Theists: Hitchens Wager

[chimp3]

This is getting repetitive. Motivation is not an action.

Thoughts and intentions are absolutely necessary in the calculus of determining the morality of action. Steam engines lack any intention in-themselves and do what they do without moral import. They are not moral agents. Similarly, tigers are not acting immorally by eating monkeys because it is a tiger’s instinctual nature to hunt, kill, and eat other creatures. Moral responsibility depends on the agent’s capacity to weight consequences and choose between actions that may or may not conform to that agents’ nature. The cultivation of virtue, in both thought and deed, means forming mental habits of courage and caring rather than indifference and cowardice, learning the physical skills required to act on them, and building up the resources needed to do so.

Beautifully written! Aside from some believers claim to a monopoly on moral responsibility, open to the most high minded of us.

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Yeah, I know..but...again, barring motivations, there is nothing that an atheist or believer could do that the other could not because the only possible answer to that question would amount to superhuman abilities.  This was absolutely -not- the question hitchens was asking, or the thrust of that wager or it's rejoinder.  It's not even a meaningful question.

It was formulated in the way that it was expliitly to point out that while it;s difficult to think of something roundly considered to be moral being the sole possession of believers, it's blissfully easy to come up with examples of immorality thusly possessed.  This furthers the notion, in the subtitle of his book...that religion poisons everything.

His formulation at least allows for conceptual space in which an answer can be given.  Your's doesn't.  Even explicitly religious acts will be reclassified as "motivations", good or bad.

I understand what Hitchens meant and I disagree. If we include motivation in judging immoral actions then we must include motivation in moral actions and we nullify the wager.