Falsifiable axioms, meaning valid because of evidence, are not true axioms at all. In logic a “falsifiable” statement is a conclusion of an inductive argument (a generalization). In mathematics a “falsifiable” statement is a conjecture, not an axiom. In physics, a “falsifiable” statement is a hypothesis whereas there is no true equivalent to an axiom.
The statement “there exist certain universal moral truths” is nonfalsifiable. Neither is “there exist no universal moral truths”. Sure, you can reach those statements with induction (thereby demoting them from axioms to conclusions), but that too relies on nonfalsifiable statements such as:
[ul][li]“what all people who ever existed believe to be a moral truth is a universal moral truth” or [/li][li]“what the majority of people who ever existed believe to be a moral truth is a universal moral truth” or [/li][li]“what all people who currently exist believe to be a moral truth is a universal/relative moral truth” or[/li][li]“what the majority of people who currently exist believe to be a moral truth is a relative moral truth” or[/li][li]“what God says to be moral is a universal moral truth” and “what the Bible/my pastor/the Pope/the majority of people who currently exist/the majority of people who ever existed/I say God said is in fact the word of God” or[/li][li]“what I say to be moral is a universal moral truth” or[/li][li]“what all the people I know believe to be a moral truth is a universal/relative moral truth” or[/li][li]“what I say to be moral is a relative moral truth as far as I am concerned”[/ul][/li]
These are all axioms, and none of them are falsifiable (although the accompanying premise will be falsifiable).
Much of your list seems to be assertions. As postulates, I suspect you can construct a case where they lead to contradictions, which would in fact falsify them. For instance, if you have two Popes, both of which by axiom represent the word of god, and one says that A is a moral truth while the other says ~A is a moral truth, you have an issue.
Axioms that are false can lead to consistent logical systems. Newtonian physics is logically consistent. It does not match reality because its treatment of time is incorrect, but that does not make it inconsistent internally. Non-Euclidean geometry is consistent and was originally thought to not match reality. Now we know it matches reality in certain contexts better than Euclidean geometry.
Those are perhaps better examples of non-falsifiable axioms.
I’m sorry but I can’t grasp your point. What is the difference between a premise as I’ve used the word and an assertion, or between a postulate and an axiom? Is not every postulate an assertion, every axiom a premise? We have already agreed that falsifiability through logical contradiction is desirable, but unless you think every religion is by definition self-contradictory, it does not follow that every religion is wrong or undeserving of consideration simply because the arguments are religious.
The difference between physics and morality is that physics purports to describe reality, whereas morality does not. It is usually assumed that we should shape reality to fit morality, and even this basic statement, the only tie between morality and reality, is itself a moral statement unassailable from the likes of physical evidence. If I claimed we should not act morally, and you claim that we should, after we lay out our arguments unless we found some common ground there would be no objective way to tell who is right and who is wrong.
This is my biggest objection to this kind of arguments. It gets into the semantic arguments weeds and never finds its way out. Meanwhile, the entire point of generally improving the state of society and social policy is lost to pissing contests.
We don’t know everything. But we also don’t know nothing. What we know is that there is no evidence on which to build religious arguments. The fact that we did just that for thousands of years is not a strong argument for continuing to do so as a matter of tradition or respect for bad reasoning and indoctrination.
Not my proposition but worth considering: Knowing what we know now about the universe in which we live and assuming there was no prior religious traditions, are we likely to come up with the kind of dogmatic belief system that we currently cling to? The answer, and I hope you agree, would be a resounding, NO. So why does it make sense to continue to tout it as a reliable moral values system compatible with more recent, more evidence based systems of ethics and morality?
what all the people I know believe to be a moral truth is a universal/relative moral truth
It is an assertion that for a given proposition A if all people you know believe it to be a moral truth then it is a moral truth. I suppose you could try to build a logical argument for this. And if you define universal moral truth as one which everyone you believes in, it is true by definition.
Do you agree that if an axiom you propose can be shown to lead to a contradiction it is incorrect? If not, I don’t know how to continue.
That we should improve society and social policy is itself without physical evidence, and not a strong argument if someone happens to disagree; much less what constitutes improvement. At some point you have to say, what do you think improvement is and why? Then you are having a full fledged religious debate, with the goal of conversion. And if disagreements run that deep, that is the only nonviolent route I see for resolution.
It was a long time ago but my original definition of a religious axiom included virtually every moral axiom, even the ones without mention of God, and this was the reason.
Well that’s just the thing. Morals don’t describe the universe like physics does. Although particular religions may attempt to describe the physical universe, you cannot discount religion qua religion on that basis. You cannot even invalidate that particular religion’s moral framework if they pull a no true Scotsman on you - many people do not follow or even believe all the tenets of a religion to the ‘t’. Either you point to the contradiction or, as far as your opponent is concerned, there is none.
Yes, I agree that if two premises are contradictory then one of the premises must be false. I also agree that a conclusion cannot follow from a premise with which it is contradictory, and that all axioms are premises (not all premises are axioms).
The axiom isolated above is not, in isolation, contradictory or falsifiable. The paired premise is falsifiable, however:
all the people I know believe X to be a moral truth
And therefore the conclusion is falsifiable because the second premise is falsifiable:
therefore, X is a universal/relative moral truth
But the point is that the first premise is an unfalsifiable axiom, yet such an axiom is required to make any moral or ethical statement whatsoever.
I’m trying to be non-rigorous. A true logician is probably wincing at my posts.
I’ve studied religion and other such pseudoscience for a long time now (that should attract some comments!) and I think the study of axioms is key to what is going on. Surely you’ve run into people who have positions based on God’s will, and when you ask how they know God’s will the answer you get is either personal revelation or faith. That latter often comes with an assertion that evidence for god somehow spoils things.
But other axioms besides religious ones also cause problems, like the relative worth of a group.
I agree. So why do people continue to do so? I’d suggest it is because the universe as it is does not have reasons behind it which makes it uncomfortable. Once you have a significant number of people buying into a god for this reason, the priests, preachers and prophets can exploit this belief to their own ends.
I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body, so disasters happening because that’s how physical laws work and the earth doesn’t give a shit about those of us who infest it. I have no moral problem with a natural disaster. But I’m in the minority.
Not what I mean. Surely you’ve done proof by contradiction? One premise, serving as a basis for a logical argument, can lead to a contradiction, and is therefore false.
The statement you gave doesn’t directly lead to a contradiction. The one about the Pope does, since Popes can (and have) issued contradictory infallible doctrine (over time, not one Pope.)
I agree with all you have written in this quoted post, so I’m not sure what you are asking for.
Let me go back a post and address this directly.
Not necessarily. Either that axiom is incorrect, or the statement which contradicts it is incorrect. The following logic is fallacious:
[ol][li]If P and Q then R[/li][li]Not Q[/li][li]Therefore not P[/ol][/li]
ETA: the correct conclusion is “therefore not both P and Q”
That there is suffering in the world that can/should be avoided and we can identify specific ways in achieving that is not something I thought would be met with a lot of disagreement. Who, for example, is in disagreement with eradicating malaria in sub-Saharan Africa? And if some do, ought we not examine their reasons for doing so before we give them equal standing with those who happen to think otherwise?
Improvement, one can confidently say, is anything that improves the quality of life on the whole without causing collateral harm that would result in an even greater harm. I don’t see where religion plays a role unless religion is what prevents the improvement of lives. i.e. Catholic Church’s stance on condoms vs. AIDS epidemic in Africa. I don’t know about you, but I would happily accept (impose?) the suffering of the Vatican’s religious moral values for the prevention of disease and unwanted pregnancies.
I think you’ve just provided an excellent reason why we must keep religious moral frameworks and arguments out of public policy. QED.
Perhaps I know something you don’t (but probably not). There are many philosophies which do not equate improvement with the removal or avoidance of suffering. In fact, there are only a handful which do equate improvement with the removal or avoidance of suffering. These are from the family of hedonist philosophies. Hedonism is the philosophy that pleasure is good and pain (suffering) is bad, and just these two things form the basis of morality.
All variants of hedonism are unpopular, mostly because of the Nozick’s thought experiment. You are given the choice of plugging into a machine which makes you experience ultimate pleasure and no suffering for life. Everybody is given the option, there’s machines enough to go around. Once plugged in you can’t tell that your experiences are artificial. Do you take that choice? It’s like the Matrix, where they said the original simulations were perfect paradise. Most people don’t plug in to the machine, because they aren’t hedonists - they see some other purpose in life besides pleasure or the avoidance of pain (suffering).
Other philosophies to not assume suffering is bad or improvement is the removal of suffering. To start there is sadism, the view that inflicting suffering upon others is pleasurable to oneself, especially in a sexual way. (coincidentally de Sade’s book was the debut of the pro-choice movement because he was a monster).
The principle philosophies that disagree are the various flavors of pessimism, some of which directly deny the idea of progress or improvement. We have already looked at nihilism and extentialism and absurdism, but this can be found also in relativism and skepticism, or any form of anti-foundationalism.
Then there is Stoicism as mentioned earlier, which says the model of improvement is not to remove suffering, but to become indifferent to both pleasure and suffering.
Perhaps most famously there is Buddhism, which is quite similar to Stoicism in this regard. Buddhists generally believe in removing suffering, but not like you do. Buddhists believe suffering is caused by desire, eg: disease does not cause suffering, rather it is the desire to be healthy. The path to enlightenment is not to cure disease per se, which might be unpragmatic, but to rid oneself of the desire to be healthy if that desire is causing suffering.
With Judaism, there is the notion that God causes suffering to test people’s faith. If you look into the issue of theodicy, the main textual source is the Book of Job. Job was himself accused in absentia of only being faithful because God had provided comfort, so God inflicted a great deal of suffering upon him, hence the Book of Job. Eventually Job seemed to question God’s justice, to which God appeared and derided Job as lacking standing to question His will. The theme seems to be that God runs a very complicated universe and we cannot possibly hope to understand or judge God - He is proud of all of His creations, including the behemoth and leviathan (hippopotamus and crocodile)which are both menaces to humanity; he has an accuser angel (Satan) who travels the earth looking to test people’s faith.
Christianity builds on top of this with the whole suffering and sacrifice of Jesus. The rationale is that Jesus’s suffered for humanity, and those who truly accept Jesus share in his suffering, for suffering is the path to redemption. I believe this is official enough to be in the Catechism for Catholics. Do you remember the monks from the “Pie Jesu” scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Mortification of the flesh is a real Christian doctrine, including self-flagellation.
So I would say there’s a lot of variety on that topic.
It’s a double-edged sword, QuickSilver. Look deep enough and you can’t invalidate a secular moral framework, either.
We’re assuming the logic is correct. Yeah, incorrect logical arguments might lead to incorrect conclusions. Or correct ones in the sense that a stopped clock is correct twice a day.
Clearly you have an entire research team at your disposal.
Here’s what I have: When all is said and done, we’re still discussing examples of philosophies on the extremes of human experience. I know people who dabble in this philosophical framework and the other. I quite like stoicism as an idea but I’m hardly one. Sado-masochism works for the right combination of people but if you’re neither, it’s unlikely to work for you. I quite enjoy “suffering” when I work out. I seek out the long and moderate or brief and intense periods of physical discomfort because the payoff is in the resulting gains. But I choose, how much, how long, when, everything. I submit that the self-flagellating monks are driven by similar motives. Pretty sure they’d feel quite differently about it if someone else was giving them a whipping (S&M aspects aside). My point is that nobody (sane) would choose a kind of suffering from which there is no relief or benefit. Those that would are also the extreme and few enough in number that I feel can be largely ignored. I would not deny them the suffering they choose for themselves as long as the rest of us don’t need to join them. Hedonism, the other extreme, also misses the point. Seeking out pleasure exclusively is unlikely to be the best way to live your life. Partly because it leads one to be ill prepared physically and mentally for the unavoidable challenges that life sometimes throws at you.
Moderation seems to be the key, as in most things. And the moderate point is a cost benefit analysis that everyone must calculate on their own. But, in general, I think society ought (and does) strive to improve “good” and minimize “bad”. What extremists say or do is irrelevant, imo.
It’s a double-edged sword, QuickSilver. Look deep enough and you can’t invalidate a secular moral framework, either.
~Max
[/QUOTE]
I try not to make the good the enemy of the ideal. Perfection is not a realistic goal for an imperfect species in an imperfect universe.
I suppose the question is this: what is the system of morals which is inherently better than a system founded on religious beliefs, and what makes it better? I assert that no system of morals can escape a major unfalsifiable axiom, namely the definition of morality.
And we must be careful to avoid a circular argument; indeed by asking whether one system is better than another may itself invoke circular logic, as the very system in question determines what is better.
But it is not I who would say laugh at someone’s religious argument because it is religious; therefore I place the burden on you to justify your own behavior.
I think if I really leaned on you, you would have to recant these statements as either irrelevant or wrong. Think about it. What makes one person sane and another insane? Is not insanity a relative criteria, determined by the norms of society?
People who believe in souls have a very different idea of “relief” and “benefit” than you do. Most will admit that their position requires a leap of faith. Does that make them insane? What if they outnumber you? What if they are the majority, and by the standards of society, you are the extremist?
One can perform a cost-benefit analysis without resorting to such platitudes as you identify with extremism, but still rely on religious tenets. Their definition of good and bad is just different from yours. If you are to convince me that religion has no place in public policy debate, you will have to do better than assume religious morals are “wrong” and point at how religion causes “harm” by your moral standards while rejecting the moral standards of the religion.
I invite you to address the axiomatic argument, because therein lie the ultimate differences between your morals and religious morals.
I prefer ethics to morality. An ethical system involves logical reasoning from explicitly stated axioms, for instance “all human life is of value.” An ethical system is what you get as a result of this reasoning. You don’t have to define it, since it is not a thing, but a process.
Better than implies some sort of evaluation method, which often comes from the axioms. If your axiom is “lives of members of our tribe are valuable, those of other tribes not so much” you get a very different idea of what actions are good from what you get with the axiom I gave above.
Cite: The Flanders and Swann song about the young cannibal who decides he no longer wants to eat people.
I laugh at religious arguments which run like this: Everyone should follow moral rule R because I know God said so and I say that this is a fact, but I know God said so based on faith so I can’t demonstrate that God really said anything.
I accept the burden to justify my behavior, but I’ll do so on ethical grounds.
For instance, I understand but reject the official Catholic doctrine that there must be a chance for every sex act to result in a child. My ethical system involves each child being wanted and planned as much as possible, so Catholic doctrine is unethical in my system just as mine is unethical in theirs. Since my system comes from purely secular reasoning, I find it more convincing up until they produce God or Jesus to tell us otherwise.
Yes. And people who try to harm themselves or others are often institutionalized in one way or another. Not often or soon enough is many cases but we generally don’t shrug and say, “Oh, well. Who’s to say what’s normal?” - trained medical and legal professionals say and support it with evidence based arguments.
I don’t recall making that claim. But since you bring it up, insanity is not how I would characterize it except in some extreme expressions. I don’t care if they outnumber me because they’ve not provided evidence for their beliefs and they’ve had thousands of years and possibly thousands of variations of belief systems with which to do so. So far, nada.
We’ve been down this road already. Let’s try something new for a change. Convince me, without resorting to majority rules arguments, why non-secular public policy positions are better for society as whole than secular ones. After all, it’s your OP.
A system based on religious belief is based on nothing but the word of an authority. An authority who cannot be questioned or petitioned. It was a “moral” act that Abraham almost killed his son, it was a “moral” act when the israelites were commanded to invade and slaughter their enemies. The Spanish inquisition, the crusades, witch trials and burnings, these were all considered to be moral, as they were done in the name of religion.
When you base your morals on religion, you fit them to what you already want to do and use religion to justify them. When morals need to be based on secular ideals, then they actually need a justification.
Very well, what is the system of secular morals which is inherently better than a system founded on religious beliefs, and what makes it better? I assert that no system of ethics can escape a major unfalsifiable axiom, namely the definition of what is ethical.
The axiom you gave, “all human life is of value”, is itself a so-called assertion and unfalsifiable. You can craft an argument to support that statement, but I assert at least one of the premises will in turn be unfalsifiable - a pronouncement of ethics without evidence as to what is ethical.
What I am seeing is a contradiction: you will laugh at a religious argument because the axioms are not demonstrably true, but I say all ethical systems, including your own, contain axioms which are not demonstrably true. So this smell test of yours doesn’t hold under scrutiny.
This is a poor example because it is not a contradiction to say there should be a chance for every sex act to produce a child who is wanted and planned for. Such a position would be quite welcome to Catholicism.
The difference between you and Catholicism might be something else, for example you may think it is unreasonable to expect people to abstain from sex when they don’t want children. The Catholic rebuttal is that people should want children:
“It is one of the fundamental requirements of the right moral order that the use of conjugal rights corresponds to the sincere internal acceptance of the office and the duties of motherhood. On this condition the woman walks in the path traced by the Creator towards the end that He has assigned to her creature, making it, with the exercise of that function, a participant in his goodness, his wisdom and his omnipotence, according to the announcement of the Angel: Concipies in utero et paries: you will conceive in your bosom and give birth’” (citing Luke 1:31; translation courtesy of Google; Pius XII, 1951).
Or better yet, here is St. Augustine who says “to desire carnal pleasure” is itself a venial sin:
“It is, however, one thing for married persons to have intercourse only for the wish to beget children, which is not sinful: it is another thing for them to desire carnal pleasure in cohabitation, but with the spouse only, which involves venial sin. For although propagation of offspring is not the motive of the intercourse, there is still no attempt to prevent such propagation, either by wrong desire or evil appliance. They who resort to these, although called by the name of spouses, are really not such; they retain no vestige of true matrimony, but pretend the honourable designation as a cloak for criminal conduct. Having also proceeded so far, they are betrayed into exposing their children, which are born against their will. They hate to nourish and retain those whom they were afraid they would beget. This infliction of cruelty on their offspring so reluctantly begotten, unmasks the sin which they had practised in darkness, and drags it clearly into the light of day. The open cruelty reproves the concealed sin. Sometimes, indeed, this lustful cruelty, or; if you please, cruel lust, resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be slain before it was born. Well, if both parties alike are so flagitious, they are not husband and wife; and if such were their character from the beginning, they have not come together by wedlock but by debauchery. But if the two are not alike in such sin, I boldly declare either that the woman is, so to say, the husband’s harlot; or the man the wife’s adulterer.” (St. Augustine)
We could go very deep into the theological aspects of the Catholic religion, but I am not terribly familiar with it myself and am not a Catholic. Just assume for the sake of argument that the Catholics reach their position logically from explicit axioms: 1) What God says is moral is in fact moral, and 2) God says X is moral. Catholicism itself may or may not be so logical, but surely you cannot show that all religious arguments are necessarily fallacious. It is my impression that you agree with me on that last point.
By your own standards, why are secular ethics better than religious ethics? I’m trying to understand you, and right now I have two theories going, both of which I find unconvincing.
[ul][li]Secular reasoning is backed up by evidence / is falsifiable[/li][LIST][li]Not if you ask “why is this ethical”[/ul][/li][li]Just because[/li][ul][li]This can be said of both sides[/ul][/LIST][/li]
~Max
St. Augustine. (n.d.). De nuptiis et concupiscientia [On Marriage and Concupiscence]. (P. Holmes, Trans.). Eternal World Television Network. Retrieved on July 16, 2019 from https://www.ewtn.com/library/PATRISTC/PNI5-7.TXT
