Social imperatives ? Internally consistent logic ? The principles that achieves the greatest good for the greatest number of people ? What makes us feel good or right (i.e. rationalized emotional well-being) ? Dogmatic axioms posited to make subjective sense of an ultimately senseless world ? Take your pick.
Exactly - we base things on outcomes (or notions of them at least).
It’s the same for nearly every human activity - when we build a bridge across a river, we specify that it must carry X amount of load, the roadway should be Y metres wide and the clearance underneath should be Z metres from the high water mark - then we perform a bunch of analysis and design, then activities that are expected to bring about the desired outcome.
What we don’t do is: declare that the outcomes of having a functional bridge is just magically impossible, and that we need to consult some external authority who (without showing his workings) will tell us what we need to do in order to build a bridge to XYZ requirements. It’s not necessary to do that.
And so it is with ethics - we form structures and conventions that are (intended to) bring about a desired result. Sometimes we do it collectively and without any explicit planned activity - just as a result of our interactions with one another - and other times, we codify it and do it on purpose. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails or falls short of the desired outcomes.
Actually, that leads to another angle of refutation. If morality and ethics is derived from a higher power that knows how morality should be constructed in order to be ‘good’, why isn’t it perfect? Why don’t we have a social and ethical structure that literally makes it impossible for me to do a ‘bad’ thing?
If you want to attack moral realism via evolution you would do better to read Sharon Street’s A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value (PDF).
The OP’s focus on “the survival of the fittest” is bizarre and doesn’t resemble any contemporary discourse of morality I’ve seen. AFAIK the only groups who claimed to base their morality on that were fascist dictatorships, early 20th century eugenicists, cut-throat capitalists, and various racial supremacy groups. They’re using the dubious appeal to nature argument (what is natural is good).
Moral realist positions are numerous. That chart doesn’t include everything, but gives a sense of the competing factions.
According to the PhilPapers survey, 72% of surveyed philosophers are atheists and 56% are moral realists.
About the closest the OP came to attacking secular ethics was the social contract, or constructivism. This doesn’t have to be about moral realism per se, but how morals are formed by societies. For example, child labor was once considered moral, then societies decided it wasn’t (or it’s OK as long as they’re far away making our clothes). Oddly, the OP describes this as magic or creating something out of nothing. The veil of ignorance appeals to people’s self interest, not a higher power.
Secular moral realism, basically anything besides divine command theory, doesn’t rely on evolution being true or not, especially given it existed before evolution was described. Evolution is usually brought up in terms of how much or even if we should trust our moral intuitions. In some cases, such as placing a high value on kin or finding incest distasteful it’s obvious that selection for fitness isn’t logical, except for the prudential logic of “if one wants to sexually reproduce fit offspring, one ought not breed with close kin.” This doesn’t mean that all moral intuitions are wrong. Even if they are, it doesn’t preclude there being moral facts. It just means we don’t have access to them, just like there may be true math or physics we aren’t smart enough to perceive.
Personally, the best argument I’ve seen for moral realism, or maybe against being an error theorist, was put forth by David Enoch. The elevator pitch is: If you can construct an error theory for moral norms you can construct an error theory for epistemological norms, but this is self defeating and destroys logic.
Interestingly, if you believe in realism for moral and epistemological norms then you have to allow arguments for real aesthetic norms. Some people aren’t willing to bite that bullet, others bite it with gusto. Cuneo goes into more detail on this in his book The Normative Web.
Here’s (PDF) a short piece by Enoch arguing for moral realism (the spinach argument). Note the lack of references to a higher power or evolution.
Why I think morality gets tricky is because of what’s sometimes called intersubjectivity, or what Searle called observer-relative facts. These are things like languages, government, money, social manners, rules of games or sport, basically most human institutions. In a way the rules of chess are a descriptive fact – this is how people play chess. They’re written down, you can point to them. But you could wave a magic wand and brainwash people to believe the rules are different. But then they would be confused by old archived games and the old written rules. So they’re not totally mind independent, but they’re not exactly subjective opinions either. There’s probably not a platonic form of chess out there we’re striving to capture. I think morality might be like that. There are in some sense rules to writing a good book, and some obvious ones most can agree on, but there’s still a matter of taste that changes over time too.
Thanks for this. I don’t agree with Enoch (I feel test 2 and 3 contradict each other, for example - arguing for the phenomenological approach in the here-and-now, but a being a privileged observer/judge to past moral actions seems wrong somehow) but he argues his case very well.
So, you’d be just like Ted Bundy if you weren’t afraid of Hellfire…
Another thank you, marshmallow. Like MrDibble, I don’t find myself in agreement with Mr. Enoch, but I also think he argues his case well.
Or if there wasn’t some external authority to point out that Bundy was bad.
The biggest debunking of all is that people who don’t have a positive faith act ethically and altruistically with frequency.
I’m a deist of the “God doesn’t interfere and isn’t personified” sense - i.e. I don’t have any belief that God rewards behavior - so from a moral perspective, I’m a secularist. Saturday I was at Costco picking up things for a party. There was a nun behind me buying folding chairs. She was counting out her cash and counting her chairs and finally got into line. I had the cashier ring up some of her chairs on me. Complete stranger. I’m not Catholic (I used to be), I don’t believe God is going to reward me for that, there was nothing in it for me - why did I do it?
Where exactly does God say that what Bundy did was bad?
AFAIK God is OK with raping people, outside the group at least. Or with holding slaves or stoning the adultress etc.
So did we get the moral, that raping people is bad, from God or somewhere else?
Where do people with different religions and different cultures in time get their different morals from?
The OP used these against each other. That would be valid only if he established that the two arguments were always used together. Some people might believe one, other believe the other. No contradiction.
While it is not the in-the-moment calculation, I don’t take things from people weaker than me because i don’t want people stronger than me taking my things. Living in a group/society with people who believe that makes things easier. Not outside creator needed. And, if the larger group thinks they can manage to take stuff from a smaller group they might do that and call it politics, war or some other explanation as to why it is “different”.
This argument fails. Here’s one reason why it can be logical for the vast majority of people to have a non-nihilist moral system: I get pleasure and satisfaction from the approval and love of the people around me, therefore it is logical for me to act in a way that maintains and extends this approval and love. The best way to do this is to treat people decently and with respect.
There are nigh-infinite other such logical moral constructs. That every single one doesn’t apply to every human doesn’t matter. Perhaps for some very small number of people, the most “logical” moral system for them to follow is an entirely selfish one (or a nihilist one), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not logical for most other people to follow an altruistic moral system.
I think it’s the OP’s position that we don’t figure it out ourselves, we tap into some universal dictionary of good/bad.
It doesn’t hold water as an idea, as discussed above.
This argument is always extremely creepy to me, because what it really boils down to once you strip away all of the pseudoscience, the illogical “logic,” and the semantic games is, “If God isn’t going to punish you for it, why not kill, rape, and steal to your heart’s content?” the implication of which is that’s the only thing stopping them from doing those things, and that makes them sociopaths.
To the OP: Would any god and/or religion suit your purpose, and if not, which one(s) would?
Not the Maya or Aztecs, I would hope. Their Gods gave them some serious fucked up morals.
If you’re going to base a theory on the existence of God then the obvious explanation is that God gave us brains so we could determine ethics and morality on a rational basis and recognize false prophets. You can’t demonstrate that any of the allegedly God given ethics have any divine inspiration but if you do believe in God then you must believe he gave us the intelligence to work these things out for ourselves. If you can’t prove that religious morality comes from God it is just another human creation anyway and one which is dubious for it’s axiomatic basis when countered by observable and demonstrable argument.
It’s obviously turtles all the way up. Why would there be any difference between up and down ? Mangetout, you disappoint me. :o
And re. the OP: I would try to make a theory based upon empirical data. The empirical data shows very clearly that the more secular a society is, the more morally it behaves. I will define that societies that claimed to be secular, but were subjects to some overarching ideology like Fascism or Marxism, as religious, in the same way as we normally consider Buddhism a religion.
Thus my first approximation would be that ethics are built in the operating system of humans, and “god” ethics are a way to obfuscate those ethics in the service of some controlling class.
Hey, any religion which includes ritualized symbolic cannibalism shouldn’t be pointing fingers.
hey now; let’s remember that to practitioners it isn’t symbolic at all. That is the actual body and blood of their savior that they are consuming, made so by Divine transubstantiation.
Well, my counter to this binary argument is that the pleasure Ted Bundy experiences is disproportionate to the amount of misery he has perpetuated. Is this a satisfactory answer? I’m guessing it may be more complicated than that.
Perhaps not having things like murder or rape legal allows me to have a less stressful life. Perhaps their absence leads to a more successful society where there are more jobs, healthcare and lasting benefits relative to reckless impulsive violence?