[QUOTE=Jaochai]
Before I go on, I’d like to say that most of the people I know are atheists - I have a lot more atheist friends than I do Christian ones, and my only Buddhist friend is the lady at Einstein Brothers. (I have plenty of Buddhist enemies, though, but that’s because I’m such a sectarian asshole.) So I don’t operate under the assumption that all atheists are simply waiting for everyone’s back to turn before they start stealing and raping.
Well, I’d understand if you think I did. But at the very least, I don’t want people to think that, and I’m not arguing from that position. Most people don’t make these kinds of inquiries into their actions and the source of their actions, and thus they act o a more basic level.
Oh, people of all kinds have senses of guilt, moral compasses, and the like. But without an afterlife, a serious philosophical examination of them can only come to the conclusion that they are on the same level as, say, a fear of flying.
Seeing as Skinner discovered that it’s possible to instill phobias and moral codes - and anti-moral codes, which is not a term that he used but I hope you get my drift when I use it - in people not only against their reason but against their very wills, is there any basis for the belief that a consience is a real failsafe or a source of ‘correct action?’
So, I give you a challenge. Imagine that you are a guest in my home. (not the home I live in now, because it’s so messy that I wouldn’t show it to guests.) I go to the bathroom, and I leave my computer unattended, internet up and logged into all the wrong places. A perfect opportunity to write yourself an electronic cheque from my personal account! So why don’t you do it?
If it’s because you’d be found out, or because I’ll come back too quickly, well, that’s just risk allocation. Does that mean that you would do it if the risk were less, compared to the reward?
If it’s because it’s ‘wrong’ to steal, well, what does that mean? If you’re taking a class of actions, categorizing them as ‘wrong,’ and avoiding them, isn’t that just another religion? How is that different, on a materialist level, from, say, keeping kosher? Surely nobody’s holding up fish-only-on-friday as a paragon of morality.
If it’s because it’s against your moral compass, or it’ll make you feel guilty, well, haven’t you read The Behavior of Organisms? The moral compass is subtly different for everybody, and not only that but it changes over time and can be explicitly changed by outside intervention. Does that imply that if you didn’t feel guilty, you’d do it? Some people have larger guilt complexes then the average, and feel guilty, for example, asking for refunds when they get the wrong order at restaurants. Whose guilt complex is the one that’s accurate?
If it’s because it’s simply abstractly wrong, then isn’t that just another religion? How do you go, logically, from that which is empirically observable to the idea that a given action is morally wrong? How is that even conceptually possible?
Also, I can’t help but feel you’re being somewhat rude to me. I know that that’s inevitable when we’re both attacking what is essentially the core foundation of the other person’s sense of self and self-worth, but I think comments like “To persons who have NOT had their moral sensibilities brainwashed out of them,” “This may be hard to understand if your only moral guide is the rantings of your God and/or priest, but it is true nonetheless,” and especially “but it also might be because the arbitrary crap you’ve been fed by your religion is flawed instead. (The main difference being, thought goes into the atheist’s moral compass.)” are all a wee-bit uncalled for. If I’ve been rude to you, or to comments that weren’t explicitly addressed to you but are yours in spirit, I sincerely apologize. The temptation to yell at people who disagree with me is ever-present (and effervescent), but I try to rise above it, if only because it’s unhealthy and makes me more likely to do it in the future. That’s risk-allocation ethics right there, but it keeps me from doing it.
[/QUOTE]
Pardon the belated reply - been busy.
Regarding the vitriol, as I noted, persons who seriously advance the “persons without the fear of the afterlife are loose cannons” argument scare the hell out of me. They seem much more likely to do something horrible or evil than any random atheist, both in theory and in my personal experience. And fear inspires defensiveness, inspiring attack. (I was going to say “preemptive attack”, but since I see the “absent the threat of hell I see no reason not to kill you” argument to inherently be a threat, regardless of source, I was therefore reacting to that, and not acting pre-emptively.)
One thing you seem to be forgetting in your above post is that, by your argument, the religious folk are also doing risk allocation - merely risk allocation that you (inaccurately*) are assessing to be 100% guaranteed risk. So the fact you seem to be pooh-poohing risk-allocation ethics strikes me as off the point and self-defeating: if risk-based ethics are somehow inherently ‘worse’ ethics, then religious people are in the same boat -or worse- than anybody else. They can’t escape the fact that there’s always a percieved carrot and stick hanging over their heads.
- I note also that it is inaccurate to assume that the fear of damnation or other heavenly punishment is a 100% perfect restraint for all religious persons. Many of them believe in something called “repentance” or “grace”. Both of these allow a certain amount of moral slippage, as does the fact that a feiry aftermath is not as strongly stressed or as effectively impressed upon all believers. (I have seen this in practice, as well.) So this takes the 100% out of the religious risk allocation and really levels the playing field.
At this point it shoudl be clear that the “I would be evil without god, so you must be evil too” argument doesn’t hold water - there is nothing different about the religious and non-religious approaches in this argument except that they are assessing a different set of carrots and sticks. The only possible value this argument could have hinges entirely upon you demonstrating that religious folks have a tendency to assess evil actions at a higher level of risk than atheists do - which you have not shown. At best, you have argued (inaccurately) that religious folk assess things which they have been told are evil at 100% risk. You’ve given no substantial reason to suppose that atheists don’t come to the same conclusion of 100% risk about things that they think are evil - and you’ve given no reason to think that theists are more likely to reach correct conclusions about what is “actually” evil (which would be a hard standard to even define). Lacking these critical points, both of which have already been cast into doubt, the argument is worthless.
Now, not that it matters, (since the argument has been, in my estimation, utterly destroyed), but I shall address your questions about risk-assessment morality.
Regarding your example with the computer and banking websites, this is a poor example because in my estimation, there is 100% risk of getting caught. It’s a computer, for goodness’ sake. It records everything. Especially regarding a banking website. If I transferred money, your website would tell you straight up “transfer of $# to account ####” in your banking records, and you could easily ask about that and discover what I’d done. So in this example, I’m perhaps more compelled to be moral than a God-fearing theist, since there’s no way for me to ‘repent’ in the eyes of you or the bank. So, like I said, poor example.
So, let’s suppose that the money was instead lying in cash on the desk. No, wait, the larger the sum of money that’s there, the greater the proportional likelihood that you’re aware of it and would notice if it disappeared. It might not be as easy for you to trace the theft back to me, but there’s no way I can convince myself that there’s any decent probability that you wouldn’t notice it. So, even if I didn’t have anything but the fear of you catching me controlling my actions, I still wouldn’t do it.
You see, most people don’t say, “oh, there’s a 50% chance of getting caught, so there’s a 50% change I’ll do it.” There doesn’t have to be very much risk at all for me to start assessing the action as if the worst-case scenarios as if they were seriously possible. Of course, maybe that’s just me. Maybe most people are like “What? 1 in 5 people who try this die horrible agonizing deaths? I like those odds! Bring it on!!”; I dunno. But I’m certainly not like that, and neither is anybody I know (atheist or not).
But let’s suppose for a moment that I’m really quite sure that you’ll never notice that your wad of cash will be gone. Well, I’d still not take it, because I’d know I’d feel guilty about it later -and that I’d have a lower opinon of myself as a person (which are not the same thing).
Does this imply that if I didn’t have guilt (and I didn’t have a self-image of a law-abider, and I lacked risk-based morality), that I would take the cash? Well, I think this describes the class of actions that I don’t believe are wrong, and that I know I won’t get caught at. I generally do do such things, on occasion. (For example, I will occasionally exceed the speed limit by small amounts if I think it poses no risks to anyone (and thus isn’t ‘wrong’) and I think that I won’t get pulled over.) Now, let’s see if you can convince me that religious people are any different, in theory or practice. (Keep in mind that you’re talking about things that they wouldn’t feel guilty for, so it has to be things that that either their religion doesn’t proscribe, or for which they don’t take the proscription seriously. And I warn you, I have numerous counterexamples handy.)
