(August 12, 2019 at 7:50 pm)Belaqua Wrote:(August 12, 2019 at 7:38 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: I re-read the question 'Why is it wrong to torture babies?' several times. I parsed it out pretty carefully. I tried substituting other words that mean approximately the same things (e.g. 'Wherefore is the evil in causing gratuitous suffering to neonates?'). I asked the question to other people as a test.
I'm not the sharpest tree in the forest, but I'm unable to find any sense in which this question is not understandable, unclear, or confusing.
But I'm pretty sure it deserves a better response than, 'I don't understand the question.'
Boru
A while back I was arguing that grown up atheists (who aren't in a vegetative state) are atheists for reasons. That we have all heard religious arguments, evaluated them according to standards, and failed to be persuaded by them.
Often the reasons for rejecting the arguments are very good ones -- e.g. "I have never seen evidence." Other times they are not-so-good reasons -- e.g. "The nuns were mean to me."
At the time someone here was telling me that's all wrong, that he and other atheists hold things to be true about the world for no reasons at all.
It may be that Acrobat feels the same way. That we perceive good and bad without reasons. That something is just good -- not good because something.
But I confess that both cases seem strange to me.
Epistemologically, Acrobat isn't wrong here. Sometimes we don't need to deliberate on whether something is right or wrong in order to intuit it. But that's not what's being asked of him.
If X is just good, then that's still X is good because of something about X