Atheism and morality

[Angrboda]

I will simply point out that two beliefs common in Hindu tradition, karma and reincarnation, make up samsara or the wheel of existence. Existence qua existence is taken to be a bad thing, and thus escaping the endless cycle of reincarnation is the goal, also known as moksha. Escaping the wheel takes different forms, but is ultimately seen as the result of acting in accordance with one's dharma which yields good karma and leads to release. Because karmic law imposes karmic burdens on the individual depending on the moral goodness of the act, these serve the same moral function as an ever vigilant, vengeful god who controls your afterlife. So you see, no god is required after all.

No, I do not think morality is well explained by the posit of a Karmic universe. There are several major problems in my view. One of the major problems is that morality instructs/favours whereas a law of nature (or supernature) does not. So this kind of view will be entirely unable to account for morality's instructing nature.

Consequences favor certain actions over others, so "favoring" is not sufficient to distinguish moral properties from non-moral ones. You have asserted that morality is instruction. I will dispute this premise now. First, even if I grant that morality may be instructive, it's not necessarily the case that this is an essential property of morality; it's possible that its instructive aspects are simply a side effect of its true nature. And as noted, there are instructive experiences which are not the result of an agent. However, a more fundamental problem is simply equating "morality" with instruction, favoring, and an agent. Since morality is not a thing, it cannot be equated to an agent without a category error (see also, Leibniz' law). Somewhere along the line, you equivocated by switching from morality as idea or process, to morality as thing. It appears to me that perhaps more clearly, one could say that morality has the effect of instructing, or morality is "like instruction," but saying that morality "is" instruction, in addition to being a category error, runs afoul of Moore's naturalistic fallacy (morality is "like morality," and likening it to anything but itself, without support, results in an error). However, reformulating it in this way makes it an argument from analogy, and not a deductive syllogism, and eliminates any compulsion to agree based upon the principles of logic. In that case, it becomes a suggestion, rather than a syllogism, and one that is not without its own problems.

Moreover, there appears to be something clearly, intuitively wrong about this forumalation, namely that neither instruction nor favoring capture the essential "moral" nature of morality. If I take something I own and break it, it has a bad result, but the result is not "morally bad" in the sense it would be if I took something from someone else and broke it. The essential "moral" aspect, the goodness or badness of acts, appears to be nowhere in evidence in your conception. What makes a god's instructions moral, qualitatively, and not a society's? (And yes, you've used the dense term rationally compelling, which still doesn't account for the moral dimension; things can be rationally compelling without having a moral value or character. At present, I'm not even sure of your meaning with that term, so I suggest you unpack its meaning. I have a rationally compelling reason not to endanger my life by smoking cigarettes, but not a moral one. And if you intend to lean on Kant's conception of a categorical imperative, please indicate this. Doing so, even implicitly, will, however, vacate the need for a god.)

Second, there would be no good explanation available of our moral sense and how it has come to track moral properties.

Since your argument thus far has not provided a similar mechanism, asking me to do so for karmic law amounts to special pleading, and is thus dismissed.

Third, such a view does not have the resources to explain moral desert.

Again, until you provide it, I don't need to provide it.

On a related note, you made it clear that the control of a person's afterlife is an essential feature for providing a compelling rational reason for obeying the instructions of a god. As the effects of karma and reincarnation provide an equally compelling reason for following the dictates of dharma, it would seem there is far more in common between the two views than first realized. Is control of essentially eternal fate a necessity in your view, or not; you've not really given any justification for it, but if your god has it, then so does samsara. Your latter two objections, how morals are instilled and the nature of moral dessert are both well captured by karmic law, as even if the consequences of karmic law have no sensible explanation for their apportionment, the feedback of the karmic loop as well as evolutionary mechanisms can adequately provide for moral sensation (because the sensation of moral law is in relation to moral phenomena, not the moral reality). And Hindus do in fact have such mechanisms in the eternal and uncreated nature of the Vedas, whose timeless wisdom was communicated through the rishis.

This is unsurprising as the Hindu view is not offered as an explanatory hypothesis. Rather, as with all religions, it is just some barmy story someone pulled out of their backside.

If you say so.