RE: Atheism and morality
July 4, 2013 at 12:51 pm
(This post was last modified: July 4, 2013 at 12:52 pm by Inigo.)
[quote] Morality "does" nothing of the sort - no more than books "educate", maps "guide", law "punishes" or guns "kill". [\quote]
Yes it does. It instructs and favours. That's just the nature of the thing I'm analysing (and that moral philosophers are analysing - read their works, they talk about its 'instructions' 'favourings' 'commands' requirements' all the time). If you do not mean to use the term 'morality' to refer to something that instructs, favours, etc, then that's fine - but you're not talking about what I'm talking about.
Maps don't actually guide. When you look at a map it doesn't tell you where to go. You do the guiding. Alternatively someone might have put a circle around something on the map and written 'go here' on it - now you're being guided, but someone wrote that and 'someone' is an agent. For instance, if you found out that a slug had dragged itself through a bowl of ink and had then slithered over the map - and by purest fluke left a trail that spelt out 'go here' - you would, upon discovering how this pattern had been created, conclude that there was no real instruction on the map. And that's the point. Something can look like an instruction without really being one. If atheism is true then our moral sense reports give us the impression there are instructions, when in fact there are not.
Instructions can be issued by agents. 'Shut the door!' - there, I just issued one. Whether one has reason to comply is a different matter. I haven't argued that morality is just any old agent, have I? I have argued that morality - or moral instructions and favourings - are those of a god who has control over our interests in an afterlife. This was because I could think of no other way in which an agent's instructions could come to be ones we'd all have reason to comply with.
Yes it does. It instructs and favours. That's just the nature of the thing I'm analysing (and that moral philosophers are analysing - read their works, they talk about its 'instructions' 'favourings' 'commands' requirements' all the time). If you do not mean to use the term 'morality' to refer to something that instructs, favours, etc, then that's fine - but you're not talking about what I'm talking about.
Maps don't actually guide. When you look at a map it doesn't tell you where to go. You do the guiding. Alternatively someone might have put a circle around something on the map and written 'go here' on it - now you're being guided, but someone wrote that and 'someone' is an agent. For instance, if you found out that a slug had dragged itself through a bowl of ink and had then slithered over the map - and by purest fluke left a trail that spelt out 'go here' - you would, upon discovering how this pattern had been created, conclude that there was no real instruction on the map. And that's the point. Something can look like an instruction without really being one. If atheism is true then our moral sense reports give us the impression there are instructions, when in fact there are not.
Instructions can be issued by agents. 'Shut the door!' - there, I just issued one. Whether one has reason to comply is a different matter. I haven't argued that morality is just any old agent, have I? I have argued that morality - or moral instructions and favourings - are those of a god who has control over our interests in an afterlife. This was because I could think of no other way in which an agent's instructions could come to be ones we'd all have reason to comply with.
