Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Minimalist]

Evolution may, in fact almost certainly must, play a part in developing systems of morality

But not evolution by natural selection. The human concept of the group goes back to Homo Erectus where we have found skeletons which show signs of individuals recovering from broken leg bones. While they may have been crippled because the bone was not properly set these individuals were still given food and water by other members of the group.

Human culture interferes with evolution by natural selection.

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

Piece of cake isn't it?

Vinny?

Notice something? Vinny changed the subject. Vinny, are you a real atheist. Would you blaspheme God? You can ignore Sauron and the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I suggest you target your abusive blasphemy on ONLY "God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit". If you are a true atheist, blasphemy shouldn't be a problem.

I'll do it on two conditions.

[DeistPaladin]

I have trouble even writing this first question in a coherent way because the term "better" calls for a subjective judgement, but here it is. If morality is subjective how can one person's view or one group's views be better than another?

I really think part of the problem here is how the Christian worldview seems so fixed on dichotomies that it imposes them even when the topic doesn't call for it (see the logical fallacy "false dichotomy"). I've noticed it in a lot of Christian writings.

The Christian worldview is indeed filled with dichotomies.

• Jesus and Satan
  
• Heaven and Hell
  
• Saved and Lost
  

The pitfall here, and so many Christians seem to fall into it, is thinking that the dichotomy is "objective morality vs. anything goes". I've already explained how "objective morality" is a contradiction in terms (morality is based on values, objectivity is independent of values). To you, "subjective morality" is a similar contradiction, since to you it means "anything goes" which is not a code of morality at all.

When I say morality is subjective (or at least I see no other conclusion that I can draw), it is to say that anytime we make value judgments ("good" or "bad") we are invoking a subjective view. However, when we declare something to be "good" or "bad" we can back up that opinion with arguments based on objective facts.

If I say to you my business does "good quality work", this is a subjective evaluation. If I were to say it's of "better quality" than my competitors, that too is a subjective evaluation. But what if I back up this argument with objective facts. Say I start citing calculated statistics like "average seat time", "remake percentages" and "returns for credit" and show that my numbers are better than my competitor? I have a stronger argument then.

So to declare a matter subjective is not to say "anything goes". We can still provide logical arguments and objective data to back up our subjective evaluations to indicate they are correct assessments.

If our morality is in a large part defined by evolution, how can we trust ourselves to make a subjective moral judgement. Isn't moral judgement then just the reflexive neural response of an electromechanical ape-like meat machine?

Again, I think you've fallen into another either/or pitfall of the Christian worldview. In this case, it's "either God created us or we have no soul". This is a side note to our main discussion but there are many other possibilities. For example, we evolved and God exists (perhaps God set the universe in motion and tweaked our evolution at points). God may exist and we have no soul (this was the view of the authors of some of the OT books). God does not exist and we still have souls (this is the view apparently of some Buddhists who believe in reincarnation, for what can reincarnate if there is no soul?). Or God and souls do not exist and we still are conscious beings, more than the sum of our parts.

How can anyone claim the right to pass judgement on anyone else, since all morality would seem to have an equal footing?

As I've said before, I don't agree that they are on an equal footing. Subjective views can still be backed with objective data and logical arguments.

For example, compare a secular society with an Islamic society that practices forms of Sharia law that calls for the brutal treatment of women. I would make the argument about how honor killings terrify a society and violate the rights of the women killed. We can invoke the social contract that the men wouldn't want to be treated that way, and so are hypocrites for subjecting women to that treatment. We can also cite statistics that reflect quality of life and life expectancy.

Subjectivity is admitting there are shades of gray, but some shades are brighter or darker than others.

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Because I am a Christian I assume you know I believe in an external source for objective morality. I believe that an objective standard exists, is based on love and truth and follows from God's intrinsic nature.

The problem is that even if God existed and was a personal, loving god, this brings us no closer to an objective standard of morality no matter how you try to slice it.

If God decides on a set of rules, this is just as arbitrary as if any human ruler were to do it.
If God determines what is right based on evaluations, this code of morality exists outside of God and does not require God's existence.
If Goodness is defined as what God wills, this is both arbitrary (a contrived definition) and also based on God's subjective will.

I'm perfectly happy with that definition. External to the mind works fine.

But God would have a "mind" and therefore any system of morality invented by God would not be objective. Objective must be external to any mind, even God's.

[Cyberman]

Evolution may, in fact almost certainly must, play a part in developing systems of morality

But not evolution by natural selection. The human concept of the group goes back to Homo Erectus where we have found skeletons which show signs of individuals recovering from broken leg bones. While they may have been crippled because the bone was not properly set these individuals were still given food and water by other members of the group.

Human culture interferes with evolution by natural selection.

A fascinating example, I didn't know that. Plus you managed to say in a few sentences what I've been trying to get across in several posts.

Once a species gains some measure of control of their environment, be it tool use (which isn't just restricted to anthropoid species), hunting, farming (I understand some ant species actually farm certain varieties of moss in their nests, for the purposes of having a guaranteed food supply) or whatever else, then natural selection takes rather a back seat. Throw language into the mix and all bets are pretty much off, evolutionarily speaking.

This was actually an advert for BT (British Telecom, for the uninitiated) and later a Pink Floyd single, but it's a quote from a certain "wheel-cheered scientist" on the subject of human social development:

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

Now give that species a written language and retire immediately, because the blue touchpaper of a dominant society has been lit.

[Minimalist]

In much of the animal kingdom the female selects her mate from the victor in some sort of contest between males. The winner gets laid...the loser goes off and reads the bible or something equally worthless.

Humans allow other cultural considerations to enter into the decision... not the least being beer and "closing time."

It would be interesting to know when such considerations began.

[Angrboda]

I think most of the people here have argued that morality is subjective and has its origins with individual thinking and evolutionary predispositions. This isn't the result I expected with my OP. I believed most atheists felt that there are overriding moral principles that could be called objective.

I have trouble even writing this first question in a coherent way because the term "better" calls for a subjective judgement, but here it is. If morality is subjective how can one person's view or one group's views be better than another?

If our morality is in a large part defined by evolution, how can we trust ourselves to make a subjective moral judgement. Isn't moral judgement then just the reflexive neural response of an electromechanical ape-like meat machine?

How can anyone claim the right to pass judgement on anyone else, since all morality would seem to have an equal footing?

---

Charles Napier, responds to complaints that British officials in India were not respecting the local custom of "suttee", ie the burning of widows:

"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them.
Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours"

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This underscores the reason why I have chosen the formulation of, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," although I perhaps should have elaborated more on the social aspects of it. Certainly, there are social constraints on the expression of our psychological dispositions, but there is also a large political element which is part of the social, but which often gets glossed over. We are a species with moral intuitions, but we are also a species that uses our moral and other intuitions to shape how we behave as groups. Much of our behavior is likely modeled on the behavior of smaller units, like the family and the tribe, and I don't half know how this gets extended to ethnicities, nations and so on. But there is a fundamental part of the human that is deeply concerned about the behavior and management of the groups it belongs to. I'm fond of saying that political philosophy rests on the back of ethics. Without a theory of what is good and moral, it's well nigh impossible to describe how societies should be run. What would you base it on?

I keep coming across "explanations" of our moral intuitions that don't seem better than post hoc explanations. If morality and moral intuitions were accessible to introspection, rationally, we should be able to look inside and say, yes, murder is wrong because P, Q, and R. There's a well known moral quandary in which you can choose to throw a switch on the train tracks, averting the death of five innocent people at the cost of one. People have no problem throwing the switch. However, when the situation is changed, and saving the five requires pushing a man off a bridge to his death, people are reluctant. If our reasons for considering this or that moral were rationally inspectable, there should be no puzzle as to why this is. Either, "Because parents tell people it's not right to shove others," or, "it would be a violation of his free will" — but no such explanations are ever forthcoming. Why?

The philosopher G.E. Moore invented what he termed the naturalistic fallacy. This is often confused with Hume's is/ought distinction, that you can't derive ought from is, but it's properly Moore's. The naturalistic fallacy says that it is a mistake to identify a property that is associated with the moral, and conclude that that property is the moral. A quick analogy is helpful. Let's say an art professor has a fondness for small paintings. All of the paintings he likes are no more than 2 feet across. He's talking to a student one day and explaining that these paintings are the height of Western aesthetics. The student suggests that a certain large painting is surely the equal of many that he's been shown. The professor disagrees vehemently, and the student asks why. So the professor explains that all great art must be no more than two feet across. The professor is guilty of a sort of parallel naturalistic fallacy. He has identified the things he considers great art, identified a common property to all of them, and redefined the measure of great art as referring to that property. Many people make the same mistake with ethics. For example, Sam Harris notes that suffering, pain and harm to well being are often associated with immoral acts; so he defines the moral as that which works to avoid suffering and pain, and increases well being. Utilitarianism as a whole might also be said to be guilty of the same error. It's a common theme. Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with maximizing well-being, I'm saying that, philosophically, it is a mistake to define it as the measure of what is moral. That's part of the reason for watching for the naturalistic fallacy. The other is that our moral intuition doesn't seem to follow such neat, mathematically precise models. The more we delve into human psychology, the more we find hidden pockets of weirdness that we didn't expect — often because we simply weren't looking, so convinced that we had already carved nature at her joints. However, the way evolution constructs, and the way the brain evolved, I suspect our moral intuition gerrymanders around a cluster of evolutionary goals, none of them singularly responsible for our ethical senses.

So the three big components in my view are, evolved moral intuitions, cognitively opaque morality, and the political element. I'm reminded of the recently discovered peculiarity about dogs and chimps. It's been demonstrated that while you can point to something and the dog will understand the gesture, if you repeat the experiment with a chimp, it won't understand the gesture at all. This is probably a useful analog for morality. If you point to something, and the person looks where you pointed, all has gone as expected. But if you ask them to explain their behavior, why they looked at the moon instead of your finger, they'll likely spin a bunch of ad hoc explanations until they end up cornered by their ignorance. We don't know "why" we look at the moon instead of the finger, we just feel that's what we "should" do it.

A frequent component of the concern over moral relativism likely centers around the notion, already voiced, that if morality is relative, we have no justification for holding somebody morally responsible. I'm akin to ascribe the solution for this to the combination of the political and the natural. Yes, the bogeyman is scary, but the evolution of biology and social systems will likely keep the closet securely bolted. But there is an analogous situation where this concern arises, and that's the debate over free will and determinism. People suggest that if all our actions are determined, we have no justification for punishing them. But I point out that we don't need metaphysical justification for punishing someone, as societal interests serve quite satisfactorily. The question of moral responsibility, ultimately, devolves into who do we punish and why? Historically, the three goals of institutionalized punishment have been deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution. Of these three, only retribution requires metaphysical moral responsibility, and it is probably the least defensible goal of punishment. Would we really lose anything in a society where punishment was based solely on the goals of deterrence and rehabilitation? I don't think so.

I think there is a great tendency, when talking about evolutionary psychology and morality, to confuse what is with what should be. Human behavior evolved in certain ways because doing so allowed that particular hominid to thrive in the environments that were open to it. This is a determinist process. Our morals evolved the way they did because that is what it means to evolve. To suggest that our moral senses "should" be other than what they are, or should be justified by some other fact is meaningless. The evolved sense of what should be is the only sense you can appeal to, even to complain that this explanation isn't the explanation we should use to justify it. You're essentially chasing your evolutionary tail.

Now as I said in the other thread, I haven't fully closed the loop between theory and evolution for myself, but looking elsewhere is, in my opinion, abandoning the tried path and stalking off into the bush. I suspect that many of these questions will be answered more fully once we have a more complete understanding of the brain and mind. (That's where my theories lead, but since they're very speculative ideas from the fringes of computational neuroscience, I won't waste your time with a digression.) I do however think that many of the answers we find will not necessarily be answers that we like, want, or need. We already notice this sort of quandary at the free will / determinism boundary, where many, regardless of its plausibility, are skittish of embracing determinism because they feel it would result in a complete loss of moral accountability, and they can't even contemplate such a world. Ethics in general is likely another frontier requiring us to face such hard choices. And Vinny is right in one regard, the absence of some sense of reliable guide to morality in our lives, and the idea of standard moral relativism, is very threatening to many. Yet no clear alternative to it has emerged.

One of the strange paradoxes of Vinny's contribution is that he is painting relativism as allowing the postulate of babies being raped and killed being moral. This is attempting to contrast what is with what might be. There are a great many things that might be that never will be. Probably a more relevant question is what are the likely boundaries of human morality, and what forces push it away from center. I'm not an ethicist nor familiar with the psychology of morality, so I have no knowledge on that score. However it's interesting to note that Vinny suggests that he has no alternative to moral relativism, yet he's appalled by the thought of baby raping becoming accepted as moral. Where is he getting the moral guidance to conclude that baby raping would be a bad thing if he has no other moral framework than relativism?

(There is a similar conundrum which crops up with respect to coherentist theories of truth. Coherentism postulates that the measure of whether a statement or proposisition is true is how consistent it is with the system of truths we currently have; i.e. how well the new fact 'coheres' with the old. Now Bertrand Russell's objection was that if you had a proposition, and its negation, and two coherent systems, it's possible that the proposition might cohere with one system, and its negation with the other. Russell found this inconsistency problematic. My answer to Russell is that there is no 'outside' the system from which to observe such a contradiction. If truth is what happens, consistency-wise, inside the system, there is no outside. Thus there is no place from which to observe such a contradiction, unless one includes the proposition and both systems in one's view. But then, there is an inconsistency in the overall system, which indicates that something is amiss truth-wise, just as coherentism predicts.)


[Any errors are mine. I didn't bother to proof this. Proofing is for the weak.]

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Oh, and I'll throw in a fascinating, but totally unrelated, example from the animal kingdom for Stimbo. They had trained several dolphins to recognize a symbol on a placard, and based on the symbol, perform a specific trick. Now one of the symbols was special, it indicated that the dolphin was supposed to improvise a trick. When shown that symbol, the dolphin would determine what to do. So they put two dolphins together and showed them the sign for improvising a trick. At first, they didn't seem to get it. So they were shown the sign again. The two dolphins submerged, and a short time later, both dolphins surfaced and did the same trick in tandem. (I believe this was from an episode titled, "How smart are animals?" I believe it was a Nova ScienceNOW episode, but am unsure.

Regarding the individual with the bone breaks, there's also a specimen from the Turkana site who was obviously suffering and in a lot of pain, likely unable to move, who was apparently cared for a long time in that condition. I don't know the age or species offhand.

[Ivaj]

I think most of the people here have argued that morality is subjective and has its origins with individual thinking and evolutionary predispositions. This isn't the result I expected with my OP. I believed most atheists felt that there are overriding moral principles that could be called objective.

I have trouble even writing this first question in a coherent way because the term "better" calls for a subjective judgement, but here it is. If morality is subjective how can one person's view or one group's views be better than another?

If our morality is in a large part defined by evolution, how can we trust ourselves to make a subjective moral judgement. Isn't moral judgement then just the reflexive neural response of an electromechanical ape-like meat machine?

How can anyone claim the right to pass judgement on anyone else, since all morality would seem to have an equal footing?

This should be good to get some friendly discussions going.

If morality is subjective one groups morality can't be objectively better then another.
We can trust that we make the subjective moral judgement that feels best for us and yes moral judgement is a natural response from an ape.
If it is within our subjective morality to pass judgement we can claim that right.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

It would be interesting to know when such considerations began.

When people stopped making their own beer and had to buy it? Probably the Egyptians building the pyramids, except they didn't use money.

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

A very longe and laborious dissertationne on moralitudes thatte referrs to the contributionnes of that dastardly pirate Vinny.

Truthfully, paesan, you likely don't want to directly address me because you think I'm going to troll you, you don't know if I'm serious, you think I'm a theist, you don't like my constant harping on the limits and restrictions of aspects of atheism, yadda yadda. And I understand.

But it appears as though you are one of the few people here who actually take these intellectual issues seriously. At least, to a much greater extent than the average atheist here who is- sad as it is to point out- content with arbitrary, post-hoc unsubstantiated pop-evolutionary explanations for what is actually a very serious matter for the intelligent atheist to consider.

You have attained some measure of admiration from my part for your willingness to go into such depth, especially in a challenging environment- in front of trolls and dastardly theists. There are very few atheists I know, even famous ones, who have such a passion for serious engagement of the issues.

The contrast between you and every other atheist here (barring perhaps C-D) is a very stark one from my perspective. And I hope some of your conscientious, introspective nature rubs off on the others here.

You have specifically brought up a problem with my "problem of moral subjectivism". The manner in which you state it leads me to believe that you agree with me when I say, strictly logically: "it is a distinct possibility that given moral subjectivism, in some possible world that the moral subjectivist will see horrendous atrocities as not just fun, or exciting or pleasurable or desirable, but morally good".

Your objection is not that what I am saying is not true, but it is, as you say: "...things that might be that never will be." In other words, it will never happen that we will be in a possible world where eugenics, torture and abuse of the vulnerable will be morally acceptable.

I won't press my disagreement with you here. But I would like to point out, quite humbly, the lessons we learned from the atrocities of the past, and how they were facilitated with the consent and tacit approval that followed the appropriate rationalizations by the community.

The case studies of Mengele. North Korea. Even Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the morbid absurdities that took place under his watch should lead us to reject any stance of glib dismissal. "Oh this will never happen..." In fact, if you are pro-life on the issue of abortion, I think this is an almost daily reminder.

If you wish not to respond, or to respond with contempt towards me like the others, I'm okay with that. You don't have to respond at all if you choose.

But please don't assume so quickly that such things will never happen. The human capacity to rationalize moral horrors is a frighteningly powerful feature of the human psyche. If at all you are concerned about humanity over perhaps your defense of this moral view, then you should really be troubled and search for a substantial answer to this problem.

I will slow my rate of posting on these forums. Much to the relief of the administration of these fora and the atheists who have become so troubled by my presence, whether for good reasons or bad. In fact an event like this ought to be celebrated on these here forums. I'm of the mind to start a whole new thread so that people can celebrate.

But it fills me with grief. It's one thing to reject the theists with their arguments. It's another thing to not see just how ethically irresponsible moral subjectivism really is- a problem that is a problem in itself, rather than just some theistic talking point.

[Haydn2]

Evolution may, in fact almost certainly must, play a part in developing systems of morality

But not evolution by natural selection. The human concept of the group goes back to Homo Erectus where we have found skeletons which show signs of individuals recovering from broken leg bones. While they may have been crippled because the bone was not properly set these individuals were still given food and water by other members of the group.

Human culture interferes with evolution by natural selection.

By helping the crippled members of your group and nursing them back to health , you are ensuring the survival of alot of genes of which you would share. This is still natural seletion and alot of the pack animals do this ( i certainly know Wolves feed and care for thier injured)