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Morality without Immortality (F*CK Sniperguy)
Apothe0sis
Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered User regular
Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered User regular
Also, that whole "morality without the context of religion" thing...why bother being moral, other than not being a dick just for that? If you don't think there's any afterlife, how can you derive morals? Also, that's probably a different topic.
Sniperguy gets the award for the stupidest bullshit for this week.
So, the argument, at its most general runs:
1) If there is no afterlife, after our death there are no enduring consequences.
2) If there are no consequences, then what we do will not matter in a few decades.
3) As such, given there is no meaning to our lives or our actions we are free to do as we will and need not bother ourselves with "being good".
4) Therefore, morality and ethics are undermined by atheism/not believing in the afterlife/liberals/evolution/big bang cosmology/humans not being the centre of the universe.
The corollary is, of course, that religion, involving the afterlife, and a deity to tell you what is right and wrong provides a sound basis for morality.
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There are thus two prongs of these ideas to attack - the first being the inhrently problematic nature of Divine Command as the basis of morality. The second being the rather shaky assumptions and absurdities of the belief that our finite lifespans sans afterlife make our lives and actions meaningless and undermine the basis for acting ethically.
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My main purpose is to argue against the latter, (though I am not opposed to moving on to a discussion as to why religion is a lousy basis for morality as well) so I shall only repond to that in this post. I'm mainly rehashing a few arguments from the beginning of Thomas Nagel's paper The Absurd.
The problem with the view of no immortality, no morality view of ethics is that it is fundamentally inadequate, almost every argument offered in its favour is a clear non sequitur or simply perverse.
If we grant that "in a million years, nothing from today will matter, so nothing today matters at all", then we also get the conclusion that it doesn't matter that nothing matters in a million years, and we've achieved a quick self-contradiction. The fact is that things matter now, and that they will not matter in a million years does not change that.
However, even were things to matter in a million years, or even some arbitrarily long length of time, so what? What is the actual connection between things mattering for eternity and there being a sound basis for morality? This tends to be justified in terms of "well, consequences now will be punished/rewarded for eternity, so things matter and thus we have a basis for morality". Which is simply the assertion that a fear of punishment/anticipation of reward is a good basis for morality. In the case of lacking an afterlife, we too have the anticipation of reward and fear of punishment and these punishments and rewards also last the full length of our existence. The reasoning favours neither side, but it should be noted provides an argument for acting morally, which depending on how you construe morality may or may not provide a basis for morality.
Next, why does length of time suddenly confer meaning? It's fairly clearly a sheer non sequitur - if our lives and actions are meaningless over 70 years, then they must be equally meaningless over 140, 280, one million or an infinite number of years. The fact that they last longer means, if we grant that our lives are meaningless and our actions don't matter, that they're simply longer periods of being meaningless.
Those who argue for the meaningless of our finite existence and those who base their arguments upon it, simply have no metric upon which to deem what is and is not meaningful. The arguments they offer to show that our lives are not meaningful without an afterlife, either do not work, or condemn us to meaningless regardless of whether we're immortal.
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As to the actual rebuttal, I alway preferred attacking the idea more on the basis of knowledge to avoid playing into the argument from the start. The basic argument going, divine basis for morality is only as valid as the objective proof of the existence of god.
Without proof of the existence of god (and beyond that proof your interpretation of god's divine morality is right) any claim of a divine basis for morality is simply an arbitrary collection of assumptions. There's a whole, relatively boring train of argument, but the nutshell is without a clear basis for each tenet of any divinely inspired morality, it's just a retarded version of humanism mixed with bizarrely pervasive zealotry.
Humans are hard-wired to practice Empathy.
Theres a fucking reason we don't go around going apeshit on each other.
We can consider something from someone else's point of view and say, "Gosh, I bet he wouldn't want to be stabbed. "
It's the sociopaths that ignore that
I countered that a.) she was stupid, and b.) that it's entirely possible to be "good" because you prefer an ordered society, and actually enjoy being a nice person, and not just because you fear some sort of judgment at the end of everything.
Apparently I made her very sad, and she was going to pray for me.
Isn't that a blatant naturalistic fallacy to use that as a justification for morality, though?
Split the difference and say we're inclined biologically inclined towards cooperation within people we consider part of our tribe/pack/what-have-you, but that the actual structure and force of the morality of any group is pretty much entirely cultural.
But kids don't have empathy, only sympathy.
So we develop it at some point from 10 to 20.
I read somewhere that morality might be biologically or genetically based.
Where in any culture is it okay to just up and kill people?
That depends on what kind of morality you're talking about. If morality is strictly a cultural (and I include instincts as a form of culture here) construct that has no value outside of its context, then sure.
The original post seems to be addressing absolute morality, which is a set of "oughts" that exist outside of any cultural context. The fact that "moral" actions are carried out doesn't imply in any way that those actions actually ought to be carried out.
Edit: I just had a thought dealing somewhat with set theory. If the set of all things which ought to be done, the absolute moral system, is the empty set, does that actually mean that absolute morality doesn't exist? The set is still a valid one, it just doesn't contain any moral instructions.
I can't quite figure out what you're trying to do here, but I'm pretty sure I don't like it. :P
Yeah, I think you're right. Jumping directly from empathy to empathic action does require a (quite possibly unjustified) argument that one's inherent morality and one's tendecy to perform moral actions or have moral thoughts are correlated. It's claimable that there are no moral people, just moral actions. Alternatively, it's possible to claim that there are no moral actions, just moral people. In either case, the morality of empathy says nothing about the morality of empathic actions.
My point does still stand in the case where it is claimed that sociopaths are immoral people simply because most people inherently have empathy. That would be an application of the naturalistic fallacy.
I know this isn't exactly what's being discussed but I wanted to throw it out there.
Ah, there's the question of whether morality is still relative even if there is a god. If God flat out appears to you and tells you that you will go to hell unless you obey him, does that actually give you a moral obligation to do so? Religion is essentialy a giant argumnent ad baculum. If we don't accept that as valid from people, why should we accept it as valid from deities?
Except "treat people the way you want to be treated" is an absolutely retarded moral compass to follow, because the way I want to be treated is very different from the way other people want to be treated.
I like being hunted by people with high-powered assault rifles. Does that mean I should go hunt people like that too?
Or to give a more realistic example, I like having my nipples pinched while having sex. Does this mean I should do the same to my significant other(s)?
The sentences are similar, but no-one thinks they're the same.
Fixed for reality.
Not that it matters since there is no god, and trying to work out what things would be like if there were is just really confusing.
Also, I agree with how you tied up the naturalism question.
I still wonder - even if God created the universe, why should God's rules matter? Why does creating the physical universe mean that God gets to decide what's moral? I mean, my parents created me, to some extent, but they don't get to decide what's right and wrong - morality can't be created by anyone.
Or maybe if a god exists then a devil and afterlife exist too, in which case you should do the right thing because doing the wrong thing gives that devil your soul and the more souls it has, the more suffering it can create in this world, which is presumably a bad thing.
There's NO posited version of the Christian God I'd follow, I know that.
Well if you live in an apartment then you have a landlord that makes the rules. If you live with your parents then they typically will set boundrys for you. If you live in a country (and my guess is that everyone here does) then your government makes the laws. You still have a choice of weather or not you want to follow those rules, and no matter what you choose you will face conscequences. God setting rules on whats right or wrong is merely following this logic on a grander scope.
Also if you think that religion is simply "do what god says because he says it you sheeple" then you have a very skewed perception on it. In fact bibically there are many times when mortal men have argued with God for better or for worse.
Now back to the subject at hand. If God didnt exsist, and there was no consciousness after death, and you had roughly 70ish years and that was it(no reincarnation). Then Morality would still exsist. Your actions would still have consequences for yourself and other people, even after you died.
Blessing those that curse you apparently not one of those atheist morals?
Morality = system of behaviour which dictates doing X is empirically Right or Wrong, as dictated by God or nature or red weevils, whatever.
Ethics = system of behaviour which dicates you should or should not do X based on your own personal beliefs / what is socially acceptable / socially benefical, or how you can see X will interact with other actions to produce a combined result.
Importantly, in a system of ethics, nobody is claiming an action (or combination of actions producing a result) is in and of itself Right or Wrong. Therefore there is no concept of acting ethically expecting some supernatural reward when dead. You act ethically because you believe you should, or because it is beneficial.
Second, morals aren't derived from reward/punishment in an afterlife, they are ordered by the (usually) supernatural agent which enacts that reward/punishment. Subtle but necessary distinction, because not all systems of morality involve reward/punishment in an afterlife.
It's not systematized, so any attempt to understand it systematically misunderstands it. Most distinctions between ethics and morals are artificial; in practice they're identical. The moral content of a society can be rife with contradictions and still sustain just fine since our concern with morality is that it be functional, not internally consistent.
EDIT: I should also mention that what is functional turns out to be pretty specific, since the human animal has a large number of needs and natural empathies, many quite complicated, and most out of his control. So could slavery be considered moral, as long as it works? The fact is that it is considered moral, for a time, specifically because it works, by the people it works for. But in the long run, society discovers that such dramatic and overt inequalities are perilous. Our social practice depends on the commitment of the people in society, and they commit because they believe that it serves their interest. Slavery negates that, so over time it has a destabilizing and dangerous effect. So we've rejected it in favor of equality; we've observed that the the premise of equality is more sustainable, more useful, even if right now it's just an ideal.
Pffft. Doesn't matter, thread will be over in a few weeks. Nothing we say here matters, why be civil at all?
If someone says the only reason they don't go around stealing/killing is because they fear hell, then that person is terrifying.
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I had that exact same discussion once. His arguments were along the lines "if there is no heaven or hell then I might as well go out and kill and rob and rape."
My answer is the same now as it was then: If the threat of going to hell is the only thing preventing you from doing that, then you're a very mentally unsound person.
Along those lines, I had this exchange when being interviewed by the head of the selection board to be an Army officer:
He was Christian. He didn't like that answer much. Apparently wasn't a deal-breaker though.
But of course since I am agnostic, there is nothing holding me back from raping and pillaging towns. People who run that line of thinking are hopefully just stupid and not thinking about it enough. I'd hate to believe that there is a large population of people out there that truly think that if the afterlife wasn't there that they'd just go berserk.
-- (Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)
It's nothing more than ad hominem towards atheists and the like from some religious folk. Certainly says a lot about how founded their own beliefs are.
This is not a topic I have spent a large portion of my time ruminating on, so I apologize if I made an off handed remark which completely pissed some atheists off. My bad.
Lime'd for truth.
This is exactly how I feel. Hell, when I play the Sims, I have a hard time letting romance sims get their groove on because I feel bad for their sim wives. And I ignore all "Buy stuff" wants in kids, because I think it would spoil them.
As for morality, I don't think there are hard and fast rules, because human interactions form an infinitely complex network and series of causalities. I actually believe in the old cliche "God works in mysterious ways." To me, that's just a dumbed-down way of saying, "Our actions have infinite unforseen consequences, so something that seems bad might turn out for the best." We in our limited imaginative and analytical capacity can only do our best to stumble around doing what feels the most "right" to us. At the end of the day, morality is just a means to an end (that is, maximizing social welfare), but the end can often be achieved by ways that defy morality. For example, if you believe killing is wrong, but your only option to prevent an event that would cause the death of thousands of people was to kill a certain person, would you kill that person?