Atheism and morality

[Inigo]

hmm, I think the meaning was lost in the crossed actors there. Justice and morality are the same thing I think. The problem that posthumous judgement resolves is justice IMO. In my view, God is completely forgiving. It is in his nature to attract morality, and see that completed posthumously. IMO, the human journey is towards morality, facilitated by God.

Ah, I see. I would distinguish between justice (the virtue) and justice (the state of affairs) and morality simply because I would see 'justice' as someone getting what they deserve, yet it does not seem automatically to be the case that just because Tom deserves to come to harm that it is right to harm him. Situations can arise where we would want to say that the situation is unjust, but that no-one is doing anything wrong.

So, a just state of affairs is one where everyone gets what they deserve. A person exhibits the virtue of 'justice' when they give someone what they deserve because they deserve it when, and only when, it is right to give them what they deserve. So a just person is responsive to what someone deserves, but their responsiveness is suitably regulated by other virtues.

Re god being forgiving. I agree that a perfectly good god would be like that. Being forgiving is, I think most of us can agree, a virtue. But if the god is forgiving then her instructions do not have inescapable rational authority. She's just too nice: we lack inescapable reason to do as she instructs because, well, she isn't necessarily going to harm our interests if we fail to. So it seems to me that to explain - in the simplest and most straightforward way - why we have inescapable reason to do morality's bidding we should posit a god who is unforgiving. This is consistent with forgiveness being a virtue, as nothing prevents her from approving of forgiveness in us.

You could posit something else that might get rid of the need to make her unforgiving - perhaps rather than being vengeful she is just trying to protect us from harms that she knows it is a law of supernature will befall us if we behave in certain ways, and all she actually wants is whatever is best for us. She is, if you like, a kind of catcher in the rye.

But the problem with doing this is that it complicates the picture for no real reason apart from squaring this account with a prior conviction that a certain sort of god exists. I, of course, lack any such prior conviction and am solely interested what can be supported by evidence. As such I see no good reason to adjust the picture.

The second problem with making her forgiving is that it would become difficult to account for our sensations of moral desert. If someone does wrong it seems to most of us that it would be in some way fitting or appropriate if this person came to harm (which, as indicated above, seems consistent with at thte same time judging it to be wrong to actually mete out the harm). If we posit a vengeful god this makes perfect sense. SHe, morality, now wishes this person to come to harm - and that's what we're sensing.

I do not take what I have just said to in any way preclude that she could be perfectly morally good. I merely take the above considerations to make more reasonable the proposition that she is not. And needless to say, I would like to be mistaken about this!