Religion is a poor source of morality

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I know what you think you mean, when you say "higher standard of value", but I think it's clear that even those holy books are based on the cultures that spawned them, as a way of legitimizing a particular set of values.

I was not thinking of holy books or any other form of special revelation. As a professing Christian I understand why you would make that assumption, so I forgive you. The higher standard of value of which I was thinking has something to do with recognizing the degree to which a thing conforms to its essential nature. This approach at least has the promise of achieving a measure of objectivity.

You have my apologies. Thank you for understanding that, almost without fail, when I'm speaking with a Christian about "higher" anything, they typically are referring to the Bible's claims about "what God says", which I hear as, "what priests said a long time ago, claiming to speak for God". But you're right, I should have asked, not assumed.

Previously, I have heard you refer a few times to the concept of something's "essential nature", and I'm not really sure what that means except to say that it seems to imply a rigidity to individuals within a species that is simply not there. For instance, I could say that "a cat has an essential nature as a hunter", but I had two cats, growing up, one of whom was a supreme hunter and one of whom never did or wanted to, as far as I could tell. In fact, she turned her nose up visibly at the activity of her sister, when they were playing and the latter spotted prey to chase. Same genes, same species, same environment/upbringing, yet one was a total housecat and the other one was a miniature panther at heart. What is the "essential nature" of a cat, then? I think the same applies to human behaviors; we are not so easily classified, nor do we have a universal "nature" to which we can align (or from which we can deviate), despite societal norms which stem from our tribalism instinct. We can only talk in terms of generalities, like "people tend to _____".

Given that, I cannot see how we could achieve objectivity about things that are an "essential nature" of a person or society. Too many competing factors seem to be involved.

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I appreciate your goodwill. I like you. You raise good points and seem pretty thoughtful overall. If I misunderstood then the fault is all mine for not reading carefully enough. You’ve made a couple statements about me here and elsewhere that I truly believe were unwarranted. For quite some time, I’ve been very careful to qualify all my statements about atheism and atheists numerically with “a few” or “some” or many. I have also been very careful for well over a year to not equate atheism per se with ontological naturalism, physical monism, materialism, etc. And despite all this you seem to think I am making wide sweeping generalizations from “the hate in my heart.” As for this thread, I guess I could go point by point, but in this case I don’t believe it would be necessary or productive.

Thank you. I do try not to make unwarranted attacks, but like everyone, my emotions sometimes get the best of me. You are certainly improving in every possible way, just since I've been here; it's possible I "came in at a low point", so to speak!

I used the phrase "the hate in your heart" because of a comment that struck me as astoundingly bitter and prejudiced toward us, which to me indicated a deep-seated anger toward and/or hate for atheists. In other words, I thought that your emotions had gotten carried away by the campus shooting which targeted Christians, and you were loosing your venom toward us. That, to me, indicated a place in your heart that carried hatred, so I expressed my concern. I will do my best in the future to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Put simply, your naturalistic position makes a circular argument. You cannot evaluate the efficacy with which moral reasoning makes correct value judgments without first assuming the efficacy of moral reasoning. That’s what I mean when I say that naturalist theories of morality unjustifiably ‘privilege’ some instincts (empathy, disgust, altruism, group cohesion, etc.) over others.

Respectfully, I think it's the other way around. Naturalist models tend to look at all behaviors in an attempt to understand the system, without giving credence to any one as "better" than the other. This is often the source of snide anti-naturalism comments I have had to reply to in the past, which implied that to us, there is nothing wrong with sociopathic/psychopathic behaviors because we have no basis upon which to "judge" such persons. We try to look at people as they are, not as we wish they should be or as we have been traditionally informed they are when the data show that they clearly are not. One example of this is the recent conversation about monogamy.

The research you cite insightfully identifies external influences (culture and experience) and innate processes that contribute to the process of moral reasoning. I do not dispute any of their conclusions.  But, and it is a critical ‘but’, empirical data alone cannot show that the results of moral reasoning are in fact moral. For example, scientific research can show that sociopaths reason differently from regular folks. Scientific research apart from a pre-determined measurable moral standard cannot show that the value judgments of a sociopath are morally inferior, equal, or superior to those of regular folks. From a naturalistic perspective, the best anyone can do is say that the behavior of a sociopath deviates from the cultural norm.

I certainly agree with almost all of this, except to comment that I don't know how we'd sufficiently define "moral" such that we could ever make the statement, "the result of this moral reasoning is moral". The reason I speak so much about the concept of empathy-based moral reasoning is because we observe that sociopaths seem to have failed to develop a system that guides our behavior based on empathy for others. That's what a sociopath is: they are as blind to empathic feelings (and thus, reasoning) as a sightless person is blind to light. And in both cases, it appears to be a malfunction of an evolved system, which is why we tend to look at it in terms of conferred evolutionary advantages in a social species like ours. To put it another way, we wonder why we're not all sociopaths: "what evolutionary advantage was it to those who developed a sense of empathy?" We look to our own behavior as an individual within groups of varying kinds, and we look to our cousin species, which also seem to exhibit empathy-based moral reasoning in many cases. I have to admit that the more I look at the social behavior of chimps, the more I see the basics of what we humans would call a "soul", and also see in their violence (and ours) the echoes of the way our long-distant ancestors probably behaved. We are a vast improvement over that origin, but I think the roots of it are clearly there in our present behaviors (in religion, "sin" is used to explain why you sometimes find a married pastor with a pair of hookers; I see it as older instincts winning out over socialized behavioral expectations).

Secondly, it is premature to say that specific social systems are more fit than others. As for now, scientific research is too incomplete to say if the moral framework of one culture is superior to another in terms of ‘fitness’. It’s all speculation. Human societies have been organized under tribal elders and warlords, dynasties, dictators, empires, communes, and nation states. Western constitutional republics and liberal democracies have only been around for a tiny sliver of human history. There is insufficient data to suppose that Western-style approaches to governance are any more likely to insure the long-term survival of humanity than Islamic Caliphates or stone-age tribalism.

You probably noted that the researchers themselves said that we need to do a great deal more studying on the subject, but I would again point to their three-tiered system of moral behavior, and their conclusion that what we call moral reasoning started out as a simple system of kin-selection-based empathy (if I am good to my immediate group, even at my own expense, it helps improve my genetic fitness because it helps my kin, and vice-versa) and has since been forced to expand since the invention of ever-larger groups, post-Agricultural Revolution. Civilization has forced upon us (before we were completely ready) the need to make much larger moral decisions than our instinctive empathy can provide for, and our cultural ideals tend to be ones that try to cope with that fact, to varying degrees of success... I absolutely agree that we have insufficient data to suppose any of what you listed. But I do hope!