You clearly don’t lack the ability to sensibly scrutinize ideas, but when it comes to the idea of God, it’s like you’ve just switch off that part of your brain. The quoted statement not only assumes that god is real, but that he is perfect and has our best interest in mind. Even if i did believe in some sort of god, I’d hardly jump to such conclusions myself.

I’ll break this down to a few simple points before I go off on all kinds of tangents.

-Even if some kind of god existed, and he seriously did give us arbitrary rules to follow for reasons he never reveals, what reason would we have to follow them? Especially when they are downright harmful. (Think teaching abstinence and nothing else, banning sodemy etc..)

-Would a perfect god give us rules that make no sense today? If he knew they would no longer apply someday, would he not mention it? Maybe update the list at some point?

-If some sort of god did exist, and there is no reason to believe he has our best interest in mind, that he loves everyone, that he knows we exist, etc… Bad things happen to god ass-kissers and genuinely good people (I hear he likes that stuff), prayer has no non-psychological effect, and babies are born with terrible genetic disorders. All of this makes sense from a naturalistic point of view, and not much from a world-view involving a personal god.

That quote from Saxe’s article stood out to me as well. It’s a great quote. While science cannot be used to inform us how we ought to behave, we still can use it to inform our moral theories, even if they all have the is-ought conundrum.

Please don’t misunderstand my moral relativism. I’m a moral relativist in the sense that no morals exist outside of self-reflecting agents. In other words, if there were no thinking things capable of reflecting on their own actions in the universe, then morality would be meaningless. Thus morality is not a universal truth which we discover, but one which is created (this appears to be our fundamental disagreement). Why our moral beliefs are as there are, and not some other set of moral beliefs depends on the process that created the thinking, self-reflecting creatures. Many of those moral beliefs will be universal among each sentient being created by the same process. From this point of view, the rational thing to do is act on our collectively held moral intuition, even if we are uncertain of the source.

By contrast, natural laws are universal truths which we discover (or at least approximate). Gravity is not the result of a process that could have created a different set of gravitational laws if the process were modified. Light does not travel at different speeds depending on what source created the light. The speed of light is constant, despite the creative process that resulted in the light. This is why I am not forced into a epistemic relativist position.

“I argue that there is Value upon which all other true value is founded and that we are not an accident.”

I actually think that we are not an accident as well, but for a different reason. I am a hard determinist and thus believe that there is no such thing as ‘accidents’ or random events, only apparent accidents and apparent random events.

Thanks for your patience. The articles you referenced are interesting. Saxe’s article importantly makes the distinction between descriptive accounts of human behaviour and what is normative: “One thing these cutting-edge studies certainly cannot tell us is the right answer to a moral dilemma. Cognitive science can offer a descriptive theory of moral reasoning, but not a normative one. That is, by studying infants or brains or people around the world, we may be able to offer an account of how people actually make moral decisions . . . but we will not be able to say how people should make moral decisions.” Likewise, if scientific enquiry can give us a descriptive account of how humans came to have moral capacity, it is outside its jurisdiction for it to tell us how we ought to behave. Darwinian evolution, in particular, can give us no guidance and direction on how we should live since it is itself unguided and undirected.

You mentioned that accepting the is/ought distinction forces you into a moral relativist position. Why would it force you into moral relativism any more than epistemic relativism? As I argued in posts #20 & #22, if our cognitive faculties (like our moral faculties) are the product of natural forces, how can we be sure they are reliable in the process of truth gathering? I don’t think scepticism about morals is a rational way to live. One doesn’t have to account for how one knows everything before belief. Some things are just basic. I know that logic and maths apply to reality without proof, just as I know that theft and murder are morally wrong and are part of the furniture of the universe also. None of these are material entities. If we live as if they are real for pragmatic or prudential reasons yet are sceptical of their reality, is this rational? However, an important difference is that moral truths are more hotly contested in that they have inherent authority and restrict our behaviour.

I agree with your comment about the Divine Command Ethic (aka Voluntarism). A mere command by an authority cannot create a moral obligation. It appears to founder on the euthyphro dilemma. However, we are familiar with commands or laws that cause obligation. Our law states that we are to drive on the left of the road and yours on the right. The morality of the laws is not in the left or right per se, but in the underlying value that, if there is not agreement on order in a society, then harm will come through conflict. This in turn is based on the value we place on human life.

God’s commands, however, have their base in His essential being. God, by definition, holds all His attributes essentially and necessarily, and as designer-creator-owner of the universe, whatever He commands and does are in accord with His essential goodness.

Wittgenstien said: “If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental.” I argue that there is Value upon which all other true value is founded and that we are not an accident. Thus meaning and purpose are not feelings to be invented but rather objective truths to be discovered.

Thanks for the discussion.

“So every moral conclusion has statements of value in its premises, and none are deriveable from statements of pure fact.”

I think we may have covered this before. I think you are right. There is no logically valid way of moving from a fact statement to a moral conclusion. They all suffer from the is-ought problem. Even the divine command ethic suffers from this problem: This is what God commands, so we ought to do it.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’ve been asking myself if this forces me into a moral-relativist position. Inevitably, I’d have to say, ‘yes’, but with a caveat. I think that morality may well be ultimately relative, but at the species level, some of it is universal. I believe this because cognitive science has revealed wide-spread agreement about moral truths. Here is a very interesting, but long article that discusses this issue. It’s worth the read. Furthermore, neuroscience is discovering that that our brains are hardwired to make moral certain moral judgments, even though we can choose to ignore our moral intuition.

These ideas are still in their infancy and somewhat controversial, but they do point out that a biology can explain morality. Since it seems our moral intuition is based in biology, it only makes sense that we use evolution to explain why we have certain moral beliefs.

Your core objection is that evolution cannot account for supererogatory moral acts, especially the sacrifice of one’s life for another’s. I’m no expert on behavioral evolution, but I’ve read a bit on this. As Skids pointed out, natural selection does not act on the level of the individual, but on the level of genes. Most of human evolution took place when we lived in tribes. Since tribes where small and largely inter-married, it is very likely that a vast majority of people anyone would come across would share many of the same genes. Thus, at worse, sacrificing ones one life to save another’s has close to a zero net effect on the gene pool. If more than one person is saved, the is a net savings in the gene pool.

The real driver for this sort of morality may be born out of external threats. If a tribe is facing genocide from without, then it would be hugely advantageous for people to view sacrificing one’s life (in a battle, for instance) to protect the tribe as a whole as a morally great act. Thus a self-sacrifice morality could be selected for.

This may not be the correct explanation, but it should point out that we should not be so quick to rule out an evolutionary explanation for a self-sacrifice moral.

First, ethics, meta-ethics and moral theory are rationally systematised into some coherent form. But each moral proposition or injunction rests on another. None can be derived from statements of fact even though they supervene on statements of fact. So every moral conclusion has statements of value in its premises, and none are deriveable from statements of pure fact.

Second, your #2 reference is to my argument which is based on Kai Nielsen’s reasoning. I would add: many moral acts can be against reason, as when one sacrifices his life to save another, etc. But then these only hold if morality is ultimately incidental to the universe.

You mentioned truth and deception. Do we need truth to survive? Many of us seem to get away with a rather small grasp of truth and yet flourish (especially we religious types, eh?). Other species certainly don’t seem to need it. Just the right response to stimuli, i.e., adaptive behaviour.

If our minds are the blind product of matter, how can we be sure that our beliefs about matter are true and reliable. And even if they are, does it (or can it) really matter? Unguided evolution is pretty indifferent about matters of truth and value.

Sure, there are all kinds of sources that can give you a feeling of dignity and worth and they don’t need to be rational or based on truth. But the belief that all persons inherently possess inestimable dignity and worth is another thing altogether. This affects morality. If my neighbour possesses value objectively and independently of my estimation, I then am morally obligated to regard him accordingly–including my atheist neighbours. OTOH if we are but sophisticated bunches of chemicals, nothing really matters even if we want to think it does, religious or otherwise.

First of all, you aren’t looking for the truth. You’re just stating that you wish the world was a way, so that’s the way you force yourself to believe it is.

Many atheists, myself included, find natural and man made (without lying to ourselves) sources of worth and dignity, and feeling special and all the other stuff people want gods for. So whether you can fathom it or not, naturalism CAN hack it.

When you realize morality is more complicated than, “my god loves me and he’s always right, so I do what he says,” you might start to see what I’m talking about.

So everything of value is but an invention of the brain. If we consider certain actions as good or bad, accetptable or unacceptable, admireable or reprehensible, these valuations are facts about the subject and not of any real property in the object.

The rub of all this is that human persons can have no inherent value outside of our own emotions. We come from dirt and go back to it and are forgotten. So why *ought* we to help evolutionary “progress”? The other creatures just do what they do and survive or perhaps not. We can “invent right and wrong” (Mackie) but wwe can’t create human worth and dignity. It must come from outside; naturalism can’t hack it.

Don’t worry about taking time to respond. The discussion is worth the wait. From which time zone do you hail from? Based on your previous posts, my guess is that you live in England, but correct me if I’m wrong.

If I understand you correctly, you are disputing any strictly rational based moral theory. I want to make sure I understand you correctly before I defend rational morality, so allow me to breakdown your argument into it’s fundamental premises:

1. If any rationally-derived moral theory is valid, then following rational thought will result in morally good behavior.
2. There are situations where rational thought can lead to theft (e.g. I can steal item X without being caught. I want item X. Therefore I should take item X.)
3. Theft is immoral.
———–
4. Therefore rational thought can result in immoral behavior
5. Thus no rationally-derived moral theory is valid.

Consequence-free theft is only one example, you can substitute in any “immoral act without adverse consequences” that benefits the perpetrator, such as your original example, murder. Am I understanding your objection to rational morality correctly? I have many thoughts on this, but I want to give you an opportunity to clear up any remaining misunderstands we may have.