The difference between ethical atheism and nihlism is that ethical atheists have more faith

[Question Mark]

I think it's definitely true a naturalist can value human life. But I don't think he can rational justify his properly basic beliefs of human value. I think this is why most societies resorted to belief in myth or supernatural.

It's very arguable that ancient leaders saw a distinct problem with everyone having a sense of "self", where accountability is only to those around them. People can be greedy, selfish bastards. Having a nice, unassailable authority figure to point to and say "I might not be able to stop you, but HE certainly can!" would likely explain early onsets of religion on the state level.

In the modern day though, I think we've learned to place our sense of morality upon the discovery that we evolved a sense of empathy, since it's counteractive to survival to foster a murderous culture.

[mralstoner]

Morality/ethics is a subset of human values. Where can atheists get their values from? Like all the other animals, our values come from our feelings/desires/emotions. Emotion is what evolution programmed us with to tell us what is good and bad in our environment.

So, talk of moral nihilism is a waste of time. We know where atheists get our values from. The only interesting question is how this insight will effect our moral culture. Our morality (currently based largely on tradition) will increasingly be judged anew according to how well such a culture promotes human happiness.

So let's get on with promoting such a moral culture and stop wasting time with unnecessary drama about moral nihilism. Nihil means 'nothing'. To say that we know nothing about human values is obviously false. Psychology and neuroscience are increasingly studying the conditions for human happiness, and we all already know what our hearts desire. Ergo, moral nihilism is nonsense. It's for drama queens.

[xXUKAtheistForTheTruthXx]

If naturalism is true e.g. there is no God and the material universe, more or less, is all that exists, the naturalist is faced with two possible stances:

1. Deny the existence of the reality of any morality at all - a human being is no more valuable than an amoeba
2. Ascribe some sort of arbitrary value to human beings

I believe that choice two, which is what the vast majority of atheists choose to do is epistemologically very similar to religious faith. In religious faith, people recognize a moral, teleological order of life in which value is ascribed to human beings as a consequence of them being created. In atheism, the value is simply ascribed to human life. The atheist might object that the value is not an objective fact, but only what is consider to be objective, but that completely denies the way that atheists use moral language (see, the language of liberalism).

I would argue, follow Alaisdair MacIntyre, that atheists have essentially a choice between Nietzschean nihilism or Aristotelian teleological ethics. Many atheists really in secret have a sort of Deist, teleological approach to ethics when they invoke evolutionary processes as grounding human life in some sort of goal driven process that confers moral worth on people. If they were honest atheists, they would simply call themselves Deists and accept that the way they talk about evolution is essentially giving a teleological property to it that it lacks in the naturalistic understanding. Evolution says nothing about why people should be considered more ethically valuable than rocks, to say so is to move from atheistic evolution to theistic or deistic evolution.

Ethical atheism requires faith. The language of physics, chemistry and biology cannot describe the moral worth of people. It cannot create a political philosophy, or tell people how to live the good life. Of course morality is related to biology, physics and chemistry, but none of these things ground atheist ethics in any kind of remotely rigorous way.

The reality, in the end, that the ethical, responsible atheist is just an atheist than happens to have more faith than the nihilist. The process of assigning values to human life is not a rigorous process. Someone might argue "people can feel pain, and I don't want to feel pain, and pain can be measured physiologically or sentience understood scientifically". This may be true, but there is no reason to associate pain with morality, unless people are designed to associate these things.

The honest atheist might as well go the whole way and either become a Deist and accept some sort of teleological universe that justifies the moral language that constantly refers to this universe, or become a nihilist and strip his vocabulary of all teleological concepts.

What the honest atheist cannot do is tell a Christian that he is corrupted epistemologically by his faith and then proceed to deny that God exists and talk about human rights. He must either choose to ground his ethical concepts in teleology and ethics that he cannot completely percieve that seem reasonable as a Deist or Christian or stop using ethical concepts at all.

The Christian is not irrational in grounding his beliefs in a supernatural religion (I myself have experienced many supernatural confirmations of the Christian faith). It is the atheist who is irrational in grounding his ethical concepts, the most important in life, in arbitrary ethical concepts that, no matter how much evidence is revealed, will never be found to have any value, because the concepts have no ground other than the opinions of the atheist.[/u][/i]

Religious Views: Christian

[Neo-Scholastic]

What is this horseshit about Christians valuing life? They don't and never have.

Generalize much? I suppose you hate Jews too. You have crossed the line into anti-religious bigotry.

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Morality/ethics is a subset of human values. Where can atheists get their values from? Like all the other animals, our values come from our feelings/desires/emotions. Emotion is what evolution programmed us with to tell us what is good and bad in our environment.

That evades the issue. Values derived solely from an indifferent evolutionary process only relate to survival value. Your 'morality' is just programmed into by random chance. Rape and slavery have evolutionary advantages. That doesn't make them morally good. But neither does it make them evil because within naturalism good and evil have no meaning.

[jstrodel]

Morality/ethics is a subset of human values. Where can atheists get their values from? Like all the other animals, our values come from our feelings/desires/emotions. Emotion is what evolution programmed us with to tell us what is good and bad in our environment.

So, talk of moral nihilism is a waste of time. We know where atheists get our values from. The only interesting question is how this insight will effect our moral culture. Our morality (currently based largely on tradition) will increasingly be judged anew according to how well such a culture promotes human happiness.

So let's get on with promoting such a moral culture and stop wasting time with unnecessary drama about moral nihilism. Nihil means 'nothing'. To say that we know nothing about human values is obviously false. Psychology and neuroscience are increasingly studying the conditions for human happiness, and we all already know what our hearts desire. Ergo, moral nihilism is nonsense. It's for drama queens.

You are using evolution in a teleological sense. Really, if naturalistic evolution is true, evolution is no more significant to morality than particles of space dust.

You are reducing ethics to your desires. But people have desires for many different things.

Why should human happiness be the ultimate standard for morality? You are presupposing something that is not at all clear, which shows you have probably not thought about this extremely important issue very much at all.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Why should human happiness be the ultimate standard for morality?

Aristotle would take issue with that (Nichomachean Ethics). Not that I agree entirely with Aristotle, but I think he builds the best case for secular morality.

[Angrboda]

Morality/ethics is a subset of human values. Where can atheists get their values from? Like all the other animals, our values come from our feelings/desires/emotions. Emotion is what evolution programmed us with to tell us what is good and bad in our environment.

So, talk of moral nihilism is a waste of time. We know where atheists get our values from. The only interesting question is how this insight will effect our moral culture. Our morality (currently based largely on tradition) will increasingly be judged anew according to how well such a culture promotes human happiness.

So let's get on with promoting such a moral culture and stop wasting time with unnecessary drama about moral nihilism. Nihil means 'nothing'. To say that we know nothing about human values is obviously false. Psychology and neuroscience are increasingly studying the conditions for human happiness, and we all already know what our hearts desire. Ergo, moral nihilism is nonsense. It's for drama queens.

You are using evolution in a teleological sense. Really, if naturalistic evolution is true, evolution is no more significant to morality than particles of space dust.

You are reducing ethics to your desires. But people have desires for many different things.

Why should human happiness be the ultimate standard for morality? You are presupposing something that is not at all clear, which shows you have probably not thought about this extremely important issue very much at all.

Wow. Back so soon. Shit. I never saw that coming.

[jstrodel]

You are using evolution in a teleological sense. Really, if naturalistic evolution is true, evolution is no more significant to morality than particles of space dust.

You are reducing ethics to your desires. But people have desires for many different things.

Why should human happiness be the ultimate standard for morality? You are presupposing something that is not at all clear, which shows you have probably not thought about this extremely important issue very much at all.

Wow. Back so soon. Shit. I never saw that coming.

Well, he didn't clutter up my thread with sexual references.

[Question Mark]

You are using evolution in a teleological sense. Really, if naturalistic evolution is true, evolution is no more significant to morality than particles of space dust.

You are reducing ethics to your desires. But people have desires for many different things.

Why should human happiness be the ultimate standard for morality? You are presupposing something that is not at all clear, which shows you have probably not thought about this extremely important issue very much at all.

Well given that you believe that there's a higher power, I rather think that you will think that human happiness is base in comparison to that higher power.

Our consideration that human happiness is the point of morality is because morality deals with the well being of human beings, that they are safe, happy, and healthy.
Christianity is one of those religions that tends to have a leaning towards self reproach, and the reproach of other people, so it's understandable that human happiness is not the highest priority.

We're not presupposing anything, though, we're basing our actions and definitions upon what is demonstrable. We can't be expected to take into consideration things that do not have a proven effect on the situation.
That's be like saying "Oh I better not go swimming in this lake, it might upset the merpeople."

[jstrodel]

Well given that you believe that there's a higher power, I rather think that you will think that human happiness is base in comparison to that higher power.

Our consideration that human happiness is the point of morality is because morality deals with the well being of human beings, that they are safe, happy, and healthy.
Christianity is one of those religions that tends to have a leaning towards self reproach, and the reproach of other people, so it's understandable that human happiness is not the highest priority.

We're not presupposing anything, though, we're basing our actions and definitions upon what is demonstrable. We can't be expected to take into consideration things that do not have a proven effect on the situation.
That's be like saying "Oh I better not go swimming in this lake, it might upset the merpeople."

Russell Kirk asks a good question: "What is happiness". Aristotle's conception of happiness was very different from utilitarianism, Mill's understanding. Aristotle's sense of happiness, eudaimonia is related to a teleological view of human nature. Happiness is directed towards satisfying the highest possible virtue. This is different than arguing for "happiness" based on some artificial construction of a social good.

The kind of happiness that receives its definition not from teleology (unacceptable to the atheist) but from some sort of social construction (as in J S Mill's the greatest good for the greatest number or some sort of liberal political morality) is at its roots authoritarian. It is a way to force others to accept the idea of happiness that the society defines. What is happiness? If it is defined in a non absolute way, happiness is just one mans will to force another to accept his will.

What produces happiness and creates happiness is totally different in different societies and environments. Happiness is also distinct from pleasure. Few wise people would say that a society that mostly pursues pleasure will in the long run achieve happiness, that holds true on an individual level as well.

Christianity is not opposed to happiness, but it is for joy. Joy is similar to the Aristotelian concept of happiness (though it has been years since I have studied that), that flows out of correctly operating human behavior. This is totally different from from defining happiness in a way that makes it a made arbitrary prioritizing of certain types of emotions or feelings over another - e.g. happiness is the right of all people to own a TV.