(May 12, 2009 at 1:40 am)Charles Wrote: The Guardian headline: “Atheist says murdering atheists would be a ‘moral act.’”

So with your qualifications - that the morality of the majority defines that which is moral for that particular majority, we are forever left with competing moral claims by various majorities however they’re described. Thus my original claim “Without a transcendent moral standard, anything goes if that’s what the majority of people want.”

Just to make sure you understand this point, I (me, moi, atheist, etc) would not think murdering atheists would be a moral act (relative morality remember), but the majority of people who were doing the murdering would (again, relative morality). As for competing moral claims, I disagree. There are only a finite number of things that can ever be considered "wrong" by sane people, and most of them have gone through the process of majority-morality-shifting (MMS). In modern civilizations, things like murder, rape, theft, etc are all considered immoral acts, and by now we are only scrambling over the details (death penalty, abortion, etc).

Quote:And with the second, we have the not insignificant problem that no person (or even majorities of persons) can unequivocally declare that certain behavior is intrinsically evil and is condemned, such as torturing babies for pleasure, or lining up innocent people to be sent to gas chambers. After all, if a majority of the people in culture X think either of those two behaviors are acceptable, then by definition they are moral. We can complain all we want, but they can tell us to shove off and create our own majority somewhere else.

Its this laissez faire attitude towards gratuitous evil where cultural relativism and emotivism come up wanting.

People cannot declare absolute morality, of that I agree with you, but people can easily declare relative morality ("I find that immoral"). As for your statement 'if people in culture X find something acceptable, it is moral' this isn't what I'm arguing (honestly, do you read my posts). I'm arguing that for the majority, this is moral (relative morality!!!). You can see this happening in any country in the world. The majority often dictates the morality of the state, and in the occasions when it doesn't, it is always the majority ruling opinion (for instance governments creating laws) that states what is moral. Abortion in America is a split topic at the moment (always has been) but the government has ruled that banning it is non-constitutional, and thereby saying it is a moral act.

Quote:By anyone’s standard; any person or culture which has a criterion for determining if an offense is a capital one. So no matter what that criterion is, murdering an innocent (of a capital crime) person would be intrinsically evil. Given this definition, would not such a murder be intrinsically evil, irregardless of the majority opinion on the matter?

If you say "by anyone's standard" then you immediately give rise to the possibility that someone out there might object, hence my point. I'm sure some of the soldiers in Iraq felt it was morally right to kill some of the innocent people there (they had to bomb Baghdad to start the war) but what about the relatives of those who were killed? You can argue from both sides of the issue, and certainly many people thought Saddam was an innocent and glorious leader, so were we right to kill him? Right and wrong is not so easily dictated as you seem to think; it all depends on the context, and on the people doing the judging.

Quote:Oh the counterexamples that leap to mind: the Copernican Revolution (16th century...hardly "current"), Einsteinian relativism (Unless I'm missing something here, how is that wrong on a large scale???), the Chemical Revolution (The chemical revolution was the turning point from "earth, air, fire, water" to discovering elements...how is that wrong on a large scale?), spontaneous generation (Spontaneous generation (otherwise known as abiogenesis) is a current scientific theory based on evidence, not disproven by any means. Experiments are currently being done to figure out how exactly life first emerged, but just because we haven't got all the answers doesn't make it "wrong")

See my annotations.

Quote:You haven’t got it right. The supporting argument "If we all decided murder was ok, we wouldn't have a society anymore" was used to support the main argument that “atheism does not entail moral nihilism.” A nihilist would never use that supporting argument, because the whole notion of a society’s preservation is absurd. Only a non-nihilist would use that supporting argument. But the main argument is what is in question. So your supporting argument assumes that the main argument has been already decided. Its illicit to use supporting arguments which assume the truth of the argument their designed to support. Its like arguing with a creationist who only quotes from creationist authorities.

No, the statement "If we all decided murder was ok..." was used to support the main argument of relative morality, MMS, etc. It was used as an example of how I (as an atheist) can explain morality and therefore do not count as a nihilist. It's an indirect connection, not a direct one. You are quite correct that a nihilist would never use that argument, and your admission to this fact only supports my counterclaim that atheists are not nihilists. How else can you explain me having a non-nihilistic worldview? All debates assume the main argument is decided (at least from the perspective of the two debaters). The point of a debate is to persuade the other (and the audience) to adopt what one considers to be the correct view.

Quote:Not at all. My argument that atheism entails moral nihilism is just that: an argument. I detailed the premises for you earlier. It is not a presupposition.

Yet when presented with the arguments that atheism is not nihilism, and when we say things that a nihilist cannot possibly say, instead of admitting that you are incorrect with your argument, you say "Well, if you were true to your atheism you would be a nihilist". That isn't an argument, and it reeks of presupposition.

Quote:I know you meant what you said, I’m just calling foul on your logic.

Go ahead and call foul on it then. What exactly is illogical about my argument?

Quote:Are not human beings part of “nature”? Are not our actions “natural”?

Perhaps you prefer the other quote “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.”

Was Dawkins out of line in expressing these sentiments, or do you agree with him?

Human beings are part of nature, yes, but Dawkins was talking about nature in the casual sense (natural disasters, etc). A hurricane cannot be said to be "evil" because we know it is a natural force and isn't human. It doesn't have a sense of morality, we do. The same can be said of the above quote. When speaking about the universe, he means just that, the universe. Not the parts of the universe, just the universe as a single entity. The universe itself does not have evil or good in it, only what we perceive as evil and good, and ultimately what we judge as right and wrong.

Quote:Well, at least there is one irreducible moral truth out there. Now that that door is open, could there not be other culturally-transcendent moral truths?

It isn't a moral truth though, it is the requirement for morality to work. A moral truth requires morality in the first place; this is completely the reverse of what I just said. In order for morality to even exist there must be a system in place that favours certain actions over others. We are social creatures, and we need to help each other to survive, therefore this desire to help has become the catalyst for morality.

Quote:So is torturing babies for pleasure another example of an irreducible, culturally-transcendent moral standard?

No, because if you took a load of people who liked torturing babies for pleasure and dumped them on an island, the morality on that island would dictate that torturing babies would be ok. Hypothetical scenario I know, but it's perfectly true.

Quote:Right, but it is the obligatory nature of moral standards which distinguishes them from mere opinion. Anyone can hold and proclaim an opinion, but they have no moral force behind them. That is, they do not impose a duty on the hearer to adopt the opinion. But when in normal conversation you say to your friend “John, it is wrong for you to cheat on your wife,” what you are conveying to him is that not only do you have an opinion on his behavior, but you are appealing to his sense of moral duty to agree with you.

Likewise to say to a Maoist that it is evil to starve your political opponents to death by the millions, you are offering more than your personal opinion; you are pronouncing that he is under a moral obligation not to starve his political opponents to death by the millions. For a moral realist like myself, affirming that moral values are mind- and culture-independent, this type of condemnation makes sense. For a cultural relativist such as yourself, this type of condemnation is mere wish-expressing with no moral punch. The Maoist could reply “I have my own majority-determined morality, so bugger off.”

But I'm arguing that there is no difference between opinion and moral standards. We each have our own moral standards, and you can predict with almost certainty that you will never find a person with the exact same standards as you. Since it would be a contradiction to label these as facts (facts cannot have multiple truth values), they must be opinions. When you tell John that cheating is wrong, you are stating your opinion on a specific moral, and appealing to his opinion on that specific moral. The only thing that changes opinions is an argument, so if his opinion differs from yours, he will most likely say "I disagree".

Indeed the Maoist could reply like that, and this is where the argument starts and opinions may change. You say you are a moral realist, but there are people out there who have a different set of morals to you, so how do you explain this? If I told you I fully support abortion under any circumstance (which is pretty much accurate) then how would you persuade me otherwise. What you seem to be saying is that by telling me "But Adrian, you know abortion is wrong" you think that I will suddenly realize the "truth" of absolute morality, but it isn't a good argument at all. I disagree that abortion is wrong, or that I "know" it is wrong. The only way you are going to change my opinion on it, and thereby change my moral opinion on it is by presenting a good argument for your moral opinion.

Quote:Then you are faced with a moral impasse ad infinitum. Your “moral majority” (pun intended) has the same validity as the slave-trader’s moral majority, with no way to adjudicate between the two other than who has the bigger army.

Indeed. I never said it was a pretty process, and who knows, maybe if Hitler had won the war and conquered the world everyone would be happier and things would be going much better than they are today. This is where I agree with Dawkins when he argues that we cannot set moral absolutes on people (his famous misrepresented Hilter quote). We are thankful that the Allies won the war, because they enforced our morality, which we consider good. However, if Hitler had won, perhaps we would be thinking how great Hitler was, because he enforced our morality, which we consider good (MMS remember). The key unanswerable question is, would we have the same morality today as we do, if Hitler had won the war instead of lost?

Quote:And it would be immoral for you to do so, because your “condemnation” is just an opinion with no more moral weight than the smoker’s opinion.

This is why I say you cannot condemn the Nazis for genocide. Your moral majority doesn’t trump the National Socialist moral majority.

Any ethical theory that prevents one from unequivocally and intelligently condemning the Final Solution ought to be summarily rejected.

Condemnation doesn't imply we need to do something about it, but often we do anyway. Our moral majority doesn't trump the Nazi moral majority, but it harshly contradicts it, and our condemnation of it lead us to act on it. We like seeing our morality spread around, it makes us feel better about the world. Morality doesn't trump morality, but majority often trumps majority.

Quote:Its inconsistent for the atheist to reject nihilism and instead live in fairyland where we get to make up our own purpose and meaning and pretend that the universe gives a shit.

I don't pretend the universe gives a shit, I know the universe doesn't give a shit about me. However subjective purpose isn't excluded by this, because subjective purpose doesn't require the universe to give a shit it requires an individual to give a shit.

Quote:Evolution made what was once considered far outside of the mainstream (atheism), mainstream. I know several students who went from a nominal Christian faith to agnosticism/atheism after studying evolution at government universities. You can probably say the same. Its not an exclusively causal relationship, but there’s a relationship nonetheless.

If you admit there isn't an exclusively causal relationship, then you have lost the point. Please don't bring it up again. I wouldn't say atheism was made mainstream by evolution. Evolution certainly helped atheists to explain life without God, but if any atheist says "Evolution shows there is no god" then I give them a slap, because such an argument is full of holes. Atheism should be (and is in most cases) reached by logical deduction.

Quote:That’s a convenient distinction for you, but you confuse purpose (which is teleological) with function (which is ad hoc). A smooth stone used to function as a hammer is not the purpose for that stone’s existence. There is no purpose for the stone, no matter what you do with it. There is no purpose to your life, no matter what you do with it. Neither example has a reason for its existence, they merely are. Its pointless to try to find in them a “subjective” purpose and thereby infuse meaning into either one.

Now you are simply arguing with semantics. You confuse objective purpose and subjective purpose. Forget the rock since you seem to not "get" that example. Lets imagine a river. Now we know the river doesn't have an objective purpose other than to transport water downhill (via laws of gravity). However humans can place a subjective purpose on the river (giving them drinking water, swimming, etc). This is the difference between objective and subjective...

Quote:The universe is not merely the stars and the space in between them, it contains you and me as well. If the universe is purposeless, you and I are purposeless.

Why argue with the obvious? Too scary?

Resistance is futile.

See way above where I showed the difference between taking a universe as a single entity and then the sum of it's parts. The universe is objectively purposeless, but is not subjectively purposeless. We are objectively purposeless, but not subjectively purposeless.

Quote:Purpose is teleological by definition, naturalistic evolution is non-teleological by definition. As Simpson said “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.” Anthropomorphizing natural selection and mutation doesn’t get you from here to there, my friend.

Evolution itself has purposeless forces, but the purpose of Evolution is quite clear: to adapt species to their habitat. Again, these are the differences between objective and subjective purposes, but since you don't seem to understand the difference I recommend you read a dictionary.

Quote:Believe it.

Not an argument. Why should I believe it?

Quote:Presuppositions are not arguments. Examples of presuppositions are the laws of logic, language conveys meaning, I exist, other minds exist, my senses give me basically accurate information of the world, etc.

Good talk, Adrian.

Fine, then I expect you to drop your obviously fallacious argument which relies on you constantly going around in circles and not knowing what certain words mean.

I'm going to have to take a break from this for a week and a bit. I have exams and too much revision, but I expect to respond to your next post in 2 weeks time.

(May 14, 2009 at 12:33 am)Charles Wrote: Logic is meaningless.

Morality is meaningless.

Happiness is meaningless.

Killing is meaningless.

This forum is meaningless.

Detect the trend?

That too, is meaningless.

Value is meaningless.

Life is meaningless.

Valuing your life is meaningless.

Empathy is meaningless.

Sounding like a broken record is meaningless.

Emoticons are meaningless.

You state your position well LukeMC, but if you agree that atheism entails nihilism, you are living your life inconsistently with your own beliefs; which in turn entails that either you don’t take your atheism seriously or you don’t really believe it entails nihilism. A consistent nihilist wouldn’t bother trying to convince anyone that his view is correct, because that would be meaningless.

It is a necessary inconsistency. To draw an analogy to your position, you seem to be stating the following:

Shit smells bad in your opinion
Your opinion is meaningless and the shit really doesn't smell "good" or "bad"
To live consistently with your beliefs, you must smell neither good nor bad in the shit, regardless of your brain and sensory organs.

It's out of my control Charles. Whether or not the things have meaning, I cannot possibly abandon them on the grounds of my disbelief in their meaning. You propose that I could just choose to switch off my brain and nervous system and all of my emotions at a whim. I can't. Thanks to my hotwiring, it wouldn't be possible for me to see things as they are; I can only perceive of things in whatever way my body is wired to allow (enter subjectivity and Adrian's points).

Imagine this rather extreme scenario. I decide my life is worthless and want to end it because "it doesn't matter anyway". I put my hands around my own throat and try to strangle myself. No matter how little I value my life, my body will always take control and force me to let go. This example is just to show how logical conclusions cannot override the basic functions of the body. "Digestion is meaningless. Stomach, shut down please... please? Oh come on "

So in the same way I cannot shut down my systems by choice, I cannot switch off my empathy, my love for happiness or my concept of "meaning". It may indeed be an inconsistency, but it isn't one which we can help. This may indeed have been your original point

One thing is for certain though, us atheists aren't making a hypocritical incosistency, as it is beyond our control. If we could live life without being tied to our ingrained perceptions of meaning I think we'd choose nonexistance, as this life would truly be meaningless and not worth living. Consistency 101 (Y). So while I agree objective moral nihilism is the logical following of a-supernaturalism, and it does follow that we might aswell kill people, I disagree that we as humans should start introducing a bunch of new genocidal blueprints for the future. In the real meaningless universe we might aswell, but under or delusionary (subjective) view of things we wouldn't be able to do such things anymore. Living a fairy tale is the only life we can know, and for all it's worth, we like feeling happy.


Haha, I'd hate to see a fundementalist get hold of this post and start spouting it to the masses. "Look! The atheists admit they are inconsistent! Their belief contains a hole which we can exploit! God wins!". Although, I don't think God would solve this problem by any stretch of the imagination. It's just one of those funky things in the universe. Living a fairy tale being the price for happiness sounds so ridiculously like a criticism of religion that I hesitated to use it. But at the end of the day, religion isn't a necessary delusion for happiness, it's a delusion built upon a delusion (In my worthless opinion of course).

As a final note, the discussion of morality, meaning, etc, may be intrinsically worthless, but under our bubble of delusion I don't believe we should/could abandon this given only the conclusion we've drawn about nihilism. We will continue to operate under a system of value, meaning and whatnot for as long as our brains force us to see things in this way. We are not omnipotent, we must bow to our limited capacity.

Hypothetical question? What do you think a being that is omnipotent would think of us human beings as a whole? Given what we do to each other, other animals and the planet?

I have no idea. I'm not an omnipotent being.

EvF

The being would probably come to all possible conclusions simultaneously. It would be able to see it from a human perspective, a perspective of indifference, and probably from many other perspectives at once, as it isn't bound to just one mode of thought. It's hard to imagine an omnipotent being having one single opinion of something and favouring it over all other possible opinions. With the power to ditch empathy and the power to use empathy, an omnipotent being would have a huge array of angles to look at it from. I couldn't possibly know which angle this being would prefer.

Very good answer.

Here's how I feel about morality. MAD. Mutually assured destruction. I'm a sentient being. That means I can feel. I can feel pleasure and pain, both physically and emotionally. If something causes me pain, naturally I'm going to seek to avoid or destroy it (fight or flight). If something causes me pleasure, naturally I'm going to seek to obtain it or create it. That's my morality.

As a nihilist, I don't believe in free will. Nor do I believe in the lack of free will. I think it likely that the concept of morality requires the ability of people to make a choice. I also find it likely that I exhibit behavior that conforms with other people's concepts of what is moral merely because it comes naturally to me.

Mind if I ask why you don't believe in free will?

I find the whole claim that atheism intails atheism to be false. Some atheist are perhaps nihilst and some aren't. It depends from person to person. I'm not an nihilist and I'm "hardcore" atheist.

Nihilism is also, like quite many philosphical ideas, to be very strange and, if may say, stupid.

Moral values falesly invented? Find that as a odd statement. They had to come from somewhere, which is from people.

Even though society has a certain ethic which they have to make everything work doesn't mean that the moral values is just invented by the society, or an goverment to control the people and keep everything together.

I do know moral values is diffrent between cultures. In some is it totally natural for women to go around topless, but here would it be morally wrong. Mostly becuase people would say "But, think aout the children!!!" and so on.

There are other diffrences to, quite many depending were in the world you are. But when it comes to killing, hurting, abusing, pedofilia, necrofilia, kannabalism and so on is it allways the same where ever you go. People find it to be wrong, it's an natrual intinct and most of these things does our empathical part of the brain repsond to.

But yes, some of the things I mentioned above is approved in some cultures. How could it be accepted there? Take a look at kannabalistic cultures, like headhunters. They do it because of what reason? Is it because they find humans to taste good? That it's fun to hunt down human and is a good way of spending your time? No, it's because of religion. They eat the one they killed, or parts of it which usally is the brain. I know zombie style. Because their spirit won't be haunting the area.

Why do they kill someone and eat him? What is the reason? They do kill enemies from other tibes, but it's ofently that they don't eat them.

The reason why they do waht they do is because they just eat persons that are concidred to be evil, and those people is not concidered to be human either. What is in their culture concidered to be an evil act? It is as it is for us: killing another human, absuing, violationg, raping and so on.

Even kannibals have the same moral values as we do.