang-up”.
Umm, because people are animals, but not merely animals. Do you genuinely not know the difference between people and dogs? If you do, why do you imagine that I don’t?
I don’t have to youtube it. I told you, I’m probably old enough to be your grandmother and I’ve been friends with lots of folks whom you would call deviants. I’ve seen naked people before, I’ve seen sex acts before, why would I need to youtube the Folsom Street Fair?
That said, why would YOU object — you just got through saying it’s educational for children “to see animals doing it” — so why is witnessing simulated gay sex and B/D costuming more objectionable than children seeing dogs actually having sex? IF the people who go to see the parade know what to expect and are there voluntarily? Have you thought this through rationally or are you just reacting emotionally to the images you’ve conjured up?
Yeah, I’m sure. Atheism only means a lack of belief in gods; atheism doesn’t give us positive character traits like tolerance and generosity. All it does is remove religious excuses for bigotry and small-mindedness.
Sex-positivity is not inherently an atheist vs theist thing. Lots of theists accept that god wants them to be happy with their sex lives as long as they aren’t hurting anyone. Lots of theists are flamboyantly gay. The majority of gay people in the USA were raised christian. Not all of them were driven away from their faith by the homophobes in their churches. As far as I can tell, there’s no justification for thinking that your god cares what people do with their genitals.
There you go again with your bizarre idea that having a sexual identity is “degrading” in the sight of god. You’re not making any sense. You have faith that your god specifically created that person, specifically gave him his innate characteristics, but then you think that your god somehow made a mistake and is suddenly disgusted when that person chooses to display any sign of the identity god gave him. No, your god didn’t make a mistake; your god gave those gorgeous men gifts of their bodies and their sexuality and wants them to show off those gifts. You think I’m wrong about that? Prove me wrong. Get your god on the phone and we’ll hear the answer, not filtered through 2000 years of goat-herder prejudice.
I’ll tell you what’s really degrading. It’s degrading when a teenager has to suck cock to earn a place to sleep for the night because his christian parents threw him out of home for being gay. It’s degrading when a pastor forces a teenager to apologize to her rapist in front of the congregation because she must have tempted him into raping her, and it’s her “sin” of temptation, not his crime of rape, that deserves chastising by the christians. It’s degrading when a christian is so brainwashed by his narrow church upbringing that he denies himself god’s gift of his sexuality, driven to the point of self-harm or suicide.
I think a few days of “gays carrying on like that in those parades” – even if it tilts towards bad manners and bad taste in public – does not ever begin to outweigh the immorality of sex-negative propaganda, spewed mostly by theists. What’s the balance of harm: on “your” side: just hypocritical offense in the eye of the beholder (forced to search for youtube gay pride parades, were you?) On “our” side: actual coercion, actual rape, actual suicide directly caused by the bigotry of supposedly-loving christians. Yeah, I’ll make room in my moral values for a little in-your-face gay pride celebration. Gay pride saves children’s lives, after all.
I take you to mean “grounded” in the sense of “in virtue of”, ontologically or metaphysically. Metaphysical grounds are what we are surely trying to get away from.
Literally laughing out loud here. Thanks for sharing. 🙂
davehooke,
I think he just meant by “grounds” reasons, rather than causes.
Why do you continue to avoid answering the question? Do you believe that what god commands is moral because god commands it or does god command it because it is moral?
Thank you for the reply, but I’m even more confused now, particularly given your first sentence.
Atheism is simply the lack of belief in a god or gods. That’s it. When you put the word in scare quotes or prepend “self-professed” to it, it gives the impression that you don’t believe that some people actually do lack belief. Your speculation on the motivations of your scare-quoted atheists strengthens that impression.
Your final sentence gives the impression that you see some conflict between lacking belief in a god or gods and being a moral person.
I assure you that I genuinely lack belief in a god or gods. I’m not an “atheist” or a “self-professed atheist”, I’m an atheist by the very definition of the term. I also have a deeply held personal moral code.
Can you abide by the rules of this site and assume that I am making these statements in good faith? If so, can you see how your phrasing could be perceived as insulting?
They are part of the hypothetical conversation you were inviting me to have. If the response (as it appears to be) is “I just bloody do, OK?”, I would pursue it no further. If it was a little more responsive to the rhetorical element of the questions, I might feel I had a conversation worth having. I’ve already said why I would want to persuade ‘him’ otherwise. But of course I’d want to know if I’d get anywhere talking to a bigot.
You haven’t specified the manner in which you attempt to interfere with homosexual activity. This would be relevant, hence the (rhetorical) questions. The basis of my objection is that you are interfering with the happiness of others. You have indicated (in your atheist guise, though I wonder too about real life) that you don’t give a fuck about the happiness of others, so I’d drop that appeal.
Christ on a flaming bike! No, of course I wouldn’t be having a completely different discussion under a completely different scenario if I was having the conversation you invited me to have under the scenario you invited me to consider! If you didn’t consider homosexuality immoral and weren’t trying to interfere with its practice, what would I have to say on the matter? “I don’t think homosexuality is wrong, and I do nothing to interfere with its practice”. That’s nice, William. Good for you.
Kicking the board over is hardly checkmate. Your protagonist simply says “don’t give a fuck”. What can one say?
It’s not an atheist-friendly axiom. It’s a human-friendly axiom. You have not been specific about the ‘action’ you’d take. If it was merely private tutting, I couldn’t care less. Even a spot of pamphleteering – it’s a free country. Though I might still discuss, as one might discuss political views one disagreed with. But if you threw bricks through their window, or taunted them, or wrote FAG on their walls, or lynched them, these would (differently) influence the action I took.
And what is hypocritical about concern for others? Or irrational, or in need of Natural Law or Big Cheese to codify?
But no-one is under any obligation to give a crap about yours. How’s that any different? The fact that you slap on that label ‘Objective’ is just bullshit window-dressing for your opinion on matters moral. You likewise lack the stomach to own up to that, if we’re reduced to swapping belligerent taunts.
OK, argue with yourself. Tell ‘atheist-WJM’ why he should not find homosexuality immoral, demonstrating the extra tools that Objective Morality gives you, denied to the poor benighted atheist. I’ll make a sandwich.
Not a relevant reply. Ethics: lacking in rationales and logic, or not?
That was one of the best comments I’ve ever read on this board.
You may be old enough to be a grandmother, but you’ve got a hell of a sexy mind (not that grandmothers can’t be physically sexy, too).
I’m with you. That makes three of us — according to Arlo Guthrie, we’re an Organization!
This could be quite a knock-down drag-out.
We know there are christians/theists who strongly advocate for gay rights and not just grudgingly accept gay parishioners as long as they’re abashed about their sexuality. So there are gay-friendly sermons and gay-friendly churches.
On the other side is the better-financed bigotry typical of christians/Islamists. So there are gay-hating sermons and gay-hating churches.
If they can’t get each other to “see the light”, when they supposedly have the hotline to Objective Truth, what hope for WJM to suddenly come up with the killer argument — for either side. We could be watching the cage match for the rest of our lifetimes.
I’ll bring popcorn.
That’s right. One of the problems with “grounds” is that it’s terribly elastic — it means “reasons” or “causes” depending on context. (Though “reasons” and “causes” are each only slightly less elastic, it’s at least a bit clearer there when we’re asking “what for?” and when we’re asking “how come?”.)
Part of my point was that we can play the reason-giving game, and we can explain the causes of our ability to play the reason-giving game, but we can’t pretend that reality is playing the reason-giving game with us. However nature is ultimately intelligible, it is not the product a rational agent, and our reasons and norms are neither inscribed on the face of reality nor copied from its secret depths.
Just to clarify, I do understand that this premise is useful to you personally. But I feel like I must be missing something—do you claim the right to use this unproved premise (assumption, more accurately) in logical arguments, while I, “under atheism” cannot?
They are not separate from it either.
William,
Your self-congratulation is premature, as usual, because your “conceptual framework” for morality is an irrational jumble.
One of the biggest problem lies right at the heart of your “system”, and it is exposed by this simple question: How is God’s view of morality any more objective than yours or mine?
Or, as I put it to Blas:
The Orb hung in the sky, black, shining. Lights on the side formed a figure ‘8’, giving it the bizarre appearance of an alien pool ball. “Find out what it wants”, they instructed the pilot.
The “8” parted, and he manouevred his craft through the opening and onto the dock. A figure approached.
“Why are you here?”, he asked.
“We have been observing your communications for many years, and you seem desperately unsure about how to ground your behaviour. We’ve decided to sort it out.”
“What business is it of yours?”
“None”.
“What are you going to do?”
“Any transgressions of The Code, you get zapped. It’s unpleasant, but not fatal”.
The pilot beamed. This is what he’d been waiting for his whole life. A reason! At last he had a rational basis for his behaviour. Who wants to get zapped? He’d be able to show those idiots who relied on ‘feelings’ – guilt, remorse, empathy, goodwill, all that stuff they talked about, as if their miserable subjective world should matter to him. He’d get it straight from the 8 Ball.
“Tell me more about this Code”.
Silence.
At least the pilot can infer something about The Code by noting when he gets zapped and correlating it to his behavior.
William’s “system” doesn’t even offer that. It’s useless as a guide to morality.
As best I can tell, the ‘moral calculus’ of atheists (to the extent that this ‘moral calculus’ concept is even meaningful) is exactly and precisely the same as the ‘moral calculus’ of theists.
No-belief-in-deities doesn’t provide any basis for morality, no—but neither does belief-in-deities. Now, belief in one particular deity may provide some sort of basis for morality—but in such a case, it’s not the bare, unadorned belief that at least one deity really does exist which is the putative basis for morality. Rather, it’s the belief in one particular deity, with Its own particular constellation of preferences/commandments/purposes, which is the putative basis for morality. You don’t get morality from the bare, unadorned belief that at least one deity exists; you need to add something else to that bare, unadorned belief first. Likewise, you don’t get morality from the bare, unadorned lack of belief in any deity. Just as theists must add something else to their theism before they have morality, so, too, must atheists add something else to their atheism before they have morality.
The ‘something else’ which Xtians add to their theism… tends to vary, widely, depending on exactly which Xtian you’re talking about. Yes, Xtians like to make noise about One True, Absolute, Unchanging Standard Of Morality, but they can’t quite manage to agree amongst themselves what that One True, Absolute, Unchanging Standard Of Morality actually is.
Slavery: Is the One True, Absolute, Unchanging Standard Of Morality for it, or agin’ it? Most Xtians today would probably answer “agin’ it”, but the fine, upstanding, devout Xtians who founded the Southern Baptist Church knew—they had faith, and Scriptural support for their faith!—that owning human beings was just fine by the One True, Absolute, Unchanging Standard Of Morality. Apparently, having access to the One True, Absolute, Unchanging Standard Of Morality isn’t as helpful as Xtians would like to have you believe…
Obviously — I’m the last person to advocate a conception of norms as Platonic entities. At the end of the day, any adequate account of norms will have to show just how exactly norms supervene on patterns of behavior. And both sociocultural and neurocomputational mechanisms are at work in the conditions of actualization of those patterns of behavior.
My point, though, was that a genuine atheism that acknowledges “the death of God” — as well as the cultural-political exhaustion and enervation of all God-substitutes! — will acknowledge that there are no meta-norms. This means that our norms are nothing more than our norms, supervening on our patterned behavior (and perhaps on patterned behavior in large-brained social animals generally — I don’t mean to suggest that chimpanzees and dolphins lack norms. If they do, that would require some further argument).
Whereas meta-norms would be (presumably) someone part of the very bedrock of objective reality — the Good of Plato, the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, the Divine Mind of Christian philosophy, and all the various substitutes in the centuries since.
However, I do want to stress that on my conception, norms supervene on patterns of behavior, and especially on patterns of social behavior; norms are not “subjective” in the sense of being merely “mental” events, on a par with thoughts and feelings.
The neglect of the intersubjective, and its distinction from (and interdependence with) both the objective and the subjective, is a major obstacle in our ability to think clearly about what norms are, why there are no meta-norms, and why the need for meta-norms is better regarded as something to be outgrown than satisfied.