Objective Morality, for Grimpixie

On another thread, Grimpixie asked the following:

To avoid a hijack of that thread, and because I suspect it will be hotly debated, I’ve started this thread to answer. And my initial answer is a fairly long one. Spiritus Mundi, Vile Orb, and others interested in ethics are invited to critique it. I begin with an apparent off-topic comment that nonetheless is a pertinent analogy:

At one time, physicists were quite convinced that one could attribute various absolute properties to matter. Then along came Einstein, and we discovered that many properties believed absolute were only relative.

Someone once summarized the implications of relativity with the idea, “Everything is relative.”

Not true. In Einsteinian physics, the value of C is an absolute. (Not “the speed of light” – that varies with the medium. But the constant C, representing the speed of electromagnetic radiation in a vacuum.) The values of a given object’s mass, duration, etc., vary in strict accordance with its relation to C, i.e., its speed.

I needed that little excursus to make clear where I’m coming from in my response.

Yes. There is an absolute morality. It’s defined in the Gospels, and has been posted on another thread recently. And it consists in total radical love of God and of one’s fellow man as of oneself.

Everything else is relative to this.

Not that I reject the Ten Commandments or any other specific rule or regulation someone may propone.

But that I evaluate how it should be applied by that fundamental rule. (Why is it a fundamental rule? Jesus said so; I believe so…;))

Mebbe that passage in Leviticus that gets trotted out in the gay debates represents God’s feelings about homosexual activity. (And maybe it doesn’t, but Jewish cultural mores written up as God’s Word…a separate debate.) However, if I attempt to suggest it to gobear or Esprix as a rule for their behavior, I may or may not be correct in my understanding of the O.T. Law (which, technically, applies only to Jews, Christians being, according to Paul, free of the Law…yet another debate). What is certain is that in trying to force a given moral behavior on them, I am disobeying the Law, since I am hardly “loving them as myself.” (I use the “gay=immoral” gimmick because it has been debated at length here already, so as not to raise another red herring by yet another example.)

To carry this one step further, let’s take a restrictive view of “Thou shalt not kill” that permits moral war, executions, etc., and simply says, “As an individual, thou shalt not take upon thyself to cause the death of another individual.”

Now, a hypothetical example: Paul Jones is a notorious serial pedophile/killer whose modus operandi is to seize groups of preschoolers, sodomize and torture them. Through his amazing elusiveness, he has been positively identified as the perpretrator of such crimes, but has escaped every time.

As you drive down the street from target practice, you in our example being an amateur sharpshooter, you hear on the radio that he has struck again at a preschool near where you are, and you almost immediately see him herding a group of preschoolers into a bunker constructed by the contractor in charge of erecting convenient structures in hypothetical examples. You know that that bunker is impregnable, with its own air supply and proof against anything short of nuclear weaponry.

However, you can stop the truck and get off a clear shot – cannot guarantee, at that range, you will disable but not kill him, but can surely bring him down.

Does the Sixth Commandment apply here?

What’s your moral duty?

That seems, if you’ll forgive me, a totally impossible way to live if it were truly an absolute guide to moral behavior.

You do not brush my teeth. You do not wash my backside. You do not masturbate me when I am horny, nor attempt to chew my food for me for digestion. The complete set of methods I use to love myself are, quite possibly, far outside the practical scope of human interaction, if not even theoretically out of reach.

Perhaps I just don’t understand the tenet. By shooting that man you are committing suicide.

erl, do not make the mistake of equating expressions of love with love itself.

I think the invocation of Jesus and/or the Bible in a thread about objective morality immediately handicaps the thread. That the morality laid down in the Bible makes such rules fundamental for you (Ploycarp in this case) does not mean it makes them fundamental for anyone else. Indeed, even the Bible and its lessons are open to debate and interpretation…not only among different groups (i.e. Methodists, Presbyterians, etc.) but often among members of the same religion (i.e. different Priests).

To me objective or fundamental morality means that it has to hold true across all religions, ethnic groups, nationalities, etc. It has to be a ‘truth’ as basic as 2+2=4 with no room to quibble about details. In the final analysis I think there are very few moral absolutes. Perhaps “Thou shalt not kill” could be amended to “Thou shalt not kill without just cause”. That might make the cut for a moral absolute. While ‘just cause’ is a loophole big enough to drive a train through you could still say that if you have no cause (or reason) for killing someone then it is absolutely wrong to do so. We’d have to argue endlessly about what constitutes a ‘just’ cause that killing is ok for.

Beyond that I am hard pressed to come-up with anything that would constitute a moral absolute.

FWIW I would take my shot at the hypothetical child-murderer but from legal standpoint that person has not been found guilty in a court of law and I would probably go to jail for shooting him (you can’t take the law into your own hands). I’d only be willing to do that since I don’t think I could live with myself knowing I had allowed however many children to come to harm through my inaction.

You mentioned earlier the concept of self-defense, and if you feel that your fellow human should be cared for as much as oneself, then saving the lives of others is demanded of you, and saving the soul of the perp by killing them may also fall into that category.

A bit too tidy perhaps.

One difficulty with morality is hindsight, many things in the past have ocurred that were evil and were judged to have been morally correct at the time.

Thomas de Torquemada is a classic example of this, he being the one who gave the Spanish Inquisition its infamous notoriety.
The Pope at the time expressed concern at his activities and methods but still did not condemn him or make moves to remove him from office.
Many at the time thought Torquemada was doing God’s work, he thought so too, we know differently.(or do we ?)

I cannot think of an example, at the moment, of something thought to be evil and turned out to be the reverse (unless you count the RC church view on Galileo which said that he was a heretic for discussing Copernicus discovery of the orbit of the earth around the sun)

Forgive me, andros, but I am just a reductionist at heart. It needs to walk, look, and quack like a duck before I will call it a duck. :slight_smile:

would you agree that if you took the references to “GOD” and the sabbath out of the ten commandments that it would be a moral code that all religions Could share. I mean its not that tough, “don’t kill,steal,lie,covet”. who could argue with that? And its just list of what is bad/wrong/evil. Any action that involves multiple activities can be should net to “good”. when the 10 commandments were written , God was telling /helping the Jews to extermine other tribes. It was that important for the Jews to survive.

of course you lie all the time " does that dress make your wife look fat?", “doesn’t your mother-in-law look peaceful in the casket?”. the lie would be “kinder” than the truth.
In the example of the child molester, lets make it simpler. Someone is abducting your child armed with a knife. you have a gun. do you warn them to drop the knife and let your son go or do you just blow them away. what is moral? the answer is not “whatever you think” . its much simplier than that.

Just FYI:
As an atheist, I do not posit the existence of a supernatural, omniscient and controlling creator. As various peoples have conflicting ideas regarding what is “moral,” and as I presently see no way to demonstrate (logically or empirically) any objective (i.e. universally applicable) morality, and as I do not require the notion of objective morality in order to explain any observable phenomena, I see no reason to posit its existence.

Whack:

I’m sure that this is the case from your point of view, as well as mine. While I obviously can’t speak for Polycarp, Jews and Christians (being monotheists) have traditionally held that God’s rules apply to everybody – whether or not you believe in the rule-maker is irrelevant. It’s simple and straight-forward: God made the rules, there are no valid rules except His, and the rules are the same for everybody. Morality, therefore, is completely objective.

Of course, this isn’t designed to be a persuasive argument. Rather, if one posits the existence of a traditional Western “God,” the rest follows logically.

Finally, as its premises are entirely faith-based (evidence for them is neither sought nor offered), Poly’s argument for objective morality is the only one that can be made (that I’ve heard) that will not elicit an objection from me, personally.

Not to be meant as a hijack…and I don’t have a cite, but I was once told that the “Thou Shall Not Kill” thing is actually “Thou Shall Not Murder”. Something about the translation getting mixed up. So killing for self defence, of for the defence of others is “ok”…or at the very least not a sin.

If that is true, killing the nasty pedophile is ok, as you would be saving many lives.

Erislover, I see your point. But my understanding of what the implementation of that law means is somewhat different from what you suggest. It’s kind of an extension of the Golden Rule: to treat you, and each other person, with that degree (a mixture of the following: ) of practical assistance and advice, respect for your innate dignity as a person and for any solitude you might be seeking, compassion, careful listening and intelligent response, etc., that I would seek in the ideal relationship with another if I had my choice as to how they would behave towards me, taking appropriate differences into consideration.

Chris is my closest friend, and loves intellectual discussions and bull sessions, allusions to popular music, and low culture. Chris from time to time needs a confidant in working through emotions, and an unindicted co-conspirator in his planning sessions, some of which are bluesky and some serious. Joann is his wife, and hates anything calling for more thought than Dawson’s Creek. But she is absolutely perfect in her ability to manage human dynamics, including in a large group. What she needs from me is to not mess up her chosen lifestyle, to remain a friend and play cards with her, not to lecture but to be present and to be supportive when she needs to “work people.” Amanda is their daughter, nine “going on sixteen,” brilliant, responsible well beyond her years, and strongly self-willed. What she needs is for her wants and needs to be taken seriously and treated with respect, even when they are being refused for other reasons, to get a lot of information, hopefully imparted with wisdom, to be taken places a girl her age cannot go alone, etc. I need to tailor my behavior with each to their needs and wants.

Varlos and Whackamole:

Thank you for the point, in retrospect obvious, that my stance on morality is founded on a particular religious view. However, let me ask this of you and other persons without a monotheistic stance:

Ignoring the primary directive of love of God, and taking the secondary directive as pragmatic rather than objective, do you differ with it as a guiding principle for human ethics, and if so how? I think I can concur that absent God there is no objective ethic, equally applicable to humanity, the hive mentality of Sirius XVII, and the Space Raccoons, implicit in the laws of physics, but I think that the stance of the Second Law is universal to humanity.

As worthy of respect as I may feel your interpretation is (which I do think it is), it seems to me to be a rather large flaw that an absolute moral tenet is so wide open to interpretation.

In the thread that prompted this one, I nominated that Hillel’s “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow,” as a standard for objective morality.

While it’s close in spirit to The Greatest Commandment, it reverses the imperative: you are not commanded to love your neighbor as yourself, but merely to avoid doing to your neighbor that which you do not wish done to yourself. This solves erislover’s masturbation problem quite nicely.

It also neatly dodges any issues with respect to God, a god, many gods or goddesses, and whatever other deities with which your particular pantheon may be equipped.

  • Rick

Damnit, bricker, I will get some action from someone! :smiley:

I think Bricker’s spin on the classic Do Unto Others (DUO) philosophy doesn’t quite cut it as an objective morality (DUO doesn’t either).

I think it works well among members of a society but does not cross well between societies where different values and standards may hold sway.

For example try this hypothetical:

My sister is married to an Egyptian Muslim man. My sister has an affair and the man throws acid in her face causing her hideous pain and scarring for life. This behavior does happen in several Islamic countries and is accepted under their laws.

My sister was wrong but I in NO WAY agree with the retribution. The Muslim man’s actions are, however, quite in accordance with a DUO philosophy from his standpoint but they disagree violently from my standpoint.

To use Bricker’s philosophy the Muslim man did something I find despicable but something that he does not find despicable.

Who’s right? I feel quite safe in saying that the Muslim man’s actions are majorly fed-up but I imagine he would view my inaction in a similar circumstance as equally fed-up.

BTW – The hypothetical above also goes to show how basing moral standards in religion is dicey since the retribution described is founded in Islamic law more than it is in their secular laws.

Hmmm. Are you suggesting that your hypothetical Muslim brother-in-law, if faced with his own infidelity, would not relish forgiveness as opposed to acid?

I have to believe he’d be much happier being forgiven, and find it… if not despicable… at least preferable to be forgiven, or merely divorced, than to be drenched with acid.

  • Rick

Whack: First off, it’s not Bricker’s spin. It’s from Hillel (as stated earlier). But that’s a minor point.

More significantly, your hypothetical fails on it’s face. You say:

but you fail to back up this assertion.

Remember, the standard being discussed is:

In order for the hypothetical Muslim man’s actions to be in accordance with this standard we would need to find that he would not object to having acid thrown in his own face.

As this seems to stretch the imagination, I respectfully conclude that all you have shown is that some hypothetical people could be motivated by religion or culture to perform acts not in accordance with Hillel’s motto.

You need to think this through further.

Naturally nobody wants acid thrown in their face. However, a suitably devout practitioner might very well accept this as just punishment. When I get a speeding ticket I don’t like it but I don’t think it was unfair or wrong either (assuming I actually was speeding). I know the laws, I understand the penalties for breaking those laws and I agree with those punishments. For the sake of argument assume our hypothetical Muslim man does as well for the acid treatment.

Conveniently I don’t think men have to face the acid-in-the-face punishment but assuming they did I would expect a devout practitioner of Islam to say it is a just and moral penalty for breaking Islamic law. If they did such a thing they would expect no less (again assuming such a law pertained to them…if you don’t like this assumption you can pick from a bevy of similarly extreme punishments for breaking various Islamic laws).

Our Muslim friend does not find the act despicable. Our Muslim friend, while not liking the thought of acid in his face, may still agree with the act itself and accept it if he broke Islamic law in such a way as to merit such punishment. In this case he is still within Hillel’s philosophy.

Polycarp:

In and of itself, I’ve never had a problem with the “Golden Rule” (or any subsidiaries thereof), either practically or intellectually. I believe we would be wrong, however, to consider it to be the guiding principle for human ethics.

Where I imagine we would differ is here: I, personally, prefer the utilitarian ethic of promoting the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number. When faced with a moral quandry, it is to utility that I most often refer. As such, I prefer to view your second directive above as a means used to achieve the end of human happiness.

From my point of view, this can only be the case if the application of this law will always – without exception – produce the greatest good. As soon as a plausible scenario is imagined in which an individual act of injustice (in the sense that it violates your second law) would lead to greater human happiness than a just action in the same circumstances, your law ceases to be universal to humanity.

On the other hand, we seldom (or never, I suppose) have perfect knowledge of the consequences of our actions. To the extent that we are ignorant of the consequences of a given choice, “do unto others. . .” seems a perfectly reasonable personal guideline.

Polycarp, I’m not clear on what you’re saying. If “his and her” standards are “do whatever you want without any concern for how it affects others”, that would contradict your moral law, right? So why did you advise him to follow it?

Presumably if you love others as yourself you would be willing to commit suicide to save the children.

Eh, I dunno TR, that doesn’t add up correctly. If you love a person as you love yourself, why would you kill him? This is the same scenario as the acid in the face, “Well, if it was me,” one would say, “I’d want someone to do the same thing.” That justification can be used to rape the children in the first place.