Theists: Hitchens Wager

[Edwardo Piet]

I can certainly choose to go lay in bed right now and start day dreaming about something. Or I can choose to not.

Well... there's the free will thread for that one! Losty asked me to make it to stop us derailing other threads hehe.

I was just saying that our morals are affected by our differences on the matter. We can debate it in the free will thread hehe.

---

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.

It begs the question to simply assert that immoral intentions and motivations are obviously immoral because they're obviously immoral.

Because intentions and motivations aren't immoral in themselves... they're only immoral insofar as they lead to immoral actions.