RE: Good day from a new member.
January 5, 2016 at 12:01 pm
(This post was last modified: January 5, 2016 at 12:03 pm by Whateverist.)
First of all welcome to the forums and thank you for sharing your story. I wish more people raised in a religion had parents like yours.
I don't personally think an objective morality makes good sense of morality as we experience it.
All moral claims seem to depend on the values a person subscribes to. There do seem to be broad swaths of commonality but obviously no moral generalizations are entirely universal. People who are brought up believing moral actions please God find it hard to let that go. And yet those who have never believed in any gods also have moral experience and do or refrain from doing some acts for no other reason than their sense that it is or wouldn't be right to do so. Some of those godless people can articulate a broader, well thought out moral schema but for others it operates intuitively. To make sense of moral experience a theory needs to take account of all the ways we find it practiced. Objective morals laid out by God only explain moral behavior in a subset of the population, specifically those brought up to conceive of morals that way.
How can you presume to say it now? Understanding how variable moral experience is, who has the authority to speak for everyone? To state it categorically merely expresses how strongly you yourself feel about it, and you can go on feeling that strongly about it even if you don't think morals are objective.
Perhaps the one aspect of moral experience which is not supported by subjectively based morality is the sense so many have of righteous indignation. To take account of that phenomenon you probably do need to understand that some people operate under moral absolutes. That doesn't mean the person who holds their morals subjectively is any more likely to rape your daughter. It just means he is less likely to become apoplectic in assuring you of that fact.
(January 5, 2016 at 11:06 am)atjanks Wrote: Do you have any opinions on an objective morality?
I don't personally think an objective morality makes good sense of morality as we experience it.
(January 5, 2016 at 11:06 am)atjanks Wrote: A recurring topic in my conversations with my roommate is that an objective anything is impossible without a god.
All moral claims seem to depend on the values a person subscribes to. There do seem to be broad swaths of commonality but obviously no moral generalizations are entirely universal. People who are brought up believing moral actions please God find it hard to let that go. And yet those who have never believed in any gods also have moral experience and do or refrain from doing some acts for no other reason than their sense that it is or wouldn't be right to do so. Some of those godless people can articulate a broader, well thought out moral schema but for others it operates intuitively. To make sense of moral experience a theory needs to take account of all the ways we find it practiced. Objective morals laid out by God only explain moral behavior in a subset of the population, specifically those brought up to conceive of morals that way.
(January 5, 2016 at 11:06 am)atjanks Wrote: He argues that without god, how can I objectively say slavery in the 1800's or the holocaust were bad. If it was morally right for them at the time, how can I say it was evil.
How can you presume to say it now? Understanding how variable moral experience is, who has the authority to speak for everyone? To state it categorically merely expresses how strongly you yourself feel about it, and you can go on feeling that strongly about it even if you don't think morals are objective.
Perhaps the one aspect of moral experience which is not supported by subjectively based morality is the sense so many have of righteous indignation. To take account of that phenomenon you probably do need to understand that some people operate under moral absolutes. That doesn't mean the person who holds their morals subjectively is any more likely to rape your daughter. It just means he is less likely to become apoplectic in assuring you of that fact.
