Morality without God

[polymath257]

polymath257The difficulty comes in selecting the goals. For example, having the goal of killing all of my enemies is not one that most societies recognize without limitations. Hence, my goals may well conflict with your goals. The question of whose goals take priority is, in some senses, the goal of laws and of morality (two very different things, I would point out).
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And, I would say that in both law and morality, the idea is that there are more worthy goals and less worthy ones. There are goals that promote a smoothly functioning society and those that do not. There are those that promote happiness and well-being and those that do not.

The is/ought distinction seems to me to ultimately be a question of goals. The 'is' side has no goals: it says what various courses of action will lead to. The 'ought' chooses between the possibilities so as to meet certain desirable consequences. What makes a consequence desirable is the next issue, of course.

I think philosophers are going to hone in on this problem of "how do we know which goals to select?" Because it's pretty uncontroversial that once you've decided which goals are best, the oughts become clear.

As a mathematician, I'm sure you're aware of the view that ultimately mathematics cannot produce truth statements. Ultimately it is only a "useful fiction." That's something that I struggle with because (I've largely forgotten the argument) but I was convinced by it when I encountered it years back. But even so, it still seems that the pythagorean theorem says something true about right triangles. And I'm sure, in day-to-day practice, mathematicians assume something similar.

I think that morality is real in the same sense that mathematics is real. Ultimately (and I mean ONLY when you seriously lay the stink eye of skepticism on it) is morality a fiction. But for all intents and purposes, moral philosophy, with proper axioms CAN produce truth statements... just like (for all intents and purposes) mathematics can make truth statements about right triangles.

My issue is, if people are going to treat morality in this way, they ought also treat math and science in this way. People want to say "science can produce truth statements"-- "math can produce truth statements"-- but moral theory cannot. I think they apply the same amount of skepticism that renders math a "useful fiction" to morality but fail to apply the same amount of skepticism to math or science.

I love skepticism. I think it's all fine and good to be skeptical about morality. In fact, I advocate such a thing. But you can have runaway skepticism. You can wonder if the table in front of you or the chair you are sitting on is actually real. And again, I think it's wonderful to explore that kind of question. But people need to be aware what level of skepticism they use. An astronomer needs to assume "Jupiter is actually there," at some point to make accurate observations of its hydrogen content. If he is unwilling in this regard, he might be apt to ignore many things his observations reveal to him. I mean, why pay attention to those observations?

In short, I think morality is just as real as mathematical or scientific postulations. No more. No less. Maybe it's all "useful fiction" in the end. But, if that's the case then: oh well!

So, along this vein, I think we can ask something like, "What are the most worthy goals?" and come up with objectively true answers. I don't mean The One and Only Answer™. I mean, a workable theory. Something like Newtonian physics that can be (and should be) improved upon. Much debate and observation and questioning ought to transpire, but I think we can get there.

Will everyone agree in the end? Hell no. But people don't agree about proven scientific fact. Look at creationists. Just because a creationist will never accept that the world is more than a few thousand years old, doesn't mean the rest of us can't look at the data and come to a better conclusion. There will always be controversy in moral theory. And the masses will often prefer the cruder theories that religion provides to more accurate ones.

Doesn't mean that (in the end) there isn't a more accurate way to see moral postulates. I think there is. And for this reason, I think morality is objective (rather than subjective).

I come at it from a slightly different point of view. I ask what it is about a subject that allows it to produce truth statements. I believe it ultimately is depndent on some method of conflict resolution.

As an example, physics and the other 'hard' sciences have a fairly specific process if two people have different opinions: look for some experiment or observation that would distinguish the two views and conduct that experiment or observation to see who is *wrong*. If there is no such experiment of observation possible (even in theory), then the two views are regarded as equivalent and *both* are accepted or rejected together based on other observations.

In math, there is a fairly well structured way to resolve differences: one person produces a proof or counter example, according to certain well-defined rules, and the proof or counter example is scanned to be sure nothing outside of the agreed upon axioms is used. If no proof or counter example can be found, the matter is left unresolved. It may even be that it can be proved that no proof is possible either way (that the result is independent of the axioms). In that case, *both* views are considered to be legitimate. If both a proof and a counter-example are produced and verified, we have a problem.

In these cases, the existence of a dispute resolution procedure is why, in my mind, it is possible to make truth claims. At the minimum, falsehoods can be eliminated.

So my question for morality is how we can resolve disputes. If one person says that 'eating people is wrong' and another says 'eating people is a good thing', what steps can we take to resolve the dispute? Is there a way that we can eliminate one view or the other and at least say it is false?

I don't seek a process that will answer ALL questions of this sort. There may be practical obstacles to whatever is required (just like we might not currently have the technology to resolve a scientific question or have a proof or counter example in math). But is it possible to resolve at least a large collection of interesting cases in an unambiguous way? In what cases do we see the dispute as a non-dispute?

Thoghts?