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MORALITY
Podly
you unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered User regular
you unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered User regular
If an atheist has morals, then they are a pretty inconsistent atheist. You can be ethical, but to be moral implies there are transcendent and normative laws concerning human behavior.
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I can't tell if he is trying to offend atheists here or not.
Moral - of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behaviour, especially for teaching right behaviour.
Has nothing to do with religion. The above definition applies towards atheists as well. I don't know why people associate morals with religion.
No. ethics concern actions. An action can be ethical without being moral (utility), but a supposed moral action will always be ethical. Morals don't have to be religious, per se, no. Look at Kant's categorical imperative: it's basically the golden rule. However, morals center on a moral code, which means that it is, which I mentioned before, transcendent and normative. If you reject God because of a lack of evidence but believe in morals, then you are not consistent in your belief system.
Podly, Podly, Podly... come on. Semantics man. Just semantics.
Extreme example: Are you gay? I'm feeling gay. gay. as. can. be. I tell you, today's such a wonderful day, I think this is the gayest I've ever felt since I met my best friend Bob!
That is your ideological belief towards it. And even your structuring of morals does not remove the normative (and probably not the transcendent) aspects of morality.
And I'm going to preemptively address something you may say: that the bible contains so many laws which are crazy. (I forget the exact number of laws in the torah.) You could say that some are not moral "ought" commandments (unlike the 10 commandments) but ethical "should" commandments; i.e., a person who loves God would act in this way, if you love god you should too.
So yes, I believe that atheists are amoral. It could offend people who feel that they have a right to be moral.
"You! Yes you! Stand still laddie! Your personal definitions are wrong!"
I interpret moral codes as being a mixture of personal choice and the framework of rules that a person in society lives within - no need for a god or gods to act as a centre - we've got the family, community and nation. I can also influence this moral code, and I can watch it evolve, which is the nice part about having a code that doesn't rely upon an unknowable force for a centre.
If you want to debate about morals and your completely hypocritical stance towards the morals of your ridiculous religion on another thread I'll be more than happy to oblige—but Marduk knows that we've both derailed enough threads with this shit already, so let's at least try to avoid it here.
Stop dancing around the issue. Why, besides a utilitarian analysis, should you act with maxims concerning your family or your nation. Why should you be just? Why should we persecute criminals unless we are simply deterring crime? If you believe that you should help your community for any other reason than you are trying to increase subjective happiness then you are not consistent in your belief system: you don't believe in an inprovable god but you do believe in inprovable justice.
edit* to whomever split this, thank you.
I fail to see the distinction. How are Christians moral? The only difference is that the Christian claims to derive his ethics from God while the atheist claims to derive his ethics from something else. They're all essentially the same ethics anyways; do unto others as you would do unto yourself, don't fuck your sister, and so on.
Nobody has a rigid moral "code" anyways. Morality is just a fabrication of the rational mind. Below all of it is the biological instinct. In extenuating circumstances, regardless of their religious affiliation, the majority of individuals will choose to save themselves before others because that is their instinct. We are, after all, really smart monkeys.
"Cor, guv! Why you always raggin' on me definitions? You're a right snooty gent an' no mistake!"
"You shall keep the Sabbath (under penalty of death)"—this is one of the ten commandments, so I'm guessing it's a "ought" law?
How about one of my personal favorites in the Bible, "if a man rapes an unbetrothed virgin, he must pay her father 50 shekels and marry her, and cannot divorce her." I'm guessing this is a "should" law—but are you saying we can derive some kind of moral "ought" from this wonderful law? Such as "you break it, you buy it"?
morality:
principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior
I'm sure you could make a special definition of morality that requires it be universal or binding, but otherwise nope.
Because we're meant to? We're hard-wired, literally coded by the forces of natural selection and evolution, to have a natural care. It's just part of us. It isn't about some logical reasoning, not for the most part. Humans aren't that logical. We wouldn't have so many vices if we were, not to mention any number of other cognitive flaws.
We feel empathy and sympathy because it's part of our universal genetic make-up to do so. The people who don't feel empathy? Brain damaged. Not soul damaged. Emotional feelings are in the head.
Just like personality can change with brain injuries. What, steel pike in the head changed your soul?
It's all in the brain. Everything that makes you you is naturalistic and cranial including the will to be nice to people, or feel empathy, or even love.
Yes, I feel I have the right to be moral (but your statement doens't offend me), and by that abide by the laws of man. Our culture deems killing another human wrong. Why is it wrong? Well we've been killing one another since the beginning of time and any God we've thought up has told us it's wrong. Who knows the real reason it's wrong, but I find it wrong because of the emotion behind it. If something you do causes emotional harm to another, and this doesn't include offending them, then I view it as wrong and will usually try not to do it.
Ethics I view differently. While ethics and morals are pretty much synonomous, they still are different. I view ethics as more of knowing when something is appropriate and inappropriate, rather than right and wrong that morals are. Ethically it is wrong to tell a racist joke in a business meeting, but not morally wrong. The reason is because if it were morally wrong, you wouldn't tell the joke to you friends and then laugh about it. Now if you said something racist and meant it then that would be morally wrong wether during a business meeting or with a group of friends.
Although he spliced in a really brilliant bit where any atheist who acts morally is not only a hypocrite, but a sucker. Since if you do not believe in a divine entity that will punish your acts of extreme selfishness (theft, murder for personal gain) that your fellow man may miss, you are only depriving yourself of the personal gains you should always be seeking.
Come Overwatch with meeeee
See my post above.
I've also heard that without the treat of hell, atheists would rape and kill everyone.
"Oh really?! The only thing that keeps you from raping and killing is the punishment? I guess that makes you a fucking asshole!"
Sure. A ought commandment would be "do not commit adultery." It is immoral. A should commandment would be not to masturbate. Masturbating, in itself, is not immoral. However, we never simply stroke up and down - we always think of someone. We intend the person as a mere sexual object. It is degrading. For example, I would not want someone masturbating to images of me, my girlfriend, my sister, my friend, etc. Ought commandments tell us the floor of human morality. You cannot murder, cheat, bear false witness, etc. If you do these, you are a bad person. Should commandments direct us to be the best person we can be. Masturbating is not wrong per se, but a truly moral person would not.
If I were to address this point, it would just turn into a another "what is the soul" debate, which isn't the point of this thread. I feel that your argument is very poignant, but that it does not capture human existence in its full capacity.
Basically I hear this a lot too as an atheist. People constantly ask me what keeps me from killing or raping someone.
Ummmm, the fact that it's wrong. The thought of killing someone and knowing what it will do to that person's family terrifies me. Also, it doesn't take a Christian to know that the treat others as you would like to be treated rule applies here. I don't want someone killing and or raping me, so I don't do it to others. It isn't the terror of hell that God says promises the heathens. If that is what keeps a Christian from doing bad, then they really need to assess their morals.
Morality is not a real thing. There's no morality lobe in the brain, or a morality section of the electromagnetic spectrum. What morality is is an intellectual abstraction for the complex interplay of emotional responses that cause people to act the way they do.
In a simplified sense, what this means is that people do things that reward them emotionally, and avoid doing things that punish them emotionally. Even more simply, though more problematically, things that feel good are right, things that feel bad are wrong.
All people, if they are to be considered people, share this system of emotional interaction. There is therefore no inherent difference between the morals of an atheist, those of a Catholic, and those of a psychopath. The differences lie only in the experiences which shape and inform those emotional responses. Thus even if we posit temporarily that God is real, the religious have no greater claim to morality than the rest of us. My father exists, but the fact that I get the newspaper for my father does not make the newspaper more real.
You aren't going deep enough here. Why is rape wrong? You talked about how it would hurt the family, etc. That is simply utilitarianism - rape might give you sexual pleasure, but it would hurt too many people. (Obviously including the victim and probably yourself.) It's not that rape is wrong, it's that in all conceivable scenarios rape would do more harm than good.
However, Utilitarianism is an ethical system, not a moral system. I believe that rape is ALWAYS wrong because of God, natural law, etc. Even before any act could be done, rape is precedentially wrong. It is one of the "rules of the game," if you will. I believe it is immoral to rape.
Do you see the distinction here?
Ethics are about evaluating the consequences of an action. Someone who is moral does not steal because IT'S WRONG; someone who is ethical does not steal because you they wouldn't want it to happen to them, and they are choosing to consciously contribute to a functional and safe society.
Morals are ethics without the actual thought.
(anectodal: I have two friends who have repeatedly claimed to avoid drug use because they, "have morals." Does this hurt anyone else's brain?)
I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying htere's a difference between "rape hurts people and therefore is wrong" and "rape is wrong"?
THIS IS ETHICS. There is a distinction between ethics and morality.
First of all, your ontology is flawed. Morality is not a real thing in that it is not extended, indeed. However, a newspaper can not be "more real." That is silly. What it can have is a larger objective nature: the newspaper can take on a moral aspect if I believe freedom of speech is a law, and my right to read/publish a newspaper is a moral right. It is not more real, it is still the same paper materially. It has a much larger objective context, though, when the moral existence is brought in.
Yes, also: empathy and sympathy.
These are some of the more fundamental emotional responses I'm talking about, yes.
Actually the distinction between ethics and morality is that ethics are tied to a specific context.
Not exactly. You need to rephrase what you said. There is a difference between "rape is wrong" and "rape is wrong when it hurts people." I feel that, as an atheist, if you are to say that rape is structurally, eternally, and fundamentally wrong then you are not consistent in your positivist belief structure. There is nothing that shows us that the act of rape is wrong unless you believe that transcendent, normative, abstract morals exits.
You make the mistake of demanding absolute compliance with a belief system - Why must I be 100% consistent with my belief system as you define it?
/dance away
BECAUSE it hurts people?
edit: see, rape always hurts someone. Else it would not be rape? So saying that 'rape is wrong when it hurts people' is saying that there are cases where it's harmless. Which I don't think is the case. Whether when you say 'rape is wrong because it hurts people' is basically the same as saying 'rape is wrong', only in the latter the reason why it is wrong, is left out.
edit: I wonder if I'm making any sense.
Because if you don't believe in God for the reason that it is impossible to prove his existence but you still believe in morals then you are being ignorant?
See, I feel like you're trying to make this more complex and abstract. What I'm trying to do is make it simpler and more concrete.
I don't have a problem with morality as an abstraction; like, say, calculus, it makes it possible to do things that would be prohibitively difficult to do with its precepts. However one shouldn't treat calculus as having some kind of transcendent mathematical meaning; it's merely the compression of complex algebraic principles into a usable form.
Understanding where something comes from is fundamental to employing it properly. Otherwise you'll find yourself accidently dividing by zero and saying that atheists can't have morals.
Because indicates cause and effect and is thus more ambiguous than "when" in the formulation. Is the cause of the hurt because Rape is wrong or because in every conceivable scenario it is wrong? There is a distinction there. If it is moral, then rape is always wrong is a structural form of our existence. Rape will always hurt people because rape is wrong. However, if the harm is always a result of the rape, then rape is not immoral, just inethical.
Rape is also a loaded term. It semantically predicates pain. Just as murder is semantically abused. If I shoot someone in the face it is clearly wrong and thus murder. However, I think that murder would be willfully taking someone's life. Thus if someone asks me to kill them because they no longer wish to live that it is murder.
I'm more than happy with thinking that it is almost certain, lets use the figure 99.99%. But anyway, my atheism is more focused on a dislike of the idea of gods, rather than their existence. What a boring universe to live in where there is an eternal force that is everything, especially one flavoured by our historical religions. Why bother getting out of bed at all?
That is factually incorrect. Murder is explicitly wrongful killing, as rape is explicitly wrongful sex.