Non-religiously-justified moral premises (philosophy).

Great Debates
1

Let’s get my position straight right off the bat: I’ve been an atheist all of my life, with some interest (and occasional grudging respect) for religion as a social / historical / cultural influence, but as far as I know myself, I’m probably just not cut out for the spiritual world-view.

I think I’m posting this because yesterday I watched Collision, which is a registration of a series of debates between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson on the question of the merit of religion (and I recommend the film to anyone, religious or not, because - even if it’s a few hours too short to really do justice to the questions involved - it sets up a bunch of very interesting points and both sides of the argument are represented by intelligent, thoughtful people who can also be very entertaining).

My question has to do with what appears to be one of Wilson’s main arguments (and I’m heavily paraphrasing and contracting so I won’t use quotation marks): how do you justify a moral framework if it’s not based on a set of God-given injunctions?

The obvious objection in a debate would be “why would a God-given injunction be moral”. But really, that’s avoiding the question from both sides (and I think that Hitchens and Wilson have given more or less that - Hitchens claims that the Christian God is a capricious character with no moral authority and Wilson claims that whatever God declaims is good). What I’m interested in is more or less: given that we are social creatures, with all of the societal pressures that that involves, is morality any more than a convenience?

To put it another way, Hitchens puts forward a scenario where you see a pregnant woman being stricken and kicked while she’s lying down in the street. Now I would think that most of us would at least be repulsed, if not compelled to do something about it. I know I would.

My question is: has any good argument - at all - been made against this scenario that does not involve a supernatural law-giver or our evolutionary mind-set as a social animal?

I’m not sure if I’m posting this in the right forum [there’s at least 3 to choose from], so mods feel free to move this thread.

2

I don’t have a lot of time, so this answer will be even more disjointed than normal. Anyway, that said, to answer your question, I would have to say . . .

Not really. Being a social animal with oft conflicting tendencies to help the self and to help others is pretty much why morality exists in the first place. It’s helpful to have some guidelines marking the limits to how much we can pursue or self-interest as well as the limiting how much others can expect us to help their own and that of society as a whole.

The trick to morality, really, is justifying coercion. You must do this, you must not do that, and so on. The actual acts that these rules refer to are kind of a separate issue and are highly dependent on social mores, the actual conditions of life, the state of technology, one’s place in the social hierarchy and a few other things. And there are and always will be mass debates over what these things entail based on a variety of principles.

The justification for coercion is a bit different, and there are pretty much only two common ways to do so. The first is contractualism. The second is consequentialism. In contractualism, the idea is that of a social contract, where you agree to help society or other people in order to receive some advantage, such as protection, education, property and myriad other things. Then, because you’ve agreed to a contract, if only implicitly, you’ve agreed to coercion in the case of noncompliance. The flaw with this idea is that there obviously is no social contract, you can’t opt out and go it alone, society often doesn’t help people very much and so on. In consequentialism, the goal is to maximize the value of human actions, and if some actions harm more than they help, then this justifies coercion against those who perform these actions since this will maximize value. The problem here is that there is no real way to compare certain values, no way to decide which values are the ones we want and so on.

Oh, now I see that you don’t care about the coercion part. It’s the existence of moral principles themselves. I’ve only addressed that obliquely. I will have to come back to that later. I was just assuming that you were looking for a replacement to the threat of divine punishment to explain the moral force of religion, but I don’t think you did. I will post this anyway, in case someone wants to read it.

3

Besides pack instinct, there’s the “pay it forward” and “golden rule” sets of thought. Our own lives are better for having had others in our history work in our favor. Our lives now are more enjoyable for other people being nice to us. Certainly, to some extent we are all in competition on a daily basis, but if one follows some basic rules of non-jerkish behavior, then everyone has a better time while we’re all here scrambling about on the surface of our planet.

If you strapped those into game theory, you’d see a generally positive effect.

4

People have been talking about natural rights and natural law since classical Greece. Do you want to go back that far, or start with a reading list somewhere around Locke, or what?

5

A couple of starting points that have been used to build morality from (I’m not going to supply a complete reading list or exposition, just give the basic idea):

  1. Absolute harms - basically a set of premises without further justification. Typically religious, but not always. An arbitrary set without religious justification is just as valid. Some claim they are “intuitive” or “indisputable harms”.

  2. Pain is bad. (Sometimes restricted to intelligent minds, or evaluated in proportion to intelligent minds).

  3. Self interest (this is where the social based arguments come from).

  4. Fairness/balance. “Anything that I would consider harmful to me, shouldn’t be caused to others by my actions or inactions”.

You can use pretty much any of those to build up either a utilitarian (greatest good) or deontological (set of fixed rules) systems, and they’ve all been used to do so.

6

Yes, but I’m not very impressed with Greek “natural law” so far. I’d appreciate some pointers to interesting ideas though.

It was interesting anyway, but yes, what I’m trying to find out is assuming a moral system is based on principles, how were/are the principles justified? The consequences can wait for later :smiley: PS: Any system that explicitly NOT justify its premises beyond “these are the premises” would be interesting too.

7

I think most people feel good when they help people - I do. It’s probably chemical / hormonal, and likely a result of evolution.

A quick google basically confirms what seems intuitive:

http://health.msn.com/health-topics/depression/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100167285

Also, MIT appears to have found morality, literally: http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=114715

8

Morality is always volitional. Unless you’re a young child or mentally deficient, you are always free to challenge and, if necessary, change your beliefs. To accept whatever your God demands of you is merely pushing the question back one step. You still must have chosen to believe in that God, and chosen to agree with him . . . or at least chosen to continue your belief in him, and chosen to continue your agreement with him.

9

As I see it, Morality is for the good of the species,not anything to do with a religion, but a biological way to help the species survive. Helping others is helping ourselves. It could be that ancient man noticed the animals that helped each other by defending the helpless and working together to obtain food etc, seemed to preserve the animal’s survival. And used that for the survival of humans.

10

I don’t think it is. If one side says you can justify a moral framework by basing it on a set of God-given injunctions, it’s not really an objection for the other side to ask for their full reasoning on that matter; it seems more like a starting point for a discussion, in hopes of possibly finding common ground by reasoning analogously. (I mean, sure, it could turn out to be an objection, if the other side fails to come up with anything – but why assume that?)

That said,

If you and I already feel that way, then we don’t really need a good argument to do something about it; we’d need a good argument to stand by and do nothing. I’m not aware of any such argument, and so if her plight touches my sympathies I figure I could get involved with a clean conscience; it doesn’t seem to involve any hypocritical inconsistency on my part sure as it doesn’t run afoul of any other such concerns AFAIK.

11

First, why does a moral framework require justification? If we’re honest with ourselves, we all know what is right and wrong in any given situation with the possible exception of those so highly contrived as to be meaningless anyway. That innate knowledge is your “moral authority”.

The only effective response to this that I can see is to say that what is right and wrong is at least partially cultural. True. But that just means you have to dig a level deeper. Native Americans believed it was “wrong” to take the flesh of an animal without giving proper thanks and respect. But this came from a perception of animals as either sentient in some sense or ruled by a sentient deity. In other words, either the animals or their god was on a par with themselves. They recognized the injustice of taking a rabbit in order to eat and therefore sought to make compensation.

So even in such a strange mindset (strange to us), basic, unquantified principles of good and bad were employed to shape the laws and customs which developed.

We are very pure creatures until our overdeveloped minds get involved and pervert the truths we know to be self-evident.

If that’s still too amorphous, then consider the need for laws in society. What justification is required for them? How are they arrived at? When are they changed? Who gets to decide? From a philosophical point of view, I see no meaningful distinction between a moral and legal framework. A moral framework gets to concepts of justice whereas that can be difficult for a purely framework, but I think these are quantitative not qualitative differences. Of course this assumes that in the legal context that the laws and legal process are generally regarded as fair. If not, then there is most definitely a qualitative difference.

Second, what is wrong with an evolutionary mindset. I’m happy to invoke ‘natural law’ which I see as being just another way of stating my first point.

How do we decide if an entity is homo sapiens? We look at a random sample, find the characteristics common to all and then ask if the new entity has those characteristics. How do you decide what natural law is? Look at every culture that has any kind of morality and ask which characteristics make them comparable. In both cases you need to be willing to do some dissection so that you can see the moral rationale behind behaviors, but both are empirical pursuits.

Third, philosophy is of limited usefulness in dealing with people and their emotions. There are times when emotions will trump any morality - divine or otherwise. The successful transition from moral foundation to moral framework depend entirely on the extent to which it is physiologically possible for intellect to override emotion.

12

Certainly a moral framework exists completely independently of religion, otherwise atheists would be constantly doing things that the rest of society considers terribly immoral. Not just minor things either. Without any moral framework these actions would seem random and evil to the “moral” people. That just isn’t the case. In fact, it is easy to demonstrate that children will develop a moral framework without any exposure to religion at all. So I think it’s safe to say that morals do not spring forth for some supernatural beings command. In fact, it makes little sense that an action is moral or immoral based only upon the word of this being, as if man cannot make any choices about his interactions without supervision.

So, wherever moral frameworks come from, they are the works of man or are some innate tendencies of man, or a combination of both. Any debate about religion and morals must first ask the question: What does religion have to morals other than the cases where religions have adapted previously written moral codes as part of their beliefs?

I would say that the religious folks have confused two unrelated things. Religions adapt moral codes but that doesn’t mean that the religion existed first nor that it created the code.

13

I think it requires some justification. I’m fairly OK with the justification being “this system is based on these premises, which we see as evidently right/moral”, but I was just wondering if I’d missed any other possible justifications. To be perfectly honest, it would make me feel better if I there was an objective justification that was convincing.

Sure, but you do tend to get some very interesting variations. I don’t know that human “emotional” morality is that reliable, especially not when dealing with “other groups” - slavery, caste systems & wars all occur far to frequently and have all been justified with “natural law” arguments.

And the extend to which the moral system matches with emotion, of course.

Anyway, lots to think about. Thanks for taking the time.

14

I think I agree with most of that. Just sayin’. :slight_smile:

Well, first you need to analyze your own predilections. Bias is too harsh a word with the wrong connotation but we’re in basically conceptually adjacent territory. Why is that important to you? Does it serve some structural purpose essential to supporting the eventual framework or is it something else. Also, what do the terms “objective” and “convincing” mean in this context? I think objective validation can come from introspection of an unclouded mind by itself. I would consider that objective and convincing. I suspect you would disagree.

This is where one’s analytical skills become important but only along side a profound grasp of the human psyche. For example why are people enslaved? Is it the lesser of the various evils and therefore, though intuitively perverse, a moral choice? Or is it to serve the baser instincts of those with more power? You have to peel back as many layers of the onion as it takes to get to the true purpose behind the actions - not simply the justifications given for the actions.

Every behavior will ultimately serve a purpose which is either good or bad - on balance. Getting beneath the cultural layers that hide the true motivations is the hard part.

I don’t think emotions have anything to do with what is right or wrong. They can help explain behaviors. The dominance of certain emotions in certain common situations can help explain various levels of good and various levels of what is bad. But ultimately, emotions have nothing to do with what is objectively good or bad. They can only provide context and explain levels of culpability.

15

Since this is basically about religion, it’s better suited for GD than GQ.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

16

The short answer is No. All systems of morality - yours, Fred Phelps’, Hitchens, Mother Teresa’s - all, without any exception, are faith-based. One simply has to accept them without question, because meta-questions about their validity are unanswerable.

If you need to argue that helping a beaten pregnant woman is moral because it makes you feel good, then someone else raping a different woman is also moral because it makes that person feel good. If you want to appeal to the survival of the species, then you have to justify choosing survival vs. non-survival as being better.

“God hates fags” is just as valid (or invalid) a moral statement as “we should tax the rich at higher rates than the poor”. Both are based on unprovable axioms.

Regards,
Shodan

17

How can you make those kinds of sweeping pronouncements and really think they are going to fly? I mean shit, dude, even the pope can’t issue an encyclical without having a little more meat than what you’re offering.

I have struggled with religion my whole life and ultimately realized I will never be more than the agnostic I am now. So what is the genesis of my morality? Or is it your position that I therefore must be either immoral or amoral?

18

It’s faith-based. I already said that.

My position is that your moral system is faith-based, and the axioms on which it is founded cannot be established - they have to be taken as granted.

My position is, further, that in this you are no different from any other moral thinker - like I said, all moral assertions are equally valid (or invalid).

Regards,
Shodan

19

No, they’re not faith based. They’re emotional reactions. Saying that being emotionally repulsed by seeing a pregnant woman being brutalized is based on “faith” is nonsensical. It’s not a belief that I am emotionally repulsed, it’s a fact. Those emotional responses are the basis of all morality.

There is no such thing as a “God-given morality” anyway, incidentally – or at least if there is, we don’t have any access to it or knowledge of it so it’s the functional equivalent of non-existent. One of the flawed premises of this kind of argument is the assumption that religious morality is supernaturally derived. It is not. Humans made it up. Religious morality IS atheistic morality.

20

I’m really sorry to be rude here, but are you under the impression that any of that actually meant something? All I heard were more baseless assertions - no reason, logic - zilch.

You say my morality is faith based.

Know what I say?

Bull-fucking-shit - prove it.

And don’t think you know jack about my background based on anything I’ve said here. But since you think that’s important - here’s my sampler pack. I’ve been follower and practitioner of the black arts, a fundamentalist christian, a Zen buddhist and host of other things so long it bores even me. What do you get when you staple all those body parts together?