Atheism and morality

[max-greece]

22 pages later, and nothing new.... typical theist...

First, I am not a theist as I do not believe in the theistic god (the all powerful, all knowing, perfectly good one). These arguments suggest morality requires the existence of a god, but not that one. (It is logically possible that morality requires the theistic god, but I think the evidence is against it).

Second, I am unclear by what 'nothing new' means or its relevance. If you mean that after 22 pages nobody has said anything to show my original arguments to be faulty, then you are correct. But this is surprising and interesting, is it not? The problem is you atheists get an easy time most of the time - for most of the time your opponents are idiots defending idiotic positions using idiotic arguments. This gives you false confidence in the credibility of your view. But in fact there are very good arguments against it. You won't hear them very often, but they exist. Most of the time all you'll hear are very incompetent versions of those arguments. So, you'll hear terrible versions of the moral argument for god. You won't hear good versions. And then you think 'ah, well the moral argument for god is rubbish'. And yes, there are lots and lots of rubbish moral arguments for god. For there are lots of idiots out there trying to defend religious worldviews, hobbled both by their own idiocy and by their religious commitments into making poor arguments.

But I haven't done that. What I've done is present what seems to me to be a good version of the moral argument. Or at least, a version that standard objections fail to touch.

Obviously that's a pain in the arse if you're heavily invested in atheism being true. Oh well. Deal.

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As I've pointed out - your conclusions is wrong. Morality is not an agent and that won't be the case no matter how many times you repeat it. Agency is an attribute of a conscious being and morality - being just a concept - does not qualify.

All you have to do is challenge one of my premises. 'Challenge' doesn't mean 'deny'. It means presenting some evidence that one of my premises is false.

Saying 'morality is a concept' is either banal or confused. it is banal if you mean that we have a concept of morality. I know. OUr concept of morality tells us what it would take for morality to exist, just as our concept of a unicorn tells us what it would take for a unicorn to exist, etc. If you do not mean this - if you mean morality just is a concept rather than something we have a conception of, then what you're saying is nonsensical.

anyway, challenge a premise. if your challenge holds up you earn the right to deny my conclusion. Otherwise you don't.

You are as delusional as any theist I have ever met. Your theory has had innumerable holes blown through it but you simply don't recognise the fact.

[genkaus]

Yes it does. It instructs and favours. That's just the nature of the thing I'm analysing (and that moral philosophers are analysing - read their works, they talk about its 'instructions' 'favourings' 'commands' requirements' all the time). If you do not mean to use the term 'morality' to refer to something that instructs, favours, etc, then that's fine - but you're not talking about what I'm talking about.

Maps don't actually guide. When you look at a map it doesn't tell you where to go. You do the guiding. Alternatively someone might have put a circle around something on the map and written 'go here' on it - now you're being guided, but someone wrote that and 'someone' is an agent. For instance, if you found out that a slug had dragged itself through a bowl of ink and had then slithered over the map - and by purest fluke left a trail that spelt out 'go here' - you would, upon discovering how this pattern had been created, conclude that there was no real instruction on the map. And that's the point. Something can look like an instruction without really being one. If atheism is true then our moral sense reports give us the impression there are instructions, when in fact there are not.

Can you not read your own arguments? Your own description of map-analogy defeats your view on morality. The same way that you consider the map-drawer or map-reader to be the agent and not the map itself, it is the moral philosopher or the follower who is the agent, not morality itself. The "instructions" within morality are the same as those on a map - while they represent agency of a certain being, they do not confer agency upon the object itself.

Instructions can be issued by agents. 'Shut the door!' - there, I just issued one. Whether one has reason to comply is a different matter. I haven't argued that morality is just any old agent, have I? I have argued that morality - or moral instructions and favourings - are those of a god who has control over our interests in an afterlife. This was because I could think of no other way in which an agent's instructions could come to be ones we'd all have reason to comply with.

Your argument for morality's agency is nonsensical. What you are really trying to say is that god could be the only possible agency behind morality - which happens to be patently false, given the large number of moralities available to us.

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First, what I am arguing is that there would need to be an afterlife for moral instructions to exist. That's a conditional. I'm not saying 'there is an afterlife'. I am saying 'there would need to be if these sensations are to have anything that vindicates them'. If I am correct about that then our moral sensations are sensations 'of' the instructions of an agent who has control over our interests in an afterlife. And therefore those sensations would be defeasible evidence of such a person and a place. Note 'defeasible'. It isn't proof anymore than your visual impression that there is a computer monitor in front of you is 'proof' of such a thing.

Then you are wrong once again - given the large number of moralities out there which are not conditioned upon an afterlife and issue moral instructions regardless.

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Er, I know it has a name. So? What's important is not whether the argument is original, but whether it holds up. Imagine we're at a crime scene and a man is lying on the ground with a giant knife in his back. I say 'well, my hypothesis is that someone stabbed him in the back'. YOu respond 'how unoriginal!'. Yes, but it is what the evidence suggests.

Except, it doesn't hold up. The point of indicating the unoriginality of your argument would be that since this argument has existed for centuries and still hasn't been accepted, mean there are a lot of arguments against it - something you should look up yourself before putting it forward.

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By your logic the way to find out what is right or wrong is to consult a sociologist and ask them what the prevailing norms of one's society are! Want to find out whether capital punishment is right or wrong? Just do a survey of your society.

Don't be ridiculous - that would just tell you what the society considers right or wrong.

For the purposes of my argument it does not matter what causes us to have the moral sensations we do. How many times? Moral sensations are not morality. If morality exists, they are the means by which we are acquainted with it. If it does not, they constitute a hallucination. Either way, they are not morality. So quite why you feel the need to give me a story about the causes of our moral sensations is beyond me. Moral sensation are moral phenomena, they are not morality itself. Morality is the thing our moral sensations give us an impression of. Your visual sense data is not the outside world, is it? It gives you the impression of an outside world. If there really is an outside world then one means by which you are acquainted with it is via your visual sense. If there is not an external world then your visual sense data constitutes a hallucination.
You must be confusing morality with moral sensations.

Hallucinations don't exist in vacuum - they are based on preexisting beliefs and knowledge. Your visual sense data may not be the outside world but it is indicative of it, because without the outside world, there wouldn't be a any visual sense data. And without morality, there wouldn't be any moral "sensations". The question then is, which morality your sensations are indicative of?

There aren't multiple moralities. You are misusing the word 'morality' or using it in a grossly misleading and silly way. You are using it to refer to different collections of moral beliefs. You are labelling a collection of moral beliefs 'a morality'. That's as silly as labelling a collection of beliefs about tables 'a table'.

Morality is not a collection of beliefs. It is the object of those beliefs. It is the thing believed. Ignore these elementary distinctions at your cost - most people do.

Your attempt to obfuscate the issue by throwing around a bunch of labels moral beliefs is pathetic.

Simply put - morality is a code of how one should act. Given the existence of many such codes - each with it s own set of instructions - there are many moralities.

Someone's beliefs regarding any one of such codes can be considered as their moral beliefs. If those moral beliefs are in complete accordance with that particular morality, then the two are functionally the same.

That is the meaning of the word morality, because that is how the word is used. What you are trying to do is to sneak in the "No True Scotsmans" fallacy, by narrowing the definition to the one given by a supernatural entity and disregarding all the other existing moralities as "no true morality".

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All you have to do is challenge one of my premises. 'Challenge' doesn't mean 'deny'. It means presenting some evidence that one of my premises is false.

I don't need to prove them false because they haven't been proven true to begin with. But, however unnecessary, evidence easily disproves your premise. Given that agency - by definition - is an attribute of a conscious being and morality - by definition - is not a conscious being - morality cannot be an agent.

Saying 'morality is a concept' is either banal or confused. it is banal if you mean that we have a concept of morality. I know. OUr concept of morality tells us what it would take for morality to exist, just as our concept of a unicorn tells us what it would take for a unicorn to exist, etc. If you do not mean this - if you mean morality just is a concept rather than something we have a conception of, then what you're saying is nonsensical.

Except, I never spoke of our "concept of morality". The concept of morality and morality itself would be two separate things. However, unlike the potential unicorn, our concept of morality is a concept and morality itself is a concept as well. Is that concept too hard for you to understand?

anyway, challenge a premise. if your challenge holds up you earn the right to deny my conclusion. Otherwise you don't.

Done and done.

[Inigo]

[quote]Except, I never spoke of our "concept of morality". The concept of morality and morality itself would be two separate things. However, unlike the potential unicorn, our concept of morality is a concept and morality itself is a concept as well. Is that concept too hard for you to understand? [\quote]

No, it is nonsense so of course I can't understand it. I understand it to be nonsense. You know it is nonsense as well, at least I hope you do.

YOu need to challenge one of the premises of my argument. One of those was that morality instructs. I take it that the above is your attempt to challenge it. But you can't challenge a premisethat morality instructs by saying 'no it doesn't....it instructs'.
You accept that morality instructs. You talked later about a code of 'shoulds'. Use 'should' if you like - but that's just another way of acknowledging that morality consists, in part anyway, in instructions to do and not do things.
So, once again, you accept that morality instructs.

It is no good saying 'but the instructions come from us' or 'we confer the instructions'. For you are still acknowledging the instructing nature of morality, it is just that now you are trying to account for it (rather than deny it) by attributing those instructions to ourselves.

Now, that falls foul of another of my assumptions about morality, namely that its instructions are inescapably rationally authoritative.

So, you actually accept my premise that morality instructs. And you accept, it seems, that instructions need to come from an agency of some sort. You accept this, you just don't realise it (for you do not realise what you're saying or the implications of what you're saying - your problem not mine).

So, there is actually only one way you can avoid my conclusion. And that is to challenge my premise that moral instructions are instructions that are inescapably rationally authoritative.

[Psykhronic]

It's nonsense because you said so. I'VE FIGURED IT ALL OUT.
/drunk

Of course you edited in a fuckload more information, luckily it all is the same.

[Inigo]

The claim that 'morality is a concept' is nonsense. It is like saying 'time is cheese'. It doesn't make sense.

Morality is something we have a concept of. And we have a concept of a concept. But the only thing that 'is' a concept is a concept.

He doesn't know what he's saying, but he isn't letting that stop him.

[Psykhronic]

What stops morality from being a concept?

And it is not the same as saying time (a concept, dimension, etc) is cheese (food). Because morality and a concept are hard to distinguish from one another - being, you know... invisible ideas.

[Inigo]

You are as delusional as any theist I have ever met. Your theory has had innumerable holes blown through it but you simply don't recognise the fact.

Well, I'm not a theist. And to say I'm delusional is question begging in this context.

You haven't addressed my argument. virtually no one has. I have presented an argument. Then what has happened is other people have offered banal accounts of the development of our moral sense and beliefs. This doesn't challenge my argument. One might as well tell me about the weather or what you're wearing. it just doesn't address my argument.

Then some people have tried to challenge my premise that morality instructs and favours. The problem, however, is that to do this one would need to explain how a moral obligation is not a directive to do something. And that's impossible. In other words, the premise people have elected to try and show false is one that it is impossible to show to be false. Premise 1 is a conceptual truth that is absolutely non-negotiable. Deny it and you're just changing the topic.

The only premise that can credibly be challenged is the premise that morality's instructions have inescapable rational authority or my claim that only a god's instructions would satisfy this condition. But nobody has done this.

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What stops morality from being a concept?

And it is not the same as saying time (a concept, dimension, etc) is cheese (food). Because morality and a concept are hard to distinguish from one another - being, you know... invisible ideas.

Time is not a concept, it is something we have a concept of. The only thing that is a concept is a concept. This rather sloppy and imprecise use of terms is what lands you with nonsense like 'morality is a concept'.

Asking me why morality can't be a concept is like asking me why a triangle can't have four sides. Because it isn't a concept, is my answer. Concepts are concepts. Then there are the things conceived - those are the things we have concepts of. We have a concept of time, of space, of morality, of unicorns, of father Christmas, of a god, and so on and so on.

[Psykhronic]

Theist = believing in at least one God.

And EDIT:

Time is not a concept, it is something we have a concept of. The only thing that is a concept is a concept. This rather sloppy and imprecise use of terms is what lands you with nonsense like 'morality is a concept'.

Asking me why morality can't be a concept is like asking me why a triangle can't have four sides. Because it isn't a concept, is my answer. Concepts are concepts. Then there are the things conceived - those are the things we have concepts of. We have a concept of time, of space, of morality, of unicorns, of father Christmas, of a god, and so on and so on.

But some of those things we have a concept of do not exist. Again, this is just you saying shit. "We have a CONCEPT of time but it is not a concept" how the fuck would you know? You realize physicist still struggle with this? And we can draw a fucking triangle, it is defined as having only three sides - by ourselves, mind you.

[Silver]

Well, I'm not a theist.

Your arguments in relation to an instruction needing an instructor (god) states otherwise.

[Inigo]

Theist = believing in at least one God.

I am a theist if that's what you mean by the term.

I am not a theist if one uses 'theist' to refer to the 'theistic' god. The theistic god has three attributes: omniscience, omnipotence and perfect moral goodness.

I am also a theist if 'theist' means 'man sat in a chair' for I believe in one of those as well.

I am also a theist if 'theist' is used to mean 'someone who believes he has some cheese in the fridge'.

I am not a theist if one uses 'theist' to mean 'someone who believes he has some edam in the fridge'.

And so on and so on.

I use 'theist' to mean 'believes in the existence of a theistic god'. If you don't use it that way, I don't care. That's how I use it and it is how I intend on continuing using it, so get used to it.

By all means find some dictionary and look it up and gleefully tell me that Mr Dictionary says something different. I don't care. Dictionaries just follow popular usage and popular usage is often confused, misleading and silly because the population is largely composed of people who possess those attributes.