morality is subjective and people don't have free will

[Edwardo Piet]

We suffer BECAUSE we care. We don't care because we suffer.

Well, it's both but ultimately we only care about the suffering of ourselves and others because ourselves and others are capable of suffering. It would make no sense to care if we didn't suffer.

We do care because we suffer. We also care because we experience happiness. Basically.... our natural reaction to emotions is by valuing them either negatively or positively. God should be able to do that without feeling further emotions and without creating an irrational feedback loop like we do.. He should be able to recognize the value in the emotions of others without needing to share in them or resort to basic human empathy.

A God isn't very impressive if He has to use the same imperfect and irrational methods as we do.

[Whateverist]

It's a pity you didn't read because the end of my post is a concise Q.E.D. against your position given my Galen Strawson.

I'm sorry, what?

I think it means you lack pity for God because of the straw man this Galen fellow keeps bringing up.  

[Angrboda]

This is an interesting thread. I appreciate everyone sharing their views. I'm surprised to see that so far Aroura has been the only one who has the 2 positions I presented in the OP. I was under the impression that most people here held both of those beliefs.

I endorse both viewpoints, but my reply appears to have gone unnoticed.

https://atheistforums.org/thread-48959-p...pid1553154

[emjay]

Your conclusions are true, HAH.

Yes, they are.

True in what sense within the confines of free will?

True in the sense of true. Do I have to quote the dictionary?

Incompatabilist, Libertarian Contra-causal free will isn't even a logically coherent concept. It's basically magic. But good luck with believing in magic. Oh wait... you already do.

 That only means that they are true to you.

Bullshit.

To quote Richard Dawkins "You mean true for you is different from true for anybody else? It’s got to be either true or not true."

Just because they exist as a philosophy position does not make them true.

Right back at you. Although you may have noticed that no serious philosopher believes in the kind of free will you believe in and the kind of free will most people believe in: i.e contra-causal, magical, libertarian free will. And the ones that do are also almost all religious and believe in souls.

And of course... having a soul is not going to defeat the argument.

From what I've read fatalism can be a part of determinism.

So? Holy crap you're bad at arguing. Just because it can be doesn't mean it always is. Dogs can be animals but not all animals are dogs. Fatalists are determinists but not all determinists are fatalists.

How many times have I heard you say I can't or I'm not responsible or it's not my fault or I can't help it or some one/thing else is to blame. You are every bit the fatalist.

Come back when you understand the difference between fatalism and determinism. I already said that legal, social and practical moral responsibility exists. But that's merely holding people responsible as if they're responsible because it's better for everyone that way. It doesn't make the retarded magical notion of humans having motives that are outside of the causal stream any more true.

Libertarian Incompatabilism=Our motives are not part of the causal stream. They supervene it (as if by magic).

Fatalism=Our motives don't exist or if they do they have no real power over us so why not just give up? (X will either happen or not happen and what you do has no bearing over it).

Hard Incompatabilism=If our motives are determined they are part of the causal stream but they still exist and they have full power in motivating us (hence why they're called out motives).

Compatabilism=If our motives are determined they are part of the causal stream but they still exist and they have full power in motivating us (hence why they're called our motives)... but despite the fact that our motives are determined and part of the causal stream let's just redefine ordinary willpower, call it "free will" and behave as if the legal definition of free will (i.e. "Did you sign that contract of your own free will?") has anything to with the classic philosophical problem of free will even though it doesn't. Let's take the approach a theologian does with God. Let's just behave as if free will not existing but it being useful to behave as if it does is the same thing as it actually existing even though it isn't. Thereby misleading many laypeople into thinking that the Libertarian free will they believe in is justified even though it's not even logically coherent and it's basically akin to believing in magic.

Hard Incompatabilism is the only reasonable position.

Explain "my motives are part of the causal stream". What motives?

All my motives.

In case you missed it the first time here is Galen Strawson's knockdown argument against free will:

In the free will debate, Strawson holds that there is a fundamental sense in which free will is impossible, whether determinism is true or not. He argues for this position with what he calls his "basic argument", which aims to show that no-one is ever ultimately morally responsible for their actions, and hence that no one has free will in the sense that usually concerns us. In its simplest form, the Basic Argument runs thus:

1. You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are.
2. To be ultimately responsible for what you do, you have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are — at least in certain crucial mental respects.
3. But you cannot be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.
4. So you cannot be ultimately responsible for what you do.

This argument resembles Arthur Schopenhauer's position in On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, summarised by E. F. J. Payne as the "law of motivation, which states that a definite course of action inevitably ensues on a given character and motive"

And here's his response in video form, from a documentary about Free Will. This video also includes the interviewer's failed attempts to defeat Strawson's argument.





Hopefully if you read that argument and watch that video with full attention and without confirmation bias.... you will stop believing people's motives have magical powers that can transcend causality.

I agree with you Hammy about determinism vs fatalism. The way I see it is this... the 'normal' decision-making process in life... ie that which occurs when we don't factor in considerations about the clockwork universe... is determined, just as everything else is. But fatalism... ie thinking something like 'what will be will be so therefore there's no point in doing anything'... comes about when people (erroneously, imo) neglect to realise that 'what will be will be' includes that normal decision-making process. So by factoring in the clockwork universe in that way to their decisions, all they are doing is making more decisions which are just as determined as they were when the clockwork universe wasn't factored in. So both choices and their preceding decision-making processes are equally causal/determined, but fatalism, and it's implications on the course of a life, comes from, imo, a bad decision... one that assumes that 'what will be will be' will somehow magically happen without you making choices, leading to apathy... but that apathy... and how it affects choices... is just another decision-making process going forward. It's just as determined as the other but leads to drastically different causal outcomes than if that conclusion hadn't been reached in the past.

[Whateverist]

We suffer BECAUSE we care. We don't care because we suffer.

A God isn't very impressive if He has to use the same imperfect and irrational methods as we do.

Then again, maybe these allegedly imperfect and irrational methods we've been given are actually state of the art and precisely of the sort He himself uses?  

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Just following the maybe where it leads .. maybe.

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[Shell B]

I don't know why. Most of us don't spend hours debating free will and morality, so you've only got a small sample.

Haha, true but I've started a few threads in the past that took the direction of touching on both of those things. I guess it is still true that most here do think morality is subjective, though only a few don't believe we have free will.

I think morality is both objective and subjective. Saying it's one or the other oversimplifies it, in my opinion. There are plenty of things where you can say, "That was objectively bad." and a number of things we think are bad because of our experience/feelings, etc.

[The Grand Nudger]

Neither the possibility nor the existence of an objective morality would necessitate that any person possesses it.  A world in which there was an objective morality could nevertheless be full of varying subjective moralities.

Moral disagreement firmly establishes that subjective moralities exist without commenting upon or excluding objective moralities, if they exist.

[Angrboda]

This goes here somewhere....

I've made the argument before, but to my mind, punishment serves one of 5 possible goals: (I just added one)

1. Insuring the safety of innocents by isolating offenders from the community and depriving them of the opportunity to re-offend;
2. Deterrence;
3. Rehabilitation;
4. Compensation - the redistributing of the fruits of the offender's resources to compensate society;
5. Retribution - making someone "pay" for what they have done because they are morally deserving of punishment.

As noted, deterrence is generally not regarded as effective. And retribution is probably, from a moral and practical standpoint, one of the least compelling justifications for punishment. I'm not going to elaborate further where this suggests we head with criminal punishment except to point out two key points.

In Michel Foucault's landmark study of the history of punishment, Discipline and Punish, he points out how, with the reforms in punishment that have occurred in Europe since the 16th century, the focus of punishment has shifted away from punishing the individual for an act to one in which we largely punish and attempt to correct the person as someone who has a mind capable of committing such acts. Thus we allow insanity as a defense, because the person's inclination to commit crime is not amenable to the treatment, punishment. We adjust the punishment dependent on the goal of fixing the criminality of the mind, not on addressing the severity of the crime; three strikes and you're out is aimed at minds that can't be fixed, not crimes that have been committed. Child molesters can be given chemical or surgical castration in exchange for reduction of sentence and leniency. Prisoners are monitored for progress and paroled earlier if they "show signs of good character" — it's not the crime that determines punishment anymore, it's the predisposition to offend which is the focus of punishment. Retribution, perhaps, is a return to focus on the crime rather than on fixing the criminal mind, but I'd be hesitant to take that step without serious consideration as to whether doing so serves any legitimate purpose.

The second point is, that as a hard determinist, I don't believe in free will. The moral justification for using punishment as retribution for a crime is that the person is morally deserving of the punishment, and that requires moral culpability which doesn't exist in the required sense if free will doesn't exist. The other four aims of punishment — deterrence, isolation from society, compensation, and rehabilitation — all can be justified without recourse to the assumption of free will; retribution alone cannot. Now I recognize that relative to my peers, I hold an extreme view with regard to free will, yet I think many of us realize that, regardless of where on the continuum regarding the existence of free will you stand, most of us recognize that most crimes and criminal behavior is a consequence of both factors within the individual's control, as well as a large measure of factors totally outside their control, ranging from social class, education, intelligence, all the way to things like being born in a society or culture that encouraged certain values and not others, to being genetically fated to the development of temperament which leaves one at increased risk of criminal or violent behavior. As a personal matter, I try to remove free will from any justification for punishment; but even someone more moderate could well be persuaded to minimize the impact that situational factors such as being born black, being poor, and such have on the fairness and equity with which we address criminal behavior; I think, arguably, retribution results in unfairness because it treats moral culpability and the resources to act morally as evenly distributed resources, and they are not.

[Catholic_Lady]

This is an interesting thread. I appreciate everyone sharing their views. I'm surprised to see that so far Aroura has been the only one who has the 2 positions I presented in the OP. I was under the impression that most people here held both of those beliefs.

I endorse both viewpoints, but my reply appears to have gone unnoticed.

https://atheistforums.org/thread-48959-p...pid1553154

Oh, sorry.

So it's the 2 of you, not just Aroura. Unless there's someone else I've missed.

[Aroura]

Im pretty sure a number of other people do as well, they just arent saying so explicitly, or they arent participating in the thread. Not that it matters. Atheists have a wide range of beliefs and ideas, herding cats. Lol