Moral standards

[GodsRevolt]

Complex life has worth because it's the life that considers morality and acts upon it. The reason sentient life has moral worth is because without it the entire concept of morality becomes meaningless. There'd be nobody to discuss it, and no actors to perform moral deeds. The conversation would be over.

Morality comes from life; our nature as evolved organisms sculpts the values we use to come to moral conclusions. Our ecological niche, the thing that allows us to succeed, is cooperation and social grouping; it's no coincidence that the traits that made us the dominant species on the planet also happen to be the things we prize as moral goods, like romantic love, self sacrifice, and so on. It's just a function of how the moral conversation takes place: we need to frame morality in terms of benefit to ourselves and others because without us- without life,- there would be no conversation to have.

This is a circular argument. You are basically saying - life is valuable because we are able to consider and determine morals, and those morals carry weight because they come from life with value. Life gets value from the morals it conceives, morals get value from the life that conceives them. Similar to the "Bible is truth because the Bible tells me so" argument.

Also, romantic love is a great example. Rape is considered immoral, considerably also unromantic, yet it could give the same results to the survival of the human race. And yet we value treating a woman as a person with inherent worth and dignity. Saying that morals strictly come from some evolved sense of cooperation for survival falls short.

At the point at which there are no beings, who is there to perform the act of torture, and who is to have it performed upon them? What you're asking is akin to asking me if, without any rocks, would the concept of rocks still exist? If there's nothing around, then evidently neither are we to be talking about it. All I can really say is that torture would be morally wrong when there are beings around that would have the same reactions to it that we do.

If another life form were present that somehow benefited from torture, then the morality of the act would change for them, as there would be no harm being inflicted. But that's a much larger issue that's just hypothetical.

This is off as well. What I am proposing to you is that treating life with dignity is a concept that remains consistent even after life has passed. The idea that torture can be an act involving no pain is an attempt to redefine the word "torture" and is a sidestep to the idea that I am proposing. Torture must be the act of deliberately causing discomfort. Im not pulling my dictionary out on this one because I think that we are both intelligent enough to understand what the term implies with any life form.

Well, the reason that life is the first parameter is because we, generally speaking, enjoy life. There is potential in life, happiness and success to be had, and so on. When I brought up euthanasia I was speaking in the context of people with incurable diseases or injuries that rob them of that potential and leave them in irreversible pain for the rest of their life. It's still their choice, but at that point the benefits of living might be outweighed by the pain- aversion to pain being another parameter, for obvious reasons- to the point where they might find ending that life to be preferable.

A hazy line to draw, particularly with your first parameter.

I feel like you're trying to look for easy, blanket answers, and taking the fact that other people are factoring in contexts as a sign of weakness. Could you just get to the point you were trying to make?

I don't see that. I see general rules of morality being thrown at me as a way to brush off a difficult question for any atheist to answer. When these rules are put into a specific context they often fall short. It is one things to put a bumper sticker on your car or tattoo a quote on your shoulder. It is a much different thing to deal with the complexities of life and what it presents.

My point here being that without specific moral standards people tend to fall into a moral relativity which, when tested, actually exposes itself as "whatever is easiest and makes me feel good at that point in time."

When you have a specific set of moral standards that you are expected to uphold, even when it is hard to do so, there is no excuse. And when you fall short of those standards, there is no ignoring it. This is why many people look at Christians and pull the hypocrite card, because there are high standards.