Moral realism is false

[Bgood]

Gruesome knight wrote

Take for example the possibility of torturing a baby just for fun: almost every human being would react with disgust and say it is wrong. Neuroscience has proven that such reaction does not stem from a rational consideration of all facts but rather from instinctive gut feelings.

That's it, instinct. Even animals don't kill their own offspring for pleasure. Common sense. Treat others as you would like to be treated. What is the big mystery to this? Any teacher, shaman or leader who can keep our minds ripe with basic morality is a good benefit. When I pick up a book on Buddha knowledge or on the dialects of Confuscious, it all says the same thing! Be good to your fellows and expect the same. No mystery, who cares from where our morals come, just be loving and kind.

And when lowlife parents shake their baby to death or abuse their children, they have karmically deserved the harshest of penalties. Too bad for them, but they WON'T be missed. But the beautiful children will always be missed.

[genkaus]

Over the past decades, numerous discoveries in neurology and evolutionary psychology have shown beyond any reasonable doubt that our moral intuitions ultimately stem from the shaping of our brain by evolution and that WITHOUT any such emotional intuition, no moral system can be built from reason alone.
This is well illustrated by the study of the brains of psychopaths: since they lack the moral emotions, they don’t consider as true most fundamental moral principles (like avoiding to create suffering, trying to promote the happiness of others) although they are quite able to reason well.

I'll stop you right there. There are quite a few things that are wrong with your basing of morality on evolutionary intuitions.

First of all, you need to learn the distinction between human morality and evolutionary morality.

Morality is a guide on how to act. The aspects of our actions that are grounded in our genetic code can be referred to as evolutionary morality. Examples of these can be found in many other species as well.

Human morality, on the other hand, is not encoded in our genes and is subject to choice. In fact, any action that is not subject to choice is not considered to have a moral dimension.

For example, some species of ants have the biological imperative to sacrifice themselves for their society. They do not have the capacity to act against this instinct. In human terms, we would not consider this action either good or bad, because there could have been no alternative.

Humans, on the other hand, may have an inclination to act in a certain way, but they are not bound by the choice. So while discussing human morality, we cannot simply refer to our biological inclinations to act in a certain way.

What you are doing here is taking some of our biological inclinations (empathy, altruism etc.) and ignoring others (selfishness, violence). You assume that a certain type of human instincts should be used as a moral guide and the rest should not. Why did you pick specifically those emotional intuitions as a basis for morality and not any of the others?

As I have said, no moral system can be grounded by mere logic or factual analysis alone, at some point moral intuitions (due to Evolution) are always going to come into play.
Take for example the possibility of torturing a baby just for fun: almost every human being would react with disgust and say it is wrong. Neuroscience has proven that such reaction does not stem from a rational consideration of all facts but rather from instinctive gut feelings.
Afterward, people try to rationalize their belief by backing them up with arguments and mistakenly think they feel this disgust because of their reasoning although it is the other way around.

While I acknowledge the existence of an emotional response to any event, I most strenuously object to using those as a guide to morality. You are incorrect in your assumption that no moral system is or can be grounded in logical and factual analysis of the matter.

Let's consider your "torturing a baby" question.

Here we have an action - "torturing a baby" and the purpose "to have fun".

To judge the morality of this action, we first need to determine the basic requirements that must be met for morality to apply.

First of all, the person should have freely chosen to torture the baby, i.e., his actions should not be a result of a biological imperative or any other form of duress.

The required assumption for this freedom is that the person is the sole owner of his life and his actions and is therefore morally justified in directing his actions to his own purposes.

The same concepts apply to the baby as well. Since the baby is also the sole owner of its life, any action by the torturer would violate the premise by which his own actions can be justified. That is why such an action would be wrong - not because it offends someone's sensibilities.

[Undeceived]

Hi, I am an atheist, I know beyond every possible doubt that there is neither God nor afterlife.
I completely agree that belief in God cannot provide us with an objective morality, as clearly shown by these examples, which more generally illustrates the Euthyphro dilemma : is something good just because God stipulated it is (in which case it is arbitrary, for God could state one ought to love ones foes as well as ordering the slaughter of the folks of Canaan. ) or did God ordered it because it is good (in which case there exists an objective standard of goodness independent of God) ?

However, I believe that the same challenge could be posed to any form of atheistic moral realism.
Over the past decades, numerous discoveries in neurology and evolutionary psychology have shown beyond any reasonable doubt that our moral intuitions ultimately stem from the shaping of our brain by evolution and that WITHOUT any such emotional intuition, no moral system can be built from reason alone.
This is well illustrated by the study of the brains of psychopaths: since they lack the moral emotions, they don’t consider as true most fundamental moral principles (like avoiding to create suffering, trying to promote the happiness of others) although they are quite able to reason well.
This shows the truth of David Hume’s famous principle that moral truths are the projection of our gut’s feelings on an indifferent and cruel reality : since one can not derive an “ought” from an “is”, moral truths are the expression of our emotions which we mistakenly consider as features of the objective reality.
No moral system can be created without the appeal to at least one kind of intuitions, the brute facts of nature never lead to moral duties and obligations.
Now, I want to state a version of the Euthyphro dilemma which shows the impossibility of defining an objective atheistic morality: is something good just because Evolution hardwired this conviction into us (in which case it is arbitrary, for Evolution could have lead us to believe that murder and torture are right ) or did Evolution produce our current beliefs because they are good (in which case there exists an objective standard of goodness independent of Evolution) ?
Let me now develop the first point: there is an extremely great number (perhaps even an infinity) of planets where intelligent beings like us could have evolved. Given the huge dimension of the sample, it is more than likely that many such intelligent beings have evolved conceptions of morality which would appear completely disgusting to us.
Imagine for example a species of giant lizards ( or whatever else if you’ve more imagination than I :-) who were shaped by natural selection to value power, violence , selfishness in so far it remains compatible with the interests of the group. When invading a city and killing or enslaving all its inhabitants, their brain generates a warm feeling of happiness, satisfaction.
When however confronted with weakness among their own folk, they feel an overwhelming indignation, anger, rage which lead them to kill the individual guilty of failure , and after having done that, their brain rewards them with an intense feeling of pleasure.
Now imagine such beings arrive at our earth and conclude based on their evolutionary intuitions that it would be moral and perfectly good to enslave all human beings capable of working and to kill all others.
What would an human atheist and moral realist say to these lizards? Do they ought to behave in a way coherent with the moral intuitions they have and slaughter or enslave all humans ?
My contention is that it would be completely impossible to show to these creatures that killing innocent beings is wrong: all moral systems developed by humans which would justify this conclusion cannot be deduced from the mere consideration of natural facts , they all crucially depend on one or several moral intuitions , which are not shared by the intelligent lizards, so there would be no common ground upon which one could argue that something is right or wrong.
Now, a defender of godless moral realism could agree with me it is fallacious to rely on evolution to define an objective morality in the same way it would be fallacious to rely on the commandments of a deity. But he could then argue that there exists a moral standard independent of Evolution upon which moral realism would be based.
The problem of this argument is the following:
As I have said, no moral system can be grounded by mere logic or factual analysis alone, at some point moral intuitions (due to Evolution) are always going to come into play.
Take for example the possibility of torturing a baby just for fun: almost every human being would react with disgust and say it is wrong. Neuroscience has proven that such reaction does not stem from a rational consideration of all facts but rather from instinctive gut feelings.
Afterward, people try to rationalize their belief by backing them up with arguments and mistakenly think they feel this disgust because of their reasoning although it is the other way around.
Based on rigorous experiments in the field of neuroscience, Jonathan Haidt shows that in the case of moral reasoning, people always begin by getting a strong emotional reaction, and only seek in hindsight to justify this reaction. He has named this phenomenon ‘the emotional dog and its rational tail’: http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/art...script.pdf
And since one can not derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, there is no way to prove that ‘one ought to not torture a baby for the fun’ by a reasoning based on fact alone, at one moment or an other , one is forced to appeal to emotions.
For example, saying to a intelligent lizard they ought no to do that because the baby is cute, because he is innocent, because he has an entire life before him would completely beg the question for our intelligent alien, which would then ask: “why does the baby’s beauty, innocence, or the fact he has still many years to live implies one ought not to kill the baby ?”. After one or two hours of circular reasoning, the honest human would be coerced to recognize it is so because these things sounds intuitively bad for him.
Concerning the objectivity of morality, I am neither a moral relativist nor a moral subjectivist but a proponent of an error theory: moral statements and truths are in fact nothing more than the products of our emotional intuitions , but because of the hard-wiring of our brain, we erroneously believe they correspond to some external facts of the objective reality and try to derive them from pure natural facts, committing the is/ought fallacy.
For those interested in the line of reasoning presented here, I highly recommend you to read Joshua Greene’s dissertation, where he clearly demonstrates the true nature of morality and develops a coherent error-theory.
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/Gree...tation.pdf
To conclude, although I am not a moral realist, I do think there is a place for ethic in each human life.
But instead of using moral absolutes such as “good”, “evil”, “right”, “wrong”, “ought”, “ought not”, referring to spooky concepts whose existence is as likely as the presence of an invisible yellow unicorn on the surface of Mars, I prefer to employ the language of desires, which correspond to indisputable facts:
We, as human being, love infant life and desire baby to growth and become happy, therefore if we want our desires to be fulfilled, then we ought not to torture babies for the fun. Contrarily to moral realism, the ‘ought’ I have used here is hypothetical and not categorical.
In the same way, I can not say the atrocities we find in the Old Testament are objectively wrong, because I don’t believe in the existence of such moral absolutes, but I can express my convictions in the following manner: if we want our intuitive feelings of love, justice and charity to be respected, then we ought to reject many books of the Old Testament as being pieces of barbaric non-senses.
The traditional moral discourse “The God of the Bible is morally wrong, we ought to fight Christianity, we are morally good whereas religious people and so on and so forth” seems to me to be completely flawed because it involves the existence of spooky moral absolutes which have no place in a scientific view of the world.
I really appreciate the critical thinking of my fellow atheists when applied to religion but I am really sad to remark they fail to apply it to their own cherished beliefs like the existence of an objective morality.

Morals can be objective while still being revealed through the emotional system. Just because a person doesn't feel something is wrong (psychopathy) does not mean that everyone who does feel does not agree on right and wrong. It is possible to be objective but not known, or to be numb to what your limbic system has to say.

"Is something good just because God stipulated it is... or did God order it because it is good?"
Both. God and goodness are co-eternal. He ordered it because he knew it was good, but that doesn't put morals above his power. It's his natural quality. "God is love."- 1 John 4:8. A person’s quality or nature doesn’t control them out of force—they agree to it because it is their quality or nature. God declares certain things good because they already seem good to him, and since we are made in his image they seem good to us too.

Another way to tell goodness is by its effects. You and I think it's good to love our children because it seems rational to us. Why does it seem rational? Because the action of loving causes more good than bad. Actions are intrinsically good or bad based on what they lead to. God doesn't need to declare adultery wrong for it to obviously be wrong. It tears apart families and relationships, and is therefore wrong. Sin has built-in destruction. You could say God has little control over his own morality, but that would assume God and morality are separate and able to be in conflict. Christians think of God and goodness as coexisting like the pit of a peach and the flesh around the pit, so there is no conflict. Every person has to fill their ‘quality’ in with something—good, bad or a combination of both. You need some flesh around your pit. Either it’s sweet or rotten.

I want to make the case that evolution could not produce morality. Remember, morality must help an organism survive. But which organism? There are tendencies to be selfish and eat all the food yourself. And then there is the tendency to save a man in the river while you yourself might die. Which one wins? Why would evolution give us two choices, of which we could and often do pick the wrong one? And why is morality calculated by an unreliable feeling rather than cold reason about what is best for our or our species’ survival?

We also see moral actions which have nothing to do with survival. If you find a quarter outside a store you might return it to the cashier. If you do, that's integrity--doing the right thing even when no one's watching and the action seems to hurt no one.

For natural selection, morality should be tied to results. If you punch and hurt someone, that's bad. But real life shows a different story. Suppose you're on a train with lots of people. Someone accidentally trips you. You say, "It's okay," because you know they didn't mean to. Another person sticks their leg out in an attempt to trip you. You spot it just in time, stop short and look at him. You become angry. Why did you become angry? He didn't hurt you, and you could care less about the person who did hurt you. Seeing this, you would determine that outcomes have nothing to do with human morality. No outcomes means morality has no place in natural selection. A dangerously clumsy individual would never be eliminated from the gene pool. It is only our eye for right and wrong that would say "Aha! That man's intent was wrong and therefore we should put him in jail." But in that case we'd be assuming we already have the moral conscience to discern. When did it develop? And why would it develop in a way that would ignore actual harmful actions?

You have an interesting analogy about the lizards, but it seems to miss the point of objectivism. All humans have one moral code, or let's assume so for this exercise. You would have no moral common ground because you created an entirely different race that would flip all morality backwards. Anyone can create a fictional race that thinks killing is okay, but that doesn't mean it's actually realistic for that race to think murder's fine. Natural selection would say an individual who consistently kills will eventually destroy their own race. But God would put that same moral in a person's head. You assert, "it is more than likely that many such intelligent beings have evolved conceptions of morality which would appear completely disgusting to us." This isn't helping morality-by-evolution at all. Scientists, when trying to debate this, argue that life would inevitably always come to the same point because it is the most beneficial point for survival. They contend that morality is this way because it could be no other way. Imagining another race in which it could be another way adds nothing to this discussion unless we're also practicing for a creative writing class.

"It would be completely impossible to show to these creatures that killing innocent beings is wrong."
This is where your argument becomes even more confusing. We're not talking about an irrational morality--no one is, when talking about evolution. Evolutionists’ goal is to show why morality is reasonable and how we logically obtained it. My (a Creationist's) goal is to show that morality is not completely reasonable and cannot 100% contribute to survival. If you return to your side and take back your statement, your analogy collapses because, logically, we should be able to convince any evolved creature of right and wrong by appealing to survival. If an action promotes survival, it is morally right (according to evolution). The lizards may have different needs than us, but all we have to do is learn those needs and we have common ground again. If morals are unable to be logically applied to survival, you have a dilemma on your hands. You'd need an intelligent agent to counter the natural tendency of unthinking Evolution. Christians call that agent "God".

"As I have said, no moral system can be grounded by mere logic or factual analysis alone."
Good conclusion. You have the beginnings of a Christian.

Now if morality is not able to be explained scientifically, evolutionists have no argument for how it could have come about. The best they can do is aim for a neutral position by claiming different humans have different views of morality. I believe we all have the same view. Everyone thinks murder, hate, stealing, coveting, dishonoring, and adultery are all to a degree wrong. They may still do them, but they understand the harm that may result. A good way to test right/wrong is this: You might think it is fine to hate or covet or lust. But would you want someone hating you? Or someone else coveting your car? Or another picking off your clothes with their eyes? Put yourself in the position of the victim and then ask if it is okay.

[The Grand Nudger]

Co-eternal now are they? Well then, being equals in this little shells game, I'll choose the one I can side with without issue. Good.

This is the densest shit I've ever seen. "Morally good" by the standards of evolution? Garbage. There is only what works and what does not. You're looking for evolution to take the place of the god you've invented, without acknowledging that you actually have to invent the ground, before you invent the god to inhabit it. What one creature feels is "morally good" may (in some cases) have an evolutionary process behind it, or serve to provide that creature with an advantage over others, but it just as easily may not. "Evolution" actually doesn't give a shit, or set any standards in that regard, because it is nowhere even approaching the sort of process you seem to believe it to be.