Atheism and morality

[FallentoReason]

Scratch that. My initial thought seems too abstract upon further reflection.

All I'll say is that "tangible" needs to be defined, because arguably, when you feel good about an altruistic action, those feel good chemicals in your brain are pretty damn *tangible* if you ask me.

Well I don't get some kind of emotional rush or anything.

I'm just a generally happy person and I would like to see most everyone else feel the same way. If I can do something to help someone out or make their day a little brighter, I'll usually do it.

I also like to see others benefit from my actions at no positive gain of my own. But technically speaking, I wouldn't say I'm altruistic, because seeing others happy *is* my reward, and thus, "altruism" as we know it in its purest form, doesn't apply to me (or others I'd argue, unless they're indifferent to the positive outcome their actions had).

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Apologies for ignoring your post - I must have missed it somehow. My claim that morality instructs/favours/commands is a conceptual claim. It is just (in part) what I mean by 'morality'. So any attempt to analyse morality that identifies moral properties with things that cannot instruct is going to fail. It won't be an analysis of the concept of morality. Like I say, we have to make assumptions and that's one of mine. Everyone else makes it too: the normativity of morality is not in question, what is in question is how to explain it.

You point to Hume's 'is/ought' claim, namely that you cannot get an 'ought' from an 'is'. This is ironic as Hume is essentially making precisely the point I am making: morality tells you what to do. Descriptions don't. Telling you that a certain act is altruistic just tells you it is altruistic. It doesn't direct you - it isn't an instruction.
However, a description of an instruction - pointing out to someone that they are, so far as you can see, being instructed not to do something, is different. That is a description. And when we say that an act is 'wrong' we are describing: we are saying that the act has wrongness (that's a description). But what we are describing is the fact the act is one that we are instructed not to do.
A description of an instruction is not itself an instruction. But it draws attention to the fact there is an instruction. And that's what we're doing when we say that an act is wrong. We are drawing attention to the fact - or recognising - that there exists (or seems to exist) an instruction not to do this thing.

There is no need to get into a discussion of altruism. For the existence of altruism (of various kinds) is not in dispute. What is in dispute is what it would for altruism to have moral goodness. We don't just judge altruism to be altruism. We judge it to have moral goodness. It is that feature that I am wondering about. It is that feature that seems to require the existence of a god.

I think all of this is undermined by what I initially posted on page 3:

A similar account can be given of the development of a sense of god and belief in god - such dispositions have (or may well have) conferred some evolutionary advantage on those who have it. But you wouldn't for one moment accept that in this way one can show how evolution gives rise to a god. It shows only how evolutionary processes may give rise to creatures who have the impression there is a god. So too for morality.

Firstly, I understand what you mean when you say morality and the notion of a theistic god are similar. What I find bizarre is that for one of those you're perfectly fine with saying that it's 100% fabricated with no basis in reality, but for the other, you're wanting to plant it on something solid in such a way that atheism is no longer a viable foundation. That's called special pleading, since from your own point of view you rationally have a defeater for believing either god or morality to be real (if I've correctly understood the above).

Secondly, I think something needs to be clarified before this thread can go any further. What is it for morality to "exist"? Let me explain. A similar example of morality would be money; it deals with physical objects made from trees and splatters of ink which we then call "money". But does it exist? Is currency actually a thing? No, I'd say that it's a concept which we've all agreed on. We have collectively decided to value these bits of paper and ink in such a way that it makes people give us things in return for this colourful paper. Likewise with morality, it deals with physical things (us) but the "value" which we assign actions with doesn't "exist" per se. Punching someone is nothing more than the molecules forming my fist coming into contact with the molecules forming someone's jaw. But we see this "transaction" as "morally bad", and just like the concept of money was something we realised would be integral for the functionality of society, so too did we realise that hurting your fellow human would be inversely integral for the functionality of society.

If my reasoning above is sound, then I'd say that your search for this place where morality "exists" is a lost cause. Furthermore, if morals were to exist independently of us, it would make them an objective truth which surely means we could a priori derive a list of do's and don't's. In the history of humanity, such a mythical set of morals has never been found which strongly suggests morality began with us i.e. evolution.

Your baseless claim that morality instructs (still not sure how you get to this point) relies on the assumption that morals *objectively exist*. Otherwise, the illusion of morals are no more "instructive" than pieces of paper with blotches of ink are "valuable". I.e. morals can't be instructive because you *say* they're instructive. Money can't be valuable because we *say* it's valuable. You're arguing that morals are intrinsically instructive, which would only begin to make sense if morals objectively existed, and that begs the question. Do they exist?