IF I don’t rob, cheat, hurt or kill others, others will be less likely to want to do the same to me. There’s also that “Shared pain is lessened, and shared Joy increased” thing I heard once from a guy named “Spider”.
I think I know him: great guy, goes on and on about power and responsibility?
No, the one I’m talking about strums a guitar at a little place called Callahan’s.
Time travelers strictly cash.
The natural world is all that exists.
I base my ethics on the idea that we should work to minimize suffering.
It comes from me being a social mammal.
I suppose… However, Bundy was imprisoned and executed, so, by a rational assessment of pleasure, he did come out with a really significant deficit. Also, I don’t know if basing an argument on an extreme outlying anomaly is terrifically valid. Bundy was very different from the rest of us.
He doesn’t seem willing to say so. Most of us would say that Bundy was seriously defective, and not a “model of man.”
Even worse, there are hundreds of theological moral systems out there: how, other than people making their choice are we to know which one to follow?
I’m with you on this. And it’s absurd to say that people won’t follow a code that was created by other people. The cultural consensus is one of the major sources of moral guidance. That’s why (in my region of the world) we don’t eat dog and horse meat. There’s no objective reason not to; it’s just a cultural value. Since that’s just something we, as people, make up, the “higher power” is no more (and no less!) than vox populi.
What are our ethics based off of?
A combination of millions of years of evolution hard wiring a set of common intuitions and heuristics and emotional preferences (some variation in this obviously, there are psychopaths that are wired differently and consequently have radically different collections of intuitions and emotions) coupled with thousands of years of human civilization providing cultures that are a sort of software that runs on top of our human hardware to provide different variations in human ethics. But it is ALWAYS bootstrapped to something VERY real and part of the natural world, our brains.
When someone asks me where my ethics come from, I respond…
From nature, from my culture and society, and some of my own individual perspectives thrown into the mix. Is that ABSOLUTELY and constant in a universal sense? Well no, but it does not need to be. Same for “ultimate meaning” in a world where people die and in the end humanity will be nothing but ashes and the void. Does something not have meaning if it is not immortal? Like the religious conception where people never truly die? Where small men afraid of death and their own ultimate place in existence refuse to face their own mortality and buy into a fantasy world where it’s all sunshine and rainbows and ETERNAL genuflecting to a celestial dictator for the rest of existence?
No thanks.
I can’t remember where I read it, but one cute argument about moral realism is that if it’s as real as math or physics then at some point computers should teach us about morality, just as they’ve taught us things we didn’t know about math or physics. Depending on what you think about the validity of our moral intuitions this could be reassuring or frightening.
Their morals seem defensible. Wouldn’t you perform human sacrifice to save the world? They were wrong on the facts. There isn’t a cosmic war and the sun doesn’t need our help to survive.
It could be that morals are as real – and as complex – as, say, the weather. Computers only recently got to the point where they can tell us stuff about the weather we didn’t know. i.e., a full simulation of an ethical/moral system might take supercomputers a long time to work out.
(On the other hand, the Golden Rule works in a strong majority of cases!)
…but under your argument, there’s nothing “bad” about being a sociopath.
In fact one person above more or less stated that there was no reason Bundy “shouldn’t” have raped and murdered, just that most people find that being respectful of people a better means to an end of achieving happiness.
So if he was logically consistent, then if he somehow discovered being a killer was a better means to that end, he’d have no problem with becoming Bundy.
So his argument actually sounds quite a bit more sociopathic - he claims he doesn’t respect others out of moral principle, just as a means to an end, which of course is true about actual sociopaths as well, such as Hitler.
Essentially he’s saying that everyone is actually a sociopath, that most just don’t act on the worse of their impulses because it’s typically not the most efficient way of getting what they want, but there’s no reason they shouldn’t if hypothetically, it was.
The formal laws of the universe, mathematics, aesthetics, where objective morality derives from.
That of course wouldn’t be the source of our higher nature, such as our aesthetic sense, rather merely our lower moral sentiments, just as species such as ants have basic altruistic instincts pre-programmed into them, but aren’t able to question then and act according to logical moral rules, merely respond to them on impulse.
That’s actually more of a myth, in fact it’s debatable that there’s any fundamental difference between a ‘sociopath’ and a normal individual.
Sociopaths simply don’t rationally restrain the lower or more primal impulses like normal people do, but all people are capable of them in dire situations, such as warfare.
Cultures and laws don’t provide ‘ethics’, simply formal rules meant to institutionalize ethical principles for the masses.
In reality though, cultures derive from values, not vice versa.
[quote]
But it is ALWAYS bootstrapped to something VERY real and part of the natural world, our brains.
Then if tomorrow your society voted to round up Jews and throw them into gas chambers, you’d go along with the gestapo?
As opposed to going against ‘society’ and joining the resistence?
How do you know that? There are quite a bit of different theories about the end of the universe, one of course being that in the end the universe will basically ‘reset’ itself from scratch.
So that would contradict your claim of course.
Science you mean?
Only the physical body is mortal, the human’s essential being is not the body of course, the body being like a good horse, or vehicle which the human pilots, and the brain being the controls of said vehicle.
I’d venture one can prove logically the notion of complete non-existence after the death of one’s body fails the logic tests, so I’d say the continuity of one’s existence after the death of their body is more or less logical fact which can be taken for granted.
Since you apparently can’t be bothered to specify which “one person” you have in mind there, I honestly don’t know who you’re thinking of – but, again: you do a big fine job of building up to that impressive last bit, and seem to expect it to do the heavy lifting; why? It’s exactly as if you already figure people will clutch their pearls and agree with you that such a thing would be unacceptable!
It’s exactly as if you don’t need to appeal to anything beyond life as we’re currently living it; your point is one that a secularist could make to a secularist; the only way it could have the desired effect on a secularist is – well, by relying on the fact that it does, on its own: that such people naturally don’t see things that way.
I mean, you’re of course still ducking the interesting question of why it’d be any different if people based their morals on “because a god said so”, and that’s a real shame. But as a side effect, the lack of “god” talk here means you’re instead basing your pitch on – what? You’re plainly making an appeal to something; to what? What do you expect will stir within a secularist when you launch into that?
And you of course do it again, in the next post:
You obviously expect that to provoke the right answer from the guy; you’re replying to a secularist, and your reply only really makes sense if you think he’s already firmly on the side of defending innocents against ‘gestapo’ types.
What do you think that means? That the guy can be reasoned with, because you can appeal to something within him – something that will react with a moral response? I mean, hey, full marks for that, but to the extent that it’s something you think you can work with, isn’t it something you think you can work with?
That’s an interesting juxtaposition, there. If you say, “The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters a second,” and I say, “Prove it,” there’s a number of repeatable experiments that you can perform to demonstrate what you say. If you say, “The area of a circle is equal to pi times the square of the radius,” and I say, “Prove it,” again, there’s all sorts of ways you can demonstrate that.
If you say, “Murder is immoral,” and I say, “Prove it,” what can you show me?
Physics tells us that for any action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The laws of morality tells us that for any action, whether or not there’s a reaction depends on if you get caught, and what the person who catches you thinks of your action. Drop a brick off a roof, and the brick will always move at a speed dictated by gravity. Drop a brick off a roof an onto someone’s head, killing them, and the outcome is entirely up to whether or not another human can figure out that you did it. That’s pretty much the opposite of an objective law.
Also, are you suggesting that aesthetics are also universal? Because if you are, this.
That’s one hell of an unearned “of course.” If ants can have basic altruism pre-prgrammed into them by evolutionary forces, why can’t humans’ more complex sense of altruism also be a function of evolutionary forces? Why can’t our ability to think and reason, likewise, be naturally derived? If we have a process that explains how that behavior came about in ants, isn’t it most logical to assume that a similar behavior in humans came about through a similar natural process?
We’re shaped by the society we grew up in. Most of us here didn’t grow up in a society that normalized violent anti-Semitism, so if the US went all Nazi Genocide all of a sudden, it would not be the society any of us were raised in.
On the other hand, if we’d all been born in Germany in 1910, and right now it was 1940… who knows? Yeah, I’d like to think I’d be standing up against the fascists, but I grew up in a liberal democracy that, after WWII, largely defined itself in opposition to fascism. If I’d been born a hundred years ago in a different country, I wouldn’t be me. I’d be that German guy who died a couple decades ago, and who knows what he would have done?
And you can point to where in the brain this “pilot” sits? What controls he uses? How he gets in and out of his “vehicle?” Can you show any evidence at all for the existence of this pilot? Because until you can, I’m going to stick with explanations that have some evidence to them - not explanations that we really want to be true, because the alternative kind of sucks.
I’m pretty certain you can’t prove any such thing, but I’m open to seeing you try.
Whether or not it’s “bad” is a matter of opinion. My opinion is that being a serial killer is really, really bad.
For the vast majority of us, it would make us really unhappy to be a serial killer. Or to steal what other people own. Or to be rude to others. There’s an aspect to altruism, that when I give of myself, it’s actually ME that I’m pleasing, so is that really altruism? But for people like Bundy, and there are a few, we have laws that make it so that they WON’T be happy if they act in antisocial ways.
It’s a plain fact that this is what happens. But what else can we do? People act how they want to act, and the rest of society puts rules in place so that the few weirdos are mostly kept in check.
What was your point again?
Sure, if you’re a Catholic. But those Protestants are only willing to take it half way.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying that there is a universal moral code. And the laws of human societies derive from this singular code.
If that’s the case, why do different societies have different laws? Shouldn’t they all have the same laws if those laws are based on a common moral code?
No, I certainly don’t think that’s something you can take for granted.
Go on then.
No such thing.
A human construct
Another human construct
Is this meant to be a summation of the other 3 (like, is there a missing “are” at the start) or a big mystery box 4th item? Would you care to expand, in either case?