Atheists: explain where your moral system comes from

[emzie]

That's not what morality is, and the golden rule is also not that.

Then you are using a personal / cultural definition of morality.

 

[Mr. Dictator]

How about this?

Objective morals can exist because all actions have consequences, and part of being a functioning human being in society is knowing which of your actions have positive and negative consequences on you, your neighbors (as a simplification), and society. It would therefor be the quest of all humans to find their own moral structure that maximizes the positive and minimizes the negative for all involved, and this can come in a variety of ways.

 

[Gogf]

Then you are using a personal / cultural definition of morality.

No, I am not. Morality is not "a universal set of guidelines agreed upon by all cultures." Such a thing does not exist.

Morality is objective and does not arise from cultures.

 

[civver_764]

There are certain morals that allow a society to function(ie. don't murder, don't rape, etc.) My life quality is improved by society existing so therefore I follow these moral rules.

Also I'm pretty sure humans have compassion built into them.

 

[Gogf]

How about this?

Objective morals can exist because all actions have consequences, and part of being a functioning human being in society is knowing which of your actions have positive and negative consequences on you, your neighbors (as a simplification), and society. It would therefor be the quest of all humans to find their own moral structure that maximizes the positive and minimizes the negative for all involved, and this can come in a variety of ways.

You are positing utilitarianism and calling it morality. There are tons of non-utilitarian frameworks for morality, and what you are suggestion still does not address the fundamental question of how we can know moral truth exists or how we can access it.

I do appreciate that you are actually trying to answer the question, though, unlike several people who seem to be posting in this thread solely because they want to criticize me for being "religious" when in fact I am not .

 

[Traitorfish]

Have you been reading this thread or are you too intent on pursuing the idea that I am somehow advancing the inconsistent idea that morality must come from god?

I think I may be communicating myself poorly; what I am saying is that your line of enquiry, while of the Devil's Advocate variety, derives from an unreasonable premise, itself a product of ignorance on the part of those who make the claims in question. It is not necessary for you to agree with the assertion in question to implicitly validate its over-simplistic nature.

I am asking a certain group of people to justify their moral systems. If you want to ask others to, that is your prerogative.

A group with no uniquely relevant features to the aforementioned assertion. There is nothing about secular humanists (or "atheists", if you must) that renders them uniquely worthy of questioning; they have merely been arbitrarily selected for criticism as part of some absurd "culture war".

As for the "simplistic ignorance of American bigots," you have yet to provide any explanation of how an atheist would address the two fundamental questions I raised earlier that must be addressed to justify a moral framework (why is there objective truth and how do we have access to it), so you have yet to show that you are any less "ignorant" than the supposed bigots.

My comment on "ignorance" was the simplistic division of the world into two camps- omniscient personal theism, and atheism- a black-and-white nonsense propagated by those making the initial assertion.
The rest is irrelevant to the points I have made.

 

[emzie]

No, I am not. Morality is not "a universal set of guidelines agreed upon by all cultures." Such a thing does not exist.

Morality is objective and does not arise from cultures.

Such a thing does exist and has been demonstrated by anthropologists. It doesn't include things like "is gay sex moral?" no, but includes a foundation for all human cultures. There are fundamental things that are agreed upon by humanity as a whole. If you want to include cultural things like homosexuality or abortion in questions of morality, then I'll excuse myself, because this thread is about you making a point and not having a discussion.

 

[Arwon]

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.

Why does there need to be some outright "true" thing? Anyone who claims they have some ultimately true basis for their ethical positions is a fool or a charlatan or a fanatic. Theists don't either. If it were that friggin simple the world would be a lot more understandable and less heinous and cruel.

 

[Mr. Dictator]

You are positing utilitarianism and calling it morality. There are tons of non-utilitarian frameworks for morality, and what you are suggestion still does not address the fundamental question of how we can know moral truth exists or how we can access it.

I do appreciate that you are actually trying to answer the question, though, unlike several people who seem to be posting in this thread solely because they want to criticize me for being "religious" when in fact I am not .

If you stand on one side of a building, and I stand on the other, we have different views of the building. Is it not the same building?

In order to see what is "objective morality" wouldn't we have to be completely objective and therefor omniscient? So, only a god could know what an objective morality is. So it seems like a dead-end road that can be avoided by not even worrying about the bigger picture, but focusing on your own morals as best you can and perhaps inspiring others along the way to search for their own.

 

[Gogf]

I think I may be communicating myself poorly; what I am saying is that your line of enquiry, while of the Devil's Advocate variety, derives from an unreasonable premise, itself a product of ignorance on the part of those who make the claims in question. It is not necessary for you to agree with the assertion in question to implicitly validate its over-simplistic nature.


A group with no uniquely relevant features to the aforementioned assertion. There is nothing about secular humanists (or "atheists", if you must) that renders them uniquely worthy of questioning; they have merely been arbitrarily selected for criticism as part of some absurd "culture war".


My comment on "ignorance" was the simplistic division of the world into two camps- omniscient personal theism, and atheism- a black-and-white nonsense propagated by those making the initial assertion.
The rest is irrelevant to the points I have made.

You seem to be looking at this question through some sort of embittered lens. I am sorry to see that. If you want to expand the scope of this discussion, please open another thread. I will no longer be replying to this line of discussion in this one.

Such a thing does exist and has been demonstrated by anthropologists. It doesn't include things like "is gay sex moral?" no, but includes a foundation for all human cultures. There are fundamental things that are agreed upon by humanity as a whole. If you want to include cultural things like homosexuality or abortion in questions of morality, then I'll excuse myself, because this thread is about you making a point and not having a discussion.

Please do not tell me what my thread is about. I am asking atheists to justify the existence of moral truths, not commonalities between humans.

Why does there need to be some outright "true" thing? Anyone who claims they have some ultimately true basis for their ethical positions is a fool or a charlatan or a fanatic. Theists don't either. If it were that friggin simple the world would be a lot more understandable and less heinous and cruel.

You don't believe in truth?

If you stand on one side of a building, and I stand on the other, we have different views of the building. Is it not the same building?

In order to see what is "objective morality" wouldn't we have to be completely objective and therefor omniscient? So, only a god could know what an objective morality is. So it seems like a dead-end road that can be avoided by not even worrying about the bigger picture, but focusing on your own morals as best you can and perhaps inspiring others along the way to search for their own.

I certainly wouldn't have to be omniscient in order to know everything there is no know about morality, because there are non-moral truths, and even if I know every moral truth, I am still not omniscient if I do not know the non-moral truths.

What does it mean to have "your own morals"?

 

[Orange Seeds]

1. I agree with you that a fundamental aspect to most moral theories is the ability to rationally decide whether or not an action would be justified by that theory. But how do you get from there to the universalization that we need to respect the autonomy of other people's rationality? If we are justifying rationality solely in an ends-based calculation (the ability to make moral decisions) then why is it wrong for me to force other people to act morally?

Both of these questions are answered traditionally by CI 2: treating people as ends in themselves.

My answer is that autonomy needs to be respected because lack of autonomy is what corrupts decision-processes. Anytime I infringe on someone's autonomy, even to bring about the desired moral outcome, it means that they're not actually making the moral decision themselves which, again, is the fundamental moral fact that most needs to be respected. No one actually behaves morally when they aren't the agent that chooses to do so (evidenced through the counter-positive: no one is responsible for a non-voluntary action--I really don't have the time to defend this, I think it is a truism). So again, not having autonomy over your decisions precludes morality.

Also, why do I care whether or not other people act morally?

A fair question. I'm not really sure. I consider it a duty without qualification. My best answer is probably that my own agency is diminished when the world lacks the same. An illustration of this is when a government is run by whimsical tyrants who don't see any value in the autonomy of citizens. Surely, the standard of my agency will diminish(I might be poor, coerced by harsh laws and so on). Thus my objective is to ensure a moral world (a world that stands by its own agency)and to ensure that it is reciprocal (since I help person x obey their meta-preferences, person x will help me). I suppose my theory is compatible with a kind of selfish egotism whereby the only important moral fact is my own agency.

I'm sure I can avoid this worry, I just don't know how to at this moment. I don't know how to collectivize it.

2. As for the epistemic questions faced by non-Kantians: why do you believe that objective moral truth exists, and why do you believe that our rationality affords us some kind of access to it? You would agree that your justification of rationality is predicated on the existence of some moral framework—how do you know that such a framework exists at all?

While I myself am a moral realist, my theory doesn't actually require objective moral truths. The actual theory really only requires two things: the existence of any normative decision and the existence of mitigating factors to our rationality (the second is an empirical requirement). Once these two things exist than my entire moral structure applies.

The only moral truth is that I need to make a decision. Our moral framework, then, is composed of what it means to live a life of good decisions. Human beings don't know what the ideal decision is (we don't have a model for what good decisions are), but we do know what factors help us make bad decisions (we have a model for what makes a bad decision). We know the latter through non-normative decisions (ex. If I am really tired, then my decisions on how to answer the questions on my calculus exam will be poor). Thus the 'ground-level' of my moral framework is limiting the factors that we know damage our decision-making faculty.

I hope that helps.

Good post though, I'm glad you understand what I'm asking in this thread .

I've been trained.

 

[emzie]

Please do not tell me what my thread is about. I am asking atheists to justify the existence of moral truths, not commonalities between humans.

Moral truths are only truths if they are shared across humanity. Hence, that's a rather important part of your question.

 

[Orange Seeds]

Is it morale for the masochist to pursue the physical pleasure of others in an intimate environment? Probably, yes.

Is it moral for the masochist to physically harm others in a way that would please him? Probably no.

Problem of relevant descriptions.

Is it morally correct in the masochist's perspective?

Yes, that's the problem. People have very different ideas of how they think they should be treated. So the golden rule is useless.

 

[Mr. Dictator]

I certainly wouldn't have to be omniscient in order to know everything there is no know about morality, because there are non-moral truths, and even if I know every moral truth, I am still not omniscient if I do not know the non-moral truths.

What does it mean to have "your own morals"?

That logic doesn't compute with me, you say even if you knew every moral truth. Your statement is more about omniscience and its requirements than the idea that knowing moral truths requires omniscience. Omniscience would require in-depth knowledge of moral truths and non-moral truths, yes, but it doesn't explain how you can know the moral truths without being omniscient. Something I don't see as possible.

And "your own morals" to me means finding the heuristics you can follow to peacefully exist wherever you are. There's more to it in my mind than that, but there's the gist.

 

[cardgame]

@ the OP:

I always find these people to be inherently more immoral than atheists of almost any stripe.

They are implicitly acknowledging that if they did not believe in God, they'd be murdering serial rapists or something

 

[Traitorfish]

You seem to be looking at this question through some sort of embittered lens. I am sorry to see that. If you want to expand the scope of this discussion, please open another thread. I will no longer be replying to this line of discussion in this one.

Well, if you'll allow me, I'll try and reduce to this basics, which will hopefully clarify my point and allow you to see why it is indeed of relevance...

The question which you are presenting us is "How do atheists justify their moral systems?", which draws on the assertion, made by certain theists, that atheists are unable to make such justifications, because they lack a guiding deity. This assertion is drawn on the prior assertion that morality must be derived from a omniscient, personal deity.

Now, a lack of belief in such a deity is not unique to atheists, but is found in a variety of spiritual positions, including pantheism, deism and animism, which themselves include religions such as Shinto, Neopaganism and Taoism, and certain strains of Hinduism and Buddhism, and even, historically, certain Christian, Islamic and Jewish philosophies.

So the group which is unable, according to the core assertion, to produce a justifiable moral framework cannot be specifically defined as atheistic, nor do atheists have any particular characteristics which, in this context, set them apart. The choice to single them out is the individual choice of those making such criticisms, and not a distinction which is of objective significance. Why, then, pursue such a limited line of questioning? What can we hope to learn from it?

 

[Mise]

God helps because religion uses the deity as a source of truth, and therefore justifies the existence of objective morality as flowing from god and our access to it as coming from communication with god.

The problem with what people are posting in this thread is that "morality" is not a well-defined term for them. In order to have a coherent moral philosophy of the type that religious people are talking about when they say atheists cannot be moral, you need two things:

- Objective moral truth.
- Access to that objective moral truth.

I am asking how atheists can justify the existence of objective moral truth (how do we know it exists?) and how they think we can access it (how can we learn that something is a part of OMT?). So far, those epistemological questions remain completely unanswered in this thread.

Oh, okay. I thought you were asking where morals come from, if not from God.

Anyway, to answer what you were actually asking, I'll use an analogy. In science, we figure out whether statement X is true or false by applying an intellectually rigorous method of inquiry (scientific method). Similarly, for moral truths, we apply an intellectually rigorous method of inquiry (philosophy; ethics in particular). We believe the results of scientific method to be True because they have been discovered through an intellectually rigorous method of inquiry; we should similarly believe the results of philosophical inquiry to be True, so long as sufficient intellectual rigour has been employed.

Now, in judging whether a particular ethical system is a good one or a bad one (i.e. one that is likely to result in true moral statements or false moral statements), you look at whether that system of ethics is internally consistent, whether it actually gives an answer to moral questions or not, whether the theory appeals intuitively to our notions of what morality should concern (e.g. human well-being -- we expect a moral theory to be concerned about the well-being of humanity, which is why utilitarianism is intuitively appealing), and whether the theory is externally consistent (i.e. it is consistent with established nonmoral [e.g. scientific] facts).

 

[Akka]

That's not the kind of justification I'm asking for. I don't want to know why you want people to follow the golden rule, I want to know why the golden rule is a statement of moral truth.

Because morality is about acting good or bad, and the Golden Rule is exactly that : telling you if what you do is good or bad.

The more I read your posts, the more you look like someone who just WANT to reach a particular conclusion, and ignore/handwave/redefine/circle around everything that isn't going according to plan.
And as I see, I'm not the first one to call you on it.

I'd like to point out to all the golden rule theorists that their theory fails the psychopath test.

Is it morally correct for the masochist to treat others as he would like to be treated himself?

The only thing it fails against is the abuses of the wording.
You could try to make a more elaborate one, but honestly if someone is going to twist a meaning, it just shows he's not attempting to get the spirit, but only to find a loophole.
Such a person isn't even trying to understand, so why bother ?

 

[Defiant47]

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

I said "basically". Non-basically, see Kantianism.

 

[Mise]

The only thing it fails against is the abuses of the wording.
You could try to make a more elaborate one, but honestly if someone is going to twist a meaning, it just shows he's not attempting to get the spirit, but only to find a loophole.
Such a person isn't even trying to understand, so why bother ?

The Golden Rule says that a judge should let a criminal go unpunished, because if the judge were the criminal, the judge would want to go unpunished.