How to easily defeat any argument for God

[The Grand Nudger]

Moral calculus and desert. We entertain the notion that a lesser bad in service to a greater good can be a final good, in analysis. Or, abandoning that, that some bad acts do not entail desert of full consequence if the outcome is good.

Conversely, we understand that s great evil can be accomplished by exploiting people’s desire to be good. That, in this instance, they do not deserve the consequences of the bad act in isolation of context with their intentions.

This can be plotted on a two axis graph, with valleys and peaks broadly conforming to ( and predicting) societal and individual attitudes.

This is the central thesis of Kagans geometry of Desert, which attempts to show an underlying logic or pattern in moral attitudes, specifically in situations with a complex set of actualizing and canceling variables, or in situations described as a field of exclusively suboptimal decisions.

It doesn’t pose an issue for realists, since no fact of any matter exists in a vacuum. It’s a problem for absolutists. So I guess we can add that to the pile.

Acros morality is one of arbitrary and subjective absolutism. He simply -calls- it “objective”.....

........because he intuitively imagines it to be True™.

---

To simplify the above ( for the peanut gallery), morality is not a suicide pact.

Using the German populace as an example ( and simplifying fur brevity) their options were to keep the trains that carried the dissidents running, or be on those trains themselves. Exclusively suboptimal. In that they chose to keep the trains running....they are responsible.

We can use a relational inference to say that there were decisions better-than the one they made, so it wasn’t particularly virtuous, but it’s s hell of a stretch to say that choosing not to die is bad, or evil.

In this, the German pop are clearly not heroes, but they’re not quite villains either.