Over at Popehat, Clark argues that “modern atheists have an incoherent world view.” After a great deal of back-and-forth in comments, Clark clarified his argument:
My thesis is this, and this alone:
Most atheists
- are, or act as if they are, materialists
- are, or act as if they are, believers in morality as something other than a convenient social phenomena (e.g. they feel a true sense of outrage when someone is being oppressed, even if that oppression takes place with the full willingness of the government and society)
- are therefore intellectually inconsistent
This is a very weak argument.
1) It’s a bit of a strawman. Although Clark was much pressed in the thread, he apparently couldn’t quote an atheist who has said that “they believe in morality as something other than a convenient social phenomena.”1 Probably there are some atheists who say that, out of millions. But it’s bizarre to apply this view to “most atheists,” when it’s obvious that most atheists don’t say that.
2) Clark’s “or act as if they are” construction is an attempt to avoid the “straw-atheist” problem, but it’s lipstick on a pig. Clark seems to be arguing that if you’re genuinely outraged at (say) the slaughter of civilians, then that’s the same as believing in some sort of objective morality. But Clark has nothing but hand-waving to support this claim. Atheists don’t claim to be emotionless; of course we feel outrage, just as we feel love, hate, boredom, amusement, and hundreds of other feelings.
3) As almost any atheist could tell Clark, it’s quite possible to believe in morality without believing that morality is something that exists, objectively, in the universe, as a separate thing from what people think about morality.
As one of his readers, “Lizard,” aptly told Clark in comments:
When you say “atheists believe in justice”, you seem to be using “belief” to mean “believe that there is actually some sort of external thing called justice that transcends the meat brains of the humans who think about it”, and I doubt that’s what most atheists mean when they use the world “belief”. “Justice” is as “real” as “calculus” or “beauty” or “Middle Earth”… it’s a concept we form in our minds. My belief that there are moral/ethical principles that should serve as guides for what we *should* do that transcend other conceptions of such principles is not based on the idea there are free floating particles of justice zooming through the universe.
4) The problem is, Clark flat-out refuses to believe what atheists tell him. For instance, Clark wrote “This, then, is the crux of the problem: [atheists] self describe as materialists, and yet believe in invisible untestable things.” One of his readers replied, “To which most self-identified atheists/materialists have responded “actually, no: “rights” are not things in that sense, they are rules created by man.”
Here’s Clark’s reply:
A charitable debater doesn’t call his debate partners liars, so I won’t, but on the other hand, I find it really, really, really hard to swallow this repeated assertion, and I’d be misleading people about my own beliefs I didn’t say that I find suspect that it’s being asserted in a debate where I’ve laid out the fact that the alternative is a belief in the reality of metaphysical things.
Similarly, this exchange between “PPLN” and Clark:
PPLN: I accept the existence of beautiful music without the need to assert some Platonic essence of beauty. I assert the existence of a well designed car without the need to assert the platonic essence of car-ness. Why can’t I accept the existence of a set of moral and ethical principles that I find beautiful and useful for the things I value in society without asserting some Platonic essence of good and evil?
CLARK: You absolutely can. I’ve never said you can’t. I just find it (a) sad, (b) dubious. With regard to dubious, what I mean is that no one ever goes to war over a fight about which car is better designed or about what music is better (I’m putting the keen philosophers of the East Coast / West Coast rap war aside for a moment). The fact that most people will go to extreme lengths to argue their moral code, defend people they see as innocent victims of others mistaken moral codes, etc. make me think the assertion that materialists believe in moral codes the same way they believe in well designed and efficient autos is silly.
You can’t have a conversation with someone who refuses to believe what you say. to believe that you believe what you say.
(Briefly, regarding Clark’s argument: The differences between car design and moral codes aren’t relevant to, and therefore don’t invalidate, the point that we can believe in abstract concepts without believing they have any objective existence. And incidentally, the differences Clark identifies are – what’s the word? – dubious; war is not as simple as people fighting over moral codes, and many people do go to extreme lengths for their music, sports teams, and so forth.)
5) The reason I think this is worth posting about, is that I’ve encountered this sort of refusal to believe what atheists say more than once, from very intelligent Christians2 who seem to be arguing in good faith.3 So, please, Christians, note:
1) Believing in a moral code – in right and wrong – is not the same as believing there is a metaphysical right and wrong.
2) If you can’t wrap your head around what atheists say we believe, the problem may be with your head-wrapping abilities, not that we’re telling lies.
* * *
6) Quoting Clark again:
If rights are merely rules created by man, why should any western atheist be upset about Middle Eastern female genital mutilation, or historical black slavery in the US, or anything else? These aren’t “wrongs”; they’re just violations of human made rules.
…wait, not!
They’re not even violations of human made rules, because Middle Eastern female genital mutilation is in accordance with local cultural rules, and historical black slavery in the US was not only in accordance with local cultural rules but in accordance with local legal rules as well.
So not only should one who truly does not believe in the reality of metaphysical truths not dislike these two things, but he or she should actively support them. Rules were being followed!
To me, this seems to miss the point.
The reason I am an atheist – and the reason I don’t believe in “natural rights” or any other conception of objective right and wrong existing independently of people’s minds – is because I believe my view to be true.4
Clark is arguing that bad consequences – no longer having any way to argue against slavery, for example – flow from believing that “rights” have no extra-human existence. Clark’s argument is wrong, but let’s put that aside for a moment, because Clark’s argument is also irrelevant.
A truth claim isn’t disproven by appealing to bad consequences. Even if the truth carries bad consequences, that doesn’t make it not true. (Murderers exist. A consequence of that truth is, some people are murdered. But it makes no sense for me to refuse to believe in murderers because I don’t like people getting murdered.)
I don’t believe in objective morality for the same reason I don’t believe in unicorns; there are no credible reasons to believe such creatures exist. Even if we’d have better outcomes if an objective morality (unicorn) exists, that in no way proves that an objective morality (unicorn) does exist.
- Clark’s construction is a little narrow; I’d say, instead, that atheists don’t believe that there is an objective morality that exists independently of people’s thoughts of what morality is. [↩]
- I’ve actually never discussed this topic with a Muslim, so I don’t know if Muslims would have the same habit. I have discussed this sort of thing with many Jews, but for some reason the “you don’t mean what you say you mean” fallacy is not one I’ve noticed coming from Jews. Of course, that may be pro-Jewish bias messing me up, go go home team and all that. [↩]
- See, for instance, my threads about atheism and morality both here and on Family Scholars. [↩]
- I cannot prove the nonexistence of “natural rights,” any more than I can prove the nonexistence of unicorns. I’m therefore not claiming that my beliefs are proven true, merely that they are believed by me to be true, and that they are the best conclusion to draw from the currently available evidence. [↩]
I think this would be a good place to plug Matt Dillahunty’s “The Superiority of Secular Morality”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEP4OIj2NA0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUPPSjMa-BQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSunqrJKgUs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTVI95wBCjc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu_VI0n4Q80
Morality can exist based on empathy with others. I’ve run across lots of fundamentalist religious types who seem to be lacking in much empathy for others, and their objective morality seems to be thundering that God is going to smite you for doing something that they consider immoral. Many of them also seem to take great pleasure in seeing others punished. Westboro Baptist Church is an extreme example, but certainly not the only example.
“You see the world the way I tell you you see the world, and if you tell me that’s not the way you see it, you’re wrong.”
Yeah, a claim like that makes any further discussion pointless.
Tangential to the topic, but I’m disturbed by Clark’s comments about “Middle Eastern female genital mutilation.”
FGM happens almost exclusively in Africa.
I don’t know Clark’s writing; when I read Popehat, it’s usually for Ken’s legal writing about things like Prenda Law and The Oatmeal vs. Funnyjunk. I basically agree with Amp’s takedown of this rather badly argued post on atheism, and this little bit of ignorance in the middle does nothing to make me think well of the author’s critical thinking skills.
Popehat is great when Ken is talking. When it’s Clark or Patrick….not so much.
One of the things that really bugs me about these sorts of arguments is that atheists are held to a higher standard for intellectual consistency than everyone else in the universe.
His breakdown of his thesis results in the conclusion that most atheists are intellectually inconsistent. And without even engaging in the details of his thesis, I would say that I believe that 100% of humans are intellectually inconsistent.
I freely admit that I am an atheist because the idea of gods just doesn’t resonate with me. I didn’t come to atheism after years of dispassionately reviewing all the evidence and all the belief systems that currently exist in the world and coming to the reasoned conclusion that it is impossible for gods to exist in the ways that religion claims they do. That I am also yet to find any logical reason for gods to exist only serves to make me more confident in my lack of belief. But it is not the impetus for my lack of belief, and I don’t think I’m the only atheist like this.
And I am sure that the vast majority of religious people ALSO don’t come to their religious beliefs after years of dispassionately reviewing the evidence etc etc etc. They came to their religious beliefs because they were raised in them, or because they had a moment of intense inspiration. That they can also find logical arguments towards the existence of gods only serves to make them more confident in their belief systems.
However, I’m willing to bet that there are MORE atheists than theists who came to their beliefs after an attempt at dispassionately reviewing the evidence, so it seems pretty damned hypocritical to hold “most” atheists to a standard that “almost no” theists are ever expected to stand by.
It’s also pretty bullshit that atheists are expected to come up with a pat answer to difficult questions about the bad things that happen in the universe, while theists get to say “God works in mysterious ways” and “it’s all part of God’s plan”. I guess it’s easy to claim “intellectual consistency” when all the hard questions get to be answered with “God said so, that’s why”.
Probably there are some atheists who say that
Anyone who thinks the combination of atheism and objective morality is rare obviously hasn’t met many academic philosophers.
It’s true, I haven’t met many – I was an econ/ws major. All I can say is that it’s a rare combo among the atheists I know, the atheists I’ve read, and the atheists in Clark’s thread. And that Clark,when pressed, couldn’t seem to come up with any actual quotes illustrating his thesis.
I honestly don’t doubt what you say – you ARE a philosophy professor, after all, so obviously you’ve met lots of academic philosophers.
But if you could suggest a specific example of such an argument I could read online, or find in a library – ideally one that someone without academic training in philosophy could comprehend – I’d appreciate it. Because like Clark, I’m wondering how such an argument would work.
All this is really saying is the subset of atheists who are also academic philosophers may believe in objective morality. Does that extend to the overall population? Given that one of the basic principles most atheists seem to share is materialism (which is supported by my personal experience), I’d have to see more evidence to accept large numbers believe in something so lacking in evidence itself.
The philosopher Hilary Bok had an interesting post about this at Obsidian Wings back in 2006, which considered how morality might be “objective” in the absence of supernatural phenomena. The post is more of a starting point for discussion than a complete sounding of the topic, but it’s beautifully clear and free of jargon.
My feeling is that “morality” might be objective in the same way that something like “economics” is. The value that we assign to money is clearly socially constructed, a fact that we’re reminded of every time that we cross borders and have to exchange one type of colored paper for another. But even though money has no value independent of human minds, it’s still possible to develop theoretical understandings of economics, and to objectively rank the truth of economic claims. (Likewise, knowing that monetary value is socially constructed doesn’t keep you from being upset if you drop $100 down a gutter, because “socially constructed” isn’t the same as “not real.”) Obviously, the process of testing and verifying moral claims would have to be very different from what economists do, so I wouldn’t argue that the analogy is exact in any way – it’s more to say that we can potentially consider morality in the same manner as we consider other major systems for organizing social interactions.
Most atheists agree that morality is neither 1) objective, nor 2) arbitrary.
A lot of very simpleminded, black-or-white theists seem to struggle with that concept. They assume it has to be one or the other.
Amp,
I am glad you wrote this (and with such a blunt and direct title that one could almost avoid reading the post itself).
I would have to put myself in the camp of those who have not heard atheists willing to admit they do not believe in objective morality. Most of this is anectdatal, and many of the proponents were Philosophy major types, so my sampling pool may be contaminated.
But, usually, the argument I tend to hear is that “the Golden Rule is an objective moral rule of reason,” or words to that effect.
And, for what it is worth, it may be a bit strong to say that, because the theist does not believe atheists mean what they say they mean, the theist believes the atheist is lying. I think the “head-wrapping” comment might be fair. But, the theist thinks the moral outrage the atheist feels suggests that they do believe in objective standards (in their heart, if not their head).
Otherwise, the counterargument is that, without quoting Inigo Montoya, “morality” does not mean what they seem to think it does.
Going further, and maybe this is making a straw man out of the argument (but I do not think it does), there is no fundamental difference in the atheist’s mind between morality and manners (a difference in degree only, but not in KIND). Manners, like morality, are simply ways cultures or societies define acceptable social behavior.
Would you distinguish manners from morality as things different in kind (as opposed to degree)?
-Jut
Most atheists I know would disagree that one’s initial emotional reactions constitute objective standards (seeing as how they vary from person to person), though if theists do, this may explain some of the theistic embrace of retrograde social bigotry.
—Myca
Lara, thanks for your economic metaphor (which is interesting) and for the link to Hilzoy’s post. (I miss Hilzoy!)
If we say that something can be both objective and socially constructed, then I could accept that there could be objective morality. But that something could exist does not establish that it does exist. A claim in mathematics can be objectively true or false because there is an objective means of testing most mathematical claims. I’m not sure any such objective means exists for testing the rightness or wrongness of moral claims.
In the post you linked to, Hilzoy wrote:”To say that some claim is objectively true is to say that there is some justification of that claim which no one could rationally reject.” I think that’s interesting. Of course, a lot turns on how we define “rationally”; there are obvious cases where the definition of rationality varies by culture or by standpoint within the culture.
Jut:
Offhand, I would say it’s a difference of degree.
But I would note that saying that something is different in degree, is NOT the same as saying that the difference is not significant. (The difference between enough rain for a healthy agriculture, and a drought, is a difference of degree, but also a difference that matters quite a lot.)
Ampersand:
And sometimes a difference of degree becomes a qualitative difference. A swimming pool is not merely a large bathtub.
Grace
I’m not, strictly speaking, an atheist, but I do not believe in a non-human source for morality. For me there is a distinction between manners and morality that is not simply a matter of degree, but it is also not a matter of their origin. It is a matter of what they are for. I can elaborate on this if anyone desires, but it seems that morality is about making choices about what to do and what not to do.
Morality, for example, tells me that I should treat other people with respect.
Manners are a guide to how to treat people with respect. Manners are culturally specific, but the impetus behind them is not – all cultures have a system of showing respect.
Does the fact that I believe that morality is not (completely) culturally dependent mean that I am committing myself to a non-human source for morality? Of course not. There is a perfectly human source that I personally believe is only somewhat culturally dependent – human psychology, which is determined both by our culture and by our genetic makeup. Morality arises from human brains, and human brains, across all cultures and times, have shared a lot in common that does not need a god to explain it.
“You can’t have a conversation with someone who refuses to believe what you say.”
Or, at least, refuses to believe that *you* believe what you say.
This is actually kind of a revolutionary thought to me. I’d been struggling with having conversations with someone in my life who is often overtly distrustful and this makes me reconsider whether those conversations are worth having once the distrust is expressed.
It’s complicated, though, because especially with people who prize their intellect, there’s a great desire not to be seen as inconsistent, and that desire can lead one to be less than honest about this or that belief in order to make oneself look consistent. That “are therefore intellectually inconsistent” is treated both by Clark and somewhat in this post as an insult is indicative of the power that *not* wanting to appear inconsistent can have.
You’re right, that’s a better way to put what I meant. Actually, I think I’ll go edit the post to say that. :-)
“Believing in a moral code – in right and wrong – is not the same as believing there is a metaphysical right and wrong.”
I guess I don’t really understand what that means. Do you mean something like: people might follow a ‘code’ but there is no qualitative difference between different codes? Or do you mean that any person’s code is as good as any other person’s code? (I.e. a rapists moral code which exalts exercising power over women against their will is just as ‘good’ as any other moral code???)
I don’t want to strawman, but it would be hard to believe that anyone who believes in morality really believes that. So I suspect that you don’t really believe that, meaning either that I’m not understanding you at all or something.
I guess if you could describe how we would distinguish between a rapist’s code and a ‘good’ moral code without falling back on some sort of axiomatic grounding for morality, it would help.
It seems to me that most atheists act and talk as if they believe in real morality (I don’t see how ‘objective’ helps or hurts the argument) but they don’t like to say so because for some reason they think it implicates a god or gods or God.
I can’t speak for anybody else, of course, but:
My argument about metaphysical right and wrong would be: there is no moral code separate from humanity, which is a very different proposition than saying that any individual’s moral code is equivalent to any other individual’s moral code. As an analogy: there is no metaphysical concept known as The English Language; it’s just what people who speak English use to communicate with each other, and it changes over time and from region to region. Someone could come in and speak Russian and claim that they are speaking English, but that doesn’t mean that their opinion has the same weight as the hundreds of millions of English speakers who wouldn’t know what they were saying.
The other important part of that analogy–there is no Platonic ideal of English to which we are striving. English (I would say, not being any kind of linguist) gets more flexible and expressive as the people who speak it get, on average, more educated and more intelligent*. You could say we’re better at English now than speakers of English were in the time of Chaucer, because we can express more complicated concepts more easily. But there’s no point where we’ll say we’ve reached the best English we can ever speak, because there’s no extrinsic judgment of quality. And yet we can rank current users of English against each other, because as a community we’ve come up with standards for how to speak the language, so we can judge speakers of English against those internal standards.
So, I would say we are better at morality than we’ve ever been in the past. Our sense of morality gets more compassionate and less hypocritical, less clique-oriented and more conscientious. I’d say one of the points of morality is to reduce suffering in the world, and we’re getting better at that, too, though obviously we still have a ways to go.** But we’re judging that morality against our societal metrics of what morality should do, and that comes (at least partially) from certain biological urges in the brain. There’s not a free-floating idea of Perfect Morality that’s separate from the human cultures that created it to begin with. There’s only what we have–which is improving over time, as judged against what humans as a group have decided the purpose of morality is. And obviously, certain individuals can fail utterly at being moral without it invalidating the consensus of the billions of other people on the planet (or millions in their country, or whatever unit you would like to use).
* In the sense that IQ scores rise over time–which is more about people reaching their full potential through better education & healthcare than it is about genetics.
** Speaking of speaking English properly, this is a weird construction I’d never noticed before. “A ways?”
Harlequin: If you’re an American, it’s grammatical (though considered informal) through force of usage; lots of people say it, therefore it’s OK. In British English it’s not found at all or very rarely, and is not considered grammatical.
From what I can tell, there’s no particular underlying reason for us folksy colonists to have modified the phrase; it just sounds right and so caught on with the scofflaw American people, who laugh at prescriptivism and routinely shove members of national language academy groups into lockers between classes.
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50767/is-a-ways-to-go-grammatically-correct
“My argument about metaphysical right and wrong would be: there is no moral code separate from humanity, which is a very different proposition than saying that any individual’s moral code is equivalent to any other individual’s moral code.”
I’d put it a bit differently. I would say that we can’t really describe morality apart from the interaction between moral agents. But then again we describe gravity as the way two masses interact. And masses are defined as the stuff that causes gravitational interaction. We describe electricity as interactions between two objects with charge. So I don’t see the fact that you can’t talk about morality until you have moral actors to talk about any more of an ‘objective’ failing than the fact that there isn’t any use talking about electrical interactions unless you have objects with charge.
Objective morality doesn’t claim that morality exists free floating from moral objects/actors. It claims that given a set of actors and certain sets of circumstances, there is an actually wrong thing to do or right thing to do.
I think the problem atheists have with the concept is that theists are so sure that if you don’t have a governing moral God as one of the parties that you can’t have moral interactions. But they thought that about magnetic and electrical interactions too, so I’m not sure why you should throw out the moral interactions with the theist explanations for them.
The other thing that atheists don’t like is that for hard moral cases theists try to shut down argument by appealing to God’s view on the matter. But they tried to do that with gravitation too. You can reject the idea that God made gravitation without rejecting the idea that things with mass function a certain way.
” I’d say one of the points of morality is to reduce suffering in the world, and we’re getting better at that, too, though obviously we still have a ways to go.”
Statements like this are appeals to objective morality. Which is great.
I don’t understand why Amp says it isn’t.
Statements like this are appeals to objective morality.
How so?
I mean, it CAN BE such an appeal, sure. The objective morality laid down by the gods demands a reduction in suffering, etc.
But “seeing people suffer makes me feel guilty for irrational reasons, and interferes with my enjoyment of my personal army of Firefly sex slaves (1/2 Nathan lookalikes, 1/2 Morenas) so I think we need to reduce suffering in the world purely so that my lazy hedonistic lifestyle will not be diminished in value” is, if overblown and wordy, at least as possible as “Jesus wants it” as a motivator. Probably more honestly subscribed too, too; Jesus makes you look good if you lie and say you’re doing it for him, but the sex traffickers are going to seem a little sketchy.
The main problem I have with claims of objective morality is that it just so happens that my personal morality lines up pretty perfectly with objective morality, but Robert’s personally morality seems a little divorced from objective reality, and the personal morality of an 8th century Norse theologian seems really far from objective morality. While we can explain that progression with a declaration that personal morality is a technology that has been improving, and 8th century Norse theologians just knew a lot less about objective morality than any modern American, that seems really suspect (as does the idea that modern Americans speak better English than Chaucerian English speakers did).
Morality does seem like it has some basic constants or near constants across human societies (although I am not an anthropologist, so that is just an impression), but most of our morality seems more like how our society structures human obligations than like a fundamental truths that the 8th century Norse hadn’t discovered.
I’m okay with calling the those cross-cultural constants objective morality (and they certainly don’t require a deity), but I don’t see any basis except convenience for calling the more culture specific portions of morality objectively true.
Many cultures hold that it is moral for women to be subordinate to men, that it is immoral to have sex with people of your own gender or to have sex outside of marriage. To me, all of those positions are obviously wrong, and within my cultural historical context, those positions seem like they violate fundamental cross-cultural moral principles, but from within their own cultural historical context they may or may not. I don’t actually need to claim that my personal cultural-historical approved morals are objectively the best morals for all people in all times in order for me to advocate for my preferred morals within any context in which I can so advocate.
Probably that comes across as incoherent, but I think that the pursuit of coherence at all costs often leads to systems of thought that are coherent but objectively wrong (and often immoral).
Of course, the specifics of modern American morality, and the specifics of my morality, are objectively what they are. They are describable. They are a thing that exists.
There is a basic problem with trying to discuss philosophical concepts in a non-formal setting. None of us have much of an idea what any of the rest of us are trying to mean by “objective.”
Sebastian H wrote:
I prefer my moral code over that rapist’s moral code; to me, my moral code is better. Happily, many people agree with me, enough so that I live in a society that formally outlaws rape.
In the rapist’s opinion, his pro-rape moral code may be “better.” But I don’t care about that. From the point of view of a rock lying on the ground on Mars, there is no difference at all between the rapist’s moral code and mine; to the Mars rock, neither one is any better than the other. So in that sense ” any person’s code is as good as any other person’s code.”
But I don’t see any reason why I should take on the rapist’s perspective, or the Mars rock’s perspective, rather than my own. From my perspective, my moral code is better. Why should I need more than that?
Please accept that I believe what I say I believe. It’s hard to have a conversation if you can’t allow me at least that much benefit of the doubt.
I don’t think that’s possible. Can you distinguish between the two codes without any axiomatic grounding? What’s wrong with “falling back on some sort of axiomatic grounding,” exactly?
What, precisely, does “acting and talking as if they believe in real morality” consist of?
Finally, let me ask you: I take it you believe in what you call “real morality.” But how, specifically, do you know what “real morality” consists of? Do you have any objective means of determining the content of this real morality?
“But I don’t see any reason why I should take on the rapist’s perspective, or the Mars rock’s perspective, rather than my own. From my perspective, my moral code is better. Why should I need more than that?”
Don’t you think that society, as well as the rapist himself, would be better off if he adapted YOUR code, though? I imagine you think he should adopt it even if he would end up worse off, that society’s gain would outweigh his loss of justification for his desired behavior. I imagine that – given your deep hostility to the crime of rape and its encysting culture – you would even rather him take on your code in the unlikely hypothetical that it made society worse off somehow.
Sauce for the g0ose; if you have no reason to even consider his code and can reject it out of hand, then he must have the same freedom, no?
Amp,
Thanks for the response and the clarification.
Funny that Sebastian H said EXACTLY the thing that the post was about.
But, just to clarify further. I know you have said you do not believe in Natural Rights. Do you equate Natural Rights with Human Rights (I do, in the sense that we have them by virtue of our humanity and that is an appeal to objectivity)?
Because it would seem to me that, taking your position the only rights people really have would be Civil Rights (rights granted or recognized by a government or society). Do you agree?
Because, I think what trips up theists is that, basically, it would appear that your view boils down to something like “there is nothing wrong with slavery, or Jim Crow laws, but I prefer* a system that recognizes Equal (Civil) Rights for its citizens.” If I understand you, I believe you would agree with that statement. Rights and Morals are are creations or conventions of society. Is that what you are saying?
-Jut
*(By the way, I use the word “prefer” because, if you suggested a system was “better,” they would say “Better how? Better why? Objectivity! God, God, God! Do you really believe what you say you do?” “Prefer” keeps it more subjective, whereas “better” suggests some form of objectivity. There may be a better word, but I am trying to make the distinction clear.)
“Please accept that I believe what I say I believe. It’s hard to have a conversation if you can’t allow me at least that much benefit of the doubt.”
I do accept that you believe all sorts of things that you say you believe, but in this case some of the things you say you believe conflict with others and I’m trying to figure out what that means. I’m accepting the thousands of words I’ve read you write about rape, justice, and society and trying to understand how that works with your alleged non belief in objective morality. I’m approaching it from respect from a huge amount of what you say you believe and confusion about what you say you believe in this one instance.
Human beings are capable of all sorts split level understandings that don’t sit well with each other on close inspection. I’m not saying that your brain doesn’t register “there is no objective morality” when you ask the question directly. I’m saying that your whole presentation of nearly everything else you talk about in politics and human interactions makes it very confusing that you really believe that.
“I don’t think that’s possible. Can you distinguish between the two codes without any axiomatic grounding? What’s wrong with “falling back on some sort of axiomatic grounding,” exactly? ”
Acckk. This is exactly what I mean. There is NOTHING wrong with falling back on some sort of axiomatic grounding. But YOUR argument doesn’t allow for it. Mine does, because I believe in a real morality. Yours doesn’t, because you don’t believe in a real morality. Which is why I ask you how you do it. Of course I think that in order to distinguish between the two you need an axiomatic grounding that says ‘rape is bad’. What I’m asking is how you do so without it because you claim it doesn’t exist.
“What, precisely, does “acting and talking as if they believe in real morality” consist of?”
It consists of fighting the rape culture, arguing for human rights, fighting against oppression, being offended by injustices that don’t directly touch you or your friends and pretty much every other thing we talk about here.
“But I don’t see any reason why I should take on the rapist’s perspective, or the Mars rock’s perspective, rather than my own. From my perspective, my moral code is better. Why should I need more than that?”
But you don’t just do that. You also want to put him in jail for following his perspective. You want to thwart him from pursuing his objectives, by force if necessary, and perhaps even by lethal force if directly confronted with an immediate threat of him going about it. You wouldn’t do that over a difference of opinion about what color a car should be or whether or not he prefers sci fi to fantasy. You aren’t acting like it is a mere difference of opinion.
“Finally, let me ask you: I take it you believe in what you call “real morality.” But how, specifically, do you know what “real morality” consists of?”
I look at things which cause harm to other people. I look at things which fail to help other people. The failure of perfect agreement about the description of morality is not the same as believing it doesn’t exist. Rounding up Jews and killing them is wrong, it isn’t just a difference of opinion between different people in charge. If you want to argue that lots of things don’t have easily observable moral answers because in lots of cases the variables are too complex to convey without actually experiencing them, or that morality isn’t particularly implicated in lots of situations that people talk about as if it were, *those* are arguments that makes sense to me in the context of everything else you write about. The argument “there is no way to really tell if the Holocaust was wrong” doesn’t.
You objectively don’t treat moral disagreements like you treat opinion disagreements. I think you want to say something like “they matter more” which is certainly true. But you weirdly also want to undercut your ability to say “they matter more” because you are removing the content from “matter” and “more”.
I’m not Amp, but I’ll answer as an atheist who holds similar views. I suspect other atheists will, as well.
Yes. When someone discusses natural rights, god-given rights, or human rights, they are simply making a statement that “these are rights which we, subjectively, believe should be available to all people, to the exclusion of competing rights.” Alternatively, they may simply be referring to a right which is used by a large enough supermajority of humans that it approaches universality, at least for the moment.
Yes. Moreover, those are the only effective rights. Think of it this way: if you have some sort of god-given right not to be burned at the stake, what on earth would that matter in colonial Salem? If you had a human right to be free, what would that matter if you’re a black slave in 1810 USA?
The “boils down to” is important, and incorrect. There IS something wrong with slavery, which is that I think it’s wrong, and so does almost everyone else.
There is nothing objectively wrong with slavery any more than there is something objectively wrong with gay sex. The lack of objective standards don’t make things more or less wrong, they just relate to the universal lack of standards.
And not to be too snarky about it, but I don’t see how theists can claim to be so “tripped up” because there isn’t an anti-slavery objective standard. Hello? Have you read the Bible lately?
Yup. Although, as noted above, there’s almost certainly some genetic predispositions as well. Humans (and other species) appear on average to be hard-wired with at least some minimal preferences for certain models of social interaction.
Knowing more about our bodies and brains would at least make a way to have measurements. After all, if we could understand what we were hard-wired for, we’d at least be able to judge an action on the scale of compliance with genetic predisposition. But that wouldn’t tell us whether measurements were moral, amoral, good, or bad: even if Joe is genetically predisposed to kill fertile males and rape fertile females, we still want Joe to avoid those things.
Quickly. Atheists don’t believe in God – that’s it. There’s absolutely nothing stopping an atheist from believing in objective morality. They are totally independent.
I think Amp is confusing objective with something that exists. Objective means something that it true independent of personal preference. e^(i * pi) = -1 is objective.
If you believe in materialism that has moral implications. People have been burnt alive for being atheists. Unsurprisingly, atheists construct a morality around topics like freedom of speech, which allows them to voice an opinion they think is true. That’s at least quasi-objective as it depends on the true state of the universe. You can change people minds on some moral questions by convincing them of materialism.
G&W:
No! Just Amp! (LaLaLaLa-I can’t hear you)
I agree it is important, but disagree that it is incorrect. You say there is something wrong with slavery, which is that you think it is wrong (along with lots of other people, which I think is beside the point for purposes of my response). That sentence crossed the objective/subjective divide. It (objectively) IS wrong, because I (subjectively) think it is. That you think it is wrong has NOTHING to do with whether it is or not, unless you and I are not in agreement about what “wrong” means.
No, the lack of objective standards means nothing is more or less right or wrong. The lack of objective standards renders everything objectively amoral. If morality is then a completely subjective judgment or opinion, it is kind of pointless to talk about. Right and wrong, good and evil almost become empty concepts; they gets reduced to “socially acceptable/socially unacceptable.” “Morality” becomes, like manners and customs, rules that a society adopts as the proper way to act in that societal group.
-Jut
Amp, sorry about the box-quote debacle.
I box-quoted 2 of G&W’s paragraphs and then decided to comment in the middle. Obviously, my fix did not work. The first and third paragraphs are G&W’s. The second and fourth should not be boxed in.
-Jut
[Fixed!]
No, it’s an appeal to a human-defined metric for what morality does. I didn’t say “The point of morality is to reduce suffering in the world,” I said, “I’d say one of the points of morality is to reduce suffering in the world.” That wasn’t a weasel phrase, that was an intrinsic part of the argument. My point, to put it more concisely than I did in that previous comment (sorry, shouldn’t comment late at night, I get…verbose), is that we don’t have to take everyone at their word as far as morality goes: we can also say, if we agree that one point of morality is to reduce suffering, then even if we don’t agree on a code of morality, we can both evaluate Amp’s code and a rapist’s code and say that Amp’s does a better job at achieving the goal of reducing suffering. But we’re also, in that case, judging the codes of morality against a human consensus and not against an objective idea of what morality should be.
(Which was the point of the “better English” argument as well–under a metric that says language should convey ideas, so languages that can convey more ideas more easily are better at being languages, modern English is better than older versions. There are lots of metrics, though, where that comparison is nonsense, including “conducting your daily business.”)
Technically, we define gravity as the way a mass interacts with spacetime and then the way spacetime interacts with any particle, mass-having or not. (And mass is also defined with reference to momentum, and there’s a lot more to electromagnetism than two particles with charge, but anyway…)
And thanks, Robert. Of course there’s an English-language Stack Exchange…