I’d almost managed to forget that Michael Egnor exists, but there he is, yelling stupid arguments at me. He dropped a pingback on my recent post about objective morality, but then he weirdly quotes something I wrote in 2012.
There is a common line of attack Christians use in debates with atheists, and I genuinely detest it. It’s to ask the question, “where do your morals come from?” I detest it because it is not a sincere question at all — they don’t care about your answer, they’re just trying to get you to say that you do not accept the authority of a deity, so that they can then declare that you are an evil person because you do not derive your morals from the same source they do, and therefore you are amoral. It is, of course, false to declare that someone with a different morality than yours is amoral, but that doesn’t stop those sleazebags.
Yay! I’m consistent!
Egnor objects, however.
Actually, Christians don’t ask “Where do your morals come from?” in order to call atheists evil. We do it to point out that objective morality is powerful evidence for God’s existence.
They can do both, you know, and they do. On multiple occasions, I’ve had Christians announce that I’m an atheist to discredit me and my arguments, so yes, they certainly do use it to call me evil. I will concede that they may think they’re making a “powerful” argument for god, but they’re not. It’s a stupid argument. I guess I was unconsciously giving them more credit than they deserve to think they can’t possibly believe it’s good evidence.
Egnor then defines the difference between subjective and objective morality to explain how the argument defends the existence of a god.
How so? From our human perspective, moral law can have two origins — subjective and objective.
Subjective moral law is based on human opinion. It may just be one man’s opinion, or it may be the collective opinion of a group of people. If our standards are wholly subjective, dislike of strawberry ice cream and dislike of genocide are not qualitatively different. The dislike is just human opinion.
Objective moral law, by contrast, is outside of human opinion. It is something that we humans discover. We do not create it. Thus, objective moral law exists beyond mere human opinion.
Oh, OK. Then I do possess an objective morality, by Egnor’s own definition. It’s not merely my opinion that we shouldn’t murder other people, it’s a conclusion based on empirical observation of the consequences of murder on individuals and society. Human cultures discovered this by seeing the harm done to a society if death runs rampant. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was also a genetic component, that we have an in-built revulsion from death, especially violent death.
Also, I like strawberry ice cream. What kind of monster dislikes strawberry ice cream? Except…OK, if you are lactose intolerant, you’ve got a legitimate objective reason to dislike it.
So far, I’m fine with Egnor’s claim. Yeah, moral judgments (but not all moral judgments!) can be based on something objective, greater than opinions about ice cream. Fine. Done and done. So we agree that atheists can have an objective morality? Not so fast, because next, without evidence or reason, he leaps to another claim, one that is not related to his earlier definition.
Of course, if a value judgement prevails over other human value judgements, there must be Someone whose opinion is Objective Moral Law. There must be a Law-Giver. That is the one whom all men call God.
No, this is false. I just gave sources of objective morality that are not dependent on authoritarian pronouncements from an imaginary deity. There doesn’t have to be an anthropomorphic invisible law-giver anywhere in the process.
This is just the standard creationist shimmy. The universe had a beginning, therefore there must have been a superpowerful cosmic man-shaped being who started it…but no, that’s not true, there could be some other material cause, or some meta-cause outside our universe that triggered it. A burp in hyperspace, a glitch in the matrix, or why not an entity that cares nothing about us, but spasmed a bunch of stars into existence for its own purposes? There is no logic to his conclusion there.
Myers, as you might expect, is a moral scold, which is odd, coming from an atheist who by definition denies any Source for objective moral standards. Without Objective Moral Law, debates about morality are merely assertions of power — I just try to force you to believe and act as I do because I assert the power to do so. And you do likewise to me.
Every time Myers scolds humanity on morality and immorality, he implicitly acknowledges God’s existence. Myers detests the question “where do your morals come from” because he can’t answer the question without acknowledging the existence of a non-human Moral Law-Giver. For an atheist, denying God’s existence appears to be more important than consistency, logic and evidence.
Notice that he smuggled in a capital-S Source as a prerequisite to objective morality, and that he hasn’t provided any evidence or even any reason why it must exist. That’s his premise. So his argument distills down to:
- Objective morality exists because God is the Source
- God exists because objective morality exists
- Goto 1
It’s as circular as a hamster wheel, and Egnor is frantically running in it.
Obviously, the solution is to put a non-human in charge of morality; that way it won’t just be a question of “human opinion.” But there are too many choices. Should it be a dolphin? A pig? A lizard? Why restrict ourselves to animals? Let’s put a tree in charge of morality.
But wait: God is a person, or three persons, or whatever. So now it’s not human opinion, but it’s still personal opinion.
And if one actually read the Bible, which many Christians claim as their source of morality, we find that Jesus H. Christ had different opinions about morality than his Daddy did. On divorce for example, Jesus H. Christ declares in every single one of the canonical gospels his disapproval of it, while YHWH not only approves, but gives instructions for how to go about it elsewhere in the Bible.
Because objective moral standards don’t exist, no moral standards exist.
File this under “people who do not understand adjectives“
‘the standard creationist shimmy.’ I sure want to see those dance moves. Wait, no, I don’t.
Paging Euthyphro, please pick up the white courtesy phone.
It is very easy to dismiss the ‘all morals are from God’ argument:
“Do you follow ALL the laws set forth in your Bible/Quran/Geetha/Granth…..whatever? If not, why not? Are YOU engaging in second guessing your own deity in deciding which morals are worth following and which are not?”
I might as well add a “Fuck you” in the end, if the original questioner was mean and dishonest.
I remember reading somewhere that someone thought society evolves. But not in a Darwinian way. In a Lamarkian way. Our current “moral law” (whatever that means) could just be thousands of society over millions of years figuring out what works for them. The fact that there are similarities stems from the fact that we’re all the same animal. No God required.
People who claim there is an objective morality are welcome to write down a set of rules that everyone agrees with, because they are obviously true. That would short-cut the arguments pretty nicely.
And then you have Joel Osteen, a man in the God Business who tells his drooling, gullible flock that he is wealthy beyond avarice because he is Blessed ™, and you, too, can get Blessed ™ for the low, low price of $19.95, we accept cash, social security checks, Visa and Master Card!
Joel rakes in $600,000 per WEEK selling Blessed ™. Definitely, objectively Moral ™, just ask Joel!
Michael Egnor uses the standard right-wing tactic: set up a straw man, then demolish it.
The whims of a deity, imaginary or not, are not objective.
Wheel of Morality, turn, turn, turn. Tell us the lesson we should learn.
Oddly enough, there are atheists who believe in objective moral standards. So the use of the term by definition is clearly wrong.
@12:
Possums have pouches like kangaroos.
Atheists have morals because they want to make the world a better place. Apparently, Christians need the threat of hell to behave morally.
PZ OP:
“It’s not merely my opinion that we shouldn’t murder other people, it’s a conclusion based on empirical observation of the consequences of murder on individuals and society. Human cultures discovered this by seeing the harm done to a society if death runs rampant.”
There’s still a fact/value distinction to be had. The observable consequences are the somewhat factual part (define murder per in/outgroup dynamics, justifiability etc), but you’re still injecting some sort of intersubjective consensus about the values (what is harm really?) that have developed over generational time into the picture. That’s objective? Or value laden? We socially constructed shared perspectives toward whether killing of o/Others is justifiable and some project this construction outward as a second nature to be “discoverable”. Not convincing. You seemed to be fine with social constructionism as a reaction to King Crocoduck on evolutionary epistemology a while back. What happened in the interim?
”I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was also a genetic component, that we have an in-built revulsion from death, especially violent death.”
Oh dear gods here come the ev psychers wanting their environment of evolutionary adaptedness back. That something is revolting due to genetic predisposition does not justify that revulsion nor an overarching moral conclusion stemming from said revulsion.
Yes they are qualitatively different. That’s because “dislike” of genocide* is not “wholly subjective”. It is, like other moral judgements, capable of being rationally explained and defended, and related to other moral judgements and to logical and empirical facts in a systematic way. The dichotomy “objective”/”subjective” is a false dichotomy, and it is not only moral judgements which do not fall into either category: so do many esthetic ones. Is George Eliot a better novelist than Geoffrey Archer? Van Gogh a better artist than Jack Vetriano? In both cases I answer “Yes” without hesitation, and can defend my answer in ways that are not available for defending my preference for chocolate over strawberry ice-cream – but there is no objective table of artistic or literary merit. In practice, of course, Ignor does not rely on the “Source” he claims to exist, because even if it does, he has no access to it. Like the rest of us, he has to rely on human judgement and reasoning – a pity he’s so very bad at them!
*Is that the strongest feeling Ignor has about genocide? I suppose we should be grateful he doesn’t think it’s great if the right people are doing it, as many of his Catholic predecessors did, and indeed his imaginary friends does, according to the Bible. Or at least, he is too embarrassed to admit it.
What he calls objective morality, I call amorality. Blindly following orders from a (pseudo) source is not a moral action it is blind acceptance of that authority. And they don’t even do that because you know they all cheat and even if they didn’t want to cheat, they wouldn’t be able to follow everything since there are so many contradictions and interpretations.
So, here’s the thing–all these arguments about absolute morality are being advanced by asshole jerk-offs who supported Cheetolini and still do. The next time one of them uses this argument on me, I’ll slam their pecker in a car door.
The universe is dreamed into existence by Azatoth.
While we cannot wake him and ask him about objective morality, his relative Nyarlahotep would find the question mildly amusing as he consumes you.
At the human (and superhuman) scale it makes sense to reduce aggression ; we cannot have mutually catastrophic battles all the time (like the one between Old George and Angleton/The Eater of Souls.)
Objective morality is just logic applied to the fact that any one brute can be taken down by two weaklings with a rock and a plan. By working together, we can overcome far, far more and live far, far better than we can in an “each for themselves” free-for-all, and for us to do that successfully and reliably, everyone involved must feel like they’re benefiting from the union – you can’t coerce teamwork successfully for long. So rule of behavior fall out that facilitate teamwork: don’t kill each other, don’t take each others’ shit, don’t lie to each other, look out for each other when they are sick and hurt because next time you might be the hurt one, and so on.
No need for a deity dictating this stuff from a high celestial throne.
…objective morality is powerful evidence for God’s existence.
Which god(s)?
Subjective moral law is based on human opinion.
False dichotomy: human opinion can be, and very often is, based on observation of objective facts and events. So a moral law is “subjective” only to the extent that the specific human opinion it’s based on is “subjective.”
There must be a Law-Giver. That is the one whom all men call God.
And whom all women call…what?
What kind of monster dislikes strawberry ice cream? Except…OK, if you are lactose intolerant, you’ve got a legitimate objective reason to dislike it.
Only if they like non-dairy strawberry ice-cream instead.
Myers, as you might expect, is a moral scold…
God’s balls, that’s the funniest bit of blatant childish hypocrisy I’ve heard in a long time.
Every time Myers scolds humanity on morality and immorality, he implicitly acknowledges God’s existence.
Yeah, right, every sound every atheist ever made implicitly acknowledges God’s existence. Including all of our farts, I guess. That joke is old and tired, and unlike what came before it, it’s not all that funny.
The universe is dreamed into existence by Azatoth.
SILENCE, HERETIC! Everyone knows mankind was invented by water as a means of transporting itself from place to place. And no, I’m not making that up, I got it from an Authoritative Holy Text that someone else wrote. And it’s backed up by overwhelming objective evidence! Water exists, QEDuh, CHECKMATE, ATHEISTS!!!
@hemidactylus, I’d say our morality is an overlapping and interacting combination of both social construction and biological construction. This goes for religious people too, of course. One could say morality is somewhat objective since it is based on facts, but I don’t know anything that’s purely objective, since everything is sifted through our perspective. The objective/subjective duality is not all that useful here.
It’s worse than that, because it’s contradictory. This sort of sentient/thinking deity is a subject. So if it were real and if it were “the Source,” then that can’t be objective.
The words “subjective” and “objective” don’t change their meanings here due to the (purported) fact that a god is not human, because it is omni-whatever, because it can throw lightning bolts at its enemies, or what have you. All he does to confuse you (and maybe himself) is to insert the word “human” in phrases like “human opinion,” but that is not built into the concept of subjectivity itself. You could easily consider many other kinds of subjects who are not human but are nonetheless subjects.
Anyway, if you gave me a circular argument for why I should believe evolution is real, it wouldn’t be a good argument. That would be unfortunate, perhaps, but maybe someday you or somebody else could do better. But this would not imply that evolution is impossible and must be rejected for that reason.
You’d really need to fuck things up very badly to confidently assert something like that…. It probably helps to be dishonest or brainwashed, so you at least won’t know or care whether or not the stuff you’re saying makes any sense at all.
I seem to recall a few food taboos in the Bible, but not a lot against the idea of genocide.
Yeah, I suppose we should read Egnor as saying that it would be wrong to trivialize strawberry ice cream preferences by comparing them to something as inconsequential as genocide.
Isn’t the appropriate response: “There is no God, therefore, your morality is completely subjective since you made up this God of yours?”
PZ:
…and on a basis for partial ordering of those consequences as “better” or “worse” than one another. (Or “equivalent” or “incomparable”, if you want to be exhaustive.) It may be a basis as trivial as preferring decreased probability of extinction over increased probability of extinction, but that still seems an additional “ought” premise; cue <a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hume’s_Law>Hume.
Also, Egnor seems to make the mistaken inference that the abstract existence of a “value judgement” that would be philosophically “prevailing” necessarily requires an instantiated entity adhering to that judgement — which is not necessarily the case, and which seems similar to the errors in most variants (aside from Gödel’s) on the Ontological Argument.
hemidactylus:
Ah; similar notion, slightly different phrasing, and headed to a more radical conclusion. (I’m partial to the mathematical formulation, as despite the limits Gödel presented that precluded the original objectives to the efforts, Bertrand Russell’s work produced results more difficult to dispute than most.) However, while PZ’s sense may not be “objective” as you might use the term, his use does seem to fall within the sense that Egnor presented. (His sense probably would also fit my own inclinations to consider “objective” akin to “completely and soundly recognizable by a verifier”, in the parlance of interactive proof systems… if PZ can see the need to include the basis.)
imback
At least on “premises”; and on definable relations between such premises. However, some such premises may be mathematical, and thus not so much “facts” in the empirical sense but more aptly termed “theorems” — or “axioms” that theorems arise from. And, as Hume notes, moral (and aesthetic) propositions tend to be reached as conclusions through reliance (if oft implicit) on an additional premise to specify the basis of partial ordering, which proposition is not empirically derived from priors, but which instead is taken as yet another axiom.
If one of the underlying axioms is taken in Refutation instead of Affirmation, a premise may shift from being “fact” to being “falsehood”.
Sigh. Sorry for the bad linking; I ought to have previewed to avoid that.
Egnor? Shouldn’t he be look for the magical ghosts that live inside us or something?
That precious book they all adhere to features a special list of Ten things. Only TWO of those ten things are codified into modern law. “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not steal”. The other eight MEAN NOTHING.
I got no problem with Christians, I just wish they would toss all that Old Testament BS and pay more attention to what Jesus did to the money lenders.
@28
or words to that effect absolutely. That is what it sounds like to me.
does not objective morality just equal absolute authority in practice anyway?
for the religious that authority is a god whom they created and sustain through belief. circular indeed!
There is a perfect scientific reason for “morality”. Our brains are wired for empathy. It’s why we all love kittens and puppies and little baby penguins even though they aren’t our species. We are also wired for cooperation. That’s why we build COMMUNITIES. We are a social species. We are not sharks or crocodiles, we’re apes. We take care of each other. Or at least we’re supposed to take care of each other. Some of us are broken. Those people somehow end up in power and don’t die in the street like they should.
There’s still a fact/value distinction to be had.
Yeah, there’s a distinction — but the line between those two things isn’t like the Korean DMZ; it’s a lot more like the US-Canadian border that goes through the town of Niagara Falls. It’s a real border, but a very porous one, with lots of regular traffic across it in both directions.
The observable consequences are the somewhat factual part (define murder per in/outgroup dynamics, justifiability etc), but you’re still injecting some sort of intersubjective consensus about the values…
The consensus is not his to “inject” into the debate; it’s pre-existing and based on a shared perception and understanding of certain objective facts about human needs and nature.
Ray,
I wish that were the case.
A truly empathetic sentiment, right there.
Ray Ceeya @32
Technically, there are no laws against killing anything, including people, but there are laws against murder. Killing can be legally done in self-defense. So, unless the Bible was referring to murder, there is only only one Commandment codified into our laws.
@37 point taken.
@abb3w, I really did mean morality is based on facts as in empirical facts. All that knowledge we have about how the world works is empirical, and it informs our morality. Yes, as I said, there are constructions that also inform our morality, but much of the heavy lifting of cause and effect is done by observation and induction. And yes it all comes with caveats that indeed our facts could be proved wrong given further information.
@36 yeah I guess I was veering off toward evolutionary psychology there.
@34- Ray Ceeya
Empathy gets you part of the way to building morality from the ground up sure. Based loosely on vague memories of Singer there are kinship (nepotism) and reciprocity (good ole boy tit for tat cronyism) which primordially undergird morality. Empathy or projecting yourself into the perspective of another is hard to differentiate from projection of the psychoanalytic kind. Treat others as you would want? Or as they would actually want? Plus sociopaths could use perspective of another to better manipulate them. Sympathy and compassion are stronger terms per social feeling and moral responsiveness.
Not sure what you mean by broken people. Those born lacking capacities for certain higher level social functioning or who are broken by experiences or society come into those states through no fault of their own. One should care for their plight and not say let them then die. If they wind up a danger to society that cannot be remediated then they should as last resort be placed where they can do no further harm. But their passive or active elimination by death is not an answer. The recent news about Alabama using nitrogen for their death penalty makes me ask why still? Elias from Person of Interest, before he had a baddy killed off, said to the baddy: “Civilization rests on the principle that we treat our criminals better than they treated their victims, that we not stoop to their level.” But then he watched the guy die.
@29 & 30 abb3w
Now there’s a name I’ve not read since my days on Fark.
@41
I was raised by parents who are adementally anti-capital punishment. As much as I want to kick assholes like Gavin McInnes square in the balls as hard as I can, I would still dial 911 if his busted balls were bleeding out and endangering his life.
@43 & @41
Sorry his name just floated to the top of my head as far as people I most want to hurt.
Am I reading this wrong, or is:
“If our standards are wholly subjective, dislike of strawberry ice cream and dislike of genocide are not qualitatively different. The dislike is just human opinion.”
basically an admission that the only (or major?) reason he thinks genocide is worse than strawberry icecream is because “god said so”? Like, the only thing deciding whether you go out after work for an ice cream cone or a lynching is how a multiply translated bit of ancient text is interpreted?
This is basically a rewording of the “if you don’t believe in god, what stops you from raping and murdering everyone” admission…
Jeezus, these people are disturbing…
Along somewhat different lines to what Reginald Selkirk said @2, Egnor had previously told us “Subjective moral law is based on human opinion,” but “Objective moral law, by contrast, is outside of human opinion.”
By this “logic,” why can’t I simply ask my cat for their opinion on morality? My cat isn’t a human!!!
As PZ notes, Egnor’s argument is ultimately circular. I imagine Egnor might want to clarify that it then has to be a god’s opinion (he might not use “god” exactly, but rather some wibbly wobbly poorly defined terminology to rule out cats and other animals as the source of morality). And so the conclusion is baked into the premise. Round we go!
@43: That would be the right call, since it would keep McGuiness alive longer so he could suffer more. Death is too light a punishment for some people.
lochaber, best comment so far. Mordant.
That abhorrent old book commands the murder of children if they disobey their parents, among many other appallingly brutal punitive acts of objective amorality.
Luckily humans can, if afforded the freedom to think for themselves, determine the immorality of such rules using their superior subjective moral compass.
IMO, the only truly amoral beings are the gods and their blindly commanded followers.
And spiders…don’t forget the spiders.
tuatara,
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.”
(Shakespeare)
@ ^ John Morales L; King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1 :
https://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/flies-wanton-boys-we-gods
A remarkable anti-religious line for the time really..
When it comes to the practicalities of ethics and reasons for why they help – cruelty is very often in the long term counter-productive eg. an army that committs war crimes and atrocities and absues and mistreats POW’s causes its enemies tobe more to resist and les likely tosurrender than one that treats its POWs kindly and does les sdamage tociovilains and committs more atrocities.
Exhibit A : Putin’s invasion of Ukraine among others.
“The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers!” Leia to Darth Vader, Star Wars episode V : A New Hope. sums it up well too.
Typos fix John Morales :
Cruelty is very often in the long term counter-productive eg. an army that committs war crimes and atrocities and absues and mistreats POW’s causes its enemies to be more likely to resist more determinedly and less likely to surrender than one that treats its POWs kindly and does less damage to civilians and committs more atrocities.
[relax, StevoR. Typos dont worry me none]
@51: “Flies Wanton Boys We Gods” sounds like a great name (okay, maybe a so-so name) for a really terrible hip-hop band trying to do Shakespeare. “Boyz2Godz?” “Wanton Hamster Wheel Boys?”
“Fly God Boyz”
It’s a bit strange to hear a theist trying so hard to argue their god does not exist.
The difference between subjective and objective is that a subjective thing depends upon a point of view while an objective thing does not. This is literally the difference between those two words. Nothing fancy so far.
So objective morality does not depend upon any particular point of view. It would apply universally. The point of view of their deity does not influence this any more than the point of view of an ant or bacteria. Again, not that fancy. Literally part of what he’s arguing, he’s just ignoring this bit whenever it’s convenient.
But… the christian god has a lot of baggage that doesn’t work very well with an objective morality. The old testament portion of their bible has their god doing quite a lot of things that would be very immoral if anyone else did them, therefore objectively they are immoral. The viewpoint doesn’t matter, we’re not talking subjective morality here. But their religion is based on the idea that this bible is true. If they ditch the old testament because it conflicts, they’re removing quite a bit of their religion, including a lot of the uglier elements. They’re definitely not interested in that!
So… Either their god does not exist or their religion is based on a lot of false stories. This is completely unavoidable based on their arguments. They can take their pick. I’ll make popcorn.
Everybody’s already commented on this, but the idea that a god is any less a subject than humans, or that morality dependent on its perspective would be any less subjective than that dependent on the perspective of humans, is laughable. I’ve seen at least one apparently good faith attempt to grapple with this philosophically, and it does sort of dodge this single problem, but it manages to run headfirst into basically every other potential hazard in doing so. This doesn’t even go that far. Barely even seems to try. Honestly, half inclined to suggest we just Egnor this guy.
The “Fly Boy Hamster Godz” debut (and last) album “We can’t get off” is only available on an infinite mp3 loop. Download it now from your nearest church*.
*Subscription fees apply.
Yeah, the bible for sure makes it perfectly clear genocide is not permitted. Hahahaha
@57- Jemolk
“Honestly, half inclined to suggest we just Egnor this guy.”
🥁🥁
Nice one!
“There must be a Law-Giver. That is the one whom all men call God.”
Piffle – everyone knows God is far too busy dreaming up new types of beetles to waste its time giving out laws…
/s
If subjective law is based on human opinion and humans are created in god’s image, doesn’t that mean that any laws given by god are purely subjective?
I think I emphasize morality as value laden and driven far more than others here who clutch at its discoverable “objective” (second?) nature. Convention as contingent social construction ossifies into a seemingly inevitable second nature. See Peterson on lobster hierarchies for justification of a status quo for apt comparative distinction.
On the other hand I actually don’t completely discount the importance of facts as playing a role in moral evaluation. Seems so long ago we were treated to a long-winded discourse on the importance of social construction in collection of facts themselves in a takedown of pompous King Crocoduck, an exercise in talking past each other if there ever was one. I am not a fan of overdone constructionism in epistemology, but think it more applicable to moral philosophy.
That being said, those who champion an objective morality in this case should be very careful when marching out Hume’s guillotine or Moore’s more analytically esoteric naturalistic fallacy as a counter when those bad actors they disagree with seem to muddle brute facts of nature and moral values, lest they have their own cake and eat it too. Just sayin’.
Oh, boy, more objective morality stuff. One thing that recently occurred to me is that the idea of objective morality often seems like the Anti-Life Equation from DC Comics: Once it’s rooted in someone’s head, it’s frequently cited as justification for any atrocity. Or at least I’ve seen a lot of overlap between people who are awfully certain about having obtained objective (or authoritarian) morality and those who rationalize biblical genocide and the like.
@64- Bronze Dog
Actually though I have strong reservations about the type of objective morality PZ and others here have put forward, that shouldn’t be confused with the authoritarian or commandment morality some Christians use as a rhetorical ploy against atheists.
Objectively, I believe in the commutation of simultaneous variables.
That being said, those who champion an objective morality in this case should be very careful when marching out Hume’s guillotine…
How about when we’re marching out to protest an unjust policy when we see it’s causing observable harm to large numbers of innocent people?
Oh good God!
Not this crap again:
“Myers, as you might expect, is a moral scold, which is odd, coming from an atheist who by definition denies any Source for objective moral standards. Without Objective Moral Law, debates about morality are merely assertions of power — I just try to force you to believe and act as I do because I assert the power to do so. And you do likewise to me.
Every time Myers scolds humanity on morality and immorality, he implicitly acknowledges God’s existence. Myers detests the question “where do your morals come from” because he can’t answer the question without acknowledging the existence of a non-human Moral Law-Giver. For an atheist, denying God’s existence appears to be more important than consistency, logic and evidence.”
I just cannot understand the idiocy of claiming thaty because God says x, y etc., is moral and x, y etc., is imoral is somehow “objective morality”. God say this or that is not an arguement that something is objective. If God actually said something that only means God said it, not that it is true.
In fact claiming in any fashion that because God said something it is objective and true is in fact little more than an appeal to authority and in this case power also. (Remember God is supposed to be all powerful and all knowing.)
Just because, assuming God exists, God says something is moral doesn’t make it moral all it shows is that God said that something was moral. If what God says is indeed objectively moral that has to based on something more than God says so, which of course means the source of morality is not God.
I keep seeing this in the Recent Comments sidebar like
and then I remember that it’s not about an objective morality hamster. It’s pretty disappointing, TBH.
So many fallacies. Just from this statement alone:
a) Just because two things have one quality in common, that doesn’t make them qualitatively identical.
b) Our standards aren’t wholly subjective.
c) We don’t merely “dislike” genocide.
d) “our” and “we” only encompasses a subset of humanity.
e) Abrahamic dogmas, among others, justify and even laud some instances of genocide.
Y’mean like when “right to life” groups march out to protest abortion policies that cause observable harm to large numbers of innocent unborn human beings?
(Not my argument. My argument is that Raging Bee is an idiot.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat-burning
Why do you mention only those particular animals at that particular stage of development? Could it be because you are appallingly stupid, ignorant, and intellectually dishonest? (That’s a rhetorical question.) Thorny questions won’t be settled by people bringing so little to the conversation.
I’m late here but there is no way to determine what the claimed Objective Morality is.
You certainly don’t get it from reading the bible.
Anyone living a biblical lifestyle today would be doing multiple life sentences in prison.
Exodus says you can sell your own kids into slavery for a few dollars.
These days that is a major crime, a felony.
It also says in the OT that being a nonvirgin bride is a death penalty crime.
If we followed OT law, half the female population in the US and Europe would be executed.
There are pages and pages of sick trash like this in both the OT and the New Testament.
Which is why the bible is not a guide to morality in any way.
I suppose we could ask the gods directly instead of reading some old book of fairy tales.
Anyone seen Thor, Zeus, Isis, Gaia, Frigga, Sophia, Aphrodite etc.. around lately?
IIRC, the claim that the xian god is the source of morality is known as the Divine Command theory.
It is actually evil.
The (imaginary) genocide of the Canaanites in the bible is said to be moral because it was commanded by god.
It fails on multiple grounds not least the problem that god doesn’t command anything that we know of, most likely because he doesn’t exist. The bible isn’t any sort of guide.
“We do it to point out that objective morality is powerful evidence for God’s existence.”
Written with a compass?
It starts with the evolved instinct to protect yourself from harm. That’s just wired in and fixed in the population.
Empathy is a secondary evolved ability that supports cooperation, which generally helps to avoid harm. However empathy is not fixed in our population.