Atheism and morality

[max-greece]

Rhythm already responded to this, but I will too since you seem to have ignored his response. You have, in one foul swoop, cut the head off of your own argument. You replied that the agent involved when we respond to pain is ourselves, which shows that your desire to ascribe an external agent as the cause of morality is entirely unnecessary. We are the agent.

This is getting tedious. Morality has more than one feature. One feature is that it instructs. Only an agent can instruct, so morality is an agent then. That does not yet establish that morality is a god, for it leaves open the possibility that morality could be us or our community or some such. Okay??

Another feature of morality is that its instructions are ones that confer reasons for compliance whatever one's interests. So if morality instructs you to X then it is a conceptual truth that Xing is something you have reason to do, and reason to do in virtue of morality instructing you to do it.

Your instructions, my instructins, and the instructions of communities do not have this feature. Therefore moral instructions are not the instructions of ourselves or our communities.

It is to satisfy THAT feature that morality has to be identified with the instructions of a god.

If by God you mean conscience then OK - otherwise no. My conscience dictates for me to do things that are not necessarily in my interest. Still no god.

[Angrboda]

I will simply point out that two beliefs common in Hindu tradition, karma and reincarnation, make up samsara or the wheel of existence. Existence qua existence is taken to be a bad thing, and thus escaping the endless cycle of reincarnation is the goal, also known as moksha. Escaping the wheel takes different forms, but is ultimately seen as the result of acting in accordance with one's dharma which yields good karma and leads to release. Because karmic law imposes karmic burdens on the individual depending on the moral goodness of the act, these serve the same moral function as an ever vigilant, vengeful god who controls your afterlife. So you see, no god is required after all.

No, I do not think morality is well explained by the posit of a Karmic universe. There are several major problems in my view. One of the major problems is that morality instructs/favours whereas a law of nature (or supernature) does not. So this kind of view will be entirely unable to account for morality's instructing nature.

Consequences favor certain actions over others, so "favoring" is not sufficient to distinguish moral properties from non-moral ones. You have asserted that morality is instruction. I will dispute this premise now. First, even if I grant that morality may be instructive, it's not necessarily the case that this is an essential property of morality; it's possible that its instructive aspects are simply a side effect of its true nature. And as noted, there are instructive experiences which are not the result of an agent. However, a more fundamental problem is simply equating "morality" with instruction, favoring, and an agent. Since morality is not a thing, it cannot be equated to an agent without a category error (see also, Leibniz' law). Somewhere along the line, you equivocated by switching from morality as idea or process, to morality as thing. It appears to me that perhaps more clearly, one could say that morality has the effect of instructing, or morality is "like instruction," but saying that morality "is" instruction, in addition to being a category error, runs afoul of Moore's naturalistic fallacy (morality is "like morality," and likening it to anything but itself, without support, results in an error). However, reformulating it in this way makes it an argument from analogy, and not a deductive syllogism, and eliminates any compulsion to agree based upon the principles of logic. In that case, it becomes a suggestion, rather than a syllogism, and one that is not without its own problems.

Moreover, there appears to be something clearly, intuitively wrong about this forumalation, namely that neither instruction nor favoring capture the essential "moral" nature of morality. If I take something I own and break it, it has a bad result, but the result is not "morally bad" in the sense it would be if I took something from someone else and broke it. The essential "moral" aspect, the goodness or badness of acts, appears to be nowhere in evidence in your conception. What makes a god's instructions moral, qualitatively, and not a society's? (And yes, you've used the dense term rationally compelling, which still doesn't account for the moral dimension; things can be rationally compelling without having a moral value or character. At present, I'm not even sure of your meaning with that term, so I suggest you unpack its meaning. I have a rationally compelling reason not to endanger my life by smoking cigarettes, but not a moral one. And if you intend to lean on Kant's conception of a categorical imperative, please indicate this. Doing so, even implicitly, will, however, vacate the need for a god.)

Second, there would be no good explanation available of our moral sense and how it has come to track moral properties.

Since your argument thus far has not provided a similar mechanism, asking me to do so for karmic law amounts to special pleading, and is thus dismissed.

Third, such a view does not have the resources to explain moral desert.

Again, until you provide it, I don't need to provide it.

On a related note, you made it clear that the control of a person's afterlife is an essential feature for providing a compelling rational reason for obeying the instructions of a god. As the effects of karma and reincarnation provide an equally compelling reason for following the dictates of dharma, it would seem there is far more in common between the two views than first realized. Is control of essentially eternal fate a necessity in your view, or not; you've not really given any justification for it, but if your god has it, then so does samsara. Your latter two objections, how morals are instilled and the nature of moral dessert are both well captured by karmic law, as even if the consequences of karmic law have no sensible explanation for their apportionment, the feedback of the karmic loop as well as evolutionary mechanisms can adequately provide for moral sensation (because the sensation of moral law is in relation to moral phenomena, not the moral reality). And Hindus do in fact have such mechanisms in the eternal and uncreated nature of the Vedas, whose timeless wisdom was communicated through the rishis.

This is unsurprising as the Hindu view is not offered as an explanatory hypothesis. Rather, as with all religions, it is just some barmy story someone pulled out of their backside.

If you say so.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Naturally. it just wouldn't do to discuss evidence based theories.

How am I ignoring the evolutionary explanation? I am not denying the evolutionary explanation!! But the evolutionary explanation is an explanation of the development of our moral sense and moral beliefs. And morality is not a sensation or a belief. It is the thing sensed, the thing believed. How many times?

An evolutionary explanation of religious sensations and beliefs can be provided as well. Does such an explanation show those religions to be true? No, it debunks them.

Similarly, an evolutionary explanation of our moral sense and beliefs DEBUNKS those beliefs.

AKA having ones cake and eating it.

You ask how many times, but that's the same question we're asking right back at you regarding the evidence of why you are inferring some greater, supernatural power behind morality when the evolutionary thesis on morality explains it perfectly well without it.

Parsimony, Occam's good old' razor and all that.

I mean, I could also cite a false equivocation fallacy where you cite a similarity between an evolved thesis on the origin of religion (which I would agree with) with a divinely inspired evolutionary morality (having the cake), but why bother?

Please, do carry on with the un-evidenced assertions. It really is rather fascinating.

[Inigo]

Consequences favor certain actions over others, so "favoring" is not sufficient to distinguish moral properties from non-moral ones.

A consequence cannot favour something without the assistance of an agent who has some kind of favouring attitude towards the thing in question.

For instance, someone who said 'this chair favours me sitting on it' would be taken by most of us to be either talking poetically or to be attributing a mind to the chair. If the latter we would consider the person misguided - insane perhaps - but at least we could make sense of his attribution of a favouring attitude. If the person clarified and said 'no, I am not talking poetically, nor do I think the chair possesses a mind and has attitudes etc, rather I think the chair is just a piece of wood, nevertheless I think it favours me sitting on it' we would surely think him conceptually confused. We would have to assume - we would assume - that he must mean something different by 'favour' than we mean. That's what I'd think anyway.

The same is true of consequences being said to 'favour' things. A consequence is just a state of affairs that followed some other state of affairs. It can't favour anything. It isn't in that line of business.

[LostLocke]

I am not denying the evolutionary explanation!! But the evolutionary explanation is an explanation of the development of our moral sense and moral beliefs. And morality is not a sensation or a belief. It is the thing sensed, the thing believed. How many times?

Morality IS a belief.
Right now there are things we consider to be moral/immoral. But 10 or 50 or 100 or 1000 or 10000 years from now we may swap those things.

The morals that tend to remain consistent, like randomly killing or hurting others, has a direct physical humanistic reason for remaining consistent.
At no point does it require anything higher than humans for it to be.

Put simply, for the sake of argument if we assume humans are the only animals on this planet with morality and we assume that this planet is the only place in the entire universe with life, if humans disappear morality disappears.
Simple as that.

[Angrboda]

Consequences favor certain actions over others, so "favoring" is not sufficient to distinguish moral properties from non-moral ones.

A consequence cannot favour something without the assistance of an agent who has some kind of favouring attitude towards the thing in question....

I appear to have made substantial edits following your posting this. Please respond to my complete post.

[Inigo]

You have asserted that morality is instruction. I will dispute this premise now.....However, a more fundamental problem is simply equating "morality" with instruction, favoring, and an agent. Since morality is not a thing, it cannot be equated to an agent without a category error (see also, Leibniz' law).

This is question begging. I am not equating morality with a thing. I am concluding that it is one. And not just a thing, but an agent - a mind with beliefs and desires.

You are attempting to challenge my premise that morality instructs. I take it to be an essential feature and thus one that is non-negotiable. This isn't peculiar to me. Every work of moral philosophy that I have ever read, and every article on moral philosophy that I have ever read, has talked of moral requirements, commands, instructions, favourings and so on. It has made use of those terms. I assume that the authors of those books and articles are, then, talking about something that they sense is in the business of requiring, commanding, instructing, favouring. I assume that all of these philosophers are talking about the same thing I'm talking about. I assume that we have a common experience: that we have experienced the world as a place that contains external instructions and that we are using moral terms to refer to these things.
The bottom line is that what I am talking about when I talk about morality - and it appears that what every moral philosopher who has ever written on the topic is talking about as well - is something that instructs, whatever else it does.

Now, perhaps instructions can just somehow exist, all by themselves, un-issued by anyone. I think that idea is incoherent. I think you do as well if you're honest. But perhaps it isn't. But I can't conceive of how an instruction can exist all by itself. I can't conceive of how anything non-agential can issue an instruction. I can easily conceive of how something non-agential can give the appearance of instructing. But upon discovering that the thing is non-agential we do not hesitate to conclude that the instruction is not real, merely apparent.

Morality really instructs. For to believe an act wrong is to believe it 'not to be done' or 'required not to be done' or 'commanded not to be done' or 'favoured not to be done'. These are commonly offered as partially capturing just what we mean by 'wrong'.
Apparent instructions are not real instructions. An act is not wrong if it merely appears 'not to be done'. It is wrong if and only if it is actually 'not to be done'.

[The Grand Nudger]

An act is not wrong if it merely appears 'not to be done'. It is wrong if and only if it is actually 'not to be done'.

That's where you switch rails, right there. You're not talking about whether or not morality can exist in the absence of a god anymore..you're babbling on about which morality is "true". If you'll pick through the rest of that post of yours you might notice that you don't actually have a problem conceding that there are things which meet your requirements that are only "apparent", not "real" not "true", not to be followed. Again, you decapitate your own argument. What you need, what you're describing as being believed in, and what you're arguing for..is actually -an objective morality issuing from a god-. All those other moralities and agents that so easily and thoroughly dismiss your conjecture are ruled out -they're not "real morality".

Good luck.

[Rahul]

All we are talking about in this much too long thread is altruism. Which has been studied in a lot of non-human species.

"Morality" is nothing more than the instincts of a social animal relating to how it should treat members of its own group.

[LostLocke]

Morality really instructs. For to believe an act wrong is to believe it 'not to be done' or 'required not to be done' or 'commanded not to be done' or 'favoured not to be done'. These are commonly offered as partially capturing just what we mean by 'wrong'.

And again, there are reasons (note that word, reason) for these.
None of these require an external source above and beyond humans.