Christians take on the more nihilistic atheists

[henryp]

I eat a cheeseburger, because I'm hungry.  
I push Carl out of the way, because he's in my fantasy football league.
I post on atheistforums.org, because I'm bored.  

Where is the necessity for good and evil, or right and wrong?  Why would you even think to include good and evil or right and wrong? 

Do you believe the inconvenience of losing a player from my fantasy football league would make me not pushing Carl out of the way Evil?

I don't know.  I don't see any necessity in describing any of those actions as right or wrong.  I don't include good or evil in those scenarios.  

No, I couldn't say that I believed that.

We can choose to either help Carl, or not...and because we are moral actors, this would be an issue of morality. - You

Morality is "the extent to which an action is right or wrong." - google - brakeman

I don't understand how the bolded parts fit together.

[henryp]

How many worlds do you have access to!?  They only gave me this one

And you make the choice if you only care about yourself or want this to be a better place.

I don't believe that to be true.  I definitely think if you have a choice humanism is the way to go.  Seems super nice.  Everybody likes everyone one big happy family.  But my beanie brain in it's love for wasting time concluded that it's nonsense.  And it's hard to believe in things you think are nonsense.  So here I am stuck with ~nihilism, trying to make the best of it.

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't know.  I don't see any necessity in describing any of those actions as right or wrong.  I don't include good or evil in those scenarios.  

No, I couldn't say that I believed that.

We can choose to either help Carl, or not...and because we are moral actors, this would be an issue of morality. - You

Morality is "the extent to which an action is right or wrong." - google - brakeman

I don't understand how the bolded parts fit together.

Carl, previously, was about to be struck by a meteor.  He is now simply a competitor in a fantasy football league.  Let's not conflate those situations as though there were no difference, or pretend that we don't understand a difference between them, eh? To continue, whether or not it is right or wrong to help Carl, in either scenario...as expressed by ones own position, would be one's own morality. My morality includes potential meteor strikings but not fantasy football leagues.

It would be wrong not to help Carl avoid the meteor. Note that it doesn't actually matter if it objectively is wrong, only that I consider it to be so. That's morality. What you do in your fantasy football league, to me, has nothing to do with morality. A fantasy football league is not as fertile a "moral field" as a potential meteor striking which I am capable of preventing. Maybe your morality is different?

Just what about those statements, specifically, are you having a hard time piecing together? Which doesn't seem to fit with which, and why?

[henryp]

Carl, previously, was about to be struck by a meteor.  He is now simply a competitor in a fantasy football league.  Let's not conflate those situations as though there were no difference, or pretend that we don't understand a difference between them, eh?  To continue, whether or not it is right or wrong to help Carl, in either scenario...as expressed by ones own position, would be one;s own morality.  My morality includes potential meteor strikings but not fantasy football leagues.

Sorry, Carl is still getting struck by a meteor.  I'm pushing him out of the way because he's in my fantasy football league, and going from 10 to 9 players screws up the schedule.

[The Grand Nudger]

-and?

[robvalue]

Well, we can either assume we have some sort of real choice to make and discuss it, or else the word "should" becomes entirely meaningless. Almost all discussion about humans becomes meaningless.

We may indeed be making no choices of course. In which case this is just what I have to type.

But it's not been demonstrated we have no choices, so saying "no choices therefor no morality" isn't valid in my opinion.

Again, I'm not argueing for morality being anything other than a subjective value judgement by a thinking agent. It's not some mystical inherent property of matter or of an action. The value judgement is still happening, whether or not I have any control over the outcome. Of course it will all be coming "from me" and be based on me, that's just describing the process.

[robvalue]

Further thought:

Appeals to determinism are pointless in an argument. If your premise is that no choices are being made, then your own use of the word "should" becomes meaningless. So saying I "shouldn't call it morality" is itself a value judgement, and indicates I have some sort of choice in the matter.

So we either agree that "should" is a word with a meaning, or else there is nothing to discuss except hard science.

[The Grand Nudger]

If, for example...a little girl is drowning...I "should" jump in the water to save her.  However, If I am mortally terrified of water....I may not be able to jump in and do what's "right".  Should, as a term in moral context, does not crumple to nothing just because we cannot make the choice that needs to be made, or if, indeed....we cannot make choices at all. We are presented with such scenarios constantly. Where the right decision is one that, for myriad reasons, we are not capable of making. This is a situation already present in our moral landscape regardless of whether hard determinism is true, it is already incorporated within the concept of moral responsibility.

We may say, regarding the example above..that I "should" have jumped in and saved the girl. We also understand why I didn't, why I couldn't, and to some degree (that degree itself is open for debate) this has an exculpating effect on a moral summary of my actions.

[henryp]

Further thought:

Appeals to determinism are pointless in an argument. If your premise is that no choices are being made, then your own use of the word "should" becomes meaningless. So saying I "shouldn't call it morality" is itself a value judgement, and indicates I have some sort of choice in the matter.

So we either agree that "should" is a word with a meaning, or else there is nothing to discuss except hard science.

We use should all the time in determinism.  The hurricane should hit the coast on Tuesday.   It's just using our understanding and trying to predict an unknown outcome, even if the outcome itself is certain.  The Hurricane doesn't have a choice, it only appears that way from our perspective.

So when I make my argument for why you shouldn't call it morality, I'm saying based on my understanding, this is the conclusion I think we should arrive at.

The other half of it is that the illusion of free will continues to exist whether we believe in it or not.  The brain doesn't just say "You got me!  Jig is up.  I'll just shut down that part now."  Because regardless of whether or not the end result is deterministic, we're still programmed to go through the process of getting there.

Re should as a value judgement, this goes back to the pragmatism vs. morality.  I'm not assigning the value of good vs. evil or right vs. wrong, or any morality to it.  I'm just implying the predicate "If we are attempting to assess this rationally, you shouldn't call it morality."  I don't think being rational is right or wrong, or good or evil.  It's just the context in which we're looking at things.

In fact, one of the cosmic jokes, is that after I tore down all my beliefs in search of "Truth", my truth turned out to include "Being rational not only doesn't matter, it was probably against my best interest, and I'd have been better off stopping at a slightly irrational truth."

[henryp]

Well, we can either assume we have some sort of real choice to make and discuss it, or else the word "should" becomes entirely meaningless. Almost all discussion about humans becomes meaningless.

We may indeed be making no choices of course. In which case this is just what I have to type.

But it's not been demonstrated we have no choices, so saying "no choices therefor no morality" isn't valid in my opinion.

Again, I'm not argueing for morality being anything other than a subjective value judgement by a thinking agent. It's not some mystical inherent property of matter or of an action. The value judgement is still happening, whether or not I have any control over the outcome. Of course it will all be coming "from me" and be based on me, that's just describing the process.

In the end, I think we're just quibbling over 'value judgement.'  Allegedly, morality requires you calling it good vs. evil, right vs. wrong.  Are those two the same?  Would you equate wrong with evil?  I just use evil instead of bad, because Evil is a 'moral' world, while bad/wrong have different meanings, some I'd associate with morality, some I wouldn't.  So even if you don't like the world evil, pretend it means morally wrong/bad.

I don't see the need to involve good and evil to make my judgements.  

In the end, I think our language and perspectives are so imprecise it's crazy hard to be sure what anyone is saying for sure.