Non-Supernatural Moral Basis

Great Debates
21

I don’t follow this.

I know that I could go out and shoplift right now. If I were caught, I’d probably get a small fine, or community service. No big deal.

My dog is laying at this moment at my feet. I could kick her, stomp on her tail, or do a myraid of other mean things to her. No one would know. Even if I did get caught, I probably wouldn’t even bat an eye at the punishment.

I could be rude and nasty to eveyone I see at the grocery store. I could make the clerk cry, and maybe even bully my way into getting something for free. The management of the store wouldn’t try to punish me-- they’d try to placate me. (This is an easy one.)

I can refuse to help people, make others’ lives difficult, not tip my waitress, lie, cheat, and abuse my fellow man at will. Nothing’s stopping me.

But I don’t do these things. Nothing is threatening me into good behavior. I simply do not do them because they’re against my ethical code. All the punishment I need for a bad act is the guilt I feel afterwards, knowing that I should have done something better. How would I be more “moral” if the reason I felt bad afterward was because I was going to be punished?

Well, basing morality on a system of rules is kind of silly. Clever people can find loopholes very easily.

This reminds me of a friend who was on the Weight Watchers diet. Each food was assigned a certain number of points, and to lose weight, she had to stay under a certain number for her daily total.

My friend found a loophole in the portion sizes. Sometimes a certain food was tehcnically under a certain number, but in reality should have been counted as higher. She was “cheating” on her diet, but staying within the rules.

The law leaves too many grey areas. Sometimes, something is wrong, but no law exists to cover it, like when a new tehnology is abused to commit a crime. The law has trouble keeping up with human ingenuity.

Sure. “Do no harm to your fellow man if you can avoid it.”

22

Where do you think your ethical code came from? Were you taught it while you were young, or do you think the guilt you feel when being bad is inherent?

One of the points I was trying to make is that laws are not enough to achieve moral behaviour from all people. You have agreed with that.

So if morality is “do no harm to your fellow man if you can avoid it.” then we must discern whether it is avoidable or not. Buddhist beliefs follow this. If a man wants to kill you, you must run first, if can’t run you must use only enough force to stop the attack. The ultimate last resort is to kill the man.

Jesus on the other hand said to “return good for evil”, “love those who hate you”. and went to His death not raising a finger against His murderers.

Morality does change from culture to culture, but is not arbitrary within the culture.

So we begin to see how difficult this business of morality comes to be.

People also use the masks of rationalization or justification to “prove” they were right in doing what they did. The early Christian movement justified the killing of thousands of people because they were non-believers.

I believe that whatever we chose as moral code should be something that works at all times and at all places. And that code is Love.

Scientists have no trouble understanding physical law: as “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

But flounder on “you will reap what you sow.” However, both of these laws do operate at all times.

So that is why I said:

“Love one another.”

If you think there is something better either secular or religious, please tell me.
Love

23

I grew up in a non-religious environment. Whenever I did something wrong, my parents would scold me by saying, “How would you feel if . . .” I was taught empathy. I was taught that if an action hurt other people’s feelings, took something that was rightfully theirs, or decieved someone, it was wrong. I was taught to treat people with respect, but not in a “Do unto others . . .” sense. I was taught that people will not always treat me kindly-- I can’t expect it from them, but I should be a better person and be kind anyway, because it was the right thing to do. That’s why I feel a cruel action is wrong.

My family later became more religious, and I eventually was sent to a Christian school. (My parents had been erroneously told it was a better school.) There, I was exposed to Christian morality. I did not come away with a positive opinion of it. I saw people behaving just as my friend did on her diet: to squeeze right up to the edge of breaking a rule without technically doing so. I saw viciousness disguised as “concern.” I saw more lying, and downright nasty behavior than I had ever seen in my life before I went to this school.

Well, Jesus sort of had a reason for his passivity, no? He had to go along with God’s plan, which meant he had to allow himself to be killed.

I don’t remember the Bible ever denouncing self-defense. The example you used of “Buddhist” beliefs (which really doesn’t sound like any Buddhists I know, but I digress) is the reasonable one: physical force is acceptable to stop a physical attack on one’s person, with killing the attacker as a last resort. As I said, “Do no harm if you can avoid it.” In the scenario of a physical attack, you cannot avoid harming the attacker in some cases when defending yourself.

Sure it is. Take a quick poll of how many people support abortion rights, the death penalty, fetal tissue research, the war in Iraq, welfare, or seperation of church and state and see how morality varies widely within our culture. I’ve never heard of a culture which had total agreement on its moral standards.

No, not really. It still seems pretty simple to me.

Pretty vague, that. Do you mean the love of a man for a woman, or the love of a man for a fine cigar?

I don’t love my neighbors. I actually don’t like them very much, either. That doesn’t change my behvior towards them: I’m pleasant and polite-- I even do small favors for them. Love has nothing to do with it. I don’t need to love people to be good to them.

Yes. “Be excellent to each other.”

Don’t tell people they gotta love that annoying jerk down the hall. It seems to be an impossible request, and so it’ll be ignored. Tell him to be good to that man, though, and he thinks, “I think I can handle that.” You could lay down a thick book of rules, or you could say to him, “Don’t hurt other people if you can avoid it.”

24

Interesting question, indeed.

I agree with SentientMeat in that there really isn’t a non-arbitrary basis for anything, if you want to be absolutely technical about it (if I read his post correctly). So I think the ‘Golden Rule’ is as non-arbitrary a basis for morality as you’ll find.

I would contend that that was having more respect for life than is necessitated by strict morality. IE, if you must harm those who would harm you in order to prevent/stop harm from being done to you, such is your ‘right’. However, if you value other life more than your own, you may choose not to defend yourself because the thought of causing harm to another is more distasteful than having harm inflicted upon you. In other words, Jesus valued the lives of his executioners more than he did his own, so he did not take or harm those lives.

25

If it has to be enforced, it’s no longer about morality…it’s a law. A truly good person does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do – not because they’ll be arrested or go to hell if they don’t. I believe most people are good for the sake of being good. We have empathy and behave honorably because we should.

26

Some of it is taught and some is inherent. I think you’re born with the basics. An example of this is when one baby starts crying, the rest cry. They know that something isn’t right and it brings an emotional response.

What does that even mean? Love means different things to different people. It is thrown around (particularly in the New Age world) to the point that it has no meaning at all.

I don’t love you. That doesn’t mean I wish harm on you. It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do my best to help you if you were in physical peril. It doesn’t mean I would ignore you if you needed someone to talk to. These are all things I would do for someone I love, as well. But it doesn’t mean I love you. Your definition of love won’t be exactly the same as anyone else’s…including your own lover!

27

I think it is fair to say that from an analytical perspective every basis is essentially arbitrary. “Traditional” a priori analytic reasoning is, I think, out of favor and for good reason. For one thing, it makes arguments boring. :stuck_out_tongue:

But I think we should take care with how far we intend to stretch the word “arbitrary” in a moral context. If we meant, “Given various alternatives, I cannot logically justify one over another,” then I am right with you. I consider myself a moral subjectivist, among many other adjectives as well, for precisely this reason. However, one might take the word arbitrary to mean, “There is no preference for one foundation or another,” in which case I strongly disagree. There are very clear preferences, and we build justifications around them. My inability to build a completely justified foundation does not necessarily affect my preferences for various systems.

For all their intuitiveness, moral truths are usually quite hard to come by. The problem moral systems face, and in fact the problem all analytical systems face, is in their application. Most moral ideas are, if some present will forgive me the characterization, rather trite and uninteresting. The application is not clear. I believe, and have argued in other threads, that the golden rule is a rather poor arbiter of moral decision-making, and I think most people would actually agree if they were to try to work through difficult but entirely plausible scenarios. As one man once said, things should be made as simple as possible but no simpler, and I think the golden rule is made too simple.

The problem with moral systems, most commonly, is how they come into conflict with themselves. Moral dilemmas are a fine way to ponder the complexities of human existence, or to smash someone’s idea of a moral system to bits. Largely, I like the former methodology better, but sometimes the latter is necessary. :wink: In general, I think investigation is a better task than assertion, and morality is a case where investigation is much more rewarding.

Generally, when investigating a moral system, a few questions need to be answered by all parties:

  1. Do moral facts exist?
  2. Why should one be moral?
  3. Who determines what is moral? / How is what is moral determined?

Those who land on the “arbitrary” side will generally suggest that the answer to the first question is “no”. As I mentioned in the other thread, this is not an uncommon response, but moral realists exist and have taken the time to make a few arguments in their favor. Largely, I think they’re wrong, so I won’t spend time summarizing ideas I disagree with for fear of introducing too much bias in the explanation.

28

Instinctive empathy, hmm. Is it instinctive or learned? It seems to me a child is selfish and “childish” and is taught empathy, or learns it by observation.

Why would anyone bother to fullfill another’s needs? Why does it feel good to do so, even when the other person doesn’t realize what you’ve done for them?

29

You may be right. It would be hard to establish scientifically whether it is learned or instinctive.

But whether empathy is instinctive (as I believe at least some portion of it must be) or a learned social behavior, it does not require a supernatural source.

The latter is a good argument for the empathetic impulse being instinctive. It may do you no good in that situation, but still you feel an impulse to help out. Why? I think because in most situations it is helpful to us (in the long run) to be empathetic. One hand washes the other as they say. Today, I may help out a neighbor whose house has burned down. Tomorrow it may be my house that has burned. And my neighbor will remember my prior helpfulness.

It seems to me that those who are most successful tend to be those who are good at maintaining social connections. Therefore, the trait of empathy (or if you like, the ability to learn empathy) would be selected over time since empathy is helpful in making and maintaining social connections.

Just a hypothesis of course, but it seems to me that there is some logic to it.

(erislover, you keep saying that the Golden Rule is a “poor arbiter of moral decisions.” Maybe you’re right, but if so, you haven’t shown us why. Please provide specific hypotheticals to illustrate what you mean.)

30

For one, I do not find it very reliable to count on another person empathizing with my position. Very often, people cannot empathize with others unless they are sufficiently similar. It is hard for me to understand human sacrifice; I consider it immoral. Your reading of the GR would suggest that I find it immoral because of my empathy for those killed, yet it utterly fails to explain the existence of human sacrifice in the first point without demanding a nation of sociopaths. I find that to be impractical.

On a practical side, I do not wish to be saved by Jesus even though a born again christian might very obviously decide that, were he in my shoes, he’d want to be saved. Similarly, I don’t want a guy who inherited millions of dollars to suggest he knows how I feel living paycheck to paycheck for six years now, the kind of desperation it can engender, and the sacrifices one makes to maintain a position. Neither, in fact, should he expect me to empathize with his stresses.

Empathy’s strength comes from shared experience. We do not all share the same experience.

Humans are obviously similar on many levels, and this is why we might see a common core of what is or isn’t moral, but practically speaking there is quite a bit of room for variation, and I don’t believe empathy will bring us back from such disparities.

31

When I use the word Love, I do so in a spiritual sense. Love is the binding force of all things. It is a state of mind, a way of life.

*As Paul said:

1 Corinthians 13
IF I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.

For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.

So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. *

This is Love. Any other use of the word is not spiritual. But remember words are only symbols, and not the real thing.

Love

32

Excellent point! True love would even love someone who hates us, even someone with “kill the messiah” syndrome. :slight_smile:

33

I don’t think I was actually saying anything in that sentence beyond defining my terms. “Theistic morality” is pretty necessarily god based, and the authority of that god is arbitrary… both in the general matter of why choose that particular deity out of the un-numbered pantheon and in specific case of Lawgiver type gods being able to give any Law they want.

The morality of individual theists may or may not be a “theistic morality”. Since that’s what I think you meant, I believe we agree. The appearance that gods are the source of theists’ moral codes stems from intellectual or ethical laziness. It’s easier to point at the Bible and go “Well, Jesus says…” than to try to formulate some coherent moral choice from some set of first concepts. Even so, I’d wager most religious people don’t follow every rule laid down by their god… even if we don’t include all the tribal laws from way back when. Whatever moral rules they use to pick and choose from their selected theistic morality is their real moral code.

Anyway.
I think this idea of utility is interesting, but the criteria for determining which moral code is more useful than another seems susceptible to arbitrariness as well. Hell, why should usefulness be a good thing?

34

spoke-, in an effort to better demonstrate the failure of the GR as a decision making routine, one might desire to suggest that the born-again in this example might not want to be witnessed to by a muslim, or a pagan. Yet how does he decide what to do? In one case, his empathetic decision is to preach in order to save (because he would want to be saved), yet in another his empathetic decision is to not preach so as to avoid a precident of others “falsely” witnessing (because he would not wish to be led astray). While it is quite likely each person will have one preference, I think it is another matter to suggest that there is an unambiguous, general resolution to the issue of whether or not people should witness. See what I mean?

35
  1. Love your neighbor as yourself.
  2. Do to others as you would have them do to you.
  3. Love one another as I [Jesus] have loved you.

This came from the Bible, but would that prevent us from accepting these principles as universal? Could we find a more succinct summary of ethics? Principle 3 avoids hypocrisy, by suggesting immitation of action rather than words.

Isn’t it interesting that a religious person (Jesus) should be the one to come up with the clearest statement of these principles?

A definition of love (and thus morality):

LOVE (verb) To purposely empathize and fulfill the legitimate needs of others in a way that will respect everyone, without seeking anything in return, even to the point of personal loss.

LOVE (noun) The attitude that produces loving actions towards others and to oneself.

B:Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?
P:I think so, Brain, but if we have nothing to fear but fear itself, why does Eleanor Roosevelt wear that spooky mask? :eek:

36

Well, my answer is “yes,” and “no.”

No, because morals are a socially consrtucted concept. Each culture develops their own set and consider them to the the end-all-be-all of moral absolutes. Then, along comes another culture and supplants those rules with what may be completely contradictory. Though they often have similar rules (“Killing people is wrong” or “Eating babies is wrong”) each culture has their own exceptions to the rule. For example, nearly all cultures share the concept of an incest taboo. For some cultures, relationships with even distant cousins is considered incest, where in others, sex between a father and daughter are permissable under certain circumstances.

Yes because we all must accept to a certain extent the morals of our current social group or be outcast by society. We must, in essence, accept these rules as absolutes, but at the same time recognize them as transient. Just as baseball didn’t always have the switch-hitter rule, cultures evolve and change.
We also have been reared to emotionally respond to outrages of our society’s rules, so we often have an almost instinctive reaction to it. (A couple of thousand years ago in ancient Greece, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye at a man having a sexual relationship with a young boy. However, my socialization has programmed be to be sickened by such a thing today.) I would not condemn those feelings as “wrong” because our actions have become ingrained by our culture.

Firstly, decent behavior is the grease of society’s wheels. It would quickly collapse in an environment of total anarchy. Morality, or ethical behavior is in a sense good citizenship.

It helps you get what you want because people react better to you. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, as my grandmother always said. Your life will be easier if you live within a society’s boundaries.

It makes you a better person. I know, a very vague designation, but there is a certain pride and self-approval one feels when you know that you’ve done the right thing.

The only way it can be: the reaction of one’s peers.

Individuals rarely come into play in deciding what is moral. If one woman decided that it was “moral” to go around topless, it wouldn’t induce the rest of society to accept it. It’s only when the idea slowly becomes accepted and the majority decides that a behavior is acceptable than an act becomes “moral.”

37

So?

No. But you’d have to ignore a fair bit of other stuff mandated by the Biblical Deity in order to observe those pronciples. If you’re going to pick and choose your law from the Bible (using your read code of morality) but claim the Biblical God as the Authority for those laws you do choose to obey (using your real code of morality), this is laziness.

You’re just looking at something someone else came up with and going “Ah, that rings true to me.” without any inspection as to WHY it rings true.

“Kill Them.”
Granted its a radically different ethical code than the one you’re recommending, but it’s much more tersely stated, isn’t it? If you’re suggesting is that the moral code that can be summarized best is the best one, I think you chould pick another criterion. That is what this thread it about, BTW- criteria for judging moral codes to find a good moral code in a non arbitrary, not “Oooh, I like that one.”, kind of way.

I’d also disagree that immitation of Jesus is a good moral code, since much of his behaviour makes no sense divorced from a belief in the afterlife and/or from a belief in his divinity. Given a belief that this life is the only life humans have to live, suggestion that someone accept abusive conditions happily (God will make it all Right in the end) does that person an injustice.

No. If we accept them as universal, he was merely one person in a long line of people stating and restating the principles. I also disagree that the statements are clear at all. Who qualifies as my neighbor? Some suggest that “neighbor” does not apply to persons of another tribe or villiage… thus, one has no moral obligation to “love” them- they’re free game. Do unto others… maybe in a world of sado-masochists.

Unless some other definition was intended…

How does this morality identify “legitimate needs”? What is respect? What of people who do not share this moral code? How does it deal with crime? Do you propose that criminals feel a legitimate need for prison and it’s our moral duty to fullfill that need for them? I think they’d disagree!

38

I find it morally abhorrent that my post to this thread, which was reasonably lucid and developed a perspective different from either of the conventional opposing views in this recurrent debate, elicited nary a single comment from atheist or theist.

Hmmph!

39

AHunter3,
That’s probably because you’ve basically described how people, theist or atheist, really make decisions. Going with your gut isn’t what most people do in conflicting or complex situations… at least, they try to overlay a little bit of intellectualizing on the choice before going with their gut, anyway.

You’ve certainly come the closest to what I was hoping for with this thread, which is basically to figure out the common rules by which “gut feeling” operates. I’d suggest the reason questions like “Is it wrong for a starving man to steal bread?” seem difficult because they conflict this innate moral sense with the intellectual overlay. Same case with self-defense being a justification for homicide. Intellectually, stealing and killing are said to be wrong… but the drive for personal survival trumps the written rules.

There’s more to it than that as we still make choices in other than life or death situations… it’s just not very clear what it happens to be.

40

I think it is probably a positive note when a good post is ignored:

It is just not understood by the average poster, or even better, it is understood and is considered to “right” to comment on. I think that is what happened to your post. I liked it. Morality is a mixture of feelings and logic, and has we grow older it becomes more important to us to refine the process.

I am at the point where morality means showing love to all people, as in my post above.

Love