Theists: Hitchens Wager

[henryp]

Also, how long do you have for the consequences to play out?  If I kick a pregnant lady down a flight of stairs, but it turns out her baby was Hitler, does that make it moral?

That's a problem of epistemology. Whether we can know the results is a different matter. You're confusing what is right and wrong in principle and what is right and wrong in practice.

In principle, kicking ladies in the stomach is wrong. Some would think that if they knew the baby was going to be Hitler then that would be okay because it's a lesser evil. I certainly don't because 1) I don't condone such violence in general and 2) If we knew it was going to be Hitler why not just have an abortion instead?

So is kicking a lady in the stomach, who unbeknownst to everyone, is going to be giving birth to Hitler moral or immoral according to consequentionalism?  You kind of wandered off on me there for a bit.  

You think you're being critiqued,  but there are ?'s at the end of these sentences for a reason.  You're not being criticized by me.  You're being asked for clarification.

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Right, but you don't really believe humans 'thinking' is different than a tornado, do you?  Because we don't have free will.

It's different because we think.

Right, a tornado is certainly bad for the same reasons... the consequences. And Hitler is like a tornado because there's no free will. But to say that something non-human is being "morally bad" sounds bizarre.

For starters, here's a reason why it's non-arbitrary: Humans respond to punishment. Tornadoes don't.

That's probably the primary reason to be honest. Humans still have compatabilist free will, tornadoes don't.

I can't choose to not kick a lady down the stairs any more than a tornado can decide not to hit the local orphanage. 

Right. But you do have compatabilist free will. You are able to modify your behavior based on how you are treated. You respond to threats and punishment... praise and blame. It's still useful to hold people responsible even in reality they aren't. It isn't useful to hold tornadoes responsible.

Was just curious how you differentiated between those two things.

Well, moral theories aren't about whether tornadoes are bad or not. You don't put a tornado in prison when they kill someone. You don't expect the tornado to modify its behavior and stop killing people if you punish it.

We still have compatabilist free will. Tornadoes don't.

We both, (i believe) think compatabilist free will is mostly meaningless, no?  We don't put Tornados in prison, because you can't put Tornados in prison.  That being said, we do try to modify non-human objects behavior. 

To get better results from humans, maybe we put them in jail.  To get better results from the weather, we reduce carbon output.  Both are just actions taken to get more desirable results from a system.