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This is of course obviously false. Morality is a part of human nature. It isn't gifted by the supernatural. Therefore concepts like justice, good, bad have a

This is of course obviously false. Morality is a part of human nature. It isn't gifted by the supernatural. Therefore concepts like justice, good, bad have as real an existence as you. If humans are part of the natural order so is natural law.

kristofferR 14y ago
I'm sorry for the misunderstanding, but I'm as strong as a non-believer in the supernatural/religious you can possibly be. I'm certainly not arguing that a supernatual force is determining what is good or bad, I'm arguing for the exact opposite - that there is no such predetermined thing in nature and that it is a purely human construct/idea. What I'm saying is simply that nothing is inherently good or bad, it's humans who assign the purely human concepts of fairness/justice/goodness/badness to things/actions/events.
- shawn-butler 14y ago
  Yes, I belive I understood you. I think apparently I haven't been clear. You are part of the natural order, the same as that tree growing outside my window. Part of what being human is, is to have a sense of what is just. As a result, that sense we all share of what is just is also part of the natural order not a fictional arbitrary construct. Determining that a mother that eats her infant out of spite is an evil act is indeed as fully natural as the growth of the tree towards the sun. There are constructed, "positive" laws obviously. That it is wrong to jaywalk for example. That it is wrong to torture living creatures to cause pain (and for those creatures with temporal understanding, suffering) on the other hand is not. The latter flows from or is immanent in nature and is an example of natural law. It governs even the behavior of non-humans. Deviations from the natural order have consequences. Some Eastern cultures raise this cause and effect relationship to the level of a force no less powerful or useful than gravitation for explaining the world (karma for example). In Western cultures, this recognition of the natural order forms the basis of many legal systems. The concept of natural right or natural law in fact is what the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution are founded upon. There is a long history of the subject if you want to learn more as I obviously have done a bad job of explaining. The work of contemporary jurists like John Finnis [0] at Oxford might be worthwhile. [0]: Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford University Press, 1997)
  - kristofferR 14y ago
    Okay, I understand what you're saying now, but I strongly disagree. To me it sounds a lot like just another human concept used to explain (what I consider) the human concept of morality. I think it is a philosophic/cultural/religious way of thinking about it, but certainly not a scientific one. If morality was the constant of nature you believe it is I don't see any reason why our morality would have changed in the massive ways it has throughout human history and still varies so much around the world. There are still hundreds of millions of humans around the world who hates homosexuals with every bit of their "soul"/mind, who don't have even a tiny bit of empathy for gays who are killed or tortured. The vast majority of humanity is still eating animal meat, most without much worry about the well being of the animals. Torture is still commonly used and justified around the globe, even by very intelligent Americans [1]. Considering how much what we consider moral/immoral varies/has varied through history around the world I don't see any reason to believe it is a constant of nature. It seems muuuuch more likely to me that it is determined by our cultures and societies than by nature, otherwise you would expect to see much greater similarities. [1] Here's a story from a just a few days ago: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/joe-scarborough-claims-zero-dark-thirty-torture-scene-true-screenwriter-and-facts-disagree/ http://www.mediaite.com/tv/joe-scarborough-claims-zero-dark-...
    - shawn-butler 14y ago
      You are conflating ethics with morality and choice/action with effect. The question posed was why do Bad things happen to good people? You noted that, from I assume a scientific perspective, bad things are just often random occurrences that people artifically label as "bad." My response is that Bad things are not random and result from a deviation from the natural order and that our sense of that wrongness from those deviations is not supernatural. To put it in a more realistic scenario (I only used torture previously because even non-human species have been shown to avoid and punish torture). Let's say I begin to suffer from chronic dehabilitating headaches and these headaches force me to stop doing the charity work I have done all my life and I become depressed to the point of contemplating suicide. I have no family history, genetic disposition, history of drug abuse etc. What I did do was build a house in 2002 that used imported drywall from China containing volatile chemicals that have been emitting sulfurous gases, carbon disulfide, carbonyl sulfide, and hydrogen sulfide which have been absorbed into my body altering my chemical makeup ever since. Is it by a random path that those molecules found their way into my body? Or is it a result of the actions of people disregarding their sense of wrongness? Yes. Am I also free from fault? No. Because I am part of and have benefitted directly from a culture that values paying the least at any cost and doesn't properly price environmental damage/costs into the marketplace. I could have built my house smaller for example paying a higher price for building materials. I could speak to your other example of discrimination by sexual orientation in the context of natural law, but I would face immediate downvotes and this isn't really the place for that discussion. We will just have to agree to disagree that human ethics hasn't really progressed that much in the last few thousand years. Natural law persists but what humans value obviously alters over time. That is, how strictly a culture decides to punish acts of torture of animals is a reflection of the culture, not evidence of its wrongness or the nature of the act. Personally, I believe that the slower rate of progress in removing Bad things from happening is largely that say unlike physics or chemistry, there is no way to improve the pedagogy of morality. With the introduction of mathematics and the creation of a universal language for scientific understanding progress at a remarkably faster rate was achieved in the last few hundred years because it is easily transmitted between generations. The only way moral education is imparted from generation to generation is by example. You can't educate morality beyond telling stories and parables and living by example so positive changes more in accord with natural order are limited in scope by time and geography. I think if you surveyed those people who justify torture in our time if torturing their children was wrong, you would find overwhelmingly that that they would say it was, but that they believe they have a right or should be able to do it to "others" based on some circumstance (such as they did some other Bad act). Doesn't mean they know that the act of torture is any less contrary to the natural order or that it won't have consequences as a result, just that they are choosing to value something else greater (and, wrongly I might add). Similarly if you asked someone eating an omelette how it tasted before and after you gave them the experience of the conditions in a factory chicken farm, you would generally get a very different response. It has been shown actually to alter the perception of the taste of food in subjects and induces disgust, that is how tuned to the natural order humans are.

kristofferR 14y ago

I'm sorry for the misunderstanding, but I'm as strong as a non-believer in the supernatural/religious you can possibly be. I'm certainly not arguing that a supernatual force is determining what is good or bad, I'm arguing for the exact opposite - that there is no such predetermined thing in nature and that it is a purely human construct/idea. What I'm saying is simply that nothing is inherently good or bad, it's humans who assign the purely human concepts of fairness/justice/goodness/badness to things/actions/events.

shawn-butler 14y ago
Yes, I belive I understood you. I think apparently I haven't been clear. You are part of the natural order, the same as that tree growing outside my window. Part of what being human is, is to have a sense of what is just. As a result, that sense we all share of what is just is also part of the natural order not a fictional arbitrary construct. Determining that a mother that eats her infant out of spite is an evil act is indeed as fully natural as the growth of the tree towards the sun. There are constructed, "positive" laws obviously. That it is wrong to jaywalk for example. That it is wrong to torture living creatures to cause pain (and for those creatures with temporal understanding, suffering) on the other hand is not. The latter flows from or is immanent in nature and is an example of natural law. It governs even the behavior of non-humans. Deviations from the natural order have consequences. Some Eastern cultures raise this cause and effect relationship to the level of a force no less powerful or useful than gravitation for explaining the world (karma for example). In Western cultures, this recognition of the natural order forms the basis of many legal systems. The concept of natural right or natural law in fact is what the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution are founded upon. There is a long history of the subject if you want to learn more as I obviously have done a bad job of explaining. The work of contemporary jurists like John Finnis [0] at Oxford might be worthwhile. [0]: Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford University Press, 1997)
- kristofferR 14y ago
  Okay, I understand what you're saying now, but I strongly disagree. To me it sounds a lot like just another human concept used to explain (what I consider) the human concept of morality. I think it is a philosophic/cultural/religious way of thinking about it, but certainly not a scientific one. If morality was the constant of nature you believe it is I don't see any reason why our morality would have changed in the massive ways it has throughout human history and still varies so much around the world. There are still hundreds of millions of humans around the world who hates homosexuals with every bit of their "soul"/mind, who don't have even a tiny bit of empathy for gays who are killed or tortured. The vast majority of humanity is still eating animal meat, most without much worry about the well being of the animals. Torture is still commonly used and justified around the globe, even by very intelligent Americans [1]. Considering how much what we consider moral/immoral varies/has varied through history around the world I don't see any reason to believe it is a constant of nature. It seems muuuuch more likely to me that it is determined by our cultures and societies than by nature, otherwise you would expect to see much greater similarities. [1] Here's a story from a just a few days ago: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/joe-scarborough-claims-zero-dark-thirty-torture-scene-true-screenwriter-and-facts-disagree/ http://www.mediaite.com/tv/joe-scarborough-claims-zero-dark-...
  - shawn-butler 14y ago
    You are conflating ethics with morality and choice/action with effect. The question posed was why do Bad things happen to good people? You noted that, from I assume a scientific perspective, bad things are just often random occurrences that people artifically label as "bad." My response is that Bad things are not random and result from a deviation from the natural order and that our sense of that wrongness from those deviations is not supernatural. To put it in a more realistic scenario (I only used torture previously because even non-human species have been shown to avoid and punish torture). Let's say I begin to suffer from chronic dehabilitating headaches and these headaches force me to stop doing the charity work I have done all my life and I become depressed to the point of contemplating suicide. I have no family history, genetic disposition, history of drug abuse etc. What I did do was build a house in 2002 that used imported drywall from China containing volatile chemicals that have been emitting sulfurous gases, carbon disulfide, carbonyl sulfide, and hydrogen sulfide which have been absorbed into my body altering my chemical makeup ever since. Is it by a random path that those molecules found their way into my body? Or is it a result of the actions of people disregarding their sense of wrongness? Yes. Am I also free from fault? No. Because I am part of and have benefitted directly from a culture that values paying the least at any cost and doesn't properly price environmental damage/costs into the marketplace. I could have built my house smaller for example paying a higher price for building materials. I could speak to your other example of discrimination by sexual orientation in the context of natural law, but I would face immediate downvotes and this isn't really the place for that discussion. We will just have to agree to disagree that human ethics hasn't really progressed that much in the last few thousand years. Natural law persists but what humans value obviously alters over time. That is, how strictly a culture decides to punish acts of torture of animals is a reflection of the culture, not evidence of its wrongness or the nature of the act. Personally, I believe that the slower rate of progress in removing Bad things from happening is largely that say unlike physics or chemistry, there is no way to improve the pedagogy of morality. With the introduction of mathematics and the creation of a universal language for scientific understanding progress at a remarkably faster rate was achieved in the last few hundred years because it is easily transmitted between generations. The only way moral education is imparted from generation to generation is by example. You can't educate morality beyond telling stories and parables and living by example so positive changes more in accord with natural order are limited in scope by time and geography. I think if you surveyed those people who justify torture in our time if torturing their children was wrong, you would find overwhelmingly that that they would say it was, but that they believe they have a right or should be able to do it to "others" based on some circumstance (such as they did some other Bad act). Doesn't mean they know that the act of torture is any less contrary to the natural order or that it won't have consequences as a result, just that they are choosing to value something else greater (and, wrongly I might add). Similarly if you asked someone eating an omelette how it tasted before and after you gave them the experience of the conditions in a factory chicken farm, you would generally get a very different response. It has been shown actually to alter the perception of the taste of food in subjects and induces disgust, that is how tuned to the natural order humans are.