From atheism to tentative agnosticism

[Angrboda]

1. How would one determine that moral reality, separate from moral phenomena (the "appearance" of moral truths), actually exists?

Let’s assume I’m correct and that morality really does require a god (that morality is composed of the instructions and favourings of a god).

As noted in the other thread, you're equivocating. Your syllogism requires that morality "be" instruction or favoring, and that instruction or favoring "be" an agent. When you step away from that strict formulation, your syllogism and argument falls apart.

Let's make the necessary changes and see: {the original in curly braces}

1. Morality is composed of the instructions or favorings of one thing toward another thing; {Morality instructs/favours/commands}
2. Only a thing which is an agent can favor or instruct; {Only an agent can instruct/favour/command}
Therefore, morality is an agent. {Morality is an agent}

At best, this formulation is incomplete; at worst, it's an obvious non-sequitur. It isn't 'morality' doing the instructing or favoring, but the agent behind it.

(And, as noted there, the essential "moral" character appears completely missing. What makes a god's instruction to not eat pork a moral one, when his advising you to marry Batsheba is not?)

The reason for this is that we should assume things are as they appear to be unless given reason to think otherwise. So, if you have the visual sensation that there is a chair in front of you, you should assume there is a chair in front of you until you have reason to think otherwise. The brute possibility that you may be mistaken is not yet positive reason to think you are mistaken.

So, I would take the existence of morality to be established if we sense the existence of morality (and we clearly do) and there is no evidence with which this sensation conflicts.

Graham Priest suggests that our seeing the chair is reason in and of itself to believe in the existence of the chair. Perhaps not grossly compelling reason, but reason nonetheless. And there is a difference here in that other's subjectivity and other means can be used to corroborate the objective existence of a chair. Whereas intangibles, such as objective morality, or free will, or consciousness, are not seen in the first place, and there is essentially no way to independently verify their contents, or have someone else corroborate their existence and content. The perception of a thing counts as evidence for the existence of a thing, but not conclusive evidence. And the fact that we have well meaning and rational people who disagree as to whether the perception that there is a moral reality is justified, or that free will exists, or that consciousness is 'real' leave us with good cause for skepticism as there is nowhere near uniform agreement on their existence. Furthermore, there are great differences as to the content of objective morality, both across individuals and across time which leaves us with considerable cause for skepticism as to whether a stable, objective moral reality even in fact exists. Notably, different people's perceptions about what is and is not moral differ, and, seemingly equivalent scenarios can evoke moral feelings in one but not the other instance. Additionally, while a chair may or may not exist by itself, it belongs to a class of visual perceptions whose reliability is well attested; the existence of objective morality is in no such class and therefore cannot lean upon the evidence of other classes of sensations for support as to its existence. Also, moral sensations only occur when "provoked" by the thought of an act; if a chair appeared only when I thought of the taste of chocolate ice cream, I'd have a lot of extraordinary questions about the nature of the existence of that chair. So, even if I agreed with you that we should proceed on the basis of how things appear lacking other reasons, we both have those other reasons, as well as an absence of an appearance of the phenomena in question. (And I notice you ducking Rhythm's requests that you produce the subject; consider this your writ of habeas corpus.)

No, that is not how I am arguing. There is something incoherent in the thought that it would be morally bad if morality did not exist. Moral badness presupposes morality's existence. My argument is just that morality has certain features and that only the instructions of a certain sort of god would have those features, therefore morality is the instructions of a god of that kind.

Coherence is a property of systems. Keep that in mind. What specific features did you have in mind? (You used a phrase about something being rationally compelling and universal, both of which appeared impenetrable jargon, especially since you qualified that a universal prescription can be individualistic. I notice you have a whole "syllogism" following the above syllogism, which I have yet to analyze other than to note that, at first glance, it seemed incredibly weak and runs afoul of the Euthyphro dilemma. Perhaps I will have more once I have considered it in depth.)

Some sensations are not sensations of anything external. For instance pain is like that. If you sense pain, you are in pain. Pain just 'is' a sensation. there is nothing more to it than that. And it is impossible to suffer a hallucination of pain (seems to me). For if you sense pain, you are in pain.

But other senses are 'of' things. So, my visual sensation that there is a chair in front of me is 'of' a chair. A chair is not a sensation (our concept of a chair is of something 'out there' not something mental). And so if there is no chair 'out there' corresponding to my visual sensation then that sensation is a hallucination. Of course, the sensation still exists. You are not hallucinating that you are having a sensation.

the sense that an act is wrong is not analogous to our sense of pain. For instance, there is something obviously incoherent in wondering "well, I feel I am in pain, but I wonder if I actually am". But there is nothing at all incoherent in wondering "well, Xing seems wrong, but I wonder if it actually is".

This may be true of pain, but that it is true of one specific intangible does not show that it is true of all such intangibles such that it is diagnostic. (And as a person who suffers chronic pain as a result of having my fingers amputated, and from knowing other chronic pain sufferers, I think you are mistaken on this. But to get away from pain, I can wonder if I am remembering the face of a dead lover correctly, or whether I'm dreaming, or whether I'm experiencing cryptamnesia; that the coherence you specify is not veridical for pain does nothing to make it so for all intangibles. Moreover, as a person with chronic mental illness, I can tell you that the situation is considerably more ambiguous than your simplifications allow. (While I'm not going to go into it, I also contend that consciousness is, in your terms, a "hallucination," so yes, you are essentially hallucinating having a sensation. I won't bring that aspect in at this time, so I'll absent my justification or argument for it, but I reserve the right to do so in future, and, if you're going to introduce notions about what this or that property of a mental event "means," be prepared to back it up with something.)

6. What do you consider "real" that you know about by another means than the mind? In other words, is there phenomena and reality, or just phenomena?

My mind is my means - I cannot use anything else - but that does not mean that all I know is my mind. Or at least, I fail to see why that follows.

Is there just phenomena? Well, no. I know with certainty that my own mind exists, for example. And my mind is not phenomena. My mind is not a sensation, it is the thing that senses.

But anyway, I take these questions to cut across this debate. I assume there is an outside world - I assume solipsism is false. And so, I think, do those who maintain that atheism is true. So this is a shared assumption and not one either side is challenging.

The question was more epistemological than specific; your entire argument stands or falls on establishing that we have reliable justification for presuming the existence of an objective moral world; so far you haven't given us adequate reason to suppose it exists, so I'm asking for the procedure you used to determine it exists. If your entire argument is that it "seems like" there is, then it's no argument at all; there are many things which seem to be which aren't, so unless you have some way of supporting its existence, I see no compelling reason to conclude that it exists.

2. In what way would a god provide for the existence of, what in common parlance is called objective morality, and you call moral reality? (See various on the Euthyphro dilemma.)"

I take it that what you are asking here is how I would deal with the Euthyphro dilemma. My response to the Euthyphro dilemma is to say what is right is what the relevant god commands.

The supposed problem with this answer is that it makes morality arbitrary. I think there is certainly a sense in which it does, but it is a rather innocuous sense of 'arbitrary' and not one that indicates a flaw in the theory.

This is generally considered an unsatisfactory account. While you may consider the arbitrariness innocuous, most would not. The main reason being that "fairness" appears to be a universal moral principle (likely a result of our being a social species), and arbitrary moral instruction results in gross and systematic unfairness. For example, if we punish someone for mowing his lawn on a Tuesday, but not for mowing it on Thursday, even though there is no reason to differentiate, we would consider that punishment unjust and immoral. Likewise, if a god were to punish one act which is arbitrarily distinguished from another act, and has no compelling justification for the distinction, we would view the apportionement of punishment of that god as unjust and immoral. (Incidentally, this points up another flaw in your formulation, as the instruction of a god as to what should be considered moral cannot in and of itself compel us to accept it as moral; he can treat us as if it was moral or immoral, but only we can make it so. This theme comes up again and again in the history of nations and cultures: the laws do not make something moral or immoral without the people's consent.)

If you don't have a better answer than that it's moral by virtue of the fact that "God wills it," then you have no answer. A tyrant may will the services of maidens in his bed chamber, it doesn't make such commands moral, no matter what his power over us. (And I'll note, if you're going to bring in an afterlife, that requires support; given that there is, admittedly weak, evidence for reincarnation, and perhaps, even weaker evidence for an afterlife, it would seem to favor the Hindu account of morality.)