Is God or religion necessary for morality?

[BurtWorm]

As an atheist, I don't think so. What do you think?

[sui generis]

1. is morality necessary to be a "good" person?

I think we've let the religious right make some absurd claims about morality without fully understanding it.

Remember, what's very moral for us is pretty damn immoral for the cow.

[trotsky]

2. Great Einstein quote.

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed." -- A. Einstein

[eallen]

3. If a god defines your morality, you have no basis for thinking him good.

To believe your god is good, in any meaningful sense, logically requires a notion of morality that is independent of your god.

[Kerrytravelers]

5. As a Christian, I agree with the Athiest. Morality isn't defined by any

one "God." MOrality is based on the right and just behavior. God is merely the crutch for those who are immoral to feel superior.

[austinguy]

64. But if there is no God, there is no morality

Because to judge the "goodness" or "the badness" of an act necessarily implies the existence of an objective standard against which to measure or compare the action. The objective standard must be immutable (unchanging) or else the objective standard would not be a true standard at all. And the standard must be one of perfect goodness (i.e., unsullied by any "badness"). This unchanging, ever perfect standard is God or of God, the definition and source of all that is good. Thus, the very fact that there are moral standards about which all rational people agree (thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not lie; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not commit adultery; etc) is a proof of the existence of God.

[eallen]

71. What nonsense!

"To judge the "goodness" or "the badness" of an act necessarily implies the existence of an objective standard against which to measure or compare the action. The objective standard must be immutable (unchanging) or else the objective standard would not be a true standard at all."

The notion that a standard doesn't count because it changes is nonsense. The standards of surgical practice are different today from a 100 years ago. So have the standards of civil engineering, naval architecture, and legal practice. These standards are objective and codified. "Objective" does not imply "immutable." Your claim otherwise is ideological nonsense.

[aneerkoinos]

72. Well, yes

Objective does imply immutable. The standards you refer to are not objective, but social codifications (which are of course very true standards, even if not immutable).

Personally, I suggest discarding all notions about "goodness", "badness", "objectivity" and "immutability" as ideological nonsense... :)

[eallen]

73. Then you're using an odd notion of "objective."

With regard to a standard, "objective" usually means that there is some kind of procedure that determines whether the standard is met, which procedure yields the same results when applied by different people. That's opposed to subjective, where the measure varies according to personal taste, i.e., whether the soup is too salty.

Immutable is a different quality, and is not implied by objective.

[aneerkoinos]

83. Standard

Ah, what you mean is objective as strive for the "ideal". The standard itself is naturally not objective (but product of negotiation and compromise), and neither is interpretation of it and the judgements by the participants on how well the standard is met, but sure, "objective" is present as ideal. That's just one of the meanings of "objective", objective as methodology and ideal (but unreachable) target of that methodology.

As for immutability and objectivity, if the standard itself is supposed to be objective, that does strongly imply immutability.

[eallen]

87. I see you live in the fantasy-based community.

I'll stick with the prosaic notions of good, bad, and objective. The fantasy notions I'll leave for Rev. Falwell and his ilk.

[aneerkoinos]

91. Up yours, too :)

I'm just not in state of denial about the fact that all of us live in fantasy-based communities. Where some can do a bit philosophy and a bit of poetry, and others just stick to the prosaic fiction of their given community.

[arcane1]

4. not sure what you mean by morality.. but the answer is still no

[BurtWorm]

8. Morality, for the purposes of this question, means standards of behavior

that promote or hinder the social contract. Feeding, helping, educating are moral. Random killing, thieving and rape are immoral. So the question is, do we need religion to instruct us in what is moral and immoral?

Many theists have made the argument that religion is necessary partly because it provides a moral compass. I tend to think evolution is more of a determinant of moral behavior. Whatever promotes social cohesion is "moral." Whatever hinders it is "immoral." Of course it's a vastly more complicated issue than this, when the individual is taken into account, but in a nutshell, I think evolution determines morality.

[kwassa]

12. Partial agreement

"Many theists have made the argument that religion is necessary partly because it provides a moral compass. I tend to think evolution is more of a determinant of moral behavior. Whatever promotes social cohesion is "moral." Whatever hinders it is "immoral." Of course it's a vastly more complicated issue than this, when the individual is taken into account, but in a nutshell, I think evolution determines morality."

From a historical framework, religion is a source of morality, more specifically monotheistic religion. Justice was seen to eminate from God, as the one source of all things. Animistic or panthestic religions often had gods that were capricious, or at war with one another.

Religion also promoted social cohesion. I don't think evolution had much to do with it; anthropology probably had much more. All human cultures had religions, which would indicate a basic need for religion among humans that is universal.

Ethics and mores, independent of gods, really came from the Greeks. Obviously, moral behavior can be completely independent of religion, and fealty to a particular religion is no guarantee of morality.

[BurtWorm]

15. From my perspective, religion is an evolutionary development

If religion had not served to promote the species, it would have been 86'd long ago.

Evolution had everything to do with our nature as social animals. We inherited our sociability from our nearest primate ancestors.

[arcane1]

19. agreed

[Az]

6. Not necissary, but

Religion is a very effective way for communicating an evolved set of moral standards. Much more efficient than hoping everyone is able to work them out at the same pace.

Initially a society that develops a religious explanation for its moral an ethical codes is going to outpace a society that has no such central code. There will be a stronger bond within the community and a more cohesive sense of how to behave.

But over time this becomes problematic. As progress is made and new concepts and cultures are discovered the dogmatic approach to social codes becomes restrictive and confining. Eventually the shift leads to social chaos and upheaval as various factions battle for dominance. It is at this point that the society has developed enough shared notions of morality and ethics that it can begin to rely on secular means of determinging morality and shift away from dogma.

[sui generis]

10. at first blush I might agree

but even with children in a secular society dogma comes first.

I don't necessarily buy into religion as necessary for moral development. Throughout history religion has been a tool used to centralize power over superstitious uneducated populations. Why not also use it to deploy "dogmatic" morality? In fact the ancient Romans thought it immoral (and criminal) not to regularly sacrifice to the gods on holy days.

I think that religious societies tend to be more warlike and aggressive than secular societies; maybe if a few of those had survived, we might have seen alternatives to having various ideals of morality crammed down our throat by high priests, popes, bishops, and kings with "divine right".

[BurtWorm]

11. That's an interesting observation.

Left to ourselves, we might never go to war--which isn't to say we'd never engage in violence against other humans. But religious morality--state-sanctioned religious morality--maybe makes it possible for people to take up arms for a cause far removed from themselves, because the religion pronounces it moral to take up arms as a member of the state and immoral not to.

[kwassa]

14. I disagree

sui:
"I think that religious societies tend to be more warlike and aggressive than secular societies; "

Hitler's Nazis, Stalin and Mao's versions of Communism brought about the deaths of tens of millions of people. Completely secular, and no religious war comes close in the level of mass murder involved.

[BurtWorm]

17. Hitler's Nazis were not completely secular.

And one could argue that Stalin and Mao, as centers of cults of personality, were gods of a new kind of religion.

[kwassa]

26. but they weren't religions as they defined themselves

[BurtWorm]

28. They demanded to be worshiped. They were no different from

any pharaoh or emperor in that respect.

[kwassa]

29. A cult of personality is not a religion

[BurtWorm]

30. Why not? Who says?

[kwassa]

31. The dictionary

re·li·gion ( P ) Pronunciation Key (r-ljn)
n.

Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.
The life or condition of a person in a religious order.
A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=religion

[BurtWorm]

33. A set of beliefs, values, and practices

based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.

A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.

Even:

Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.

A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.


All of these can hold in some personality cults that transform the head fo the cult into a godhead, a stand-in for the divine. Even if the divine is not explicitly referred to in such cults, even if the supernatural is denigrated in them, they take the form of ancient ruler-worshiping cults, complete with codes of behavior, icons, rituals and ceremonies--even little red books of aphorisms. Were those who worshiped the pharaohs or emperors not religious? If you accept that they were in that context, I don't see how you can argue against Maoism or Stalinism or any other cult of personality as religions.

[kwassa]

36. oh, please, you need to change word definitions to win this argument

very weak, indeed.

Bottom line, religous wars have nowhere near the death toll of secular wars.

AND in many wars religion is just a cover for a power grab.

[BurtWorm]

40. From an atheist's perspective, there is almost no difference between

a supernatural cult and a cult of personality as far as the effect each has on a society goes. Each requires a certain relinquishing of freedom and abnegation of the self in service of a larger cause, whether it be "God" or "Stalin" or "fatherland."

From a theist's perspective, I would imagine you think the (presumably) "divine" nature of the object of worship is a glaring difference? I don't see why that should be so.

[kwassa]

41. The effects can be similar, or very different

and many religious folk would argue against the idea that they are relinquishing freedom, but perhaps finding greater freedom.

Either way, secular governments don't fit the definitions of religion, or religious governance.

[BurtWorm]

44. A government that is omnipotent and that gets to define morality

is a theocracy, it seems to me, regardless of whether its object of worship is a god or a dictator.

[Az]

35. The word religion matters little

What matters is how the people are affected by the institutions in question. What hooks they grab on to in order to affect their control. The same psychology that is at work in strong dogmatic religious institutions can be found in strong dogmatic governmental institutions such as Marxist Communism and Hitler's Nazi Germany.

[kwassa]

37. So, the enemy isn't religion, it is dogmatism, isn't it? Then fight

dogmatism, not religion.

Including atheistic dogmatism.

Dogmatism of any kind.

[Az]

57. Now you are talking

My battle has always been with dogmatic authority. Whether it attaches itself to a religion or a political structure they are deadly.

[kwassa]

62. Thanks! Nice to see somebody gets my point!

[sui generis]

18. well two things

Nazi Germany manipulated religious people and then began disposing of Catholic priests when they thought that catholicism would be a challenge to their power instead of a tool.

You gave a few "big" examples, but there are countless examples of religious wars throughout known human history over things as profoundly stupid as consubstantiation vs. transsubstantiation, and in my opinion more human evil has been done in the name of divinity than the pursuit of religion could ever hope to justify. Hitler and Stalin and Mao merely redirected "worship" to themselves, brooking no disagreement or political heresy on pain of death.

[kwassa]

27. It would be tough to match the death tolls of secular dicators

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge supposedly wiped out 1/3 of living Cambodians.

Saddam supposedly killed 100,000 Iraqis, and he is also a secular Baathist.

[lazarus]

34. And the millions killed in the 20th century

far, far outnumber all the people killed in all the religious wars since the whole thing started, don't they?

On a percentage basis, God owns the mass murder crown, wiping out all of humanity (sans drunken Noah and family). That's damned near 100%.

And he ordered the Israelites multiple times to wipe out entire groups of people.

[kwassa]

38. What's your point?

I don't understand your post.

[lazarus]

59. My point is

That, on a percentage basis, God is the greatest mass murderer in history, wiping out virtually the entire human race.

That, over the course of several millenia, untold millions have died in religious wars.

Getting worked up over two or three dictators in the 20th century, and thinking that their actions prove something, is way off base.

[kwassa]

61. You have offered zero substantiation, which makes your argument

lame.

You haven't risen from the dead, yet, Lazarus.

[lazarus]

107. Substantiation?

In the Bible alone there are millions of deaths on God's orders. Here's a few:

Genesis, Chapter 7
21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:

7:22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

I'd say on a strictly per capita basis, that puts God at the head of the mass murder list. Everyone except Noah and his family. 99.999999999% of humanity wiped out.

Unless it didn't happen. Let's head to real history:

The Thirty Years War is estimated to have killed 11.5 million people. That was a religious war, btw.

The Crusades took out about 9 million.

Hitler took out quite a few million, and yes that was religious in nature.

The violence in the Middle East is religious in nature.

Violence in Ireland, same thing.

Serbia/Croatia, India, Pakistan, Algeria, all filled with violence based on religion.

1 million dead (at least) in the Muslim/Christian war in the Sudan.

And I'll leave you with this:

http://www.holysmoke.org/haught/homicide.html

"When the First Crusade was launched against "infidels" in the Holy Land, mob-like armies gathered around Europe. Some Germans followed a goose thought to be enchanted by God. It led them into Jewish neighborhoods, where they slaughtered the residents. Advancing Christian armies decapitated Muslims and catapulted the heads into beseiged cities. Finally, the crusaders captured Jerusalem and massacred the populace. A chronicler priest wrote: "In the temple of Solomon, one rode in blood up to the knees and even the bridles of horses, by the just and marvelous judgment of God"

After a Vatican council proclaimed that the host wafer miraculously turns into Jesus' body during the mass, rumors spread that Jews were stealing the wafers and driving nails through them to crucify Jesus again. Murderous mobs wiped out more than 100 Jewish communities to avenge the tortured host.

Other massacres stemmed from rumors that Jews were sacrificing Christian children and using their blood in rituals.

When the Albigenses Christians in southern France wouldn't conform to official dogma, Pope Innocent III sent troops to exterminate them. After the town of Beziers was captured, soldiers asked their papal adviser how to distinguish the faithful from the heretics among the townspeople. He commanded, "Kill them all. God will know his own." It was done.

The hunt for heretics led to establishment of the Office of the Inquisition. Pope Innocent IV authorized torture. Shrieking victims were broken on fiendish machines and then paraded to the stake. Some were scientists like Giordano Bruno, who incurred the church's wrath by teaching that the planets orbit the sun.

In the 1400s, the Inquisition turned its attention to witchcraft. Clerics declared that some women were having sex with Satan, transforming themselves into animals, flying through the sky at night, and casting hexes on godly folk. The number of "witches" tortured and executed over three centuries is estimated from 100,000 to 2 million.

From the 1500s, members of India's Thuggee sect strangled people because they believed that the goddess Kali wanted her followers to eliminate excess lives generated by Brahma the Creator. Thugs were garroting an estimated 20,000 victims a year in the 1800s until British rulers stamped out the religion. At an 1840 trial, one Thug was accused of sacrificing 931 people.

The Reformation triggered two centuries of religious war that took millions of lives. Eight Huguenot-Catholic wars ravaged France. Protestant-Catholic slaughter sundered the Low Countries. England suffered killings when the Anglicans broke with Rome -- then more killings when the Puritans broke with the Anglicans. The Thirty Years War brought the worst religious death toll of all time. Amid the Catholic-Protestant combat in Europe, both sides paused to kill Anabaptists for their crime of double baptism.

Islamic jihads (holy wars) killed multitudes over the course of 12 centuries. First Muslims spread the faith west to Spain and east to India. Then breakaway sects branded other Muslims as infidels and warred against them. A jihad in the Nile Valley in the 1880s destroyed an Egyptian army and wiped out defenders of Khartoum, led by British General "Chinese" Gordon. Wahhabi believers crushed other Muslims and created the fundamentalist kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

After the Baha'i faith began in Iran in 1844, the Shi'ite majority killed Baha'is by the thousands -- and this persecution has continued into the 1990s.

Muslim and Hindu taboos led to the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857. British governors in India gave their native troops new paper cartridges that had to be bitten open. Animal grease on the cartridges infuriated Hindus, to whom cows are sacred, and Muslims, to whom pigs are satanic. Troops of both faiths rebelled and massacred Europeans.

In the late 1800s and again during World War I, Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians killed each other by the hundreds of thousands."


It goes on and on and on. The point remains, religion does nothing to make people peaceful. It appears to give them an excuse to get even more violent.

[sui generis]

46. I am bothered that you don't even mention

religious wars, which have been going on throughout history and to this very day. I certainly don't consider religion "the lesser evil", and I'll take a secular government any day of any year over a religious oligarchy or even a christian democracy.

[kwassa]

63. I won't take a secular dictatorship over a christian democracy

Simply because the great evil is dicatorship, regardless of the type, religious or secular.

I believe strongly in the separation of church and state, by the way, and would like to see all references to God taken off our dollar bills and out of the pledge of allegiance. I also endorse anyone's right to worship whatever religion they chose.

I think man's capacity for evil is always present in man. I actually think that good and evil are human concepts, that represent the two poles of possible human behavior. Any government that creates safeguards against exploitation by evil behavior is desirable, and democracy is the only one that does, so far.

[sui generis]

68. whew - you had me worried for a bit

although I wasn't claiming to support secular dictatorships myself in most cases I do believe that in some cultures a secular dictatorship is a necessary step of stability on the way to democracy. Until the "tribal" and "warlord" mentality is overcome, among other significant cultural differences, democracy won't ever work as intended and without ongoing violence in a country like Iraq. Musharraf knows this about Pakistan, and he has the additional burden of having to contend with ultra right wing muslim political factions who could easily "vote out" the idea of democracy.

Here in our democracy more than half of us voted for a president four years ago who was never sworn in, and whose opponent was safeguarded by the SCOTUS because he would have been "harmed" in any recount.

Here in our democracy we have gone to war pre-emptively to save the world from Weapons of Mass Destruction that never existed, and we then changed our tune to "fighting for our freedoms"(???), for which we gladly sacrificed over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, 2000 of our own children, and immeasurable goodwill in our search for the real culprit: oil.

I think it's funny that people say that Saddam killed "as many as" 100,000 people -- it's a convenient number that's come out just about now to "offset" the 100K we killed, as if the books are balanced now.

If you take all the people on both sides of the wars he's initiated you might get there, but that's not the same thing as someone who rounds up civilians and kills them, and Saddam most certainly did not kill 100,000 civilians and gloss over it the way we do. I'm not supporting Saddam at all, but we ARE manufacturing numbers here - I think it's probably closer to 10,000 in uprisings, the Kurd massacre, and his various political "activities".

At any rate, even if it was incontrovertibly 100,000 people, we are no better and no less guilty of those deaths as we sit here with our own heads up our asses about "right" and "wrong" and which forms of governance are more or less moral.

[lazarus]

32. So two examples are supposed to disprove the original statement?

sui:
"I think that religious societies tend to be more warlike and aggressive than secular societies."

You list the Nazis and Stalinists and Maoists.

First, the Nazis were not secular. I'll give you the Stalinists and Maoists.

Second, sui said "tend to be". To most people, that doesn't mean "always are". I can't imagine how you could interpret that statement to mean "Secular societies are never warlike and aggressive" because that's not what he said. At all.

[kwassa]

39. I think he was wrong, and I gave examples

and he didn't give any specifics.

[lazarus]

58. You gave three examples

One of which was wrong. And that did nothing to show that his statement was incorrect, since he didn't use an absolute, or ever claim that secular societies are peaceful.

[kwassa]

60. None was wrong, your argument is false, of course

[lazarus]

108. Excuse me?

You claimed Hitler was secular. That'd dead wrong. He was raised a Catholic, stated repeatedly throughout his life he was a Catholic. The SS had "Gott mitt uns" on their buckles.

The argument is right. Religious societies do tend to be more violent. Just look at my latest post upthread. I list quite a bit of "substantiation", something you haven't done, either, btw. Just listing a few dictators and blithely stating they killed more people in their few years than all the religious wars in history isn't an argument, it's a cry for help.

Once more, if you want to believe in the Bible, God is the greatest mass murderer of all time. He killed all but a handful of the entire human race, man woman and child.

[sybylla]

136. Gott mit Uns

Don't think you can include the Nazi's there. Regardless, whether religion is used as a tool or is denied as a tool, it is still a tool to control the populace. These weren't bastions of secularism. These were religious, moral people, brought up with religion and adherence to a particular moral code acting as they were required to under the transitory and not so transitory tyranny of madmen.

Because communism banishes religion, do you think the people in Russia and China suddenly had no moral compass? Without the everyday influence of religion did the people begin to murder their neighbors, steal and lie?

Tyranny knows no bounds and is non-discriminatory in choosing its breeding ground. On the other hand, religious wars specifically propagated to suit religious ends, like the Crusades, only evolve from one source.

[Az]

25. Not necissary

But at early stages of developing civilization a culture that encompasses a religious context is going to have an advantage. It is going to be able to spread faster as a result of the religions own nature to seek to spread itself.

[RobertSeattle]

7. This is one of the core dividers between Conservatives and Liberals

I would think a strong majority of Conservatives think a "God" is required for morality and the converse for liberals. Conservatives need absolute absolutes otherwise they don't feel good about themselves.

[Tux]

134. Not really

There are liberals who think there is a god that gives the basis of morals. It's a Christian idea more than a conservative. Too bad fundies hijacked Christianity and make all Christians seem like loons.

[zauberflote]

9. Nope

There is no God (thank you, I'm taking that as a given) and yet there is "morality" or at least a societally codified system of proper behavior.
The concept of God, for me, is a metaphorical substitute for a very complex set of emotional, psychological and biological factors that go into creating a sense of how to live as an individual while agreeing to the restrictions of society that help us survive as a species.
Morality is an extremely difficult concept to figure out, so early man created easier supernatural explanations and got to the closed system of a god working everything out.
Good books to read on the subject include classics like Rousseau's "The Social Contract" and Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents." Since those books were written in the 18th and 20th centuries respectively, perhaps it's time for some new takes on the matter. Maybe they're already out there. Any ideas?

[sui generis]

13. absolutely

the "social contract" is nothing more than the verbose application of the "golden rule", or more importantly, the idea of "do no harm".

The idea of god comes out of our confrontation with the impending demise of our consciousness in death, and out of the need to explain the "unexplainable". So while most of us agree that lightning is caused by a complex series of physical events and that weather is not random, our great-ancestors thought that drought meant the gods were pissed off at us, and getting struck by lightning meant that you had probably done something to deserve it.

Nowadays we know that a burning bush is usually just the result of a tough bikini wax :evilgrin:

...but if you can manipulate people by fear of retribution rather than empathy you will find a very effective means of spreading so-called "morality".

[Ready4Change]

16. No.

There's lots of reasons for people to act morally. Good, biological reasons, and good sociological reasons. God wants us to be moral too? Icing on the cake.

God/Religion can be as much of a problem as an assistant in promoting morality. It can be a way of reminding people that being good is good. However, it can be (and has been) used a tool for immoral purposes.

God/Religion is like electricity. They can provide light and comfort, or torture and destruction. Moraliy rests in their use, not in their essence.

All IMO.

[Beetwasher]

20. Forced Morality is NOT Morality!

If you're only refraining from killing people because you think you'll go to hell if you do, then you're not a moral person, you're a murderer being held in check by threat and fear of punishment. If you refrain from killing people because you personally really do think it's wrong, then you ARE a moral person. See the difference?

Religion gives people an excuse and a reason to NOT be moral, especially Xtianity. Think about it. You can live the most foul, debased, immoral life imaginable (like Bush does) and then repent on your deathbed and be forgiven and go to heaven because theoreticallly, Christ already died for those sins. So as long as you accept him before you die, none of your immoral behavior matters and you don't have to fear being punished and going to hell.

[Igel]

55. Yes, but I'd rather live in a society where

those that didn't buy into the social contract (however you want to define it or source it) are forced to conform to the reigning morality.

The alternative is to have each person set his/her own morality or standard of behavior without penalty.

[Stunster]

21. A better question

is whether materialism is compatible with a belief in human conduct having objective, normative, universally binding moral properties.

Well known atheists, such as J. L. Mackie, have argued that it isn't, and have thus tried that morality is simply a subjective and projective phenomenon, produced by human psychology, which is itself a product of brain evolution. (Mackie famously described objective moral properties as 'queer'---meaning, they did not fit into a materialist worldview.

Such a view is known in philosophy as a form of moral anti-realism, which is contrasted with moral realism, which holds that there are objective moral facts, properties, and truths, which are independent of human beliefs about morality. Moral anti-realism denies the existence of objective moral facts, properties and truths. Instead there are just our behaviors, practices and beliefs.

Moral realism however may be naturalistic. That is, moral facts, properties and truths may be defined in terms of natural states of affairs. The most famous example of a naturalistic form of moral realism is Utilitarianism.

In recent decades, Utilitarianism has come under increasing attack and has certainly lost much of its previous allure as an adequate theory of morality. More and more materialists and naturalists are thus abandoning any attempt at any form of naturalistic moral realism. Instead, they increasingly see that if materialism, then the intuitions behind moral realism must be false, and so adopt moral anti-realism.

In this, I believe they are correct. That is, I believe it is correct that materialism entails moral anti-realism. And so the question becomes whether moral anti-realism is an adequate account of morality. This is a major controversy in moral philosophy.

My view is that moral anti-realism is not adequate as an philosophical account of morality. Hence, though an atheistic materialist may be a morally good person, etc, I think that in most cases, their moral beliefs and practices (whether they realize it or not) actually imply the truth of some form of moral realism, while their materialism entails the falsity of moral realism.

Hence I think such people exhibit to that extent an incoherent belief system.

[BurtWorm]

22. "objective, normative, universally binding moral properties"

If you're arguing that appeal to the supernatural is necessary to promote belief in these properties--i.e., in an "objective" fixed morality--you may be right. But that doesn't mean these properties are real. To call skepticism about the reality of these beliefs "anti-realism" seems the height of perversity.

[Stunster]

42. That's what it's called

Realism and anti-realism are just technical terms in contemporary analytic philosophy.

Asserting a non-naturalist form of moral realism means: there are moral facts, properties and truths which exist independently of human minds, and which are not definable in terms of any natural (physical or material) states of affairs.

This, just by itself, does not of course entail the existence of any God. One could be a Platonist about morality, believing in a realm of objective moral properties and truths existing as Ideas, or Forms, or Abstract Entities. This would allow you to be a moral realist, and believe that morality is not simply a material reality, but without believing in a personal God.

However, since many atheists are materialists, it may be the case (as I believe) that rationally they ought to be anti-realists about morality, or else give up their materialism. And since materialism is often the reason they're atheists in the first place, they may think that, if one is going to go to the length of giving up materialism, one may as well be a theist rather than a Platonist.

One reason theism may be more plausible than Platonism is that morality seems essentially to do with persons and personhood, and it's difficult to understand how a merely Platonic moral realm, which would be devoid of personhood, could give rise to moral obligations for persons. Moral value and personhood seem to be intrinsic to one another. Hence if you're going to give up a materialist worldview to accomodate your deepest convictions about morality, the theistic worldview, in which personhood is ontologically and explanatorily basic, may appear more coherent.

[BurtWorm]

45. Those may be philosophical terms, but to call belief in the reality

of an ideal "realism" seems perverse to me. Actually, calling skepticism about the reality of that ideal "anti-realism" seems even more perverse. Who earned to right to call these things by those names?

[Beetwasher]

47. Good Question, Personally, I'd Like To See A Source That Backs Up That

claim that those are accepted definitions or accepted technical terms in current analytical philosophy...I don't buy it. I could be wrong, and if I am I'll admit it, but I'd like a source.

Forgive me if I don't accept the posters word on this one, but indeed, that terminology is perverse.

Personally, I see absolutely no problems with having a materialistic and morally relativistic world view. That's actually what we're talking about and it's most certainly NOT problematic.

[Stunster]

48. Here you go

http://faculty.washington.edu/wtalbott/phil440/trreal.htm

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0801495415/qid=1107214147/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-9704187-1211820?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/074562345X/ref=dp_item-information_1/103-9704187-1211820?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics provides a highly readable critical overview of the main arguments and themes in twentieth-century and contemporary metaethics. It traces the development of contemporary debates in metaethics from their beginnings in the work of G. E. Moore up to the most recent arguments between naturalism and non-naturalism, cognitivism and non-cognitivism.

Individual chapters deal with: the open-question arguments and Moore’s attack on ethical naturalism; A. J. Ayer’s emotivism and the rejection of non-naturalism; Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism; Allan Gibbard’s norm-expressivism; J. L. Mackie’s ‘error-theory’ of moral judgement; anti-realist and best opinion accounts of moral truth; the non-reductionist naturalism of the ‘Cornell realists’; Peter Railton’s naturalistic reductionism; the analytic functionalism of Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit; the contemporary non-naturalism of John McDowell and David Wiggins; and the debate between internalists and externalists in moral psychology.

The book will be an invaluable resource for students, teachers and professional philosophers with interests in contemporary metaethics.

[Beetwasher]

49. OK, I Was Wrong

I see no difference between anti-realism and moral relativism though...But I'll read further, maybe it's in there...

[Stunster]

53. Moral anti-realism

does lead to relativism, in my opinion.

So, a common thought is that atheistic materialism leads to moral anti-realism, which in turn leads to moral relativism.

Now, this thread is entitled "Is God or religion necessary for morality?" I'm suggesting that the word 'morality' there needs to be spelled out. If by 'morality' you mean something objective and not reducible to material processes, that's one thing. If by 'morality' you simply mean our relativistic moral beliefs and practices, that's another. You certainly don't need God or religion for the latter sense of morality. But if the first sense is meant, then arguably that sense of morality is incompatible with a materialist worldview.

In an earlier post on this thread I suggested how that incompatibility might lead a moral realist to accept theism. The argument revolves around objective moral value not being physical, but also being intrinsically connected to personhood. This leads to the positing of a nonphysical, personalist ontology as the metaphysical basis for morality, which obviously fits well with theism.

[Beetwasher]

54. A Moral Realist Is Still A Moral Relativist

A Moral Realist ascribes to a normative, situational truth about morality. That IS moral relativism.

From your link:

Moral Realism (MR): There are normative truths about what one morally ought or ought not to do. (There is some disagreement among moral realists on whether or not these truths depend on one's situation). These truths apply to all rational beings (at least, when they are in relevantly similar situations).

A Moral Anti-Realist doesn't even recognize normative truths. It's merely an extreme form of nihilistic moral relativism.

[BurtWorm]

69. You seem to me to be stuck in a language-logic maze.

As they say in General Semantics, it seems to me you're mistaking the map for the territory. A person can rationally believe that morality, as E.O. Wilson argues, is traceable to the parts of the brain that were naturally selected to promote it. In which case, it does reduce to material orgins, and yet it is also quite real and effective.

[Stunster]

74. The problem is

that's also the explanation that has to be given by the materialist for immorality. And it too, sadly, is quite real and effective. The type of explanation for our beliefs and behavior is the same, but most of us think that moral behavior is justified, and immoral behavior isn't. One could say that, well, this bit of the evolved brain causes this type of (good) behavior, and this bit of evolved brain causes that type of (bad) behavior, and ditto for our beliefs about what behaviors are good and what behaviors are bad. But that is to ignore the justificatory question altogether and commit the Genetic Fallacy. See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy

Evolutionary biology has to explain both morality and immorality on the same material-cum-neural-cum adaptive basis. Trouble is, this gives us no principled way of normatively justifying morality. The contrast between morality and immorality becomes vacuous. If something is adaptive (such as killing weaker members of the species) then that becomes the right thing to do. In order to avoid this unpalatable conclusion, the evolutionary materialist has to say that it's not 'really' adaptive. But all this does is to make the supposed contrast between adaptive and non-adaptive behavior vacuous. So either the evolutionist preserves a non-vacuous contrast between adaptive and non-adaptive behavior, but at the price of sacrificing a non-vacuous contrast between morality and immorality. Or vice-versa.

Actually, that's just one problem. There are others.

[BurtWorm]

75. Why does there need to be a "principled" way of "normatively justifying"

morality? I don't need to justify "moral" behavior to my daughter ordinarily. Why should you share your toys and not horde them? Why shouldn't you hit someone you're angry with? Really, what are the answers to those questions? Is it because there is a principled way of normatively justifying sharing and not hitting?

[Stunster]

76. The biological perspective

is simply that different people have different urges and desires.

You have a desire to get your daughter to share toys. Adolf Hitler had a desire to rid the world of Jews.

Why is one kind of desire right, and the other one wrong? It can't simply be self-interest, since good behavior is often punished and bad behavior is often rewarded (look at Bush & Co.)

Cooperation? Free people cooperated to enslave other people for millenia.

We need normativity, because just describing our practices and our beliefs reveals a lot of immorality and horrendous beliefs.

[BurtWorm]

78. Two thousand--even 200 years ago--enslavement was not considered

horrendous but totally natural. How can we be sure that any normative justification is not just an apology or claim for one person's taste of "morality" over another's?

Should I tell my daughter, "Share your toys because that is a real principle many wise philosophers have labored for millenia to justify normatively"?

She can understand this: "Don't you want others to share their toys with you? Do you want people to hit you when they don't like what you're doing?"

The Golden and Silver rules: almost numeric in their elegance and simplicity.

[Stunster]

95. Naturalism and morality

Some have argued that the terms 'good' and 'bad' can be given a
reductionist analysis and/or definitions in terms of purely
descriptive features of the world. One attempt to define 'good', for
example, is to say that it just means, 'desired (or desirable) upon
reflection.' But the Holocaust was desired upon reflection by senior
Nazis. It would only be possible to exclude the Holocaust from being
judged good if the 'reflection' itself was to include moral
reflection. But then you'd have a vicious circle. Even if one
could refine one's attempt at defining 'good' so as to exclude such
counter-intuitive outcomes without circularity, there would still
arise the question, why *ought* we to do what we desire or find
desirable upon reflection? Why is *that* something that binds our
conduct? Why is it morally wrong to do things which we don't desire
upon reflection? We may not, upon reflection, desire to spit at
strangers (they might harm us if we do). But just because our
rational instincts tell us to do or not do X, why is it morally
obligatory to pay attention to our rational instincts?

Many naturalistic thinkers will answer the last question by saying
that *all there is* to moral obligation and value is the functioning
of rational instincts and desires. The first problem with this reply
is that instincts, dispositions, and desires vary tremendously among
humans--some are instinctively aggressive, others instinctively
deferential and compliant, some are extremely egoistic and cruel,
others loving and altruistic. They vary from ethnic cleansing to
caring for lepers. The second problem is that if reason (the
'rational' part of 'rational instincts') is only instrumental---that
is, if reason only enters the picture as the process by which agents
deliberate about and choose between various possible *means* to their
various ends, then the naturalist is left having to face the fact that
some people's ends are truly horrifying from a moral point of view.
But in that case, one can't reduce morality to the ends people are
disposed to pursue. If, on the other hand, reason enters into the
picture by actually adjudicating which *ends* ought to be pursued and
which ought not to be, then one is back in a vicious circle. One has
smuggled moral reason and moral judgement in to sort out the varying
ends between which the naturalist, contemplating a factual description
of the great variety of people's dispositions and desires, must choose
in order to give any remotely plausible account of the content of
morality.

The biological perspective is simply that people have different urges
to do different things. But biology provides no criteria for deciding
why one set of urges should be labelled more 'moral' than another.
We would be left describing the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime as
yet another `interesting' manifestation of humankind's factual
dispositions.

Similarly, the attempt to derive morality from evolution is logically
flawed. Evolution is simply a descriptive theory. Morality is a
*prescriptive* theory---it prescribes certain kinds of conduct for
humans, and PROscribes others. But if evolutionary biology is to
explain morality, it must show the link between morality and adaptive
behavior. The trouble with this is that a very large range of human
behavior is agreed to be immoral, while evolution has to hold that
nearly *all* behavior derives from the adaptive features of our
genetic makeup. From this it would follow that much, perhaps even
all, immoral behavior is adaptive. But then adaptiveness cannot be
that in terms of which moral behavior is defined, or that from which
specifically moral (as against immoral) behavior springs.

Some naturalists are prepared to bite the bullet about this. That is,
they are ready to say that there is no such thing as morality in any
robust sense. There are just human wants and human inclinations to
talk a certain way about them. Morality, if the term is to be
retained at all, simply refers to whatever happens to be the majority
of, or most commonly possessed, sets of dispositions and ways of
speaking with regard to inter-human conduct.

The problem with this view is that it falls foul of naturalism's most
basic starting point---human experience. Naturalism privileges
science as a form of knowledge because it relies on the most immediate
data yielded by our consciousness of the world. Among these data are
most certainly the deliverances of our sensory and perceptual
abilities. We experience a patch of green and call it grass. We
hear a sound and interpret it as indicating a wave is moving at a
certain speed through a large body of air molecules. We look at a
dial and determine by its measurement the mass of a subatomic particle.

But these are not the only kind of data of consciousness. There is
also the utter conviction that shooting defenceless innocent children
as they attempt to escape is something we are morally bound to
condemn---that it is *prohibited* to act thus, whether anyone wants to
or not. There is the absolute certainty we find our conscious mind
giving us that leaving a man to die of thirst in the desert while
driving off in a full water-tanker is an abhorrent act of callousness
that violates an ineluctable moral obligation (unless one is racing to
save the lives of others who would die if you stopped to help---in
that case one's obligation is different--saving the others--but it's
still an obligation).

In other words, naturalism rests its case on the sheer force and
given-ness of sensory experience. But that force and given-ness is
at least, if not *more*, present in the case of people's consciousness
with respect to major moral duties and moral values. One is *more*
ready to attribute an experience of green to optical illusion or
bodily malfunction (such as color-blindness) than to give up as
illusory the idea that one must not kill kids or leave dying men in
the desert. One is *more* ready, in a laboratory, to attribute the
position of the dial to a random electrical disturbance rather than
the properties of the object being studied, than one is to attribute
the notion that we should not rape our grandmothers to a mere lack of
desire to do so.

Naturalism, in order to dismiss morality as a projection or illusion
with no real objective claim upon us, ends up having to deny the
validity of the only thing that would even render itself
(naturalism) plausible in the first place---the deliverances and
character of the subjective conscious experiences of human beings.

[BurtWorm]

102. That's a lot to address. Which point do you want me to address first?

I'll start here.

Some have argued that the terms 'good' and 'bad' can be given a
reductionist analysis and/or definitions in terms of purely
descriptive features of the world. One attempt to define 'good', for
example, is to say that it just means, 'desired (or desirable) upon
reflection.' But the Holocaust was desired upon reflection by senior
Nazis. It would only be possible to exclude the Holocaust from being
judged good if the 'reflection' itself was to include moral
reflection. But then you'd have a vicious circle. Even if one
could refine one's attempt at defining 'good' so as to exclude such
counter-intuitive outcomes without circularity, there would still
arise the question, why *ought* we to do what we desire or find
desirable upon reflection? Why is *that* something that binds our
conduct? Why is it morally wrong to do things which we don't desire
upon reflection? We may not, upon reflection, desire to spit at
strangers (they might harm us if we do). But just because our
rational instincts tell us to do or not do X, why is it morally
obligatory to pay attention to our rational instincts?




My belief is that "good" is an English word that has as much relationship to hard reality as the English word "dog" does. "Dog" refers to anything from a Pekingese to a Great Dane, from this particular Great Dane to that one, to all of those animals running in the dog park, and even to those animals or objects that are not dogs but are mistaken for them, as well as to metaphorical dogs.

Most people usually do not grapple with moral dilemmas until there is a conflict between two "goods," one of which may be "taking pleasure for myself" and the other "preventing pain to someone else." Some get even more complicated, wherein pain for someone is unavoidable. There is no code book to help one decide many moral problems.

[Stunster]

106. We hold radically different worldviews then

Needless to say, I think yours is wrong.

Ooops. Another normative word, 'wrong'. It's about as normative as 'good' is.

Oh well.

[BurtWorm]

111. You don't have to be snippy about it.

We may have different worldviews or views about the origin of morality, but we probably have similar ideas about what is and isn't moral.

[BurtWorm]

123. Another consideration: How does one *know* what is moral?

From your point of view, there are absolutes it is imperative to know in some way, or to reason one's way to, presumably, in order to be moral. But how does one know that one is reasoning one's way to the correct absolute in morally complex situations? Do you receive a sign that you've hit the target? Do you go back and check the moral code as it is written when you find a moment during or after a moral crisis? Or must you wait for judgment day to see if you got the right answer?

From my point of view, there is only reason, and there is always the possibility that you've reasoned incorrectly--that the net result of your reasoning makes things worse than they could have been if you'd reasoned correctly. And you will know if you've reasoned incorrectly if you are trying to be moral--i.e., trying to do the right thing.

But we are also free not to be moral, to not be reasonable, or even to use our reason to be immoral. You must agree with that. You must also agree that making such a choice usually has consequences. For some--for those with conscience, empathy, compassion--the consequences are immediately self-evident (or eventually, at least) in this life, even if they believe the "real" consequences for all our actions come only after corporeal death. For others, the consequences become evident only when they're caught, convicted and penalized.

Nevertheless, for still some "lucky" others, there are never consequences. These are the psychopaths, sociopaths, fortunate sons who somehow gain power over the lives of others, who have no conscience, who never get caught, who are, indeed, protected from the consequences of their immorality by their drones and other moral cowards. And some who believe in moral standards deal with this sick fact of the universe by imagining supernatural correctives and punishments for these injustices, which they call judgment day and karma. But others of us have to grapple with the meaning of these horrendous injustices in a universe that ultimately doesn't care whether we live, die, prosper or suffer. There is always the possibility that someone will fall through the cracks and get away with murder, genocide, lying their way into wars for treasure, or just stealing an election or two. What do we do about that?

There is always--and in my opinion *only*--this hope: that humans can reason their way to a kind of justice and choose to act against this immorality, to resist it while it's going on, or if that has no effect, to bring it to light after it's over. In my opinion, it's folly to trust supernature with justice. To do so, in my opinion, is to permit injustice, which is a kind of complicity in it.

[Stunster]

127. A couple of things

Any reasoning procedure might fail. It's not just when we reason about morality. So your argument would affect the whole of science too. As is now a commonplace in philosophy of science, not only is verificationism the wrong account, so also is falsificationism. This is Kuhn's famous response to Popper's account of science in his seminal book THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS. Lakatos and many others have developed more sophisticated accounts of how science works. Epistemological skepticism is the bugbear here, and in the end you just have to not be a global epistemic skeptic if you're going to do science, morality, pure mathematics, or engage in any form of rational inquiry.

But coming back to morality, I never said that there's any guarantee that our moral reasoning will be correct in any given instance. That's what moral realism allows us to say. Moral truth transcends, or is not reducible to, or is independent of, our ability to know it. But that precisely argues for the objectivity of morality---its truths are not dependent for being truths upon our reasoning. (Analogously, the way the physical world is not dependent for its being that way upon our scientific reasoning).

Next, Kant and others give an argument for theism from the nature of morality. I won't reiterate the argument here, but a modern form of it goes like this: you yourself noted the sociopaths in our midst, etc. One can generalize this observation: there is a great deal of evidence that the attempt to be moral will not meet with any systematic success---a great deal of immorality will continue to occur, and the moral goals we set will frequently fail to be attained.
Wars, injustice, Republican control of the White House and Congress, rape, pillage and plunder, the whole kit and caboodle. Ok, if morality is a rational enterprise, then it must be possible for its goals to be realized, and to have a reasonable expectation that they will be realized. Hence, upon the assumption that morality is a rational enterprise, then it follows that something like supernatural justice is reasonable hypothesis. But if there is no supernatural justice, then it's not reasonable to suppose that morality is a rational enterprise---yet almost everyone does, and the folks that don't are deemed sociopaths, psychopaths, etc!

You can read a lot more about this type of argument here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-arguments-god/

[BurtWorm]

128. Why do you have higher standards for human behavior in a godless

universe than in one with gods? Why do you think reason alone would be sufficient to perfect human society when you don't expect the same from reason with god added into the mix?

[Stunster]

129. God is a lot wiser, and more powerful than us

What the argument is saying, in other words, is that for morality to be a rational enterprise, there would have to be something that is a lot wiser and more powerful than us to achieve the goals.

This is really just Kant's argument from morality to the existence of God. I'm not saying anything very new.

[BurtWorm]

130. So if we're not so wise with God, why would you expect us to be any wiser

without God? I don't understand your double standard. You haven't explained it very well.

[Stunster]

131. It's God who's wiser

and more powerful. Christianity and other religions give some details as to how this plays out, but that's not the key thing here.

The essence of this Kantian argument is that there has to be something wiser and more powerful than us for morality to be a rational enterprise.

I have to go to work now. Have a nice day.

[BurtWorm]

132. How wise do you have to be to know that you don't do to others what

you don't want done to yourself? Are humans so stupid that they can't figure this out without a God in the universe? Well, yes, some of them are that stupid, but the species has survived because as yet most are not.

[aneerkoinos]

86. Crap

All you are saying that we need normativity because that is according to you the only way to avoid some thing happening that by other normative value judgements are seen as "immoral" and "horrendous".

That is just circular logic and/or tautology, normative jugdements require normative judgements.

Normativity is form of paternalism, which is related to cult of fear and cult of personality. And normative systems come in all shades of colour, there is nothing inherently "good" about them, rather the opposite.

I tell my kid that if he does not share his toys, the other kid is likely to respond in kind, so they both will end up sulking and having no fun playing together. Or let him learn by experience, if guiding words are not well received. This is based on observing causes and effects, which is not exact science but entails a good level of predictability - and leaves also plenty of room for creativity in problem solving.

[Stunster]

92. Normativity

has got nothing to do with preventing something happening.

It's to do with making principled distinctions about the things that do happen.

Rape, Rwandan genocide, caring for the sick, loving your kids....

These things all happen. But they're not all morally justified. Normative questions must be asked, not merely descriptive ones about what our brains happen to do.

Adaptiveness is really the tautology here, not normativity. The good is adaptive. So if something's bad, it must be non-adaptive. Yet you only have to look around you to see that there's a lot of bad shit going down all the time, and it's been that way ever since anyone can remember.

[BurtWorm]

94. Actions speak louder than normatives

You can tsk tsk the Milosevicist Serbs all you want, but from their perspective, ethnic cleansing is not only moral but necessary. So what is a moral person to do? Continue tsk-tsking or find some course of action? Does one need recourse to a moral code to figure out what to do?

[Beetwasher]

97. The Problem Is Your Using Relative Labels and Judgements To Begin With

What makes you think only the "good" is adaptive? And the "bad" must be non-adaptive? That just isn't the case. What WORKS is adaptive and then we place relative moral labels on that behavior. There's NO objective "good" or "bad" behavior ONLY normative judgements of behavior as "good" or "bad". Behavior is adaptive on what works. It's pragmatic. Agression and competition work and are used to achieve certain goals, so they are adapted as behaviors. Some would normatively label agression and/or competition as "bad" others as "good". In the end it is ALL relative.

[Stunster]

98. Well, this is the whole point of the thread, isn't it?

If materialism/naturalism is true, then yes, it does appear that "There's NO objective 'good' or 'bad' behavior".

That's one reason I'm not a materialist or naturalist.

[Beetwasher]

99. No, Actually, It's Whether God or Religion Is Necessary for Morality

So I can assume that you DO think there IS objective truth about morality and that if flows down from god?

[Stunster]

105. My view

is that there is objective truth about morality. Yup.

Comparing explanatory hypotheses which would account for this being the case (as I think it is), I think that it's better explained upon the hypothesis of theism than on the hypothesis of materialism. In particular, I find the sociobiological understanding of the phenomena of moral experience grossly inadequate.

I find it more coherent to say that we are created with a capacity to understand moral goodness; and the freedom to choose or reject it; and that moral value and disvalue transcend merely material processes; and that moral value is rooted in personhood; which itself has a transcendent source and purpose; and that this underlying metaphysics is reflected in the normative conception of morality that people generally (including typically materialists themselves) rely on in their assessment of human behavior.

On my view, the immorality that materialists themselves frequently complain of is a feature of human life that precisely tends to disprove the materialist worldview they espouse. The latter puts genocide on a par with tsunamis. Both are held to be processes of material nature, as is anyone's lamenting them (albeit differentially). But this flies in the face of our deepest mental experiences and convictions! We think that genocide is not just a natural process. We think it has normative properties that natural science cannot detect by any conceivable experiment (such as 'moral wrongness').

I think my theory explains the phenomena better than materialism does. I don't buy the evolutionary materialist story about morality being a human construct driven by natural selection of genetic traits. I just don't buy it, and I don't think most people ever will.

Sorry if you find that upsetting.

[BurtWorm]

110. You are imagining the worst about points of view you're not even trying

to understand. I would probably be called a "materialist" on your view, but I do not equate tsunamis and genocide, and I happen to believe in justice.

[aneerkoinos]

112. My view

is that you keep ignoring other possibilities besides naive materialism and theism, and refuse to enter into discussion about your basic premisse of personhood (which excludes the possibility of natural state of impersonal compassion).

I find that upsetting! :D

[Beetwasher]

113. You Are Necessarily Connecting Materialism W/ A Physical Explanation Of

Morality. Why does that have to be so? There's absolutely no reason why someone can't have materialsitic views on some things and non materialistic views on others, especially something like belief and morality. Morality and ethics may have absolutely NO basis in materialism whatsoever (except that they are the byproduct of a brain). They can be complete and total products of human imagination and reason and also NOT ideals. Morality can be completely relative and NON-materialistic. As a matter of fact, IMO, it IS. I don't argue for morality from a physiological/materialist perspective at all. I see morality as a product of reason.

[aneerkoinos]

100. So

According to you "principled distinctions" (into good and bad?) are a "good and necessary thing" in themselves.

That's an axiom, not an argument. Unless you reveal another axiom from wich the value of making value judgements can be deduced.

And as anti-dualist, it is an axiom I definitely do not share. As for the problem of suffering, to which you must be referring by "there's a lot of bad shit going down all the time", my take is the Buddhist one, suffering is caused by attachment, especially attachment to "good", or more accurately "pleasurable".

[Beetwasher]

50. Actually, Not Surprisingly, You Are Misusing the Terminology

Moral Realism (MR): There are normative truths about what one morally ought or ought not to do. (There is some disagreement among moral realists on whether or not these truths depend on one's situation). These truths apply to all rational beings (at least, when they are in relevantly similar situations).

Moral Anti-Realism (MAR): There are no normative truths about what one morally ought or ought not to do. (The advocate of MAR typically provides an explanation of why it seems to us that there are such truths).

First of all, it's very specifically MORAL Realism and Anti-Realism (MR and MAR). That's actually important.

Second of all, MR is actually relativistic NOT objective as you are presenting it. The word NORMATIVE is important here and implies relativism, as is the parenthetical comment about the disagreement between realists and MR's situational dependence.

The difference is between a moral relativity that is either based on commonly accepted standards, MR (normative) or totally nihilistic, MAR. Neither one has to do with an objective ideal of morality.

[aneerkoinos]

67. There's one basic flaw

>>>One reason theism may be more plausible than Platonism is that morality seems essentially to do with persons and personhood, and it's difficult to understand how a merely Platonic moral realm, which would be devoid of personhood, could give rise to moral obligations for persons.<<<

And I think it's the individualistic presupposition of morality. I would say, based on basic everyday observance, that morality is interpersonal, social phenomenon, or more generally presupposes division between subject/agent and object/outer world.

As for the question, what comes first, personhood or interpersonality, I'm inclined to say latter. Experience of personhood, separateness, seems to be something we grow gradually into during linguistic and other socialization processes. Infants don't differentiate between themselves and their surroundings.

Platonism aside, "moral obligations for persons" seem to be nothing but attempts to codify something that many people feel naturally, how Socrates' Daimonion tels him to act in each situation, ie (mostly subconsciouss) consciense. If separate personhood is "illusion", product of early socialization processes, build on somekind of unity, it seems quite logical to think that compassion/love is the natural state, only often veiled by complexities of personhood.

[eallen]

24. My claim is that the existence of a god makes no difference to the answer.

[davidinalameda]

23. of course not

you can be moral and not follow any religion

[More Than A Feeling]

43. I can only speak from my own experience

I wasn't particularly moral as an atheist. I was a bit of a jerk, to be honest. When I found God, I did not automatically become a moral person, but it really did help me to realize that God knows everything I have done, and He/She/It still won't turn me away, but will instead draw me closer, and offer me the forgiveness I needed to put my guilt behind me and move on.

So I guess the answer is that, for me, God and Religion does help, as far as my quest for morality goes.

[El Supremo]

51. No, but the reverse is true.

Judeo-Christianity says that we must be forgiven of our sins. Although sin is not exactly the same thing as lack of morality, I guess you could call them equal here.

We must be cleansed of our sins for our soul to be one with God.

And it looks like Einstein never looked into the Reformed Theology of John Calvin. Trying to do good works does not bring you salvation. God decided that before we were even born. After all, where would you draw the line on how good you must be to get to heaven? Or as Luther argued, how many dispensations will get your uncle out of Purgatory? Good works should come naturally to His "chosen people."

I don't know whether I believe in all that, but it fits with my philosophy of fatalism.

[Az]

65. My take on this issue

Caveat being that I neither believe in God or heaven.

Works are a sign that the individual has embraced the word. I actually turn this notion around on some fundimentalists when they are telling me I am going to Hell for being an atheist.

I ask them if they love Jesus. I ask them if they embrace the teachings of Jesus. I ask them if rejecting the teachings of Jesus is the same as rejecting Jesus himself. I then point them to Luke 6:30 and ask them for their wallet or coat or some other inconvienient thing. You would be suprised how fast they reject Jesus when it has an impact on their life.

[Hardrada]

133. Ask them when was the last time they made peace?

And don't let them get away with claiming some nebulous otherwordly peace. I never get a good explanation for what that spiritual peace is or what it's good for. It is all very simple as children learn: "Don't Hit!!" But those people will hit and then say they seek a "higher peace."

[H2O Man]

52. The question may be

is a belief in God or a religion necessary for morality? We might agree that there is a sum total of the laws of the universe, although we may have a different word or notion of those universal laws. One of them is gravity; a person need not believe in gravity to be affected by it. The same % of atheists are moral as non-atheists.

[Enquiringkitty]

66. Morals vs Ethics

When I was a pre-teen I was confused about the difference between morals and ethics so I asked my preacher. He told me there was a very big difference between them. He said that morals were based on a set of laws that the population volunteers to follow or the social norms of what is acceptable within that society. Ethic involve basic right and wrong. I was still confused so he gave me an example : It is moral to tell the truth and immoral to lie ... given. You live in Berlin in 1940 and have a family of Jews in your attic. A Nazi officer asks you if you know the where abouts of this family. It is immoral to look him in the face and say "no"; yet it is the ethical thing to do because it is the right thing to do. None of us would feel guilty for telling that lie but we would feel guilty for telling a lie but we would feel guilt for telling the truth.

[Igel]

56. No. Sufficiently strong tradition and training to be loyal to that

tradition is sufficient.

Call tradition the terms of the social contract, or the set of things that are deemed real, or what you want. You can codify it as a religion (which isn't to say that I think all religions are necessarily just the codification by some ruler of a social contract). Whatever. It may be the most efficient way of ensuring that most people get what they want, but it's not easily derivable from the individual's perspective.

Without a common set of values and standards of behavior that we call "morality", you get no social contract. Religion is the handiest way of implementing it. It makes fear of punishment, if that's an acceptable (or at least adequate) preventative measure, universal--it doesn't matter if your mother or the FBI know about it, "God knows."

Or you can displace love of and obedience to parents to God. It helps in training kids: If you love God, you won't push your brother down the stairs. "Pushing your little brother down the stairs just isn't done" sounds limp.

My problem with (as #21 would put it) anti-realist views is that there's no justification for upholding the social contract other than greed and selfishness: I uphold the order and hope all others do, too, otherwise I'll be killed for my shoes. It jars me to think that's a sound premise for much of anything.

[BurtWorm]

70. The species selects for individuals who are "moral."

Of course it isn't 100% successful, but people who are moral--i.e., whose behavior reinforces social cohesion--tend to survive to reproduce and pass their genes on.

[Stunster]

77. That's a GOP argument

The rich are rich because they're moral. The poor are poor because they're immoral.

Fuck that shit.

[BurtWorm]

80. The GOP does not believe in natural selection for starters.

They're all ID all the time.

More to the point, you're way off base with your characterization of my point, which had nothing to do with wealth. Not every one who lives to die a natural death or to pass on their genes is wealthy. Not by a long shot.

[Stunster]

84. Not all GOP voters are fundies

Many are libertarian, survival-of-the-fittest types.

My point is not specifically about wealth. It's about the basic logic of your argument, and about what it lends itself to.

"Nature selects for morality as an adaptive trait" is what your saying. So the strong, fit, healthy, successful are likely going to latch onto to what you're saying---and they do, by the droves, in the GOP. And then they'll slash another government program and declare:

"If you're poor, or sick, or handicapped, or whatever, and need the government to stop you from starving to death, chances are that's because you're morally deficient, and we're going to treat you accordingly".

Heard it!

And I say fuck that shit, and the E. O. Wilsons out there who peddle the 'intellectual justification' for it.

It's a load of fucking crap that should be confined to the self-congratulatory assholes at the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and American Enterprise Institute.

[BurtWorm]

85. Nonsense.

You are trying to make it sound as though my argument is about wealth (which is about people being shits to each other), when in fact, it's about morality (which about people being kind to each other). Social Darwinists think in terms of individuals' survival. But I'm talking about sociobiology and how societies survive. These are totally different and it's dishonest to try to equate them. How soon before you accuse me of using a "Nazi" argument. :eyes:

[Stunster]

88. So, we've been living

in progressive, decent, moral *societies* all this time?

I must have missed that in school. Probably spent too much time focused on 20th century genocides.

This is why attempts to explain and justify morality along evolutionary materialist lines fail. To the extent they're not vacuous, they're simply wrong about the social facts. To the extent they're right about the social facts, they're vacuous.

[BurtWorm]

93. The problem with many theism-based ciritiques of natural selection

is that they have Hegelian teleological expectations that mislead them into thinking natural selection is about "perfection." It's not about that. It's about maximization--what works best in the long run in given circumstances that can and will change, thus constantly refreshing the criteria for what is to be selected. Nature makes mistakes. Humans and human societies make mistakes--gross mistakes.

Perhaps you also make the mistake of thinking natural selection implies a lack of freedom? Clearly you view humans as being free to commit genocide in a universe where there are "real" moral principles somewhere. Why do you think humans aren't free in a universe without those "real" principles?

[Stunster]

101. The notion of a 'mistake'

is a teleological notion.

Nature makes mistakes. Actually, on the materialist worldview, it doesn't make sense to say such a thing. But you knew that, right?

One reason I'm not a materialist is this:

Scientific naturalism privileges epistemically the deliverances of our sensory experiences (hence its insistence on empirical verification, etc). This is to privilege a certain range of our experience. But I have the moral experience of thinking that it would be wrong to rape my grandmother, and not merely because I lack the desire to do so, or because societies in which grandmothers were raped by their grandchildren would fare less well than societies in which this was severely frowned up and generally didn't happen. In other words, I privilege my experience (i.e. my deep sense) that there are fundamental moral obligations, properties, truths, and values, which are not reducible to or the products of natural material processes. I would be more inclined to question the validity of my sense-experience (that, say, the dial was pointing to 58) than I would be to question the validity of my moral experience. So if an epistemic privileging of sense-experience leads me to doubt objective moral value, to me that is a 'reductio ad absurdum' of that kind of epistemic privileging. And if scientific materialism requires that kind of privileging, then to me that means there's something wrong with scientific materialism.

Notice that sense-experience itself is incapable of justifying the epistemic privileges that scientific materialism accords it.

This is not to eschew science. It's useful, and important. But there are some aspects of reality that it fails to do justice to, and one of them, in my opinion, is morality. Its method is good for dealing with things that are tangible, physical, visible and quantitatively measureable. But one shouldn't assume that everything in reality must be tangible, physical, visible and quantitatively measureable. The normative, moral obligation not to drive off in a full water-tanker after finding a man dying of thirst in the desert, without giving him water, is, to my mind not something that is tangible, physical, visible or quantitatively measureable. But I still, and always will regard it as an important aspect or dimension of reality, that derives not from something going on in a brain, but from something ontologically quite different, namely personhood, and its intrinsic relation to objective moral value, both of which I take to be metaphysically primitive.

[BurtWorm]

103. On your view of a materialistic worldview nature doesn't make mistakes

but in my view, it experiments, proceeds by trial and error, and therefore, does make "mistakes." Mutations are a kind of mistake.

[aneerkoinos]

89. You are misrepresenting

He said: natural selection prefers those "whose behavior reinforces social cohesion", which to me seems quite valid theory. But I admit that the word 'moral' in that context is quite misguiding.

[Stunster]

90. So, we've been living

in progressive, decent, moral *societies* all this time?

I must have missed that in school. Probably spent too much time focused on 20th century genocides.

This is why attempts to explain and justify morality along evolutionary materialist lines fail. To the extent they're not vacuous, they're simply wrong about the social facts. To the extent they're right about the social facts, they're vacuous.

[aneerkoinos]

96. Hmm

I assume you intended your double post as typing saving answer to two different posts, and this is intended for me.

>>So, we've been living in progressive, decent, moral *societies* all this time?<<

I hope you are not trying to imply that we have now reached the perfect society with perfect value systems?

I'm more inclined to believe that future generations, if we don't succeed in preventing their birth, will be as or more horrified by what we today consider "progressive, decent and moral", as we are horrified by slavery.

>>This is why attempts to explain and justify morality along evolutionary materialist lines fail.<<

If you would stop ignoring my posts and read them, you would see that I'm not trying to do no such thing. "Materialist" is very ill-fitting description of me. Principle of observing cause and effect and adjusting behaviour accordingly don't make any exclusive materialistic presuppositions, most of the causes and effects are very mentalistic, and some quite mystical... :)

[VioletLake]

79. Some interesting ideas here...

Good Behavior
http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/summer96/inbrief.html

[BurtWorm]

81. Extremely interesting!

Thanks! :toast:

[VioletLake]

82. You're welcome. :) n/t

[BurtWorm]

121. I think this article addresses something most people ignore

when talking or thinking about morality: the legacy from our hominid ancestors. Moral behavior is clearly something primates have been working on a long time. I wonder what those who believe in a divine origin for morality would think of this article.

[GOPBasher]

104. Of course it's not necessary for morality.

If you want to be good just for the sake of being good, not for your good "reward" after you die, then good for you!

[aneerkoinos]

109. Here's an idea

Clearly, some kind of categorical imperative is needed for any moral code. Here's my suggestion:

Evolutionary materialists might quite well accept that it is categorical imperative for human kind to not to self-destruct but to do our best to keep on playing our part in the Grand Game of evolution. We can even generalize a bit and include also non-materialistic quantum-platonists: we are quite good in this observing business, so let's do our damnest so we can keep observing the shadows at the cave's wall and philosophizing about them - because, who knows, it's not logically excluded that this our observing business doesn't serve some higher purpose.

So, in these cases the categorical imperative of survival and morality derived from that axiom does not need God or religion. But clearly this is not a universal imperative, it is very much conflictory with Harmageddon cultists, who see self-destruction or "end of days" as desirable. It seems unavoidable that survivalists and Harmageddonists need to get rid of the other side, according to their mutually exclusive imperatives. Or perhaps by getting rid of Harmageddonists the Survivalists would be doing both sides a service, giving Harmageddonists what they seek and improving their own chances of survival... :evilgrin:

I'm not sure what Mahayana Buddhism with Boddhisatva ideal (all sentient beings to be helped to enlighten and gain freedom from karma) would say about such survivalist categorical imperative, probably some kind of middle way between yes and no, if they would bother to answer... ;)

[Az]

114. Careful

A materialist's drive is not the same as their DNA's drive(technically RNA). Read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene to get this issue. A species drive may be slightly different than the core RNA's. This enables the species to propogate more effeciently than just the RNA's predilection to replicate itself.

From this we can see that the basis of morality for a materialist need not be tied to propogation. Thus the impetus for morality within the materialists venue becomes governed by the terms and concepts derived from the mind and the social structure it is dependent on.

[aneerkoinos]

115. No thanks

I will not read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. :)

I was not trying to claim that cultural evolution is conflictory with biological evolution, if that is what you thought. I meant to include both.

But would you be willing to accept pushing the ods for continuation of biological and/or cultural evolution of Human kind and/or civilization in some form or other as "Categorical Imperative"?

[Az]

116. Not really

Not all materialists reduce the problem down to that level. Most muddle through on a combination of learned factors and self created notions. I guess I am objecting to the idea of reducing it to a single factor. We are a bit more complex than that.

[aneerkoinos]

117. Fair enough

But I'm still fascinated with the idea from scientific viewpoint, because I consider extermination the ultimate and True falsification test of the totality of our theories. No more humans, no more philosophizing and theorizing observers... :)

Aw, shucks. I don't understand what you object to. What has descriptive level of complexity of human behaviour got to do with logical requirement of axiom for any consistent moral code?

[Az]

120. Your quest is natural

We crave answers. Answers that are succint and complete. Answers that satisfy our needs. Extermination certainly puts an end to questioning and the stress to the existance of questions.

My objection comes from the fact that there are a multiplicity of inputs to forming our social and personal ethical values. Biology, social forces, religious moral constructs, personal idiosyncracies. All these come together in different mixes in each person to form their own personal understanding of morality.

[aneerkoinos]

122. Ah

Spoken like a true relativist. Admirable! So I wonder, what multiplicity of inputs formed your own deeply relativistic moral conviction? ;)

Is there, btw, any room for freedom of choice between all those inputs?

[Az]

124. You say that like it's a bad thing

Of course there is room for choice. A person can feel as though there is a strong compulsion from society for some moral value and their own sense of right and wrong can overcome this. Its not about making a perfect copy of societies values. It is about how an individual internalizes the values presented to them.

[aneerkoinos]

125. No no

Not a bad thing at all, the opposite. I'm just curious, trying to find out how you think.

But now you introduce a new thing, 'persons own sense of right and wrong'. I was under the impression there was just those inputs, so what is this "own sense of morality" and where does it come from? And can the theory of "own sense of morality" considered anymore relativistic?

[Zynx]

118. No. But I think it does help to keep some of the more wicked elements of

secularism at bay.

[sundog]

119. There's a difference?

:shrug:

[sam sarrha]

126. absolutely not.. religion does not have a monopoly on morality. though

many of them believe they are ordained to convince us of that.

the fundies believe that they can look at a person and determine if that person lives their lives through gods little voice in their heads.. that is scary.. they believe that they don't do ANYTHING but what god wants them to do...TALABAN !!! those guy are starting to FREEK ME OUT !! it s worse than when i was a kid with the penticostals

[Theres-a]

135. No

[Zhade]

137. As a former fundie now atheist, I naturally agree: of course not.

Only the arrogantly self-righteous believe otherwise.

[Dervill Crow]

138. Good grief, no.

A major problem for me during my evangelical Christian phase was the fact that I knew so darn many really wonderful moral agnostics and atheists who really didn't need saving.

[seaj11]

139. Absolutely not.

If religion is a set of beliefs regarding the nature of existence and one or more deities and has a moral code guiding its adherents, then no--one needn't religion to be kind, considerate, and avoid harm to oneself and to others. And that's what morality is.