Help! Can ethics be mandated without religion or other assumptions?

Great Debates
21

If you want to go the full “objectivist” route, then religions aren’t any better at teaching ethics or morality. I mean, what could possibly be more self serving than trying to earn yourself a spot in Heaven?

I don’t understand why you can’t accept that some people do good because they wish to do good. Sometimes they benefit from it. Sometimes they don’t.

But most importantly, your view on how the world works doesn’t mean that the world works according to how you view it. So you’re objective. So you feel no one could possibly have morals because we’re all self serving. Bully for you! Now step away from yourself for a few minutes and try to figure out what other people believe.

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I understand that some people wish to do good. I wish to do good. I believe this desire comes from the conditioning of our childhood and the programming of our society.

The implication of this is NOT that we should no longer do good, it is that we can no longer prove to someone else that THEY should be selfless. It is an arbitrary assumption that we SHOULD help others.

I have to write a paper on why we should not harm animals, but I don’t think I can prove one way or the other whether we should or not. My proffessor will not find this stance acceptable!

Religious people are no more selfless than non religious people, but they have a basis for insisting other people “do good”.

23

That’s nice to know…

I don’t know about this. Certainly our society has something to do with the way we act. If we were all living in an anarchist civilization I would not behave the way that I do now. Why is this relevant to the basic ethical question of “Why do good?” As suggested by Max Torque there is most likely an overarching fundamental good to now killing other people needlessly.

That is a remarkably close minded sort of assignment. I’m not sure that I could convince myself into the “animals are people too” kind of rhetoric of Peter Singer and Tom Regan long enough to actually write that paper. As with any paper of that sort, look at the arguements of people who agree with that statement and then pick the elements of the arguements that you think work the best and espouse them. With the correct citation, of course.

<hijack> I did once write a paper dismissing the “marginal cases” objection to denying animals rights. That was funbecause I got to speak my mind and come up with a way to keep experimenting on animals and eating Jumbo Jacks without guilt.:cool: </hijack>

So does everyone else! It’s called the “golden rule” sometimes and it ammounts to “Don’t mug me and I won’t mug you.” It works out the best for all people in the end because no matter if you are the top dog you do have to sleep sometime and someone will kill you.

–==the sax man==–

24

Logical atheists and theists alike should base all of their actions on their own long-term self-interest.

Theists understand that there is a God, and that because he is omnibenevolent, obeying his laws is in their best long-term self interest. You can’t murder precisely because God said you can’t. When God says you can kill (Amalek, for example), you can and must kill.

Logical atheists can justify a lot of their compassion as being in their self-interest because “they like being compassionate”. That doesn’t answer the question of why an atheist who doesn’t enjoy being compassionate should be.

All other arguments (social contract, fear of being caught, etc.) break down under the right conditions.

 "If I break the Golden Rule just this once, and kill that lady to steal her money, the world will not plunge into anarchy."

How many atheists are willing to admit that if they didn’t feel guilty about it, and were unlikely to be caught, they’d kill someone for the right amount of money?!

This reminds me of a business course I was taking. We spent a few weeks on business ethics, even though the teacher was an atheist.

She tried to justify business ethics by saying that being ethical is really just good business. For example, if you treat your employees well, you’ll have better employees and lower turn-over. If you’re honest with your customers, you’ll have more repeat business.

That’s not business ethics at all!! That’s just being a good businessman. By her own arguments, she would have to admit that if it weren’t good business to be honest with your customers, you shouldn’t be.

Being ethical is doing the right thing (as defined by God), even when no earthly logic can show that its not in your own self-interest.

25

The last sentence of my previous post should have read:

Being ethical is doing the right thing (as defined by God), even when no earthly logic can show that it IS in your own self-interest.

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If being ethical depends on God-made rules, then aren’t you stating that only your religion is ethical? Could a valid set of ethics be derived from any other religion? If I think that “God” is an imaginary construct, why can’t I just be ethical with rules made by the family of Man, without going through the extra step of then attributing the rules to “God”?

28

Since this is a Great Debate, I can say:

Yes – my religion is right and all the rest are wrong. You can think whatever you want about God, but that doesn’t change the fact that he exists and specified a very specific detailed set of instructions on how people should live their lives.

That said, you can derive your own ethical rules by which you live your life in any maner you please. You might happen to derive the same rules that my religion holds to, in which case your ethics will be sound, but the derivation will not be valid.

In practice, if you do this, you’ll probably end up agreeing with the real one-and-only set of ethical rules dictated by God on the major points, but you’ll get some of the finer points wrong.

For example, just like me, you’ll derive that its wrong to rob the wallet from an innocent old lady and use the money to support your drug addiction, but you may come to a different conclusion as to whether it is permissable to steal money to pay for life-saving medicine, if you don’t harm anyone physically by steeling the money.

You may even derive some of the major rules incorrectly, though I hope you wont. For example, 60 years ago, and “enlightened” society somehow derived that it was acceptable to kill people because of their religion or ancestry. They thought that genocide was ethical. What they did, they did for the good of society,so they thought.

29

Mhand: So you get to define “ethics” as doing the right thing ONLY when it isn’t in your best interest? If something is good for you, it is unethical, if something is bad for you it is ethical? Good grief.

You claim that your religious beliefs give you a perfect morality. But how can that be, when you yourself state that sometimes people who share your religious beliefs made incorrect moral decisions? How do you know that you are right and they were wrong? Yes, God told you. But didn’t he tell them the same thing? Or at least, didn’t they believe that he told them the same thing?

Let’s face facts here. There is not and cannot be a single obvious moral system derived from the Bible, since many people have derived different moral systems from it. If it was obvious, everyone who read the Bible would have the same moral system.

Now, back to atheistic moral systems. Why don’t I roam the streets killing people? Because it would be dangerous. Why is it dangerous? Because people don’t want to be killed and they would try to stop me. Why don’t people want to be killed? Because they were born that way. Why were they born that way? Because all their ancestors, for millions of years wanted to live, and those that didn’t want to live didn’t become their ancestors. Wanting to live is given by evolution. An organism that doesn’t attempt to live will die, and won’t contribute to the next generation.

So here I am surrounded by people who want to live. I want to live. It works out to make a rule: I won’t kill you if you don’t kill me. Hey, how about we also teach our kids this rule? That way they won’t try to kill each other. Now, I suppose there are times when I can kill someone secretly to gain some sort of advantage. But how realistic is that, realistically? Are the contents of an old lady’s purse worth the risk of life imprisonment?

Ah, so why aren’t we atheists constantly making such cost-benefit decisions and killing when it is advantageous and refraining when it isn’t? Well, because it almost never is advantageous. As I go through life, I’ve never encountered a situation that would be improved by murder.

But of course, nobody really does these cost-benefit analyses. Because most of our morality isn’t discovered logically, it is already present in human nature. I don’t have to make a cost-benefit analysis to know that I want food. I simply have an instinct to eat when I get hungry. I have an innate desire for human companionship. I didn’t choose it, I was born that way. And why? Because humans are a social species. We crave companionship and family life, just like horses crave herd life, and wolves crave pack life.

When we derive morals logically, we are merely discovering (or rediscovering) the reasons those morals already exist. We have ethics because we are a social species, evolution has given us a baseline set of ethics. Why are we a social species? Because sociality is a succesfull strategy…but it isn’t the only one. We could be solitary as badgers, then we wouldn’t need ethics.

Yes, none of this makes any difference in a cosmic sense. If I kill millions of people, ultimately it is meaningless. But so what? Just because I know that the reason I love my wife is so that we will stay together to raise another generation of humans doesn’t mean that I don’t love my wife. I can use logic to figure out how to get what I want, but I can’t use logic to want what I want. Yes, if I starve to death it doesn’t matter…I could just ignore the hunger pangs. But I still feel the hunger pangs, I still feel the pain, and I still want to avoid the pain. I might wish that I didn’t want to avoid pain, but wishing doesn’t make it so.

You claim that morality comes from God. But lets go back to Genesis. Suppose you are in Abraham’s situation. God tells you to kill your son. Does that make it moral for you to kill your son? Is morality whatever God says? Can God make it moral for you to kill your son, if that is what God orders? Then ALL morality is arbitrary. Morality is only God’s whim…if he changed his mind tomorrow then it would be moral for us to rape, rob, torture and kill. But, (I imagine you saying) God wouldn’t change his mind like that! But didn’t he do that to Abraham? If God ordered you to kill, rape and torture would you do it?

If so, then your claim of perfect morality is built on the same sand as the atheists.

30

That’s an awfully cynical view.

Dude, you have some serious misconceptions. Please explain why you don’t believe atheists can be ethical.

O.K., please tell me you’re not making a generalization about ALL atheists because of something ONE of your teachers said once (and which you more than likely misinterpreted).

Right and wrong are defined by humans. It doesn’t have to be in our self-interest, it only has to be in our nature. If the fear of God is the only thing that keeps you moral, I feel sorry for you.

Ooh, ooh - do I get to call a Godwin here?

31

This is such an excellent point. As an atheist, I’ve been arguing the libertarian, self-interest worldview to fellow athiests for years. It absolutely amazed me the first time I went to a meeting of my college’s Freethought Alliance (an atheist/agnostic/etc group) that everyone there was a liberal Democrat or Green or Socialist, that I was the only Libertarian or Randian.

Only a concept like that of God can justify anything other than a consequentialist ethical system. Without a god, there is no inherently right/wrong attribute to associate with an action. There is merely the question of whether the consequences of that action in the world are positive or negative to whatever degree, and for which people they are positive or negative. Socialist notions of doing the most good for the most people and sacfiricing the individual when necessary have no justification, for what makes my interests less valuable than those of even 1000 people balanced against me?

That said, self-interest is not always what it seems. It is clearly in my self-interest not to steal the possessions of my neighbor, so as to contribute to an atmosphere in which possessory rights are respected, thus making my own rights more secure. Whatever form self-interest may take, it is the only path for the real atheist. That so many atheists liberate themselves from one intrusive authority figure demanding self-sacrifice (God) and immediately replace it with another (government/society) is frustratingly illogical.

32

No. The ethical thing is always what is in your long term self interest. Because there is an omnicient omnibenevlant God who told us how to calculate what is in our long-term self interst, the ethical thing is to do what he says.

The business teacher, was trying to argue that you should conduct business in a certain way (she called “ethical”) because its good business. Well, that means she’s defining her long-term best self-interest to be “good-business”. She should also be willing to admit that, by her logic, if its good business to be dishonest, she should be dishonest. She tries to get out of this by saying that its NEVER good business to be dishonest, but thats cop-out, because we all know that it sometimes is.

Morality is a means of classifying actions as right and wrong. No one only does “right”-classified actions. Just because someone does wrong, doesn’t mean their classification system is unsound.

I agree. Its not obvious just from reading a 3300 year old Hebrew document. To understand the system, you also need the oral law. That oral law was taught to me by my father, who learned it from his father, etc., back to Sinai. Anyone who tries to interpret the Bible in the absense of the Oral Law is bound to find it ambiguous and make mistakes.

I think you’re making my point. You logically don’t kill people because its not in your long-term self interest. It very rarely is. You’d usually be caught. Or at least, the risk would be to high. BUT – by your logic, if you came across the right opportunity, murder would be “right”. It would be in your best interest, and there’s nothing more important than that.

You can call Godwin all you want, but I think anyone who lived in the 20th century would be hypocritical to claim that morality and compassion are somehow built into human nature. The evidence is stacked against you.

Yes

Yes – it is. But, my arbitrary morality is right and yours is wrong. :slight_smile: If I’m right that God exists, trying to follow his laws will be in my self-interest more than anything you can calculate or derive or “feel” through your evolved compassion.

I’ll go further. God has no concept of “tomorrow”. That’s a very human concept. God knows the past and the future and controls it all, so there’s no sense of time for him. He can’t ever “change his mind from A to B.” The only reason anyone would ever change there mind about something is because they have more information. That’s not possible as he has all information.

No. God never changed his mind. He didn’t “test” Abraham so he (God) could learn something. He did it because it was in Abraham’s best interest to be tested. God, of course, knew what Abraham would do, and that Isaac wold not be killed.

33

Its not “fear” of God. Its love of God and his laws. I enjoy follow his laws, and I know htat doing so is in also my own self-interest.

You’re worried about “fear of God” being the only thing that keeps me moral, but you don’t even believe there is an objective moral. Morality is defined by humans, you say. Thus, different humans are free to define it differently. You just define your actions as being moral. At least I try to measure my actions against an objective standard.

34

I think that’s a very important point. The reason why this type of discussion of morality gets messy has nothing to do with the nature of the subject; the problem is all in semantics.

There needs to be seperate words for objective and subjective moralities.

Seems to me that only God, or some other supernatural phenomenon which supercede our laws of physics, can define an objective morality. If our conciousness and our world is dictated purely by the laws of physics, operating impersonally, than what basis do we have for saying we should not hurt others? What difference does it make in the long run? What is the basis for this most basic moral.

There is none, it is an assumption. We can operate by the assumption because doing so makes us happy, but intellectually we must acknowledge that it is only an assumption.

35

Can ethics be mandated without religion or other assumptions? No.
Of course you can say that your personal ethics were hard wired into you, but that is hardly a mandate for everyone else. Or you can say your ethics are in your own best interest, which still does not create a mandate and also is open to wide variance in behavior because of singular circumstances. Finally, you say that you like being kind to your fellow man, and wonder why anyone would need a God to tell them to be good. There are many problems with this statement, the obvious one being that you still haven’t decided what is objectively good so there is no way you can deride someone for not being so without God to tell them to. The bigger problem is that the world itself, apart from ethics or behavior, is different according to whether there is a God or not. We might be nothing more than the product of random occurences. Or we might be deeply and eternally valuable and beautiful creatures created in the image of a God whose beauty we cannot presently comprehend. You can’t take the ethics of one of these worlds and complain that it doesn’t work in the other! Saying that following God means that you would have to do something bad if he told you to, is basically saying that it is foolish to follow God when he doesn’t exist. Saying that following man-made ethics is foolish, is basically saying that it is foolish not to follow God when he does exist. Because both statements are based on a world which is the opposite of the world the ethics are derived from, neither statement has any weight. Just to be logical about it, then, it is not just God’s command that prevents believers from doing wrong, it is the very existence of God that makes those things wrong. It is not that they need God to make them be good, it is that the existence of God, and the implications on what we are, determine what is good. Therefore you cannot take ethics from a world where God exists and compare them with one where he doesn’t. (Have I beaten this point into the ground enough yet? OK) As for a world where God doesn’t exist, in such a world we are only temporary creatures, only as important as we can make ourselves believe we are. There can be no mandate of ethics, unless people in their own self interest decide to believe that God, or some other fundamental assumption, does exist. I wonder, if athiests are all about self interest, would they be against creating a new “perfect”, yet bogus, religion, with the intention of mandating the best possible ethics? (and has this already happened?)

36

So you say. But the facts don’t support your contention. In fact, some of the most horrible atrocities in history were committed by people who believed they were following “God’s laws”. Despite your claim that these “laws” provide an objective moral framework, religious people do not behave any more morally than non-religious people. In fact, I would say that, if anything, my brand of morality is superior, since I can use my ability to reason, rather than blindly following the Bible and not truly considering if I am doing the right thing. For example, I am able to arrive at the conclusion that execution is probably not the right thing to do to adulterers, whereas, if I merely take God at his word, I would be forced to come to the opposite conclusion.

And honestly, do you really believe that nobody had ever thought murder might be bad until Moses showed them some stone tablets? Puh-leeeze.

37

There is no reason that an Atheist cannot be ethical, or altruistic, or compassionate, or crazy! Theists can be selfish, mean, cruel, or dishonest as well.
Ethics is a matter of compliance with standards. Who proposes the standards, who enforces compliance, or if compliance is voluntary is independent of the nature of those standards.

You claim that ethical judgments based on a belief in right and wrong come from cultural indoctrination, but that objectivist evaluations do not. An interesting proposition. Where do those evaluations come from?
Also implicit in your contention is that altruism cannot arise except as a consequence of a special adaptation of self interest. That rests on an assumption that human beings make their choices in a uniformly logical manner. This is a patent absurdity. I might be kind as an affectation of social style, or generous as an expression of political contempt. The fact that it makes no logical sense does not mean that it cannot happen. Being good is not limited to those who seek rewards. You can choose to be good because you don’t like evil. Or, you could choose by accident.

Tris

38

Nightime said it a lot better than me with his Two-Worlds thesis. Before you can talk about morality, you must deside in which world you are theorizing.

No mater which world you believe exists, the world with a God, or the world without one, you should understand how morality works in both worlds, because one must be true.

Most people who believe in the God-exists world, get this. Some people who believe in the there-is-no-God world don’t get this.

VarliosZ, who believes in the there-is-no-God world, understands the consequences of his belief:

That’s a perfectly rational and valid position, although I believe its unsound because God exists.

blowero doesn’t seem to get it.

In your there-is-no-God world, there’s no such thing as an atrocity. Nothing is objectively wrong. There’s no difference between putting out a useful fire and killing a useful person. There’s no difference between putting out a dangerous fire, and killing a dangerous person. They’re all just chemical reactions.

So, what do you mean by “most horrible attrocities”? Are thye horrible accoriding to some arbitrary standard that you believe in. Why is your standard binding on anyone else!

In my G-d-exists world, morality is an objective system for determining which actions are “right” and “wrong”. The fact that some, or even many people who claim to believe in that system either misinterpret the system, or simply ignore it, doesn’t change the fact that there is one objective morality.

In which world are you reasoning. In the God-exists world, the only thing that is right is what God says is right, and its right precisely because and only because God exists and says its right.

In the there-is-not-God world, executing an adulterer is just like putting out a fire, or stopping any other complex chemical reaction. Was the fire useful to you, or not? Will putting out the fire prevent other dangerous fires? I guess you reasoned that all such fires are useful to you, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be useful to everyone else.

Although its off-topic, in the effort to fight ignorance, I’ll add:

Although reading the 3300 year old Hebrew Bible may make it sound like you just go ahead and kill adulterers, that’s not how its interpretted when you take the Oral Law into account.

The laws on capital punishment are very complex and the prerequisites for executing a death-penalty are very rarely met. Among them, very strict rules on the character of the witnesses and on the types of judges that can rule in such a case. In fact, its been over 2000 years since a Jewish religious court (called a Bet Din) found all the prerequisites necessary to execute anyone.

39

MHand, you say some intriguing things. For example, “In your there-is-no-God world, there’s no such thing as an atrocity. Nothing is objectively wrong.” This, basically, rejects several instances of objective morality that have come down the pike. Rand’s Obejctivism, Aristotle’s Virtue Theory, social darwinism, and probably even utilitarianism (in that it seems, in principle, to be based off of measurable preference for behavior as the guiding principle).

Why do you feel that without a God there is no objectivity? Why do you believe that, even if there were no objectivity (which I am compelled to support), there must not be a method for determining action in the face of choices? With or without God, choices exist. With or without God pleasure exists. With or without God people will make choices based on some standard. The source of this standard may be arbitrary, it may be unsupportable, it may be axiomatic. But not accepting to believe in a god doesn’t automatically derail any of these things.

The motivation for moral behavior, in your case, comes from your belief in god—in your knowledge of god’s existence. The motivation for other’s moral behavior is most likely rooted in their belief—their knowledge—of the nature of existence as well.

This is simply poor logic. First of all, there could be several different conceptions of god, and denying any one of them (or not accepting them) does not entail that one must accept the opposite as a consequence. The law of the excluded middle doesn’t work that way. One can love people without Jesus even though belief in Jesus compells one to love people. Rejecting Jesus’s spirituality doesn’t mean I must reject love, even if you conceive of it that way (and I really don’t see why you would), unless you are using “love” with a definition that is non-standard.

The capacity to make moral choices is usually associated with the ability to recognize choice, to have a will with which to make a choice, and to have some standard with which to weigh the available choices. The end. You’ll note no mention of god in there because there is no need for it to be there. It can be there, but that is only there to define in what manner we source the standard with which we weigh our choices. If we reject god we aren’t compelled to make decisions based purely on chemistry, because, you’ll note* chemistry isn’t listed there either.

40

Not that social darwinism, to my knowledge, is a bristling academic field, but it is intuitively an objective basis for reality.