Actually you seem to be ascribing to me positions I haven’t taken.
I have not asserted that religion necessarily plays any role in the consciousness or proliferation of morality. I am speaking to its source as being outside of the natural world. Nothing more, nothing less.
However, am I correct in reading into your post an acceptance that torturing children is morally wrong? If so, how do you form this view rationally, and on what basis do you deem those of the past who thought other wise, wrong?
Finally your view of history is not entirely accurate. Children have been badly treated at times throughout history, but so have Jews, people of colour, Christians, the mentally ill, etc etc. But we can see in many civilisations that children were educated, supported in extended family units, fed, nurtured etc etc.
You may or may not know what naturalism is. Nothing you have posted indicates that you do. Further, you made an assertion regarding naturalism that you have failed to support by any citation from any text on or description of naturalism. That behavior is unpersuasive of your position.
Similarly, you have asserted an “objective morality,” but you have not provided a reason for anyone outside yourself to accept your claim. (Actually, you have failed to even provide a definition of “objective morality” and you certainly have not provided any context for a logical discussion of that idea. A plea for recognition for a single example that would generally be accepted by your current audience in this culture in this era simply fails to make your point.)
If you want to persuade others to your point of view, you really need to step up your game. One aphorism that gets quoted round here with a certain regularity is that a gratuitous assertion may be gratuitously denied. Your assertion regarding objective morality is one. Your claim regarding naturalism is another.
From the perspective of your audience, you are the one being evasive.
If you cannot provide something more substantive for your beliefs than that you believe them, you are going to fail to persuade anyone of your position.
The word “if” is an important word to be able to identify by sight.
What do you mean rationally? My morality is a.function of my individual neurological function and the environment in which I live. I evaluate past and present other moral beliefs as right or wrong from my perspective and my belief that I am right.
If morality was the result of an external agent, not only would we have to figure out why we observe secular fluctuation in morality (as we have been talking about re: treatment of children), we would also be stuck trying to explain intraindividual development change in morality, as well as cross-cultural variability in morality. It is a fickle, inconsistent and arbitrary agent, this morality-imbuer you imagine.
Please state for me which culture or cultures it is that has treated children in the samefashion consistently, from say the 1600s to the present day.
There is also the role of our animal origins as a social species in our instinctive moral structure. We have instincts that impel us toward protecting children; it hurts us to see children being harmed. We encode this feeling in our laws, but part of it, at least, derives from our instincts. The same is true for cooperation, trust, honesty, sharing, mercy, and a number of other moral values: they originate, in part, from our animal instincts, and this is part of why we enshrine them in our moral systems.
The “blank spots on the map” metaphor of knowledge. There are fewer and fewer places where dragons might lurk. Those of us who were born before the space age knew an earth that actually and literally had unmapped places. Now, with satellite scanning, there aren’t any (meaningfully large) unmapped areas of the earth’s land surface (and, in fact, relatively few of the sea floors, either!)
100 years ago, the idea of “Bigfoot” wasn’t completely nonsensical. But, today, enough of the North American north-west has been explored to make the idea much less supportable.
We can never “know everything,” but we can exhaust certain kinds of knowledge. They’ve calculated pi to 10 trillion decimal places! Even God couldn’t have used more than a few hundred!
The universe is too chaotic for any set of laws to inevitably produce humans. Now, the proposition that God invisibly and undetectably modified the outcome of random events to produce humans is unfalsifiable and a lot more defensible than your assertion. And it has the same outcome.
Why would you want to claim that God never interfered when God clearly interfered by producing Jesus?
You seem to be working to a double standard. On one hand you seem to require me to not only provide a pointer evidence but also to paraphrase that for you, whereas when I call someone out on their not engaging on morality (in fact running way) then you don;t like it. Well tough. If people are here for genuine dialogue they can extend themselves beyond a few seconds of viewing a clip or doing a google search to actually seek for truth.
Now, to some specifics. Naturalism is, in it’s simplest form, the proposition that the natural world is a closed system, more so that nothing exists outside of the natural world, and that the answers to origins lie entirely within the natural world.
At some point I recall I was asked to demonstrate that, and I began with morality. I asked a simple question. In a purely naturalistic world, why is the torture of an innocent child morally wrong. I am still waiting.
And so by that mechanism child torture will be morally permissable if yur neurological function and environment, coupled with your ‘belief’ (whatever that means) say so.
I didn’t claim that (sigh). The claim I was responding to was that we somehow live in an enlightened age and prior to this age we treated children like crap. That is nonsense. The ancient Egyptians educated their children, raised and nurtured them in extended families similar to many cultures today, recognised and affirmed their intellectual and physical attributes, and yes some sold them as slaves.
The agent of morality is neither fickle, arbitrary or inconsistent, although humans are. Yet whatever your neurons or your ‘beliefs’ may tell you, there are certain actions that throughout history have troubled sane human beings consistently, irrespective of time or culture.
Says the person whose approach seems to be “I assert things and demand you prove me wrong, and while you’re at it please do all my homework for me” and also who denounces anyone using the most common definition of “creationism” while creating a strawman about “naturalism”.
I’m not entirely sure what morality has to do with evolution or creationism, other than to produce a distraction from the repeated questions about science and requests for evidence. The existence of morality only requires imposition by an external force if you start from the premise that morality cannot exist without that external force. Which is begging the question.
Of course, there are people who think that the torture of an innocent child is morally correct. Some of them are called Christians while many others are Muslim. Strangely, it’s much rarer for the non-religious to claim moral correctness for child torture. Of course, the majority of Christians and Muslims and other believers are against such practices but it does suggest that morality is not remotely objective, nor that it is derived from faith or divine inspiration.
Objective morality doesn’t exist, and 2) even if it did, your conclusion does not necessarily follow.
Ah, the old “I’m pretending not to see the answers that I didn’t like” trick. You want people to watch YouTube videos to support your points, but you won’t even read the thread you’re posting in? Now who has a closed mind?
I am sure that you believe that you are making some point, but you are really failing in your effort. Your “objective morality” assertion and “child torture” question were the result of a secondary exchange that appeared to have moved away from your blanket (and unsupported) assertions regarding naturalism and did not appear to be connected in the way that they appeared in the thread. ::: shrug :::
However, considering your attempt:
There are any number of reasons, in a naturalist world, where the torture of any person would be considered wrong. Society lives by rules that develop within the society to ensure further cooperation among its citizens. Over time, those rules develop patterns, among them, taboos on inflicting harm on those who cannot defend themselves. By establishing a taboo against the defenseless, society sets boundaries by which reckless violence is restrained, making the overall society more successful. As the clearest example of the defenseless, we have children, so they come under such taboos with the strongest emphasis. (That is why so many societies do not have prohibitions against harming children: they have not developed to the point of that level of intra-societal protection.)
The problem with your attempt to attack (your version of) naturalism, is that you have asserted that an objective morilty exists, but you have failed to demonstrate that it does. With your posts, we are back to gratuitously denying a gratuitous assertion.
Let’s review your “case.”
You assert that there is an objective morality.
When challenged that there is not one, you point to your own belief that harming children is objectively morally wrong.
When it is pointed out that there are societies in which harming children in various ways has not been penalized, you simply shrug off such evidence and go back to asserting your “truth.”
Where is the evidence for your claim? Why should we accept your assertion since you have made no effort to demonstrate that it is true? Why should your personal opinion carry any weight in the discussion?
There are any number of reasons why a society would develop a taboo against harming children. I have provided one. The fact that many societies have failed to develop the same taboo is strong evidence that your “objective morality” does not exist. So, where is your evidence? No one is “running away.” We are simply waiting for you to hold up your end of the discussion.
“Naturalistic” reasons that the torture of children is a bad thing? Okay.
It is uneconomical. The time and energy expended in torturing children would be better spent hunting, gathering, or building shelter.
It is unproductive. Torture is pain applied for a goal. Children are not likely to know anything that will help your warriors defeat the enemy, nor will their warriors be demoralized by our torturing of their children. Now, the public torture and humiliation of one of their champions is a different situation, but you were specifically asking about children.
It is anti-survival. Peoples who torture their own children tend to have fewer descendants. Peoples who torture their enemies’ children gain more enemies. Peoples who torture their servants’ or slaves’ children have untrustworthy retainers.
I have trouble envisioning a “naturalistic” scenario that would promote the torture of children. It seems to me that a culture which can entertain the idea of torturing children (on a regular basis, I am for this exercise ignoring outliers and individual actors) must do so based on religious or political teaching, and so be at the stage of development where a ‘state’ can dictate behavior that is counter to the naturally evolves social codes of our species.
Finally, “child torture” is a strawman. It does not follow that a very common tendency to take care of our children means this was imposed upon humans by some outside agent, especially as we observe analogous behaviors in most other social species of mammals and birds.
Care to engage, or do you just want to keep pretending everyone is trying to evade your question? Seriously, do you really think we haven’t heard that objective morality stuff a thousand times before?