At Evolution News and Views, David Klinghoffer presents a challenge:
Man needs meaning. We crave it, especially when faced with adversity. I challenge any Darwinist readers to write some comments down that would be suitable, not laughable, in the context of speaking to people who have lived through an event like Monday’s bombing. By all means, let me know what you come up with.
Leaving aside Klinghoffer’s conflation of “Darwinism” with atheism, and reading it as a challenge for those of us who do not believe in a supernatural deity or an afterlife (which would include me), and despite lacking the eloquence of the speakers Klinghoffer refers to, let me offer some thoughts, not on Monday’s bombing, specifically, but on violent death in general, which probably touches us all, at some time. Too many lives end far too soon:
We have one life, and it is precious, and the lives of those we love are more precious to us than our own. Even timely death leaves a void in the lives of those left, but the gap left by violent death is ragged, the raw end of hopes and plans and dreams and possibilities. Death is the end of options, and violent death is the smashing of those options; Death itself has no meaning. But our lives and actions have meaning. We mean things, we do things, we act with intention, and our acts ripple onwards, changing the courses of other lives, as our lives are changed in return. And more powerful than the ripples of evil acts are acts of love, kindness, generosity, and imagination. Like the butterfly in Peking that can cause a hurricane in New York, a child’s smile can outlive us all. Good acts are not undone by death, even violent death. We have one life, and it is precious, and no act of violence can destroy its worth.
William,
Suppose we know with certainty that there is a God, who created us and the universe. Furthermore suppose we know that this God wants us to behave in a certain way.
Should we behave the way God wants us to? How do you decide?
Justify your answers.
That’s not self-evident to me. Plenty of societies have engaged in that behavior. How exactly is that “self-evident”?
I don’t expect the willfully blind to see much of anything – not even the blatantly obvious.
One person’s blatantly obvious is another person’s utter bafflement, I guess. Since you refuse to enlightenment me, I suppose I must suffer through my befuddlement.
Hmmm…I disagree on this point based on the definition of “self-evident”:
There are plenty of cultures and groups throughout history who found torture of children to be acceptable. Given that, I can’t agree that it is “self-evident” that it is wrong. Of course, given William’s arguments, I can’t say I know what he means by “self-evident” (hence the quotes and the definition provided).
Robin,
The nature of a self-evident truth is that it doesn’t require, nor is it amenable to, explanation. It is self-evident.
Unfortunately (at least for some), free will allows us to deny even that which is self-evident. Because you can deny a self-evident truth doesn’t make it any less self-evident.
I’m incapable of enlightening anyone.
If you don’t see on your own why a transition from, say, devout Christian to bull-dog hard-core materialist atheist “would” change large swathes of what one cares about (pleasing god, avoiding hell, spreading god’s word, going to heaven, doing god’s work), nothing I say can possibly enlighten you.
You might choose to understand a thing after I have said it, but it will not be because I said it that causes you to understand. Pointing out the obvious doesn’t make it any more obvious.
William J. Murray,
Atheistic materialism as opposed to theistic materialism??
The majority of accepters of evolutionary theory are not atheists. Atheism does not require materialism. Those who subscribe to something vaguely resembling what you probably mean by materialism tend to call themselves physicalists. This is what I mean by your label being useless.
Physicalism does not mean that your conclusion follows from your premises. Almost no-one believes in this naive reductionism.
Your question presupposes a theistic framework that I find incomprehensible.
In my theistic framework, what “should” means, in terms of morality, is fulfilling the (good) purpose for which you were created. Since good is taken as an innate quality of god and not arbitrary (IOW, god cannot change what “good” is), whatever god “wants” you to do (designed you to do) is innately good and what you should do.
So, in my theistic terms, you’re asking me if I should do what I should do, since what god created me for is the very definition of “what I should do”.
Unfortunately, because one believes in a more “sophisticated” form of “physicalism” doesn’t mean they have escaped the self-referential, concept-stealing problems that plague “naive reductionism”.
Generally, all it really means is that you have developed a more sophisticated semantics to cover up the fundamental flaws in your metaphysics. When all is said and done, without autonomous free will agency that is separate from and can override the impulses of the body’s brute chemical interactions, Darwinian morality is a deceptive charade.
Anyone can see that.
So if God innately believes that torturing babies for pleasure is good and created you for that specific purpose, will you gladly comply? Why or why not?
Under my theism, good is defined by and is an innate quality of god, not something god believes. If the innate quality of god – creator of the universe and designer of existential purpose – coincided with “good” being “the torturing of innocent children”, then of course I would probably consider “torturing innocent children for personal pleasure” a self-evidently good thing, and I would go about doing so as best I could – and so would pretty much everyone else, whether they believed in god or not.
But that’s not the situation we’re in.
The question is whether something that is “self-evidently evil” to you right now would become “self-evidently good” the moment you became aware that God desired it.
Suppose you wake up tomorrow and find that one thing has changed — you now have incontrovertible proof that God wants you to torture babies for pleasure. Will it then be a “self-evidently good” activity that you will gladly engage in? Or will you still feel that it’s wrong, and try to find ways to avoid doing it?
Deciding to do moral acts in order to be favoured with eternal bliss, and/or avoid eternal torture, appears to WJM to be the ‘self-evidently’ coherent and logical way to go. For his (imaginary) ultra-reductionist opponent, there is no such logic to moral acts. But they do them anyway. Even though I have no absolute standard by which to judge ‘what is right’ (apparently it’s “that which gets me a pass into Heaven/avoids Hell”), I would observe that many people behave in a way that accords quite well with the assumed external standard of the theist. Despite purportedly considering themselves mere “collections of atoms”, their motivation is not the self-serving, almost cynical one of (say) the born again desperate to make amends for past misdeeds.
No-one sees any reason to invoke an ‘external standard’ in terms of such relatives as humour, beauty, or musical appreciation. But we find common ground with many in the things that appeal. And so it is with morality. It is a sense. While WJM may believe that denying moral absolutism must lead to people ‘choosing’ what is moral, that is like saying a lack of ‘beauty absolutism’ leads people to choose whom they find pretty/handsome.
Oh, it makes a huge difference. What it doesn’t self-evidently do is make a person less moral – less inclined to care about the effects of their actions on others. What it may well do is to alter their ethical stance. They might care less about saving gay kids from hell, and more about saving gay kids from bullying.
You say that it is “self-evident” that torturing babies for pleasure is wrong, and I think you are implying that that is just as self-evident to atheists, and I would agree.
So are you saying that only theists care about what is right and what is wrong (although we all know it, it being self-evident and all), because only theists fear the eternal personal consequences for doing wrong?
I think WJM would like to think that atheists committing moral acts (or decrying immorality), having no objective morality, are parasitising god-given morality without giving due credit.
Sort of moral plagiarism – in itself immoral
William J. Murray,
That is rhetoric, not an argument.
keiths,
Under
In most cases, I’m certainly no judge of what is moral – especially not for other people.
“When all is said and done, without autonomous free will agency that is separate from and can override the impulses of the body’s brute chemical interactions, Darwinian morality is a deceptive charade.”
That part’s not rhetoric.
I kind of thought that was the whole point of morality. You seem to be suggesting that unless there is retribution or punishment element not being moral, there can be no morality. So basically according to your argument, the only reason Christians such as yourself do anything “good” is out of fear of retribution, not out of any internal desire to do “good”. The seems contrary to the whole concept of moral to me, but what do I know…
This on the face of it is not accurate for most theistic institutions include the belief that acceptance of the divine principles of the institution alone remove any consequence of moral infraction. In other words, most theistic institutions hold that their divine beings give members a “get-out-of-eternal-punishment” simply by holding specific beliefs, not by being moral.
This isn’t a rebuttal. You have not shown that the cultures that engaged in child torture knew they were being immoral or any similar scenario. Simply stating, “well, it’s self-evident to me and thus those other folks must have been acting immorally out of free will” is not a rebuttal.
No, I’m saying that it only theism that provides a sound basis for caring about it. I’m sure virtually all atheists care about it to some degree – but they have no reason to under Darwinism. IOW, there’s no reason why a Darwinist shouldn’t stop caring about morality. There’s no reason for a Darwinist, under various circumstances, not to fudge the moral line whenever it suits their purposes – or to cross it altogether. Studies show that, generally, when people feel they can get away with it, they behave less morally. Like it or not, moral behavior is strongly tied to a sense of repercussion or consequence. Only theism can offer a 24-hour moral policing system, and only theism can provide necessary (inescapable) consequences for behavior.
Under Darwinism, there is no rule of reciprocity or karma, nor any kind of divine justice. If you do something immoral for personal gain, and get away with it, and profit from it, you win – it’s that simple. There is no downside to it. If your “conscience” feels bad, so what? You can train yourself to ignore your conscience. What difference does it make, under Darwinism?
It is apparent that, under Darwinism, it is easier for people to talk themselves out of moral behavior. I suggest the same problem exists for forgiveness-based theistic doctrines like Christianity. What’s the point in behaving morally if you can punch a card and be forgiven for it? No, erasing your moral debt is not something even God can do. If morality is an objectively existent phenomena, then I can no more escape my moral debt than I can escape the debt I owe gravity if I step off a cliff ledge.
Oh, definitely yep.
Yeah it is. There’s no argument there, it’s just opinion.
I’m not a Christian, Robin.
I didn’t say or imply that morality doesn’t exist unless there are consequences; I said there’s no reason to care about it unless there are necessary consequences – good consequences and/or bad. Without consequences, under Darwinism, you can “be moral” (perhaps follow your own particular inner sense of what is good), but the question is, why should you? When it comes to sacrificing yourself, or turning away something that would really profit you, or having to do something that you really do not want to do; if there are no necessary consequences, then why should you choose to do “good” (which is just a relative concept anyway under Darwinism) over doing what you really want to do otherwise?
Under Darwinism, you’d just be serving some ghostly Darwinian impulse over something that is clearly in your own benefit. So you would have two Darwinian impulses – acting for your own benefit or acting for some vague sense of “the good”, both of which are urging you to make different choices in a particular situation; why would a Darwinist pick the Darwinian impulse of doing “the good”, even if meant harm to oneself or loss of great material benefit, over the other Darwinian impulse of serving their own needs and desires?
It makes no sense, which is why, IMO, when Darwinists make this kind of argument – that they will do good without the benefit of godly reward and self-sacrifice without any divine threat, so to speak – they’re spouting ill-considered nonsense just to position themselves as morally superior to theists.
There is no rational reason under Darwinism to make a self-sacrificing, even self-harming choice instead of a self-serving, self-benefiting choice if you take necessary consequences off the table. You’d just be stupid to serve some vague, Darwinian sense of “good” (which which would be of no more importance than the evolutionary impulse of “liking lemon pie”) and turn down great personal benefit.
It’s like saying that if someone said they’d give you a million dollars to lie and say “I don’t like lemon pie”, you’d refuse to lie. I don’t even know of any theist that wouldn’t lie about lemon pie for a million dollars, and under Darwinism, that’s all any moral good is – a subjective preference.
You seem to be using ‘Darwinism’ not simply as shorthand for atheism, materialism or whatever, but as something someone would adopt as a credo – “I am a Darwinist, therefore I think I should conduct my affairs according to the principle of Natural Selection”. An elaborate projected is-ought fallacy. You are tilting at windmills.
OK, I think I get it, William, thanks.
I also agree that under debt-forgiveness schemes Christianity, the divine policing system doesn’t really work either, by your reasoning, so that seems coherent.
But consider this: under both Christianity and “Darwinism” (your definition of), there is also positive incentive to do good, independent of any personal consequences – because in the first place, Christians do not want God to grieve, and in the second place, Darwinists do not want other people to grieve.
In fact, in some readings of Christianity, the two are not different – “whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me”. The only real difference there, is that Darwinists cut out the end man.
So I agree that fear of bad consequences in the next life, or desire for good consequences in the next life, under a theology that does not incorporate debt-forgiveness, may well tend to promote altruistic behaviour even to the detriment of self-in-this-life.
But I suggest to you that this is not the only effective motivation for altruistic behaviour. A simpler motivation is straightforward sympathy or empathy – fellow feeling, if you like, which appears to be an inbuilt human characteristic, for which we have a not-bad Darwinian model, in fact. A built in capacity to suffer when others suffer – to suffer-with (sym-pathy) – as when we wince at another’s pain, or smile at another’s smile.
And in any case, because we are social animals, and because in general we all do better if most people are basically altruistic to some extent, we do our own policing, in the form of literal policing, and criminal justice systems, as well as moral taboos. These are not arbitrary – they are honed over centuries in order to maximise public good, and minimise harm, in other words to promote altruism.
And they have the benefit of being self-evidently real – we do not have to postulate some kind of pay-back system in a putative but unevidenced afterlife – we can simply read the statute book, or listen to our grandmothers when they tell us that if we poke our sisters, it will make everybody sad.
True, but this holds for all people, theists and non. If, as you say, theism actually provided a 24-hour moral policing system, theists ought to be less inclined towards immoral acts when they can get away with them. Yet this is not the case. How do you explain this?
This also displays a poor grasp of what Natural Selection actually means – a mythic ‘f***-everyone’ approach to survival. There are many ways in which organisms can increase their genetic contribution to future generations. They are not all base and selfish, as a glance behind the title of The Selfish Gene might reveal. For social organisms, behaviours and attitudes that aid social cohesion can be beneficial to the genes of the giver as well as the recipient. For parents and relatives, behaviours that assist offspring – to the point of self-sacrifice – have pretty clear selective value.
I didn’t claim it makes atheists care less, or makes them less moral. I said that it takes away any sound basis for caring about morality.
Let’s remember, the argument I’m making here is not that atheists care less, or that atheists are less moral.The argument I’m making here is that Darwinism (atheistic materialism) has no sound bases for a coherent, meaningful morality, and that only theism offers such a basis.
Most people who believe anything – theist or atheists – hold their beliefs, IMO, largely superficially and without any great examination. It is my opinion that most people come to their beliefs for rather pitiful reasons – theist and atheist alike. One can become an atheist just out of outrage at whatever God they grew up with, or become a Christian because someone in a church turned on the air conditioner at a particular time and they mistook it for the holy ghost.
Either way, many if not most never acquired critical thinking skills and hold their beliefs largely because of irrational commitments. My point here is that for most such people, they engage moral debates not out of a rational examination of the logical principles of their own views, but rather out of an emotional response against particular forms of theism, which often results in some claim of being “more moral” than a theist, or badgering theists about behaving morally out of fear of going to hell.
But Darwinistic morality is an absurdity if taken out of the context of a theistic social history. There is absolutely no compelling reason to care about Darwinistic morality – which is why nobody has even tried to offer one up.
Once again: Under atheistic materialism, why should I care about morality at all?
There’s a reason nobody can answer this; other than how I appear to those who do care about morality, there is no reason to care about morality – and, in that case, I don’t really care about morality, all I care about is the appearance of morality.
My apologies then for assuming you were.
How about for the simple reason that some people like the way others treat them when they do good things? Or even more simply, some people get a rush of dopamine when they do something good, and thus are rewarded by their own bodies for doing the right thing.
See above. That’s just two reasons out of many. Some people do things because they are wise and recognize that short term gain is fleeting at best or that short term gain will not have the lasting effect that doing something good will have. The point is, there are many varied situational reasons people live by moral principles that require no external entity of authority or promise of 72 virgins.
Makes perfect sense to me.
See above. I provided four rational reasons why “Darwinists” act morally. I’m sure I can come up with several dozen reasons if you’d like.
Depends. I can think of a couple very good reasons why someone would reject the money – one being that someone who has a reputation as a respected food critic might actually want to maintain his or her integrity over a simple payout.
There’s a recent study of prisoners that indicates about 25 percent literally lack the brain structure needed to feel empathy. That’s a simplification, but approximately true.
For some of us the question of justifying morality doesn’t make sense. It’s like justifying breathing. It bothers me to hear people demand rational reasons for something that to me is like breathing.
I can only assume that people who lack empathy have fewer obstacles to acquiring wealth and power, so laws and morality were invented to reign them in.
Firstly: because as social animals we have set up societies that punish selfish behaviour, that cause people harm, because that way we all benefit. So we have a reasonable practical substitute for your karmic CCTV.
Secondly: because we have evolved a good sense for what constitutes “cheating”, as well as the capacity to feel one another’s pain, as part of the selective pressures on us as social animals (a drive to punish cheaters makes cheaters less likely to thrive, and the social group more likely to do so).
Thirdly: our capacity for symbol-making and abstract thought has enabled us to develop cultures of morality in which moral ideals are reified as worthy goals for us to try to achieve. These are under constant revision in the light of new knowledge about what causes harm and what is beneficial.
Reference? I am not aware of any one “brain structure” that is “needed to feel empathy”, although I am aware of functional and structural brain correlates of empathy. But that doesn’t tell you that the person can’t feel empathy – it may simply mean that they don’t.
I`m surprised that you think this. Did you read the newspapers? Do you know human history? Humans killed each other since they are on earth. Maybe you scientist have problems to understand the world outside your lab. What do you think about Milgram`s experiment?
Anyway according to you all humans beens thinks that make harm to others is bad. No choice about that .
So the muslim suicide bombers freely have chosen to perform the attack? Given the informatin they had they always will do the same or they are free to chose to do or not to do the attack.
what metters to others what you think?
This people thet do not learn not to be selfish, are different to the others that do? Are they less or more happy? Have they better lifes?
This people , are different to the others that do? Are they less or more happy? Have they better lifes?
Isn´t then your morality based on your education?
My question is Can I choose between think that good is what likes me no matter what and good is be altruistic do not harm. According to your first paragraph seems all the humans has no choice to think the second option but there are people that think the first are that way of thinking determined by our genes and enviroment or we are free to choose one or the other based on arguments.
Perhaps this is what Petrushka was referring to:
http://www.livescience.com/13083-criminals-brain-neuroscience-ethics.html
This press release may refer to Petrushka’s study but the original paper is paywalled.
This would matter if I was arguing about “effective motivators”. I’m arguing about sound rational basis. Appealing to emotion is not a sound basis for any rational morality.
How many questions can you beg in one sentence? We all do “better” by what standard? Altruistic according to what definition? “Unselfish for the welfare of others?” Who decides what constitutes the “well-fare” of others? Who decides what is in their best interests? Who decides what “harm” means, and what “minimising” it means? Who decides what “good” means?
Without an objective (read: absolute) grounding, all of the above is just relativistic pablum – and that’s what the argument is about. It’s not about whether or not a culture with ill-considered logical grounding can formulate an effective and decent moral structure even if, upon logical examination, that framework is essentially self-referential and without sufficient logical foundation.
I readily admit that yes, even an atheistic society could establish an effective and decent moral structure. That’s not the point, the point is that their decent moral structure exists in spite of their lack of rational support and foundation. They can do so in spite of their irrational worldview precisely because morality is an objectively existent landscape in our mental world. Even most crazy, irrational people can effectively navigate the conditions that gravity places on the world around them and their own bodies – even if they believe gravity is some kid of angelic hand holding things together. Being irrational and not having a sound understanding of “what morality is” or what it must be doesn’t prevent one from behaving morally any more that not being aware of gravity keeps one from stepping off of a cliff.
So you’ve never seen a kid poke another kid, trip them, or whatever, and laugh?
The whole point is that if you’re not going to get caught, there’s no reason to be moral. That’s why morality requires necessary consequences, not arbitrary ones. When you start referring to the law and how groups of people react to things as one’s guide to “how they should behave”, you’ve just opened up a whole new case of problems for your Darwinistic morality. Should I do whatever the statue book says? Should I regard how my parents and elders coerce my behavior as guides to how I should behave morally? By what principle should I challenge the law or figures of moral authority? Is behaving according to empathy always a good idea? Or can it also lead to disastrous bad ends? And can my empathy be manipulated?
What should I use to evaluate all of these concerns? Reason, or feeling? If reason, then according to what standard? The standard some group of lawmakers or society came up with that I’m now thinking about challenging?
Without an absolute standard, Liz, morality sinks into a relativistic morass of competing views where people can talk themselves out of even self-evidently true evils and goods. It may be self-evidently true to me that gassing millions of Jews is wrong, but without necessary consequence, so what? SO WHAT if evolution has conditioned me to view such an act as self-evidently wrong? Evolution has conditioned many people to do and think many things, both what we consider to be self-evidently good and what is self-evidently wrong. Why should I not flip the switch and gas the Jews if my life and the life of my family depends on it?
Out of service to evolutionary conditioning that makes me “feel” empathy towards them? Out of service to the process of brute physics that makes me “feel” that such an act is “wrong”? Surely you recognize those are pitiful reasons to not flip the switch and, by sparing the Jews, sacrifice myself and my family. If THOSE are the only reasons I have to not flip the switch and sacrifice my family – service to an evolution-produced sensation – then not flipping the switch would be insane.
But, that’s all Darwinists have to self-sacrifice for: evolution-produced sensations of right, wrong, and empathy. There are no necessary consequence, just arbitrary ones. You can as easily suffer for making a good choice as an evil one, and as easily prosper and thrive for making an evil choice.
To rationally support making hard, self-sacrificing moral choices, “service to an evolution-produced sensation” doesn’t cut the mustard. It doesn’t even crawl up on the table. It takes far, far more than that – whether recognized consciously or not – to make the hard moral choices, because if you really believe you’re making that sacrifice just to appease an evolution-generated sensation in your brain, then that’s just flat-out crazy.
Either way, many if not most never acquired critical thinking skills and hold their beliefs largely because of irrational commitments.
No-one has given the matter any thought but you?
Theistic social history was preceded (if we evolved from a language-lacking branch of the great apes) by a nontheistic social history. Theism is an attempt by our more recent ancestors to satisfy a number of conundrums that present themselves to our complex brains – what happens to this sense of ‘I’ when I die? Where did it all come from? What comfort is there in a world full of crap? Morality is but a part of that fabric – behave according to these precepts (which generally codify genetic and social constraints) and you will placate these vengeful types that generate famine on a whim.
Placing theism first, and accusing non-theism of ‘stealing’ concepts, betrays an irrational commitment to a later worldview. Religion did not invent morality, but codified the innate sense which (fortunately) we retain when we abandon religion. Because that is really what’s at the back of it all. These self-evident truths are not always visible to those who underthink the matter.
Thanks, got it!
Interesting functional study. Although I’d still say we can’t interpret that as meaning that it’s because they don’t “activate” those regions that they can’t feel empathy – you could just as easily phrase the conclusions that they can’t activate those regions because they don’t feel empathy. In fact, I’d say that there isn’t actually a difference between those two conclusions! A person who has difficulty in feeling empathy will have a brain that shows that they aren’t feeling empathy, just as pennies landing heads-up will be highly correlated with pennies landing tails-down 😉
What we really want to know is why some pennies land heads up, and others land tails up, and fMRI doesn’t tell us that. Structural and developmental studies might, though.
But your own morality begins with your innate response to the idea of torturing babies for personal pleasure.
How do you know that that is a God-given hint, not just your own emotional response?
I’ll leave that question there, and tackle your other points in a second comment.
Robin writes: “In no case has any action considered “evil” ever inspired more evil that the reactive inspiration of “good”. NO CASE.”
I suggest that the numerous laws violating our civil liberties in the U.S. and the invasions of other countries subsequent to 9/11 manifested enough evil to make this claim less than self-evident.
By the dictionary definition and Latin derivation of the word “altruism” – concern for others.
And if you’ve been reading my posts, I’ve gone into a fair bit of detail about how I think we resolve ethical dilemmas, namely by weighing up available information, a lot of it from science. For example, we now know that cigarette smoking damages people’s health, and shortens their lives, so it has become unethical to promote cigarette smoking.
Not at all. We have perfectly good objective methods of measuring harm, and one easy method is to ask the person whether they mind what we are doing. Or we could use indices of health, or poverty, or observe whether our actions disable them, or kill them.
Clearly, William we are not on the same page, here, at all (I thought, briefly, that I could see your point, but no longer).
Your moral premise, you said, was the self-evident truth that torturing babies for personal pleasure is wrong. I agree, and would generalise; harming others for personal benefit is wrong. So we have a definition of immoral behaviour: harming others for personal benefit.
Given that that is self-evident (evident to both atheists and theists), then the question arises: why should an atheist bother to avoid immoral behaviour, when it gives him/her pleasure?
Your answer is: no logical reason, because an atheist doesn’t believe in karma.
My answer is: every logical reason, because an atheist, like any other member of human society, knows that if she behaves immorally she will be treated as a “cheater”, and subject to both social and legal sanctions. Moreoever, we have those social and legal sanctions because, as a social species, we are able to come to the collective agreement that all our interests are best served if people don’t cheat – seek personal gain at the expense of others, i.e. behave non-altruistically, aka immorally (see foundational premise on which we agree).
Now the issue of what constitutes harm/expense/benefit – and we are into the territory of ethics, and again, you agree that some ethical dilemmas are difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. So we agree that it isn’t easy, and that people trying to be altruistic can nonetheless come to different ethical decisions.
At least I think we agree. Can you confirm so far?
Good.
Our rational support and foundation is exactly the same as yours: the perception of the self-evident truth that harming someone else for personal gain is wrong.
In fact, it’s even more rational: it’s the perception that in order for us all to reap the benefits of social living, it is important that individuals do not cheat – serve themselves at the expense of others.
But we have a perfectly sound understanding of “what morality is” – or at least, you have not provided any evidence other wise. You agree that moral truths are self-evident to both atheists and theists. Do you disagree that, those self-evident truths apart, that a society will better serve its members if cheaters are subject to social or legal sanctions? In which case what is irrational about constructing a social and legal system that promotes altruistic and punishes cheating behaviours? Seems perfectly rational to me.
Of course, that was the point of my illustration. Hence the importance of grandmothers.
You know Patrick, I actually thought about that as an example. I rejected as an example however because I don’t think that – for example – the 9/11 attacks inspired violations of our civil liberties or invasions of other nations. Rather I think that the 9/11 attacks provided an excuse for those who have always desired to engage in those behaviors to do so. It’s hair splitting though, so I’ll grant you that my claim isn’t as strong as I would like it to be.
William,
I asked:
You responded rather evasively:
Yet you already told us that it is wrong to torture babies for pleasure:
Please reread my question and answer it.
First, you’ve moved the argument from Darwinistic morality (which is a set of feelings/sensations produced by atheistic evolution/physics) to Social morality – which I assume you mean a social morality generated by Darwinistic forces.
First, I flatly disagree that we have such societies as you describe. I think we have societies that basically allow the powerful to take advantage of the non-powerful, and laws that – for the most part – only serve the interests of the powerful, while often victimizing the weak. In the world I live in, I must choose to be moral in spite of the social structure and in spite of the machinations of the powerful, even when being moral might cause me to be socially outcast or thrown into jail.
Looking at the history of society, what law and society enforce is conformism to a norm that is generated by the powerful, and morality is most often a force that is used by individuals and groups to challenge and police the immoral activities of the state and the immoral swings of culture.
Government and law do not produce or enforce morality; the produce and enforce conformist norms that may or may not reflect the moral good, and it is historically the place of self-sacrificing moral individuals and groups to challenge this cycle as states and cultures generally cycle from the morally idealistic to the immoral and corrupt under the influence of power.
Unless you draw your source of moral motivation from somewhere other than cultural norms and the law, there is no remedy for the immoral corruption always sneaking into the state and into culture. Otherwise, that corruption must be de facto considered the “new, improved morality” if we leave it to the state and culture to supply the consequences for immoral activity.
If we look to the state and to culture to police morality, we end up with millions of dead jews or babies being thrown off the cliffs because they are not perfect, and no principle by which to challenge that consequences enforcing such behavior are themselves moral.
Once again, you need an absolute moral reference as the fundamental principle of morality, or you have no means by which to challenge cultural norms or the law, if “society” is your basis for moral rulings and enforcement.
IOW, I find your claim that Darwinistic society and law as effective distributors of moral consequence to be laughable on the face of it. More often than not, society and law rewards immorality – or, at best, is haphazard in its moral policing, and most often protects the powerful whether they are moral or not.
If we have evolved a sense of “cheating”, then whatever we evolved would be called “good”. Your phrasing makes it sound as if there is something outside of the evolutionary process by which we could evaluate our “sense of cheating” as “good”. Under darwinism, our evolved sense of cheating is just what it is, and we label it “good”.
It has not been my experience that cheaters are less likely to succeed and thrive. You apparently live in some utopian society I have no knowledge of. In my society, cheaters often win, are often applauded by the population, and are often considered heroes. In many societies, so are people that rob banks and blow up buildings and innocent people.
When “moral ideals”, “harm”, and “beneficial” are purely relativistic concepts under Darwinism and assumes the conclusion that I should hold “harm” and “benefit” to others, and “cheating” et al as worthy of consideration in the first place, there is no sound reasoning here – only self-referential question begging.
You’ve provided no basis for caring about morality here; you’ve only provided a basis to fear social non-conformity.
Legal and social sanctions aren’t “arbitrary”.
I would agree with all this – I’m just saying that at the kind of low-level of moral conformity achieved by threat of punishment, an electronic CCTV camera is a reasonable substitute for a karmic one. However, if we are driven, as some Christians are driven (see above) not by fear of jail/hell/social exclusion, but by love of God/our fellow men, then, sure, we will do better than that, which is why a few great souls like William Wilberforce changed the social and moral laws of his day. My point is that you do not have to be a theist to be a Wilberforce – you just need to be more-than-averagely motivated by the conviction that harming others for personal gain is wrong (and we agree that that is self-evident).
The self-evident foundational principle on which we appear to agree.
If it is self-evidently true that it is wrong, why does the consequence matter? As Huckleberry Finn said about not betraying Jim (IIRC), he’d rather go to hell than betray his friend. For Huck, the self-evident moral truth trumped the consequence. I hope I would do the same.
I don’t know, William – that’s what the trolley example was about. Sometimes we are faced with horrible choices between two evils. Would you torture a baby under duress to avoid the painless death 100 others? I think I would, because it seems to me that the painless death of 100 babies is less evil than the agonising pain of one. But many people differ, which is why there is such debate about abortion.
I’m not claiming ethical dilemmas are easy to solve, or that one solution fits all, but I think you agree. Where we seem to disagree is over why we should try to solve ethical dilemmas in the first place. You think it’s only worth doing if there is threat of eternal consequences. I think it’s worth doing because it’s right.
Maybe that makes me irrational. If so, I think I’d prefer to be irrational. I’d rather be like Huck, and do what I thought right, even if it meant eternal fire.
It would not be self-interested, certainly. But are you really defining “rational” as “self-interested”? Perhaps you are. In which case you have a peculiar oxymoron at the heart of your moral model: morality is defined as not harming others for personal benefit; rationality is defined as being moral only if it benefits you.
You sure you want to go that route?
This is true. We cannot comfort ourselves with the conviction that good deeds will ultimately result in reward, even if they result only in personal pain in this life. We are doomed to be like Huck Finn – doing good for good’s sake, not for the ulterior motive of good karma.
I once heard a story that I think was supposed to be Indian, maybe Hindu, that went something like:
There are four levels of good deed:
On the lowest level are good deeds done for fear of punishment.
On the next level are good deeds done for desire for reward
On the next level are good deeds done for the pleasure doing good
On the highest level are good deeds done because it benefits someone else.
The tricky part is that as trying to achieve a Four, automatically knocks your deed down to a Three.
You seem to be saying that the only rational bases for a good deed (an altruistic deed) are One and Two. I disagree.
How about: you’re making that sacrifice to help other people?
I think your problem is that you have a straw-man view of materialism as a view that “reduces” our decision-making apparatus to a series of logic-gates in which a self-destructive conclusion should give an error message unless the logic-gates aren’t working properly.
I think it’s time we had a separate post on this.