Atheism and morality

[Angrboda]

I have already addressed the point about a Karmic universe. But I'll do so again because I'm bloody nice and tolerant.

A karmic law of supernature is not an instruction. It is just a description of what is going to happen. Second, such a view would not be able to account for moral desert.

We appear to have passed by each other in the edit once again. I'll try to contain my editing prior to post, given the frequency of your replies.

I added the bolded portion below.

Note however that your second syllogism doesn't seem to offer, in itself, any reason to prefer the formulation "a vengeful god who has control over your afterlife" to "an unforgiving and inflexible karmic law which will condemn you to an eternity of incarnations filled with suffering if you do not behave morally, as communicated by the uncreated and eternally existing Vedas." In particular, it's possible the Vedas issue from an agent and we are simply ignorant of their true source, so arguing that they require an agent is ineffective. The moral instruction contained in the traditional Indian metaphysics appears to offer an equivalent and equally rationally compelling reason for complying; why prefer one to the other?

As my amended post noted, the fact that we are not aware of the source of karmic law does not in and of itself imply that there isn't one, so that is an argument from ignorance and/or silence. And again, as noted previously, your account has not provided an account of moral desert either, so requiring the karmic law scenario to provide one is special pleading; matter of fact, your account seems to vacate the whole concept of moral desert. By your account, we obey the instructions of this god, not because his instructions are worth obeying, but simply because the consequences of doing otherwise would be unpleasant. (I noticed in your thread about Mary and "Immoral atheists" that you appear stuck in the rut of consequentialist ethics. While you seem to imply you are widely read in ethics, when the rubber hits the road, you seem utterly incapable of seeing anything but a consequentialist ethics, your inescapably evil god scenario being a case in point.)




Moreover, it occurred to me that while an agent may be required for issuing the instruction, it does not necessarily follow that the agent issuing the instruction is at all responsible for the consequences that make the instruction itself inescapably compelling. If we were on a forum which censored swear words and automatically banned upon reaching a certain quotient, and you had repeatedly violated the prohibition, I might warn you that if you continue such behavior then you would be banned. In that case, I am an agent, I am issuing an instruction, the instruction is inescapably rationally compelling, and yet I am not in control of whether you do or do not experience the consequences. And before you point out that the content of the instructions themselves had to originally issue from an agent, which I could dispute, that is not the specific problem here. The problem is in inferring from an instruction the existence of an agent responsible for that instruction. My mother used to advise me all the time, occasionally with threats of the consequences of my actions. Sometimes my mother would be the agent responsible for the consequences, sometimes not. She passed away in 2002 and so the inescapably rationally compelling nature of her threats is no longer real, but I still recall her instructions. What in your syllogism a) requires that the agent in question be the one responsible for creating the consequences of your actions, and b) even if I were to accept that these instructions require an agent who can offer rationally compelling reasons for obeying, what in your syllogism implies, if at all, that this agent is currently existent? In other words, your syllogism suggests that morality at one time had a real substance, but it doesn't demonstrate that it still retains that substance, and has not in the passing of time become merely hallucinatory.