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Ultimately I believe my position is as knowable as many things. But as you notice, the wider point is that anytime we believe that humans have objective value o

• redial 10y ago
  You keep saying, in many different ways, that you can prove your hypothesis that morality is objective by inserting a god into the argument, followed by asserting the relativity of your position. I don't know how you are missing that.
  • keane 10y ago
    The argument isn't to "prove...that morality is objective" or, for that matter, to prove God exists. It is just an observation that "For morality to be Objective, this is the necessary dependency: God". It's not saying much more. Even when we understand and acknowledge Hume's observation, morality may or may not be Objective, God may or may not exist. But if God does not exist, morals are not Objective. Just our inventions, along with God and we used both for our comfort/survival/thriving. And what's fascinating is that in such a world, all those times Theists (and Atheist Humanists) proclaimed that humans had value without scientifically-accepted empirical evidence they would not have been acting Immorally/Wrong.
    • redial 10y ago
      >> The argument isn't to "prove...that morality is objective" or, for that matter, to prove God exists. It is just an observation that "For morality to be Objective, this is the necessary dependency: God". The argument is that for morality to be objective, something external must be the source. You are making a huge jump by calling it god, and then you go even further and claim it's the christian god. >> But if God does not exist, morals are not Objective. Just our inventions, along with God and we used both for our comfort/survival/thriving. If god does not exists is health an invention? Science has liberated us from attributing health to gods, I suspect the same will be true of morality. To me it already is more moral to care for someone just because they are a fellow human being than to do it because some ancient manuscript may have commanded it by fear of ironically, itself immoral and eternal torture. >> And what's fascinating is that in such a world, all those times Theists (and Atheist Humanists) proclaimed that humans had value without scientifically-accepted empirical evidence they would not have been acting Immorally/Wrong. I'm assuming you mean 'humans had no value'?
      • keane 10y ago
        >>The argument is that for morality to be objective, something external must be the source. This is what Hume shows. Can you refute his observation by providing a source of objective morality that is Empirical/not external/not supramundane? (You can't. There is none.) >>If god does not exists is health an invention? No and by volunteering a metaphor that compares the existence of objective moral facts (Values/Ought) with empirical facts like health (Facts/Is) you betray a laughable lack of understanding of the Is-Ought gap. >>Science has liberated us from attributing health to gods, I suspect the same will be true of morality. The question at hand is whether we do so tenably. >>because some ancient manuscript In the case of Christianity the attempt is to follow the instructions of an actual Person and the central feature of Christianity that distinguishes it from perhaps all other religions is that actions must lack self-interest, ruling out actions based on fear as Tim Keller explains http://subspla.sh/8149923 http://subspla.sh/8149923 >>immoral and eternal torture Conditional immortality is an area of exploration, cf. http://jewishnotgreek.com/ http://jewishnotgreek.com/ >>I'm assuming you mean 'humans had no value'? No, that's what I meant. If morality does not truly exist, it was not morally 'wrong' anytime humans proclaimed it truly did. We remember the realization of the Marquis de Sade that if God does not exist then everything that is, is Right; but further, if the unempirical does not exist, then proclaiming it does is not wrong. In the words of philosopher Thomas Nagel: "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either". Fun.
        • redial 10y ago
          >> In the case of Christianity the attempt is to follow the instructions of an actual Person and the central feature of Christianity that distinguishes it from perhaps all other religions is that actions must lack self-interest, ruling out actions based on fear as Tim Keller explains http://subspla.sh/8149923 http://subspla.sh/8149923 Every major religion claims a lack in self-interest. Almost all of them offer torture as dissuasion. >> This is what Hume shows. Can you refute his observation by providing a source of objective morality that is Empirical/not external/not supramundane? (You can't. There is none.) That is not what he shows, no one has been able to show this external source. That is what he postulates. And I think he is wrong. >> No and by volunteering a metaphor that compares the existence of objective moral facts (Values/Ought) with empirical facts like health (Facts/Is) you betray a laughable lack of understanding of the Is-Ought gap. What you don’t understand is that you only called them values because you have no explaination for them. Is-Ought is only a problem if you chain yourself to the baseless idea that Oughts have to be supramundane(??). Science can tell, empirically, what ought to be, and it already has in many many cases; it tells us with a very broad body of evidence that women are not inferior to men, thus we ought to treat them equally. Is that objective? it is objective enough at least in the same sense that medicine tells us objectibly that we ought not to vomit every day. That is why the analogy works. Your argument fails because at the end of the day it is nothing more than the god of the gaps argument: You don’t know were morality came from, therefore god.
    • mercer 10y ago
      Perhaps I don't completely understand your argument, but I don't really see how 'morals are not objective' and 'we act as if they are' is much of a problem. Most people I know also accept that humans are highly irrational in most areas of life, and yet at the same time are capable of rational thinking (and using science as a tool for this) and understanding these irrational processes. It always struck me a bit as 'begging the question' when Christians I talked to pointed out the inconsistency of 'not believing in objective morality' and yet 'holding strong moral viewpoints', because this very need for consistency kind of assumes that there should be such a consistency. Perhaps this is is a justifiable thought if you assume that there's a God who created things in an orderly fashion. But that's a premise many people don't share. While you might not be making this exact argument, my point is that if you can accept the, in my opinion, overwhelming evidence we are not very sensical creatures living in a not very sensical world, the problem you point out isn't really a problem. We have evolved to act as if there are moral absolutes, just as we perhaps have evolved to dress up our need to copulate, procreate, and combat loneliness as 'romantic love'. I can believe the latter and still be a romantic without any problems.
      • keane 10y ago
        True, it's unavoidable some humans are always going to be wrong. But, in the same vein as earlier, we can't reason that because (some) humans don't care about what is true, humans should continue to not care about what is true. As far as others suggesting you resolve inconsistencies and hold logically consistent conclusions: yes, to arrive at Truth by examining what logically follows from true and sound reasoning you are going to have to first adopt the 'dependency' of Western logic. But, indeed, you only need do this if you care to know Truth. Many humans reject the use of Western logic (eg, the New Age community) and prefer vague, unexamined existence but I agree this ultimately is each individual's prerogative. Your perspective seems to be "humans often hold untenable positions and Earth has not yet been destroyed because of this (or apparently impacted in any significant way from it) therefore I may (without impact) hold untenable positions", a position I and your Christian interlocutors I think unsurprisingly reject. My most sincere advice to you and to all everywhere is found in Rousseau's echo of Juvenal's motto "Vitam impendre vero"—you must stake your life on Truth. Re: your ability to be a romantic you'll note that the conclusion in Vladimir Solovyov's truncated syllogism "Man is descended from the apes; therefore we must love one another" does not follow. Materialists can practice what looks like romance but cannot be romantics in any meaningful sense of the word.
    • Snowe 10y ago
      I think what you are trying to say, or what you want to believe, is that for morality to be objective it needs a coercive power behind it. I'm surprised no one has brought up law as an analogy. There is seemingly no reason for many laws to exist other than the fact that historically it was what humans believed in the past to be right or wrong (eg. sodomy laws). Laws exist because most people agree to abide by them for the most part, because kings or parliament have codified them, and because they are enforced with coercive power. The reason morals exist is because people agreed with them, priests codified them and they are enforced with coercive power (not so much in modern secular society, but softer coercion such as shaming and shunning still exist). Laws are a social contract enforced with coercive power, I don't see how morals are much different. If you're arguing against those who can't see the gap between Is and Ought, that is fine, but I suspect most people have accepted and moved on from there once they realise it, and yet they still behave in moral ways for the most part.
      • keane 10y ago
        Morality is the differentiation of actions proper and improper; generally defined 'morals' is that language that contains imperatives: what humans should do (as sentences, called 'norms'). When we wonder why there seems to be a lack of behavior that follows these morals in the world, we approach the concept of morality from a descriptive sense (we observe that human behavior has changed). Increased insight in this pursuit is found when we examine how humans themselves have approached morality from a normative sense (what is actually proper and improper). When humans have considered morality they have come to understand that the morals humans proclaim—again, language that contains imperatives—either correspond to real, objective moral facts ("Moral Realism") or are merely invented delusions expressing human emotions ("Moral Nonrealism"). Prior to the Enlightenment, there was a category of accepted knowledge outside of empirically observed nature (e.g., the non-natural, supramundane, supernatural, etc). The Enlightenment itself was a shift in human thinking that rejected this category as invalid, switching our criteria of acceptable knowledge to the material, to the empirically observed. The shift in thinking did not happen all at once. Certain beliefs remained, held over from earlier times—somewhat as dependencies—until they could be examined and dismantled individually if they lacked empiric evidence. Western society's assumption that objective Moral Facts existed in a material universe remained for some time until examined by David Hume in 1738 in his A Treatise of Human Nature. Here Hume observed the difficult reality of the relationship between facts (that which is) and values (that which we claim ought to be), concluding that we cannot assert prescriptive or normative values based on descriptive facts. Hume's Is-Ought observation upset the world, and has resulted in our modern condition. If empirical observation is categorically never able to locate oughts, a world that accepts Empiricism alone is one forced from Moral Realism to Moral Nonrealism: morals no longer correspond to Objective Facts, but can only be understood as invented whims and emotions, which—apart from society's ability to enforce or inflict punishment for as a conditional consequence (what Kant termed 'hypothetical morality')—can be ignored without consequence. The transition from a society whose intellectuals and leaders held Moral Realism (viz, Christendom) to one where artists, philosophers, and intelligentsia hold Moral Nonrealism (the Modern West) has been a long, painful process since 1738. The Marquis de Sade astutely summed up the painful condition of man following Hume's revolution in thought saying "If there is no God, then everything that Is, is Right" and the majority of Western thought since then has either been in reaction against this belief (i.e., revivals of Evangelical Christianity) or experiments exploring this accepted world (e.g., Surrealism, Dada, Modern Art, Existentialism, Egoism/Individualism/Anarchism, Deconstructionism, Postmodernism, etc). From the introduction to Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor by the American Heidegger-scholar and philosopher Charles Guignon: Briefly put, the issue is this. Either God exists or He does not exist...if God does not exist, then the picture of the universe formulated by mechanistic materialism must be true. But, in this case, given the point of view of modern science (what Ivan calls "Euclidean reason"), the universe consists of nothing but meaningless material objects in causal interaction, effects follows cause according to the laws of physics, people are determined to do what they do, no one is guilty of anything, and so there are no such things as right or wrong, good or bad. Or, more precisely, the ideals of justice, goodness, benevolence, dignity, and so on turn out to be purely human inventions, the results of projecting our needs and wishes onto brute, meaningless matter, and so they are illusions lacking any basis in the order of things. ...Dostoevsky regarded [this] as the inevitable outcome of the perfectionist stance of detachment and moral superiority: the idea that, for higher people, "everything is lawful." [If] "God is dead"...then why not step outside the law and do whatever you want? From this standpoint, morality looks like a suckers game. The paradox [of] Westernized ideals, then, is that its austere discipline of detachment and self-transformation tends to undermine its own moral underpinnings. In the end this form of idealism spawns a self-serving moral nihilism.