(October 3, 2010 at 5:10 am)fr0d0 Wrote: Sure there are lower standards VOID. That's accepted.
Only lower standards don't make Kants model work. Only perfect morals do that.
That doesn't contradict what I said - Kant specifies a God or equal force acting upon an afterlife.
Firstly, Kant's model is a non-sequitur for god, it also lies on a false premise (his relationship between rationality and justice).
Secondly, There is nothing at all about lower standards, if you think there is you have no understanding of the moral arguments, even Kant knew that there was no difference in applied morality between believers and the non-believers, like he addressed in regard to many of his non-believing colleagues.
The question to be addresses is "where does morality come from" not "what's the best possible situation we could imagine for a moral system". We have no reason to believe that a God exists, so no reason to assume that the moral system implied by his existence exists either. That rules out two options 1) Divine command theory and 2) Diving attitude theory.
There is nothing intrinsically more valuable about behaving morally in either theistic or naturalistic systems, the same criteria still face us and we still make the same decisions based on the same moral conditioning (praise and condemnation shown to people who behave in ways 'considered' to be immoral). The only thing that is different is where morality comes from. I believe it is the relationships between the desires of all persons involved. A person with good desires will act in a way that tends to promote more desires than they thwart. A good person would not approve of slavery, for example, because they have a desire not to be enslaved or to see their loved ones be enslaved, and so does everyone else therefore there are more and stronger desires not to be enslaved than there are to enslave someone else, and the position that promotes more desires while thwarting the least number is the moral choice.
The relationship between desires and the state of affairs is an objective measurement, in the same meaning of the sense that, as commonly accepted as being objective in philosophy, it is not based on the subjective understanding of one or more persons, but it is a factual statement about the state this system is in.
This objective naturalistic morality is more than sufficient for me, it requires no unfounded assumptions, fits the general way we talk about morality, and delivers more conclusions
What matters not what you want morality to be, it matters what it actually is. If you need to suppose that everything is just going to work out okay in the end because God is going to bring ultimate justice then that's up to you, but I would rather deal with reality as it known to be.
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