Theists: Hitchens Wager

[Edwardo Piet]

I can posit objective morality very easily. Everything is totally evil. There you go. Anyone can use that moral system, and it doesn't rely on anyone's opinion, not even mine. It's not my opinion that everything is evil, I just wrote it down so that I can point to it as an objective moral system.

The next question is why anyone should care about this objective system. I don't think they should, I think they should ignore it and think for themselves. Having it be objective doesn't make it useful or desirable. Even if I happened to agree with it that everything is evil, that makes it no more valid for anyone else.

I think the problem is that morality is about what's good, and immorality is about what's bad.

All I take objective morality to mean is that some things cause harm and other things don't. And morality always seems to be about at the very least not causing needless harm to living beings for no good reason.

I don't think anyone should care about a 'moral system' that everything is evil because it's not really a system if everything is just evil.

True, I can't prove that "moral" should mean "not causing living beings needless suffering" but no one can prove that healthy should mean "At least not constantly bleeding from both eyes" either. All criticisms of objective morality appear to apply to criticisms of objective health. So my conclusion is that morality can be objective in the same way that health is.

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The laws of physics and maths are objective truths.

Maths is a language that points to true things...

It's all semantics.

...just like semantics can

This may seem yet another “just semantic” issue, but I never understood why so many people hold semantics in such disdain. After all, semantics deals with the meaning of our terms, and if we don’t agree at least approximately on what we mean when we talk to each other there is going to be nothing but a confusing cacophony. As usual when I engage in “demarcation” problems, I don’t mean to suggest that there are sharp boundaries (in this case, between scientific theories and philosophical accounts), but rather that there is an interesting continuum and that people may have been insufficiently appreciative of interesting differences along such continuum.

Source: http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.co.uk...ucing.html

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Let me be clear that I'm not talking about involuntary thoughts that pop into your head, nor about mental health issues. Nothing involuntary can be a sin, because it is not freely chosen. I'm talking about choosing to fantasize about scenarios where you're killing people because you hate them for their sexuality.

Right. Well I think the difference between us there is I don't think that thoughts or fantasies can be chosen! But I do think there's an important difference between an intentional action and an unintentional action.

I know I can sit and day dream and fabricate fantasies in my head for a while about stuff - or I can choose to get up and do something else.

This is where our disagreement on free will becomes relevant

To me, thoughts think themselves.

My point is, a person can be a bad person without having actually gone through with doing a very bad thing that he would otherwise have loved to do.

And, as a conseqentialist, I think that ultimately the only bad things are bad actions. Intentions are bad only insofar as they lead to bad actions.

Hitler had a very deep hatred for Jewish people for a long time. Do you think if he happened to have died before he was able to have millions of innocent Jewish people killed, he should have been considered a decent person just because he hadn't actually done the bad deed yet?

On consequentalist grounds, yes.

And someone who kills someone by accident is bad, but not as bad as someone who does it on purpose... because someone who does it on purpose is more likely to kill people in the future.

From my perspective, as someone who doesn't believe in ultimate moral responsibility... Hitler is like the human equivalent of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or volcano killing people.

Because it was all still just in his head?

Yes. You can't hurt people with your thoughts.

What's in your head matters.

I think it only matters when it leads to harmful action.

You probably think my position on morality is crazy, or weird, or immoral... but if you are interested in learning more about it, if you're curious about the opposing view... here's a page on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism