Atheists: explain where your moral system comes from

[Gogf]

Perhaps I have been unclear: please explain why you believe the ethical prescriptions your moral system makes are TRUE, not what the internal mechanics of the system are. This is an epistemological question.

What is logical is what is correct.

How do you derive ethics from logic? Are you a Kantian?

Most ethical systems are found to a greater or lesser extent in other animals (primates especially), and are more or less universally adopted in human civilisations throughout the world. Various studies have shown that specific ethical systems are artifacts of natural selection; ethical systems are "universal" insofar as they apply to any sufficiently intelligent life that evolved under the same evolutionary pressures that we did.

I don't know whether the question applies to me, but yes, I consider ethical systems to be meaningfully prescriptive.

Why do you believe them to be meaningfully prescriptive? How do you get from "everyone has this belief" to "this belief is true"?

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Perhaps I have been unclear: please explain why you believe the ethical prescriptions your moral system makes are TRUE

I don't. Especially not in all caps. I think they are the right way to go, but I could be wrong.

I base them on subjective reasoning, so how can I be sure?

 

[Gogf]

I don't. Especially not in all caps. I think they are the right way to go, but I could be wrong.

Please explain why you believe they are the right way to go. Do you have a reason for it? Are you just emotionally drawn towards acting the way you consider to be moral?

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

People post all the time about how there's this common misconception that "atheists cannot be moral." I am curious what morality means to most CFC atheists.

If your explanation consists of an appeal to moral intuitions, please explain why those moral intuitions have access to some sort of objective moral truth. Please also clarify what it means for an ethical statement to be true and what it is that makes these ethical statements objectively true.

If you do not believe in objective morals, please say whether or not you consider your moral relativism to be meaningfully prescriptive and discuss the relative merits of this versus the objective morality that religion can (supposedly) provide.

Morality is whatever the prevalent practices and beliefs are of a given society. It may or may not have any connection to religion. If anything, religion is either a handy excuse to engage in malicious behavior, or conveniently forgotten when it does not suit an immediately advantageous act. People also tend to select what parts of their religion they like to follow, while ignoring all the dislikable parts.

My own morality is drawn from my own experience of right and wrong, justice and injustice, not from any religious or cultural institutions, which may be by their natures even unjust.

 

[Mise]

Why do you believe them to be meaningfully prescriptive? How do you get from "everyone has this belief" to "this belief is true"?

For example, it's been shown that mentally ill people (specifically, people whose brains are underdeveloped in... some area related to empathy or something) respond differently to moral questions than the vast majority of people (I'm talking 95% sort of majority). So when I say "ethical system X is prescriptive", what I mean is, "if you want to know how to act like someone who isn't mentally ill, you should act in <this> way". Put another way, if your ethical system makes you act like a mentally ill person (see Objectivism, for example), then it's not a very good ethical system, and you probably shouldn't act as it tells you to.

 

[Defiant47]

Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative.

My morals are not designed by it, *it* is designed by/describes my morals - through my ethical studies, I found that its teachings were basically what I've been doing all along and what I agree with.

My moral system basically starts from an axiom, a basic assumption that other humans are real humans and alive, like me. It all falls into place from there.

 

[Onionsoilder]

My moral system basically starts from an axiom, a basic assumption that other humans are real humans and alive, like me. It all falls into place from there.

This, pretty much... The whole treat others as you wish to be treated thing. Do not take actions that harm more than they help. I hold this to be true because it seems to make everyone else around me a much happier person, and that seems like a good thing to me.

 

[Gogf]

For example, it's been shown that mentally ill people (specifically, people whose brains are underdeveloped in... some area related to empathy or something) respond differently to moral questions than the vast majority of people (I'm talking 95% sort of majority). So when I say "ethical system X is prescriptive", what I mean is, "if you want to know how to act like someone who isn't mentally ill, you should act in <this> way". Put another way, if your ethical system makes you act like a mentally ill person (see Objectivism, for example), then it's not a very good ethical system, and you probably shouldn't act as it tells you to.

This still doesn't help, because you're still making statements like "you [...] shouldn't act as it tells you to" without providing an explanation for where that moral prescription comes from. You also have not provided an explanation for why something that makes you act differently from most people is "not a very good ethical system." I have yet to hear a non-circular justification for atheist morality in this thread.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

Perhaps I have been unclear: please explain why you believe the ethical prescriptions your moral system makes are TRUE, not what the internal mechanics of the system are. This is an epistemological question.

I base my morality on the realisation that morality has nothing to do with religion, but is simply a mechanism which allows society to work without individual members of said society braining each other every five seconds (or at least facing severe punishment if they do). Religion either developed as a way of enforcing such systems or parasiting off them, take your pick.

As Nanocyborasm has said morality changes to suit the need of the society in which they exist. For example the values and morals of Victorian society were much different than current ones, e.g. there was much prudery over sexual acts, but persons in positions of power (e.g. husbands, job supervisors) could get away with sexual violence without much consequence, whereas today it is the opposite (at least theoretically in the West, a lot of sexual violence still goes unpunished, but now there are laws against it).

My basic moral principle is "do no harm onto others unless they are about to do unwarranted harm onto you or a third party", and I got this idea mainly from my parents, but also from the larger society I grew up in. For me whether that society was religious or not does not factor (I grew up in pre-paedo scandal Ireland).

 

[Gogf]

Morality is whatever the prevalent practices and beliefs are of a given society. It may or may not have any connection to religion. If anything, religion is either a handy excuse to engage in malicious behavior, or conveniently forgotten when it does not suit an immediately advantageous act. People also tend to select what parts of their religion they like to follow, while ignoring all the dislikable parts.

My own morality is drawn from my own experience of right and wrong, justice and injustice, not from any religious or cultural institutions, which may be by their natures even unjust.

So you are a relativist? How would you attack Nazism or slave-ownership under your framework?

Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative.

My morals are not designed by it, *it* is designed by/describes my morals - through my ethical studies, I found that its teachings were basically what I've been doing all along and what I agree with.

My moral system basically starts from an axiom, a basic assumption that other humans are real humans and alive, like me. It all falls into place from there.

Kantianism is much more complicated than "other people are morally equivalent to me" and requires a much more extensive justification.

I base my morality on the realisation that morality has nothing to do with religion, but is simply a mechanism which allows society to work without individual members of said society braining each other every five seconds (or at least facing severe punishment if they do). Religion either developed as a way of enforcing such systems or parasiting off them, take your pick.

As Nanocyborasm has said morality changes to suit the need of the society in which they exist. For example the values and morals of Victorian society were much different than current ones, e.g. there was much prudery over sexual acts, but persons in positions of power (e.g. husbands, job supervisors) could get away with sexual violence without much consequence, whereas today it is the opposite (at least theoretically in the West, a lot of sexual violence still goes unpunished, but now there are laws against it).

My basic moral principle is "do no harm onto others unless they are about to do unwarranted harm onto you or a third party", and I got this idea mainly from my parents, but also from the larger society I grew up in. For me whether that society was religious or not does not factor (I grew up in pre-paedo scandal Ireland).

It sounds like you don't believe in objective moral truth, which is exactly the criticism that religious people often levy against atheists. In fact, from what I have seen so far in this thread, no non-religious person here (with the possible exception of the potentially-Kantian Defiant) seems able to provide any justification whatsoever for why they believe what the believe about ethics, exception of course those who don't seem to believe in ethics at all.

 

[Karalysia]

It's called secular humanism yo.

 

[Gogf]

It's called secular humanism yo.

Please elaborate (explain why you believe in moral truth, where it comes from, and how we can have access to it). Don't just throw out buzzwords!

 

[Karalysia]

It's quite simple, secular humanism holds that moral truth is based on critical reason, factual evidence, and scientific methods of inquiry, not religion or faith and that is the method through which moral truth can be disovered. The primary purpose is to seek soloutions to human problems. Dogmas, ideologies and traditions, regardless of if they are religious, political or social, should be critically examined and not be accepted on the basis of faith. The main principles behind secular humanism is the betterment of humanity and the focus of improving all lives of both the individual and society as a whole since the afterlife is irrelevant so its what we do here and now that matters.
There is an objective truth and knowledge, learning and creativity are prized the search for that objective truth should be driven by reason and scientific inquiry. There are a number of secular humanist philosophers dating all the way back to ancient Greece.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

It sounds like you don't believe in objective moral truth, which is exactly the criticism that religious people often levy against atheists. In fact, from what I have seen so far in this thread, no non-religious person here (with the possible exception of the potentially-Kantian Defiant) seems able to provide any justification whatsoever for why they believe what the believe about ethics, exception of course those who don't seem to believe in ethics at all.

Simple you do ethical things a) because that is how humanity has evolved, to be ethical (mostly), b) societal pressure and c) "Enlightened self-interest" (please note I'm not giving any weighting to the three influences, though there probably is some sort of difference).

It is not hard to imagine that people can be moral because of their own personal viewpoints, actually far easier to believe than "they only way we can be moral is because God gave his commandments and made us so".

Ethics have nothing to do with religion, that is your problem. You are starting from that false premise and then discounting everything which contradicts that premise as not being worthy of consideration. There is no objective moral truth simply because there is no such thing as an objective unchanging morality, there is just a blend of the personal beliefs and the needs of society. For example in Christianity and Judaism the morality over homosexuality has changed over the years to suit the changing needs of the societies in which the religions exist.

 

[emzie]

Perhaps I have been unclear: please explain why you believe the ethical prescriptions your moral system makes are TRUE, not what the internal mechanics of the system are. This is an epistemological question.

I don't see how biological morality is any more TRUE than a biological imperative to reproduce. It's not a matter of being true or correct in an objective sense, it's just something that... is.

 

[Orange Seeds]

I'm a liberal Kantian.

I believe that ethical choices are prior to assessment rubrics: regardless of what is morally correct I am required to choose it. This means that the fundamental moral fact is the human being's agency. Thus morality is respecting a human beings ability to make a true, uncorrupted decision. I don't know what an uncorrupted end-state decision is. I am able, however, to understand coercive inputs.

My moral system requires few but demanding things:
1. The development of my own ability to pursue meta-preferences rather than immediate preferences(ie health over the pleasure of food). People often call this rationality, but that's begging the question.
2. Respect for other people's decisions in all matters insofar as they do undermine other people's decisions (a kind of Kantian harm-principle).
3. Aid for other people who clearly have defective inputs in their decision-making processes (poverty, addiction, and so on).

This means that animals, and the mentally disabled have few moral rights. They have moral rights only insofar as some truly rational person cares for them. My moral framework is often criticized as elitist, but I think that it is only so trivially.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Please explain why you believe they are the right way to go. Do you have a reason for it? Are you just emotionally drawn towards acting the way you consider to be moral?

Do unto others seems like a reasonable way to judge how to treat people. There's not one uniform way I arrive at my morality. There is not one template model I use to draw a moral standard for every situation. Sometimes this is emotional, sometimes it isn't, sometimes it's influenced by strong personal feelings, sometimes it isn't.

The strange thing about this thread is the supposed rift between theists and atheist with regard to morality. I think that the rift is there in specific situations but in many situation there is little difference in how most atheist and theist arrive at their moral standards. They are after all usually very similar. I think there are some rules which make societies successful, these rules get ingrained in culture and passed on by all kinds of interacting which have nothing to do with gods or religion or holy scripture.

 

[Mise]

This still doesn't help, because you're still making statements like "you [...] shouldn't act as it tells you to" without providing an explanation for where that moral prescription comes from. You also have not provided an explanation for why something that makes you act differently from most people is "not a very good ethical system." I have yet to hear a non-circular justification for atheist morality in this thread.

You've lost me. Why don't you explain why God would help, and maybe I can understand what you're asking me.

Bear in mind I have no idea about philosophy and have never taken any course or read any books on it at all.

 

[Gogf]

It's quite simple, secular humanism holds that moral truth is based on critical reason, factual evidence, and scientific methods of inquiry, not religion or faith and that is the method through which moral truth can be disovered. The primary purpose is to seek soloutions to human problems. Dogmas, ideologies and traditions, regardless of if they are religious, political or social, should be critically examined and not be accepted on the basis of faith. The main principles behind secular humanism is the betterment of humanity and the focus of improving all lives of both the individual and society as a whole since the afterlife is irrelevant so its what we do here and now that matters.
There is an objective truth and knowledge, learning and creativity are prized the search for that objective truth should be driven by reason and scientific inquiry. There are a number of secular humanist philosophers dating all the way back to ancient Greece.

You still haven't answered my question. I didn't ask for a wikipedia-style description of your moral philosophy, I asked you to tell me:

1. Why you believe it.
2. Why it justifies the existence of objective moral truth.
3. How we can access moral truth.

Please answer those three questions wrt secular humanism.

Simple you do ethical things a) because that is how humanity has evolved, to be ethical (mostly), b) societal pressure and c) "Enlightened self-interest" (please note I'm not giving any weighting to the three influences, though there probably is some sort of difference).

It is not hard to imagine that people can be moral because of their own personal viewpoints, actually far easier to believe than "they only way we can be moral is because God gave his commandments and made us so".

Ethics have nothing to do with religion, that is your problem. You are starting from that false premise and then discounting everything which contradicts that premise as not being worthy of consideration. There is no objective moral truth simply because there is no such thing as an objective unchanging morality, there is just a blend of the personal beliefs and the needs of society. For example in Christianity and Judaism the morality over homosexuality has changed over the years to suit the changing needs of the societies in which the religions exist.

You just asserted "objective morality does not exist because there is no objective morality." I hope you understand the problem with a statement like this. Would you like to rephrase?

Finally, you state that "we act morally because we have evolved to do so." What does this mean? You have not presented a framework for what "acting morally" means. Usually when people use the language of ethics, they are referring to some kind of ethical truth. "Acting morally" means acting in accordance with objective morality. If this is not what you mean by "acting morally," please explain what you do.

 

[emzie]

Finally, you state that "we act morally because we have evolved to do so." What does this mean? You have not presented a framework for what "acting morally" means. Usually when people use the language of ethics, they are referring to some kind of ethical truth. "Acting morally" means acting in accordance with objective morality. If this is not what you mean by "acting morally," please explain what you do.

Why restate what others have written about?

If you're genuinely curious, skim through these

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_altruism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_morality