On the one hand, Theistic morality is based on the arbitrary authority of a given deity. On the other hand, Atheistic morality does not exist. Or does it?
Several people mention empathetic morality, humanism, “love thy neighbor”, the Golden Rule, etc. to be countered that the choice of any of these bases is just as arbitrary as “because god says so”.
Arguments can be made about the behavioural fitness of a choice within the mores of a given culture. Not killing people is a good moral choice, regardless of the reasoning, simply because the people you live amongst will get together and do unpleasant things to murderers. This could be further abstracted to hypothetical cultures working under a given moral framework to see how well they operate in competition with other cultures or in dealing with deviant individuals. Even that has problems, though… because it may very well be that the “mercilessly convert all others” moral code performs well.
So, what do you recommend as a basis for a moral code that doesn’t invoke the supernatural for justification… and what makes that basis less arbitrary than picking a god out of a hat?
Alas poor Lobsang! his thread was hijacked by a hundred tangents. Well, he shoulda seen it coming.
As far as morality goes, of course its arbitrary in the sense that there is no ultimate basis for moral actions. But so what? we all agree, more or less, what moral actions are and for those people who don’t, we have the police.
Look, our social morality is based on a social contract. I agree to give up certain rights in exchange for getting certain protections. I don’t get to beat you up when you piss me off, but you don’t get to beat me up when I piss you off. For the most part, these trades are fairly common-sense and non-controversial. Occaisionaly there will be controversies around the borders, i.e. abortion, animal rights, public safety laws etc. Generally we agree to social cohesion by trying to resolve these controversies through the courts and our elected officials.
For more personal morality we can rely on a golden rule, as modified by Kant: Don’t do to your neighbor what you wouldn’t want him to do to you. If you can imagine every person in society acting as you are about to act then your action is either good or at least not bad.
Finally we have the engine of morality which is our feelings of benevolence compassion empathy and civic responsibility. I suspect most people have these feelings and wont cause any great pain to others because it just makes them feel bad.
Thus we have three bases for morality none of which require recourse to a supernatural being. In fact I would argue that our basic moral instincts come first and we weld them onto a supernatural being later. Religions can after all order us to commit profoundly immorall acts. Witness the large scale human sacrifices of the Aztecs and the Carthiginians, or the justifications for slavery in the Old testament.
My moral code is very simple: I will cause no intentional harm or pain to any creature, if it can be avoided, and to try to add joy to other people’s lives when I can. Or, as was put in Bill and Ted, “Be excellent to each other.”
For many the simple maxim of “Do unto others . . .” gets twisted into “I’m doing what he did unto me.” Somehow, people can almost always justify their actions. No matter how evil somebody is, chances are, they’d say they’re a good person.
It’s hard to take an honest look at one’s self. I really can’t say I’m a good person: I lie, I’m selfish, and I have a mean streak. All I can say is that I’m trying to be a good person, and in my opinion, the effort to make yourself better every day is the essence of true morality.
No one can ever be perfect. All we can hope for is that tomorrow, we’ll be a little more patient, a little kinder, and a little more generous with our fellow man.
For me, these rules don’t necessarily contradict my stance as a moral relativist. Which behaviors are acceptable and which are deviant are defined solely by the time and culture in which you live. Rules are transient. Being kind to one’s fellow earthlings is more of a general philosophy with which I’m comfortable.
I shall say this just once in the hope that no more threads will fall prey to one poster fleeing the arena and thinking they’re being clever.
There is ultimately no non-arbitrary basis for ANYTHING.
Logic, mathematics and scientific falsifiability are themselves epistemologies which are merely agreed on as the starting point for certain problems - you wouldn’t use them to analyse a painting, for example. Similarly, they can only be used to examine a “morality” on the basis of an ALREADY agreed criterion.
If someone refuses to agree any epistemology or criterion (even to the point where they speak in gibberish since a mutually understood language is an arbitrary choice), what point have they “proven”? That someone can be an obtuse, unhelpful knobend?
It is necessary to agree some first principles:[/list][li]Can we agree that God exists? Not with me, I’m afraid. [/li][li]Can we agree what makes us happy? Hmm, tricky - your list might be entirely different from mine. [/li][li]Can we agree that having one’s toes broken with a hammer is undesirable? [/list]Here we find more common ground. We might not agree on God or “happiness”, but I venture that far greater consensus can be found when it comes to suffering, as correlated with physiological stress indicators and medical diagnoses. Starvation, hypothermia, stomach cancer, mental illness: these might be said to be universally undesirable.[/li]
And so, I contend that a reasonable and logically consistent basis for morality is utilitarianism, specifically the “negative” utilitariansim proposed by Karl Popper:
[ul][]Can we agree that God exists? Not with me, I’m afraid. []Can we agree what makes us happy? Hmm, tricky - your list might be entirely different from mine. Can we agree that having one’s toes broken with a hammer is undesirable? Here we find more common ground.[/ul]
I was looking at some statistics a couple of days ago.
They show the rise of depression, suicide, mental, emotion problems.
The chart predicted this would continue into the future. Suicide rates are triple what they were 30 years ago.
I believe this correlates with the teachings of science that man is only biology.
I am not talking about belief in God. But I am talking about the morality teachings of religion. When people begin to believe there was no reason to be strickly honest, loving, or compassionate they gaveup their defense against stress, and fear of the unknown. This resulted in higher stress levels and more depression and emotional problems. So while belief in God may be a crutch, it was a very helpful crutch.
Some may argue society is more stressful today, I would agree with that. But when one has an anchor against the wind, one is better off than their friends who don’t.
I have noticed “Spiritual Psychology” groups on the web. Some Psychiatrists are beginning to look to religion to help stem the flow of disorders.
One does not have to believe in God in order to be helped by the teachings of religion. Besides, who knows what the word “God” means any more. Something different to each individual.
Love one another is the benchmark of all religions concerning morality and is not arbitrary. Benchmark means standard.
This is the morility of religion.
If you don’t accept any higher intelligence, then I guess it would be arbitrary on how you felt at the moment. Impulse morality. But I can’t see that it would be worth anything.
Untrue. As SentientMeat eloquently explained, it is entirely arbitrary. There’s no universally valid reason to choose that as the basis of your morality.
I believe, that if I stay in touch with my feelings, not blocking them when they are unpleasant, learning from them, and figuring out what they are telling me, then they will guide me about what it true and what is right.
I believe this is not “arbitrary”, or, rather, that it is only as “arbitrary” as anything that anyone can ever know about anything. Whatsoever and whithersoever. You cannot “know” that certain patterns of light and color picked up by your optic nerve mean there’s a computer monitor except as a consequence of a lifetime of letting your feelings guide you into selecting belief systems about patterns of sensation and what they mean.
Feelings in the sense of emotion are akin to, and as valid as, feelings in the sense of optical sensation. (Or auditory sensation, tactile sensation, etc. The evidence of our senses.) It is how we know.
That there is no absolute certainty with regards to what we therefore “know” to be morally right is true and unavoidable. You certainly can’t make this axiomatic human fallibility go away by gilding a Book and calling it Truth. It was presumably written by another mortal person who only had the same emotional guide to knowing right and wrong as you do. If, instead, it was written by the Sacred Sky Spirit in the Blood of the She-Doe, your only way of knowing that to be the case is by deciding on the basis of the same emotional guide by which you come to believe anything to be or not to be true. If the Mystical Medicine Man takes you into the Medicine Tent and explains that the Book was written by the Sacred Sky Spirit, you only way of knowing that the Mystical Medicine Man is right is by deciding on the basis of the same emotional guide that you believe the Mystical Medicine Man.
So there is uncertainty, and fallibility, and subjectivity of personal experience (and bias and distortion and perception). There is also communication with others of our ilk who have the same built-in emotional sensing structures for sussing out truth and morality, and we take what we gain from comparing notes into account and we are affected emotionally by others’ arguments.
Standard disclaimer: I do not claim to be an atheist. However, kindly note that I have not used the G-word or claimed* Divine status for this feeling-centric process of knowing, and I have not referenced anything supernatural in this post.
I’m gonna have to line up behind Larry Borgia here. This isn’t so much about empathy, but rather long-term selfishness. I can’t do what I want in a society where people keep kicking me in the head. This therefore is something I would wish stopped for my sake. Short-term selfishness would be upset that, in return, I couldn’t turn around and kick someone else in the head. Long-term would remember that there are other more important things I can’t do in my life while suffering from various concussions, and thus the trade-off is rather worthwhile. I can see the benefit for myself if the police arrested people trying to kick other people in the head, even if I don’t necessarily empathize with the victim. Or maybe that is the key component to empathy…
The selfishness of saints?
Y’know maybe I should lay off the medicinal products
I don’t think so. First of all, the teaching of evolution was already pretty well established thirty years ago. Then, as now, people believe it if they want to; religion is still a part of society. I haven’t seen any studies to indicate that a significant number of people are less religious than they were 30 years ago.
Secondly, our lives are a LOT more stressful than thirty years ago. Much has changed. There’s less job security, longer hours . . . most families can no longer depend on one income to support the household.
I disagree. My lack of religious faith has no bearing on whether I chose to be honest, loving, or compassionate. I do those things simply because I believe they’re the right things to do, which, in my opinion has more worth than doing them only because I fear the wrath of a deity if I do not.
My dog does not chew on my shoe because she knows she’ll be punished if she does. Should I say my dog is “moral” because she fears punishment? If the only thing holding you back from killing your neighbor, or robbing a bank, or beating up old ladies is the fear of punishment, I can’t say that’s “morality.”
I have no fear of a deity’s wrath. If I steal, or kill and get away with it in life, I’m not worried about a god punishing me after I die. But I don’t do those things because they offend my personal ethics. I don’t do them because I chose not to-- not because I fear supernatural consequences.
Perhaps so, for some.
I know quite a few religious people who are just as unhappy and stressed as those who are not.
I had a suicide in my family recently. She firmly believed in God. We used to have little arguments about it. She said that everyone needs a little faith in their lives. I don’t see where it did her much good when she hit the darkest moment of her life.
Sure. Real friends are very important. Talking to the air won’t give you the same comfort as talking to someone on the phone, or over a cup of coffee.
Yes, and some quacks are using crystals and voodoo. Your point?
Just because a few doctors turn from accepted therapies doesn’t mean that their methods are good. My mechanic could pray over my engine, but I’d rather he changed the oil filter.
Yes, one does have to believe in a god to be religious. That’s the whole point. How can I be helped in any way by religion if I don’t believe in the supernatural? Fear of the deity’s wrath won’t keep me in line, praying when I don’t believe that prayers are heard won’t make me feel any better, and going to church to be in a community of people who believe something I don’t doesn’t sound appealing.
I believe that religion adopted the simple, logical rules of human understanding. Morality didn’t begin with the concept of a god. It’s the other way around.
Clearly. Religious beliefs can vary widely from culture to culture. (Contrast Zen Buddhism with the Aztec cult of human sacrifice, for example.) But humans agree almost universally about what consistutes moral behavior: not killing without cause, not stealing from your friends, protecting your children, sharing when you have more than you need, and so on.
We can even observe moral emotions in animals that clearly have no religious sensibility. A dog can be loyal. A dog can feel guilt. But a dog can’t pray.
It seems to me that humans and other social animals have a natural moral sense hardwired into them. This moral sense has evolved to encourage harmonious survival in a tribal setting. Behaviors that are in accord with this natural moral sense feel right and just to us. We then build abstractions upon these hardwired feelings to extend our raw moral sense into realms where conflicting moral imperatives make it impossible to go on gut feelings alone.
Religion evolved in human culture when this process of abstract moral extrapolation was coupled with the desire to explain and understand the natural world. In short, we manufactured an explanation for the mechanism behind existence that provided a grounding for our natural moral sense.
Eliminating a belief in the supernatural doesn’t do anything to change our innate human moral sense. If anything, it can strengthen it. As an atheist, I realize that the responsibility for living a moral life is mine and mine alone. I can’t push my duies as a human being off onto a supernatural entity.
Who takes better care of a house? An owner, or a renter? Who do you trust to be more moral, someone who accepts a natural morality as part of his fundamental being, or someone who sees it as something imposed on him by an external authority … ?
Through all recorded history the different cultures included a religion, and a God or Gods, it may be hard to say which came first, morality or religion. Kinda like the chicken and the egg thing.
But I can agree that morality may stand alone from any religion or God. However, it is the God, or higher authority, that puts the enforcement clause in it, the “or else.”
Without the idea of sure enforcement morality has little meaning.
We do have laws and officers to back up that law. But without morality they would be overwhelmed in an hour. In Canada there is 1 policeman for every 500 citizens, probably about that here in the U.S. So without a strong belief in honesty, integrity, kindness and such, law enforcement would clearly not be enough.
Now we set down to design a morality, without religion, that will work.
Morality is not arbitrary, if we decide to put “obey the laws of the land” in our morality then we must do just that, obey all the laws of the land, not just the ones we like. If everyone decided to obey some, but not all. Such as doing dope, then they are no longer moral under this definition.
Even the law can be wrong, so now what do we do.
So I pitch the ball in your court and ask you to design a morality for us, without God.
It seems to me that all of those formulations boil down to the Golden Rule. (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”)
As I mentioned in the other thread, the Golden Rule appears in every major religion. This suggests to me that we all have an instinctive empathy, which manifests itself every time we try to write down a moral code.
And if you think about it, it makes sense that we would have evolved empathy to help us thrive in social settings. We are, after all, creatures of the pack. (Which explains why we get along so well with dogs. But that’s another thread.)
