I had to mull over this post in my sleep as I found this to be the most compelling argument that I've heard yet for the existence of morality without a deity. Thank you for challenging me. I do not pretend to think that I have perfect answers for the points you have brought up, but at the very least I hope they're coherent.
I am glad I gave you pause; generally, that is the best you can achieve in debates anyway, save, perhaps, tipping over undecided bystanders; as so, I'll consider anything else that follows in this conversation a bonus.
Anyway, lemme address some of your concerns in the rest of the post.
Experience may tell us what suffering is and what it looks like, but experience alone does not make suffering wrong. Societies may elect to encourage values which help the self-perpetuation of the society and the happiness of its individuals, but that does not make actions which contravene those values any more or less wrong.
I find many behaviors morally repugnant - repulsive and disgusting, even, and which I believe would be wrong under any circumstances, in any society. But if the self-preservation of society and the happiness of its members is the only goal, morality can (and has) be situational, especially as it is society who determines who can be a member.
(...)
In essence, then, utilitarianism and pragmatism simply comes down to whichever group can shout the loudest and get the rest to follow them.
"Morality is situational"; but you say this as if synonymous to "morality is arbitrary", and that is the fundamental error in your critique to a human-based morality. There is a secondary error as well, the notion that inserting a god solves this objection, but I'll get back to that in the proper place of this reply.
For now, I would like to borrow again from Sam Harris, that eloquently confronted that in the context of morality. He asked his listener to imagine a state of ultimate suffering, that he called the "maximum amount misery to the maximum amount of subjects for the maximum amount of time". Now, if we are having any discussion about what are our goals, both as individuals and as a species, I think it should be quite uncontroversial that such state is to be avoided, that we should not strive for the maximum suffering for the most people for the longest of times, but we must strive to get as far away from that as possible.
If you are moving away from that, stands to reason that we should strive for the
polar opposite; the maximum amount of happiness for the maximum amount of subjects for the maximum amount of time. These premises seen, again, to be quite uncontroversial, so I'll presume you won't challenge them here.
The minute you grant this to me, you establish that
there is a continuum; and
whatever values we decide to uphold will cause us to move for one direction or the other in such continuum.
In a deity-centered worldview, obedience to god should steer us in the right direction - assuming a god that is interested in our well being, of course, but again, this topic will be better argued when appropriate - and that is the bases for the theistic approach for morality.
Now, in a human-centered worldview, the best interest of humanity is intrinsic, and knowing that there is a continuum, there will be right ways and wrong ways to move to the desired direction. How do we pick the right ways?
Well, we look at what people do
when they are unconstrained by limitations. Give a person endless supply of food, and see how many people choose to eat, how many people choose to starve. People prefer eating? Then check - eating is good. Give people a choice between being beaten and not being beaten. How many people choose to be beaten? Very few? Then check - physical integrity is a good value. Give woman the option to have sex only with those they want, and how many choose to make themselves available to anyone and give up the choice? Very few? Then check - sexual freedom is a good value.
Ergo,
experience is the key to knowing what behaviors promote well being. Of course, it gets more complicated when we start getting paradoxical and contradictory interests. Nobody wants hard work, everybody wants food and housing, but to get food and housing,
someone has to work hard. We start to enter the realm of political legitimacy, and in this topic, let me just say that legitimacy derives from trying to balance the will of people with the necessities of reality.
The same is true about morality; there are some obvious answers to morality, like, no murder,. no theft, no slavery; and there are much less obvious stances that admit variations, from also important/structural (should guns be forbidden or allowed?) to casuistic (should you go through a red light if you are fearing being attacked by bandits in a deserted street?), to cosmetic (how much skin can people on a given society show before being in violation of decorum?).
There are many variations in what is a peak and what is a valley of morality, but the point is that
in a human-centric view of morality, the path in the continuum is constricted by the laws of physics and the requirements of reality, and therefore, a choice can be objectively right (moral) or wrong (immoral) as it has an impact on how we are placed in the spectrum.
That is why, when you, say, go to a conference in agriculture, and someone says at stage that he has discovered a new form of potatoes that will be able to cheaply end world hunger, we don't expect him to have to answer the challenge "and how do you know that people are not happier being hungry"? That is why the search for the cure of cancer will not be controversial in a human-centered approach to ethics, and a cure will never be rejected on the premise that having cancer might be what people want.
We know, because as can assess what we want for ourselves, and we can empathize and project a similar dynamics to everybody else.
The question of "how do you know that values that perpetuate happiness are moral?", or, to use your language,
(though we can know what suffering is) "that does not make actions which contravene those values any more or less wrong", is a question that only has place as a philosophical curiosity, just like absolute or phyrronic skepticism; how we know that people want to be happy, and to maintain a society that promotes happiness, is exactly how we know that placing my feet in the ground will prevent from falling in an abyss to the center of the earth, or that the sun will rise tomorrow -
cogent and coherent experience.
Induction, the quality of forming postulates based on experience, as put by Hume, and Popper's falsifiability, both paint a functional picture to the human experience, just as it does for anything else. There is no special dispensation that separates us from other forms of knowledge or of evaluation of the world, and in this, perhaps we find another true point of conflict between a theistic and a humanistic POV; but I am again ahead of myself here.
What I want to get across is that, if to sustain the point of necessity of divine intervention as a source of morality, you need such a regression that you have to retreat to the earliest and most base-forming efforts on philosophy, arguing points that are premise-making but have little to do with how people live their lives, than your argument is, truly, in trouble, from the level of it's very fundamentals.
Let's take Nazi Germany, for example. The society determined that the disabled (among others) were not productive members, and therefore were challenging the self-preservation of the society by taking more than they were contributing, therefore, their expulsion and destruction was morally justified.
I had to separate this bit for a technicality. Every time Nazis are mentioned, I call Godwin, for instant debate-winning bonus. So I guess I already won, but I'll continue arguing so the conversation won't go stale.
Do notice, however, that in order to repute moral the wiping out even of that group of people, that has an objective disadvantage to other groups, not only you have to be inconsistently casuistic (consider that you yourself will never be handicapped, we are all a car accident away from that), you also have to deny the premise of humanitarian morality. Remember above? What do handicapped people do when we give guns in their hands? Only a minority of them commits suicide? Than presuming handicapped people want to live, until informed otherwise - Than check; good value.
Not that I even needed all that; all I had to do was to point out that Nazi's aren't a challenge to humanitarian ethics, because they didn't adopt humanitarian values by any stretch of imagination. Does that mean that morality does not exist? No, just means that it's not self-applicable.
But, truth be told, we don't even need the empirical base here; the mere fact that the argument is internally inconsistent, because it protects humans by either destroying other humans, or dehumanizing them, is grounds for rejection of this as an "example of valid ethics" on logic alone.
Ah, but the proponent of divine command morality would also reply that the human interpretation of a deity's law is also a work in progress
The question of a divine authority allowing evil to happen opens up all sorts of other doors regarding free will, etc etc.
And in doing so the theist would defeat the purpose, and any supposed advantage, of divine law. See, if god is perfect, no matter how flawed his subjects are, god should be able to teach anything, morality included, perfectly, in the first attempt; as I said in this forum in the past,
the limitations of the subject cannot constrain god, or the consequence is that they are also the limitations of god. A perfect being is expected to be able to teach quantum physics to a donkey using only the vowels of the Greek alphabet; an impossible task, sure, but isn't god capable of doing the impossible? Creating energy is
harder than what I just described, and yet,
fiat lux.
But I am happy that you have bought the issue of free will, because see, if by free will you mean that people have the ability to disobey god's ethical mandates, than the consequence is that
choosing to adhere to god's ethics pertain an evaluation of reasons why god's ethics should prevail by the person adopting it.
Let's assume, for argument's sake, a perfect ethical preset, from god, to humanity. Nothing guarantees that this will be a favorable, human-nurturing, set of rules; humanity off center, god's arbitrarity enters, and as he is good by definition, if he tells that stabbing children is a good deed, than doing so is automatically righteous.
(Remember when I said that people lose perspective in deity-centered ethics? That is why Abraham had no tools to defy god's edict and, should god not have changed his mind, in the context of the history, the killing of his son would have been the righteous thing to do. The story even treats it as so, as it never points out that Abraham should have disobeyed.
I also would like to point out, in line with a previous argument, that it would not be unprecedented that a cure for cancer is controversial in a deity-centered morality. When heart transplants first came, there were real criticism from religious groups that man was interfering in god's reign over live. And that argument is ancient, having happened with inventions like lightning rods and penicillin; again, no perspective, losing sight of unnecessary suffering)
But assuming a caring, loving, god (as it is the point of argument for most modern religious), and his set of impeccable rules; well, if they were mandatory, not only in observance, but in form of observance, than you could argue a pragmatical superiority to an experienced base ethics.
however, if, as you argue, the interpretation of god's edict is a work in progress, than you are again using experience to show that previous interpretations were wrong.
You inevitably fall in the same trappings as the ones you argued against a experience-based morality, but convoluted by series of added problems given that removal of human centrality and the arbitrarity of the source. And this is the secondary problem of your argument, as I mentioned earlier; You are falling, again, in the problem of infinite regression, like it always happen when one argues
a priori sources, be it for the universe itself, or for just a part of it, like the human effort to enunciate ethics.
That's actually not true.
In ancient times slavery was a simple fact of life, and not considered a negative (although the exact details could vary from society to society). And the color of your skin or the status you were born with did not preclude the possibility you would be enslaved.
Slavery based on skin color/race is a much more recent invention.
Skin-based slavery is casuism, true, I'll not elaborate it for my answer will be universalist.
Most people aren't philosophically sophisticated and never really question those things, this being why in daily dealings, most never assessed the wrongness of what they were witnessing. But rivers of ink were spent trying to justify the unjustifiable, trying to define away people from the concept of human beings, or postulate some intrinsic inferiority that justified different rights, even if based on very false and unrelated details such as the aforementioned color of skin, for example.
But those acknowledge as humans, as members of society, were not subject to slavery. Nobody wanted to be enslaved, nor wished it upon their children. Even those who accepted it, accepted it just for others.
And there goes my experience criteria again: given the choice of being free, or being enslaved, how many people choose to be enslaved? Very few? Then check - slavery is a bad value, that will move our placement in the continuum closer to the wrong end.
The idea of morality adapting and evolving is not unique to a humanitarian POV.
I agree, it isn't; because in truth, all morality is human-based; the supposed external authority is fictional, and you have no more choice in adapting to experience than us. In my language, I am talking about human-based and deity-based as different, accepting as an axiom this false dichotomy, as it was convenient in my exposure that your perspective does not solve the problems that you yourself posed.
But you got exactly to the conclusion to which I was herding you;
experience and adaptation are the true sources of our ethics. Placing god in the mix is unnecessary complication, and I would love to be able to say that it is just unnecessary filler, but truth is that, as it introduce supposed infallibility and unshakeable authority, it slows down progress that otherwise would come faster, on top of all the problems of misdirection of values that I have been long arguing.
I kind of avoided that line of argument not to turn this into a debate of religion being true or false, as the OP suggested; nevertheless, this is such an organic consequence of the falsehood of the premise that, once challenged, I had to point it out.
The problem I cannot get past, and that I cannot understand, is that without a God, why is someone else's pain wrong? Yeah, I don't like pain. I know they don't like pain, and society works better when we don't inflict in on each other, but why is that wrong?
It is wrong as a fundamental. As an election of a primal value that human beings are worth something, and their necessities matter. In this point, I need to specify that this is an axiomatic approach, an election of values. Think of this in the same terms as you think on the choice of obeying god. Why you do it? because you chose to believe. Why you chose to believe? Because you believe god exists! It's believe justifying believe, a circular argument, no better than valuing humanity because we are human.
At some point one have to enunciate a primordial value one wishes to uphold, to serve as the foundations of posterior decisions. I think the idea that, being humans ourselves, the well being of creatures such as us, as political a decision as it is, should be adopted as a cornerstone, is a pretty solid and acceptable axiom.
I repeat; when your argument for the necessity of divine ethics has to rely on the philosophical doubt if pain is a bad thing, your thesis is in trouble.
Without God, why is it wrong for a man to marry a 12 or 13 year old girl? You can't quantify that sexual pain or childbearing pain will be greater than if you wait 6 years. And from a practical point of view, the more members you have in your society the more productive and wealthy it can be, so it would be of great utility to start having children as early as possible. (note that I bring this up acknowledging that this can happen WITH a God as well, depending upon his divine law, but I do not see any reason without God to believe it to be wrong).
I don't know what to say here, except, again, that experience shows that people that young aren't truly ready, neither physically but specially emotionally, for the burdens of having sex or offspring. It could be different, if nature was coherent, (or if there actually were a divine being that planned us perfectly to only be able to have children when we are ready, but I digress
). But bringing a million examples like this will further us nothing if you don't bring up a problem with my logical construct here, because my response will always be the same.
I acknowledge that not every religion has the same morality, but in my specific case, I would argue that every human being has intrinsic value because God created us. Therefore, the idea of basic rights makes sense if every human being has the same value, regardless of the utility they can provide to society.
Human beings do not have intrinsic value otherwise, their only value comes from their utility, or is manufactured by society, which means that society can change a person's value at any time.
This is only a problem if you elect society as your focal point.
I think humans have value, and societies are tools that can be legitimate or illegitimate depending on their commitment to further the happiness of humans. The fact that it is the channel through which we elect behaviors does not give it center stage.
If anything, what you say is yet another example of how taking humans away from the center is dangerous, because if society is your focus, than you can destroy humans if it is good for society. Or god. Insert any non human focus here and the problem is the same.
Whatever you have here is not human-based morality.
Let's not pretend that religious texts have a monopoly on horrific acts of violence or discrimination, or even a majority
People have been killing each other for every reason under the sun since we can remember, and even before.
And I would argue that people matter
because of the deity, but then again, the gets down to more questions regarding specific belief systems.
Did I come across as saying that religion is the cause of all violence? Because I never intended to. I don't want to dispel the idea that I am pretty much hostile to religion, though, because I truly think it's a force that became destructive as it became outdated, but no, I never considered that religion is the source of all evil.
I do consider that is the source of much evil, evil of the kind we are speaking here, though,
exactly because "god said so" is an arbitrary statement with pretense of authority.
Melodramatic, to say the least. It doesn't make sense to split people into "good" and "bad", as every human has the potential for both good and bad within them. Humans are far more complex than a simple dichotomy. In fact, splitting people into "good" and "bad" is one of the most basic ways to justify discrimination.
And I would argue that any society or group of people, given enough momentum in a certain direction (regardless of the source of the momentum), can do evil things.
Hyperbole have much value, specially as a teaching tool. Of course you will be a reductionist when you rely on a sound bit; Weinberg however has a sophisticated argument on the evils of religion to society, probably influenced by the life work of his colleague, Abdul-Salam, that spent his life trying to revert the descent of the Islamic world into the current nightmare of ignorance it endures, after an important religious authority of Islam of 12th century, Al-Ghazali, introduced the doctrine of exceptionalism, that all events of the universe are examples of god acting, and that there are no universal rules or patterns, just the illusion of one given gods infallible coherence, a doctrine that many people deem responsible for the downfall of what were, once, the prime scientific culture in the world.
He has much reason to fear that influence in our society. But, specifically about the quote, his point is a very condensed version of mine; that when religion, not humanity, dominates your thinking, you are very much at risk of loosing perspective if you are doing right or wrong with your actions; hence, a good person might unwilling do extreme harm.
Regards
.
