God & Objective Morals

[Tex]

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C: objective morals exist.

At: then that means I can know them a priori (i.e. through reasoning) because they are independent of me, which means I don't need God to know them.

C: yeah, but it was God that set these morals. That means these objective morals point to a divine being.

A: but why did he choose those morals to be good and not other ones?

C: he didn't choose, it's in his nature for those morals to be the right morals according to him.

A: could his nature have been different?

C: no, he just is. He is eternal.

A: so they necessarily had to be like that and not another way?

C: yes.

A: what caused this necessity?

C: well, these morals are such that they work the best.

A: so God necessarily had to reflect these objective morals?

C: yes, it's in his nature.

A: then that means there is something apart from God that made it necessary for God to be the way he is. Just like the engine is necessary for the car to work only when I drive. There must be an external condition that gave rise to this necessity.

C: no, God is all that existed for all eternity.

A: then it can only mean these morals are arbitrary since there was no necessity, no external reason, for God to have been the way he is, but you say there was: they are the best way to live.

C: ...

A: therefore, there is something external to God where objective morals exist. This means I don't need God to know them.

C: ...

A: but, it seems like there is no way of knowing them a priori otherwise humanity would know what they are by now, therefore, objective morals must not exist, and since you claim God necessarily reflects "the best way to live" which doesn't exist, he must not exist either.

C: ...

***

Just a compressed version of a 2 hour chat I had with a Christian friend today. As we said bye, he told me he wished the conversation had been more "productive". What a subjective thing to say! It was definitely productive :p

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First, I'm just nit picky, but a priori means able to reason, yes, but it specifically is talking about ontological reasoning. You don't need any sense organs to experience anything, just the ability to have rational thoughts. On contrast, a posteriori is the ability to reason if there is experience. However, you're still correct in word choice through the dialogue. And sorry for the critique!

More importantly, I think the argument is fine until this:

"then that means there is something apart from God that made it necessary for God to be the way he is."

The thing that makes him reflect the morals is also part of his nature. Part of being moral isn't just what you think, but it is about what you do about it.

[Ryantology]

For reasons I have posted about rather extensively elsewhere, I do not believe moral systems based on evolutionary psychology satisfy the requirements a moral system should have. Primarily because certain behaviors generally accepted as immoral, like rape, may in fact assist the survival of genetic material for some low-status individuals. Using pain and pleasure as an index of morality, like Utilitarianism, involves a highly arbitrary assessment of what degree of pleasure offsets what degree of pain (or loss) and to what degree these are spread among individuals.

This is the flaw in trying to base a moral code on a single standard. The only way to have a real, working moral system which is of benefit to everyone is for a social contract to evolve. That's by no means a perfect method, but it is the best (really, the only) one suited to pretentious primates like us, because civilization offers manifold benefits to people, and it is not possible to operate a civilization without understanding and restraint from the people living in it. Attempting to establish any person's personal idea of morality as objective and applying to everyone is a flawed approach which never works in the long run.

However arbitrary the specific ratio of pleasure vs. pain as a moral determinant, almost all humans experience pain and pleasure and react to both in fairly similar ways (seek pleasure, avoid pain). Humans also, usually, possess a capacity for empathy, which is essentially the understanding that whatever you can do to someone else, someone else can do to you, and that people are likely to treat you the way you treat them. All human morality is based on this reality, and the two biggest flaws we have are the evolutionary artifact of might making right, and our difficulty rationally determining what is actually helpful and what is actually harmful, very frequently confusing them because of personal tastes (sorry, Christians, gay marriage is not nearly as harmful as the insistence that two consenting adults of the same sex who are in love cannot enjoy the same rights and privileges).

[Neo-Scholastic]

...The only way to have a real, working moral system which is of benefit to everyone is for a social contract to evolve.

Any social contract would serve as a binding code of conduct whether overtly or tacitly expressed. Establishment of such a code would come from some cultural/political process. Enforcement of the code of conduct would range from social pressure to criminal prosecution. Both establishment and enforcement depend on power and the willingness to use force. If you accept 'might makes right' as the ultimate basis of morality, then social contract theories make perfect sense. I do not believe any moral system worthy of the name can have power and force as its foundation.

[Ryantology]

Any social contract would serve as a binding code of conduct whether overtly or tacitly expressed. Establishment of such a code would come from some cultural/political process. Enforcement of the code of conduct would range from social pressure to criminal prosecution. Both establishment and enforcement depend on power and the willingness to use force. If you accept 'might makes right' as the ultimate basis of morality, then social contract theories make perfect sense.

The use of force to ensure order (after all, there will always be deviants) is not the same as dictating morality on the basis of having more power than other people. There is more than merely the force of law which prevents most people from doing bad things under the social contract system we (try to) employ. Force alone could never keep it going for long. This is, not even subtly, different from a system where morals are dictated from a single authority and said to be absolute, and you must follow the rules or be punished by that authority. That is the sort of system which makes it easy to commit atrocities, because it's easier: you only have to worry about offending one person, or that person's exclusive group. The feelings and desires of other people matter only if and when that authority says so, so when your God tells you to gear up and go ruthlessly slaughter your Canaanite neighbors, people thousands of years later will tell others that this is not wrong or immoral, because God's commands can never be immoral, no matter what they are.

I do not believe any moral system worthy of the name can have power and force as its foundation.

Then, it's time to drop your Christian morals.

[Neo-Scholastic]

The use of force to ensure order (after all, there will always be deviants) is not the same as dictating morality on the basis of having more power than other people.

Not true. In a social contract theory, socially accepted norms define what is and is not moral. Social contracts develop from the exercise of different kinds of power from charm to brute force.

I do not believe any moral system worthy of the name can have power and force as its foundation.

Then, it's time to drop your Christian morals.

Your statement applies to only one very narrow and rare position about the foundation of Christian morals, one that has not even entered the conversation. Go tilt some windmills.

[FallentoReason]

First, I'm just nit picky, but a priori means able to reason, yes, but it specifically is talking about ontological reasoning. You don't need any sense organs to experience anything, just the ability to have rational thoughts. On contrast, a posteriori is the ability to reason if there is experience. However, you're still correct in word choice through the dialogue. And sorry for the critique!

No, please, tell me these things; I'm here to learn

I thought "a priori" meant that we could literally sit on a couch and come to the conclusion that something must be true? Seems to me we can do that with morality and moral problems.

More importantly, I think the argument is fine until this:

"then that means there is something apart from God that made it necessary for God to be the way he is."

The thing that makes him reflect the morals is also part of his nature. Part of being moral isn't just what you think, but it is about what you do about it.

I'll try and explain myself some more: could it have been possible for a world to exist where burning puppies is the morally right thing to do? If yes, then apparently morality is arbitrary because although we can say that's horrible, our feelings toward that action mean nothing whatsoever. It also means God's nature is arbitrary. If you say no, it was necessary for God to be the way he is, then that begs the question.

I used the example of my car. The engine is necessary to the car *only* when I want to drive. It's not necessary if I want to jump up and down on my car. It's not necessary when I want to vacuum my car. Therefore, it means that for something to be *necessary*, there must be an external condition. Well, then, if God's nature is necessarily the way it is, then what's the *external* thing controlling this necessity?

I'll leave it there and wait for your response.

[Ryantology]

The use of force to ensure order (after all, there will always be deviants) is not the same as dictating morality on the basis of having more power than other people.

Not true. In a social contract theory, socially accepted norms define what is and is not moral. Social contracts develop from the exercise of different kinds of power from charm to brute force.

I guess someone adherent to a misanthropic worldview would deliberately ignore the subtleties between interacting social forces and monolithic power play.

Your statement applies to only one very narrow and rare position about the foundation of Christian morals, one that has not even entered the conversation. Go tilt some windmills.[/quote]

Your catchphrase should be "Stop saying things which are true but I hate hearing". God is the unified, total, and very frequently deadly force which allegedly fuels your morality. You do good because sky daddy says so, because you want sky daddy's promised rewards and you want to avoid sky daddy's promised punishments. Christian morals are more about glorifying the dictator than they are about establishing stable social orders. Read your Bible one of these days, I'm not convinced you ever have.

[FallentoReason]

…does..morality [need] to be a "physical" thing? Does that mean that we can literally see the good in certain actions, we can actually point to a physical thing and say "look, that's 'goodness' right there

To some extent yes. What I mean by physical reduction is this. You can translate everyday descriptions about abstract terms, like goodness, directly into the language of physics. You can say something like this action is fair because it satisfies certain criteria, perhaps a utilitarian one: For example you could define fair as the measurable difference between the neural states of the benefiting subjects and compare them with the neural states of the losing subjects multiplied by the index of genetic information preservation. So, you can indeed point to the output of the equation as say, “The results are in and we have detected goodness.”

Hmm interesting. I can think of a certain type of case where this wouldn't work though: Nazis killing Jews. We can look at the neural state of the dead Jew and say "well, there is no neural state, so the net value is zero" then we can look at the Nazi and say "there is a positive neural state" and come to the conclusion that killing Jews is 100% in favour of goodness. In fact, we can change Nazis for 'x' and Jews for 'y' and justify any act of group x mass killing group y under this working definition of "objective morals".

This may seem silly and I think it is. But that is only because I do not identify the mind completely in terms of brain-states. But that is exactly what physicalist explanations of the mind-body problem entail: that every mental process can be described in terms of physical processes without any consideration of the qualitative content of consciousness. In contrast, I believe mental processes have features that prevent them from being reduced entirely to the brain’s observable physical processes. Hence all my quibbling on threads about consciousness.

Are you a dualist?

If that a priori knowledge is not based entirely on a physical system, like the brain and its physical context, then you cannot truly call it objective since it cannot be empirically observed. That knowledge would be purely deductive, i.e. a categorical imperative. That keeps it in the subjective realm of qualitative mental properties.

Ah, I see what you're saying. As in, if its "location" is not grounded in something physical, then essentially its "location" is planted in mid-air i.e. it becomes subjective?

Is this why your project necessarily has to search in the physical world, because without anything physical to latch on to, morality is basically by definition subjective?

But it need not be arbitrary if, oh say…there was an infinitely wise and just God, who evaluates the love found in our behavior against Himself, the standard of perfect love. At this point you wonder which god would exemplify this type of perfect love. I already know Exi's and Godchild's answers. As for me I'll hold off on opening that can of worms.

I believe my OP addresses the problems with a divine entity being the source of morals. If it was *necessary* for this infinitely wise being to make morality in such a way, then what dictated this necessity such that no other world was possible? Whatever the answer, it means there's something external controlling what God Almighty's nature had to be like and on we go knocking down the whole concept of "objective morals come from God"...

p.s. if you think it's possible for a divine being and objective morals to exist, then maybe try finding one of the premises that is false, and we can discuss that? Here's my syllogism for the OP:

1) It is in God's nature to give these commands as being objectively right
2) These objective morals satisfy condition x
3) If 1 & 2 are true, then God's nature couldn't have been any other way than this way
4) If 4 is true, then it is necessary for God to be this way
5) If 5 is true, then something external to God must have been the condition that made it necessary for God's nature to be this way (i.e. premise 2)
6) If 1-5 is true, then objective morals exist independently of God
7) Objective morals do not exist a priori
C) Since it is in God's nature to reflect objective morals, God doesn't exist.

[Whateverist]

Any social contract would serve as a binding code of conduct whether overtly or tacitly expressed. Establishment of such a code would come from some cultural/political process. Enforcement of the code of conduct would range from social pressure to criminal prosecution. Both establishment and enforcement depend on power and the willingness to use force. If you accept 'might makes right' as the ultimate basis of morality, then social contract theories make perfect sense. I do not believe any moral system worthy of the name can have power and force as its foundation.

Well no but it works nicely enough as a code of justice to enforce the agreed upon behavioral limits that a community will accept. By banding together we indeed inject power and force into the system. Since we are all invested in maximizing our liberties while maintaining safety, we have the basis for checks and balances in the exercise of that force. Abuse will occur but if we all feel it necessary we'll put in safe guards and just carry on the best we can.

[FallentoReason]

Any social contract would serve as a binding code of conduct whether overtly or tacitly expressed. Establishment of such a code would come from some cultural/political process. Enforcement of the code of conduct would range from social pressure to criminal prosecution. Both establishment and enforcement depend on power and the willingness to use force. If you accept 'might makes right' as the ultimate basis of morality, then social contract theories make perfect sense. I do not believe any moral system worthy of the name can have power and force as its foundation.

Well no but it works nicely enough as a code of justice to enforce the agreed upon behavioral limits that a community will accept. By banding together we indeed inject power and force into the system. Since we are all invested in maximizing our liberties while maintaining safety, we have the basis for checks and balances in the exercise of that force. Abuse will occur but if we all feel it necessary we'll put in safe guards and just carry on the best we can.

Pretty much democracy. The way in which we go about monitoring our rules is democratic in nature.