Well, yeah. Of course I think my objectives are better than other objectives; if I didn’t, they wouldn’t be my objectives.
What are your objectives?
For most of human history, what we call “murder” and “theft” were a great way to achieve an individuals objectives. It’s still that way in most of the world. Only here and now does it “seem” different. Murder is becoming harder to get away with in the western world, but theft is still a really good way to amass great wealth. Look at the recent story on 60 Minutes about Medicare fraud… people stealing millions individually and possibly billions collectively and no-one minding the store.
Killing your rival and gaining his resources or opportunities is consistent, workable, and how the universe works in most areas of nature, for all of the history of life on this planet, and lead to outcomes that satisfy the desires of the killer. Male lions drive off or kill the rival leader of a pride, and kill his offspring so they can father their own.
You really have to “believe” in order to override the overwhelming evidence against it. Why should you believe, “it’s fair that everyone have the same opportunity,” when, “I’ll just kill him, take his stuff and make more opportunities for me,” is, to quote you:
“…workable in practice…” (and makes) “sense with what we know about how the universe works…”
Everyone thinks their objectives are better than others; that’s why you can’t choose any one set over any others.
And for ALL of human history SOCIETIES have punished individuals who murder and steal. Because the other individuals who have to live with a murderer or a thief find those actions intolerable. That’s why murdering and stealing are wrong. The fact that sometime people break the rules does not mean the rules don’t exist.
What may be confusing you is that often societies have different rules for “insiders” and “outsiders”. Cheating a stranger is fine. Cheating your brother is not. Killing someone from the next valley is okay. Killing your next-door neighbor is not. Human beings have an innate moral sense only when it comes to small groups. Extending those impulses to a larger human community requires conscious effort. (But an effort that is necessary in order to live an any society larger than a small band of hunter-gatherers.)
But killing someone and taking his stuff is NOT workable in practice in any place where the social order hasn’t completely broken down. If you start murdering your neighbors your neighbors will quickly band together and put an end to you. Because killing and stealing from members of your own family/tribe/clan/community is always considered wrong.
If one set of rules produces widespread pain, suffering and misery, and another doesn’t, wouldn’t you say those are rational criteria for choosing one set of rules over another?
Again with the attempt to evade the painful knowledge that people espousing ideas very similar to yours shed more blood in the 20th century than anyone else. The Marxist/Communist movement has quasi-religious aspects, as does any mass movement, but to equate its philosophy and principles with monotheistic religion borders on madness. Doubleplusgood doublethink, Comrade Der.
Congratulations. That paragraph actually manages to outdo Ayn Rand for simple-minded either-or, black-or-white thinking.
But the Communists didn’t murder people because of atheism. They murdered them because they adopted an inflexible ideology that they were willing to pursue no matter what the consequences. And while Communism officially embraced atheism, Nazism didn’t. Some Nazis were atheists, some were Christians. What united them was not their views on religion, but their commitment to a toxic value system.
I think existentialism is the best possible philosophy for the current age, or any age short of utopia. Why?
Because when you come right down to it, it’s just you and the bullshit. And you don’t matter.
But if you fight the bullshit, you at least mean something - even if you matter nothing.
Fascinating answer. It prompts me to ask again: what are your objectives?
[quote=“Snowboarder_Bo, post:67, topic:544237”]
[quote=“ch4rl3s, post:63, topic:544237”]
Notice how the atheists say they are demonstrably as good as others, but the best example they give for a logically derived ethic is: “keep the relatives of those you kill from killing you, and also not to run afoul of secular police authority.” Do you notice that what they are pushing as good isn’t even the average standard I’ve been suggesting. It’s worse* than that. Not doing anything that would get you arrested and removed from society is the **absolute minimum **we ask to let you live in society.
(emphasis mine.)
Whaaa??? Do you even read the posts??? I obviously “made it up myself,” “to bear false witness against others,” by the simple expedient of directly quoting Voyager immediately before my comment.
That’s the best example so far given with a reason behind it. and… Like I said, not getting yourself removed from society is the absolute minimum we ask to let you stay in society.
It’s not my “moral instincts” I’m using as the test.
Sorry, I often forget that not everyone understands what they are arguing about. Even though the direct implication of my statement was that since we have a codified set of writings, we have to test what any spirit, (or human,) tells us against those writings. I will admit that you probably had no way of knowing that that was what the bible teaches as well, though.
No. I wouldn’t. Not unless you have already arbitrarily selected, “Less pain, suffering, and misery is good” as your purpose. And then there is no reasoning required. It automatically suits the purpose.
It’s a circular argument. If you define “less suffering” as “good” then choosing the set of rules that causes less suffering is good. No thinking required. It’s the deciding how to rationally choose “less suffering” as “good” part that you haven’t described in any detail yet. How do you get around averaging in the purposes of serial killers and anyone that doesn’t already hold your beliefs into your objective standard?
It doesn’t matter for the purposes of this discussion. My question has always been, how do you incorporate my purposes, your purposes, and everyone elses purposes into an objective standard set of morals?
That’s not arbitrary; that’s what the vast majority of people want.
Serial killers are trying to inflict unwanted suffering on others. Morality is all about what standard we can all agree to live with.
And again; the collective desire of humanity is a better moral standard than mutually contradictory claims about the hypothetical desires of a god or gods that there is no evidence for. Religion fails completely as a moral standard, both from a moral and rational standard. It produces vile behavior and has no rational basis for its claims.
I’ve already dealt with this.
We all choose the facts we accept. I choose to believe that my dog chased a squirrel the other day, and that a while back a car flipped over one morning and landed in my yard. I choose to believe these things because I have evidence for them. I can’t prove to you that they happened, but I believe them to be objectively true. And if they had wide ranging implications, (they don’t,) our logical world views would differ based on whether we believed these facts or not.
Did OJ Simpson kill his ex? Did Rodney King act in a way that provoked the police to think he was resisting arrest? These have an objective truth value, and yet peoples views differ wildly and these questions have wide ranging implications to the societal view people have. But, people choose which facts they accept. Most of the time, we’re taking someone’s word on something anyway, and accepting their interpretation of the facts, (and accepting that they have the facts.) And we can get it wrong, and they can get it wrong.
Sure it is. Because choosing to believe is what we all do. I don’t have a magic wand to tell me which “facts” are true, and neither do you. We all make choices. If you don’t have the truth value of the premise, (and often you don’t,) then you find a conclusion you have evidence for, or accept, and work backwards. See which premises lead to that conclusion. (or take it as your premise and see what you can prove from it. It often amounts to the same thing.)
And if you choose to accept conclusion “a” because you have evidence for it, and it can only come about from premise “A,” then it doesn’t matter if you have any other evidence for premise “A.” you simply must accept it for the sake of logical consistancy.
Only if you are a believer of some variety. Otherwise, we study the facts first, extrapolate from them, and arrive at our understanding of the world that way. Whether you like it or not, postulating a conclusion first are creating some fact-free chain of “logic” to justify your assumption isn’t good reasoning. No matter how may time you claim it is.
Choosing what you believe is an act of madness, it is the denial of reality. The fact that it is central to religion is a major cause of the worthlessness of religion.
Of course it does! You’re talking up the importance of following a codified set of writings; if someone tells me that, No, I Reject The Part About Executing Homosexuals and someone else replies But We’ve Got To Follow The Codified Set Of Writings, then I of course want to hear why it’s so important to follow the codified set of writings. You say it’s arbitrary to select “Less Pain, Suffering, And Misery Is Good” as a purpose; I’m asking why it’s not arbitrary to select “Doing God’s Will Is Good” as a purpose.
If I’m phrasing your purpose badly, then by all means rephrase it while answering the question. But how you answer that question speaks directly to the point; does your justification differ from an existentialist’s? If so, how?
*Everyone *wants less suffering for themselves. Even serial killers (who care about no one but themselves) want to avoid personal suffering. And virtually everyone (with the exception of a few pathological cases) wants less suffering for their family & friends.
So, yes, I feel fairly comfortable in saying that a desire to avoid suffering is a human universal. The only question is how far we extend that desire to others beyond our immediate circle. But if you say “suffering is bad for me, but good for you”, you need to justify why. What rationale to you have for distinguishing what’s good for me and my friends, from what’s good for you and your friends?
You can certainly imagine some bizarre society where everyone thinks suffering is good, but why? Such a society has never existed in reality, and indeed, there’s nothing to suggest that such a society would even be possible for human beings to achieve. We’re just not wired that way. It’s as much a fantasy as a society where everyone is completely selfless, or a society where everyone only sleeps one hour a night.
[quote=“The_Hamster_King, post:118, topic:544237”]
*Everyone *wants less suffering for themselves. Even serial killers (who care about no one but themselves) want to avoid personal suffering. And virtually everyone (with the exception of a few pathological cases) wants less suffering for their family & friends.
So, yes, I feel fairly comfortable in saying that a desire to avoid suffering is a human universal. [\QUOTE]
Sure, the real question is in how we try to avoid suffering. More on that later in the post.
When I’m imagining the rationale of an atheist, I’m not saying “suffering is bad for me, but good for you”, I’m saying “suffering is bad for me, but your suffering may be good for me. And there is no other rationale that I need to listen to. As soon as your suffering benefits me, I don’t need to justify it; it’s good. for. me.” There is no rational reason for an atheist to ever do anything that doesn’t ultimately benefit them. The only reason to deny this is that we try to make the benefits of killing us and taking our stuff really small and the penalties high. And that isn’t a denial of the actual point, it’s actually an acknowledgement of the point.
Let’s imagine such a society. I’m imagining a society where the young, on a very regular basis, think that the elders are unfair, mean, hateful, deliberately trying to make them suffer, and evil. Why on earth would the elders of this society not let the young, for instance, have cake for breakfast, or wear that short skirt to school, or go to that unsupervised party, or take the car wherever… Can’t they see how much the young suffer, (and they really do suffer, if you’ve ever watched closely, they are in agony and really think the elders are evil in that moment… for not letting them do whatever they want.) So, why would the elders allow this suffering? To teach lessons, to make the young better people, and… to prevent greater suffering later? What obvious hogwash. This society universally seems to believe that the suffering is necessary for growth and improvement. That working through the suffering is better than alleviating it now. (Well, almost univrsally believed, present company excluded, apparently.) But we all know that those elders are evil, don’t we? And if you haven’t figured out which society this is, it’s almost every one on earth… ever.
ha.
If humans allow this suffering temporarily to promote the growth of their young to adulthood, why do so many atheists that I talk to on this board have a problem accepting that a benevolent creator, trying to promote our growth into something much more than merely human, would allow even greater suffering temporarily? But I do hear them saying they think that this proposed elder is, (just like I hear from children,) unfair, mean, hateful, deliberately trying to make them suffer, and evil.
But, it’s only children who still believe that is evil. When children mature, they realize that the elders did have good in mind for them, and don’t look on those memories the same way anymore. I’ve used these analogies before, specifically with Der Trihs, but no one seems to get it. If there is a benevolent creator much more intelligent than us, than we, like children, may not understand the lesson yet and be like children trying to explain adult motives to other children. Only someone who thought their intellect was the end all and be all of the universe would think differently. The universe could still look the way it does now, and have a benevolent, loving creator.
continuing the thought.
I can show it’s possible, but, like I said about us all choosing what we wish to believe, he will never accept it even though he said…
Even though he shows that’s what he does all the time. Denies reasonable explanations. Even though most thinking atheists realize that they can’t disprove the existence of such a god. Der Trihs is adamant that he has. Complete denial of reality. He’s not even worth talking to, and I always eventually wonder why I keep doing it. But, people like Snowboarder Bo, and The Hamster King keep falling into the same intellectual abyss, so I keep doing it.
Once more… If you have two starting points, (A, and B) that you can not conclusively prove one way or the other, even if you are led to think A is more likely than B… If A leads to a conclusion (a) you can’t accept about the world, and B leads to the conclusion (b) you like and have reason to believe, why would you insist on believing A and b? That is what isn’t logical.
And about denying reality? We don’t even know what reality is, and most physicists have stopped asking the question. They deny they are even looking for reality anymore. They can’t tell you what an electron is doing when they aren’t looking, they can only give you a probability of what they will find when they do look. And they shy away from the question of what is really going on.
There’s more if you want it. I don’t deny anything we can objectively call reality. I don’t deny your experience. I deny that your experience acurately depicts reality.