Elfman

Thanks for clarifying my misuse of the term. I will try to be more careful in the future. I agree with the distinction.


You do not seem to go so far as to say that atheists do not have Absolute Moral Claims. Just that you disagree with those you have often heard. Are you claiming that there is no such thing as an action that is wrong all the time for everyone? For example, I think torturing babies for fun is wrong all the time everywhere for everyone (and I think God would agree).

I agree....a theory can be critiqued on grounds of inconsistency and coherence on its own claims. No problem there.
I would LOVE to hear the atheist theory of morality, especially one that does not end up in a reletivistic morass. Give me something that has some solid ground under it!

No. False. Morality is not authority at all. I never made this claim. I said that those in authority can legitimately make rules for those under their authority, and those under the authority then have a real moral obligation to obey....as long as the rules do not break an even higher authorities' rules. So I could be ordered to torture a baby because my boss thought it would be fun to hear it cry, and I would be morally right to disobey. Why? Because their is a higher authority that has informed me (through my ability to reason and intuit right and wrong) that such behavior is actually absolutely wrong. So an action isn't "right" just because God said to do it, but he would not say to do something that was absolutely "wrong" because He is the way He is.


I see the Eryphro dilemma peeking out. ;-) Ha Ha. Nope again.....God acts as He does without a higher authority giving him rules. What I call God's actions is irrelevant. Moral incumbency can be deriven from authority, but not necessarilty absolute morality as you defined it. For example, God made the universe and gave value to human life. Before God said it was wrong to murder, it was (see Cain and Abel). So moral truths can be derived from moral intuition (given by God), from the universe we live in (made by God). So I agree that atheists can be moral people because they can reason out right and wrong from the world they are in. Rape is not strictly forbidden in the bible, yet I know it is wrong.
Were authority = morality, that would be giving God the power to make ABSOLUTE moral truths by whim, and that is not how it works. But God can say to those under his authority "I want you to do X" and regardless of what "X" is, if you dont do it, you will have committed a disobedient (wrong) act, UNLESS "X" was an ABSOLUTE moral "good" in which case, I believe God would never ask you to transgress it. So you then ask why is God "good" and that is asking why is blue "blue"...it doesn't make sense. If you change the question to "why do we call God "good" we can talk about that, but that is off point.

I think that the universe, made by God - based on who he is and what he wants to accomplish, was made with moral realities for us. So if we lived in a world where it was impossible to die, attempted murder would be seen as a silly activity, not necessarily an immoral one. God made the universe as it is, and gave us the ability to reason, so why can we not inuit objective moral truths from that? Just dont confuse why we call something "right" with something being "right."


I agree in part. With people, we say that they can do both bad and good things that is our nature. So our nature is braod enough to include both...it is a contrary nature that can go either way based on our will, our desires. I do not see God having this ability because, as you said, we must act according to our nature. (Please no one jump in and say they thought God could do anything, he must not be omnipotent.) So I may be a murder and just haven't been pushed far enough. So I think your approach to defining "nature" is a bit simple.

I agree...."not that informative" other than in the light that man's nature is different than Gods as far as capacity for doing Absolute evil.


I understand this perspective. As for moral laws, they can be like other laws....I do not have to obey the laws of CA while in VA. they do not apply to me. I am not under their sphere of authority. BUt if I go there, I have to. This may seem like a double standard to you, but it isn't to me. I see no evidence that God making a law for people to act in a certain way then makes that an ABSOLUTE moral law to which he must subject himself, but it is a real law that has real moral obligation based on God's authority over us.
Example...I tell my kid that he must clean his room right now. He is wrong to disobety me (unless a dirty room was tied to an ABSOLUTE moral good which it isn't), and yet having a dirty room has no absolute moral status just because I said so. And yet, he still "ought" to do as I say because I am his father (authority higher than his) and have asked him to do it (and the thing I have asked him to do seems a morally neutral act).
See how it works? No arbitrariness (his room was dirty and I wanted it otherwise), no incoherence or self inconsistency. Just a cleaned up room.:love:

connick

Awesome. Welcome to the fray elfman.

I disagree. I think that any suffering or evil, no matter how slight, is contrary to the nature of an all-loving and all-powerful god. The concepts of evil and suffering need not be fleshed out to see this.

That's what it seems like to me. God created and uses evil according to the Bible.
An all-powerful and all-loving god would have no need to cause the famine in the first place or cause the enslavement of Joseph's brothers, nor does he have an excuse for not feeding the starving Egyptians himself. To say that God had to do it that way is not only to limit his omnipotence, but a flat out falsehood. There are several conventional ways to have solved the problem and an infinite amount of divine methods for preventing or ending the famine without introducing further suffering.

This boils down to a tautology, elfman. Whatever God does is right because God is always right. It demonstrates nothing except that you believe in a god who can never be wrong because he can never be wrong.

No, I think what you meant to say was that it's not wrong because God always does the right thing. A circle couldn't be more circular.

Moving on to your response to Prof.
While this is tangent to the discussion at hand, I personally think the "relativistic morass" is in fact the answer to the question of morality. However, we can discuss that later in another thread perhaps.

So where does these absolute morals come from if not from God? Did he not create everything as it says in the Bible? This is another circular argument. God's rules are God's rules because they are God's rules.

In regards to Prof's definition of nature you said:
You seem to be implying that the word nature is not as simple as Prof laid it out. Definitions are about as simple as things get and a brief one for nature is "a description of how a thing acts". Calling something simple is a non-argument. Please, demonstrate your point instead of simply saying you have one and that our views are too simple.

As I said above, your argument here is that whatever God does is right because God is always right. This means that God can arbitrarily do as he pleases and always be right.

Prof

Remember I qualified "often enough." Depending on how you phrase a moral issue, you can arrive at some absolutes. Especially when you include not only the action but the reason for the action. Because the reason for the action is, in of itself, at the heart of what makes something moral or not. Hence having the wrong reasons will, by the nature of reason/logic, hold as wrong "in all possible worlds."

So the trick there is you've provided not only the action but the reason for the action. "For fun."

Inherent in the concept of "torture" is thwarting the desires of the victim. That is (by the lights of many/most value systems) "wrong." But within a number of value systems torturing a baby could be, in a logically possible world/scenario, the "right" action, insofar as it may serve a greater good.

However, if you include doing it "for fun" then that equates to the desire to torture babies. And (in a value system to which I subscribe which evaluates desires before actions) the desire to thwart another person's desires - the desire to torture - is an inherently desire-thwarting desire; hence the wrong desire in all possible worlds.

However, commands like "Thou Shalt Not Kill," and plenty of other actions around which moral questions reside, do not make sense as "Absolutes."

Plenty of systems provide for objectively "bad" or "good" actions. Once an underlying criteria is established - e.g. if promoting human happiness and welfare over suffering is taken as a basic tenet, there are plenty of facts about the nature of human suffering that entail that some acts toward humans are objectively "bad" in light of the moral tenet and "good."

"God doesn't like it" will, however, never be such a tenet, which makes any action objectively "right" or "wrong."

As far as one theory goes, one that I find compelling (Desire Utilitarianism), "ought" by it's nature relates to actions and desires. If X is not a possible action, it is incoherent to say anyone "ought" to do X. Likewise, to say any being "ought" to do X remains incoherent without the existence of a desire relating to X. No desires, no values, no reasons to do X.

Hence "ought" statements entail desires, and desires provide "reasons for action." You "ought" to buy the bigger hammer = "the bigger hammer will be such as to fulfill the desire in question (which might be the desire to hammer in a big nail).

To skip to the central tenet concerning what makes for moral "oughts": Desires themselves, being malleable, are amenable to the question "ought one have Desire X?" And since any "ought" statement must appeal to X's tendency to fulfill desires, then "ought one Desire X" entails answering whether "X desire" has the tendency of fulfilling desires.

Hence, moral desires are the category of desires that have the tendency of fulfilling other (and stronger) desires. (And are desires we can universalize).

The desire to Rape is objectively a bad desire, because there is plenty of objective evidence supporting that raping has the tendency of thwarting desires. (And, it's actually inherent in the very notion of "rape" anyway: it is forcing sex upon someone against his/her desire).

Have fun.

(I don't propose to have found the perfect moral theory, but some are clearly more problematic than others...theistic theories being typical of the more problematic species).

Back to your argument:


Wait, but you just DID equate "following an authority" to a "moral obligation."

It's right there in stark letters above. (I highlighted it just so you don't miss it).

An authority makes rules, those under those rules, in your own words then have a real moral obligation to obey.

So, still, what one "ought" to do, by the principle you are espousing, derives from following the rules of a higher authority.

That is the principle you've established. And the linking of Authority to morality is amply denied by the fact none of us would agree that something is made "good" via the command of someone in authority! (We may agree a military commander is an authority, but if he starts demanding women raped and children tortured in war, we would not say his commands are "good" because we recognize that morality is separate from authority. Hence your principle fails to be established. But nonetheless, you ARE stuck with your own words which attempt to establish the derivation of morality from Authority).

But then you want to throw away this principle as soon as you get to God.
"Except God: there is no higher authority handing Him the rules."

However, if it's the case you still want to say that what God does is moral, then you show that morality does not derive from following the rules of an authority...as God Himself provides a case against that claim.

Therefore your appeals to how authority works in human affairs, as if this had something to do with morality...was just a smoke screen. A sham.

What really is the nature of morality. What really makes something wrong or right for God?


Ok, so God values human life. It's not biblically supported very well, nor is it supported by the facts of life...but it's a nice notion.

Still doesn't tell us whether we ought to do as God desires. And the "Authority" argument you are riding is already shown to have no justification.

You are arguing in circles.

Right there, again in stark letters, you equate "disobedient" with "wrong."

Don't you see it? You wrote it!???

You are trying to have your cake and eat it too. Trying to say that we "OUGHT" to do as God desires because of His authority over us and if we disobey that authority that equates to an immoral act (doing "wrong").

But then you can't use this for God, so you get stuck in this mess:


Well, there we have it. WHY wouldn't God ask us to transgress a particular command? What makes it wrong?

For instance, why couldn't God love the torturing of children?

If He could, would that make it "good?"
If He can't simultanesouly "love the torture of children" and make it "good"...then you agree "good" is established by something other than God (and God's nature).


Only when you've defined God as good.

But that simply begs the question on which this argument is based: "What JUSTIFICATION would you have for defining God as good?"

This gets to the heart of the nature of morality.

And you don't answer the nature of morality question simply by defining X Good...you answer it by providing REASONS, justifications for defining X Good. Which you have failed to do (see the failure of your appeals to authority).

Right now you've simply offered no coherent reason for what "ought" entails, what is the nature of morality, and why I ought to do as God desires.

Now, since you mentioned the Euthyphro, let's lay this out:

Does God have justifiable reasons for his "moral" commands?

If He does, then it is those reasons from which the "rightness" of an action is derived, not from He who commands the action.

If God does not have, or does not require, justifiable reasons for his commands, then you offer me no reason to accept them. You end in sheer arbitrariness of God.

Prof

connick

How so? God says don't kill, but he kills. God says do not covet, but is himself jealous.

I went to church and Sunday school. I believed and I prayed. I gave myself up to God's will. Never once did he answer any prayers of mine. When critically thinking about the dilemma later in life, I discovered the logical impossibilities and barbarism of the God I had been indoctrinated to worship. If you say that I didn't wait long enough then you are adding requirements that are not in the Bible. It is clear from the text that prayers will be answered. If you say that God will answer prayers if he has his own reasons to, then God's works are equivalent to the results one gets by writing the prayer down and keeping it in their underpants.

Then you are ignoring reality. Never has an amputated limb regrown. Never. No doubt, countless devout Christians have prayed for healing. Never has multiple sclerosis been cured, despite massive amounts of prayer. Never has Down's syndrome been reversed by prayer. Never has death been reversed by prayer. It seems in the eyes of Christian apologists that every time a person prays and recieves a benefit that the prayer has been answered. While every single prayer that goes unanswered is waved away as not being God's will or in his "master plan". That's the same as saying "whatever will be will be". Which means exactly nothing. Nothing is predicted by this and nothing can ever be evaluated using that statment. If that's how God behaves he may as well not exist, and in all likelihood he does not.

Elfman

But one must still flesh out the concept of "all loving" and "all powerful". I am not sure how you are using them. Does God's all-lovingness mean he cannot punish evil because punishing people might hurt? How is it possible to be all-loving and yet still just and "good" then. Can this be done if people are still given a free will? Many claim "all powerful" to mean he can do anything...even make a square circle. How are you defining these terms?

I do not subscribe to the idea that evil needed to be created other than as a byproduct of good. Just as one would say "God made darkness", when darkness is an absence of light or cold is an absence of heat. It requires only the positive to exist in its form which is inherently a privation of what is good.

True. (note God didn't enslave Joseph's brothers....they enslaved one of their own - Joseph) God could have just sent rain and the harvests would have been full. But then, generations of people, millions, wouldn't know about how God can work through even the evil desires of men to accomplish his goals. That is a far more complicated feat. And if the end goal is for us to love God and enjoy his creation of our own free will, than we learn far more about him this way. It is about relationship.

I believe in a God who cannot do evil because He is incapable of it. Not a God who can do whatever He wants and it thus becomes good because I think He cannot do otherwise.

Sounds like a good one.

Not sure how you are getting to this circular argument here. God made everything, but somethings, like evil, are results from an absense of good. So while he is responsible for making the universe, by putting in free moral agents, he left open the possibility that they would do evil. He does not make us do evil, even though he made us able to do evil and knew that we would choose that course sometimes. Where do absolute morals come from? Good question. What do you think? It seems to me that we call certain things moral absolutes based on our ability to intuit that they are. That doesn't answer why they are, but just because one may have trouble answering a "why" question does not mean a certain thing isn't the way it is. Torturing babies for fun seems to be intuitively wrong (as prof says) in "all possible worlds." I am not siure what he means by all possible - ruled by logic?

Well, I could say that it is not in my nature to murder someone, but maybe if someone killed my child, I could. Does that mean I have the nature of a murderer? Or, is that my nature changed due to circumstances? If we are saying that nature is merely descriptive....I murdered so I have the nature of a murderer, then fine. But it doesn't do much good to talk about my nature given that anything could happen which might change me from your average church going, contented citizen, who doesn't cheat on his taxes into Hitler. My contention is that God's nature is such that he does no evil ever.

Elfman

How so? God says don't kill, but he kills. God says do not covet, but is himself jealous. [/QUOTE]

Small misquotes here....the bible says don't murder, not dont kill (they are not the same thing), and as for coveting it reads:

"You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor."

So it says that you shouldn't covet possesions, but references to God's jealousy are not ever about belongings, but about God's desire that you love him over other gods. This is not a contradiction.

Elfman

I do remember you qualified "often enough." Could you expand on the "all possible worlds thing." I am not sure exactly what you mean by it. Is a Alice and Wonderland world not a possible world because it isn't governed by reason? Are their other qualifiers?

Secondly....there is no command "Thou shalt not kill".....that may be the most common misquote outside "money is the root of all evil." Murder is used instead of kill because murder implies unjust killing. Small point, but small definitions may be important later.

Elfman

You seem to think that torturing babies for fun is one such a case of a moral absolute. Do we agree then that at least one moral absolute exists?



We can make criteria which we use to call something "good and bad" but that, in no way, makes something good or bad. And it certainly does not have any binding power or real "oughtness" to it. You claim that God commanding something doesn't make it right absolutely....well then how much better does your artifical construct of "goodness" based on human suffering or thwarted desire fare in that regard? You haven't solved the problem yourself.

Side note:
I view our purpose for "being" as wrapped up in it all as well. We are made for the purpose of being in relationship to God and loving one another and enjoying creation - basically, being the people God wants us to be. You mentioned motives as a big part of the moral equation...I agree. Apart from a desire to love God, then our actions are not truly "good" even if they appear to be "nice" to everyone around us. I doubt God will be impressed with anything I do...I am certainly not banking on my works to impress.

I dont want to get confused here....I think you are saying that just because God says not to do something, that doesn't make the action itself wrong in some objective way. I think I can agree with that (tenatively). To get biblical...Adam was told not to eat the fruit of a specific tree in the garden. Eating that fruit was not made wrong by that command in any objective way. But I would contend that disobeying one's maker is wrong if our very purpose for being is wrapped up in the concept that we are supposed to be in relationship with that creator. So eating the fruit was wrong to do because God desired him to do otherwise....it is a matter of fulfilling our purpose in obedience to God, not anything to do with the wrongness of eating fruit itself.

Brain smoking...must rest.....



Not sure I followed all this. Wouldn't rape be a desire for one person (to do it), which results in thwarting the desire of another (the victim). Wouldn't they cancel out? How are you weighting the fulfilling of one desire against another?

I have toyed with the utilitarian angle from the prospect that God has set a purpose for us.....and as we fulfill that purpose that is "good", as we seek to deny our purpose, then that is "bad." (That purpose being to love God and enjoy his creation). God's rules then become a part of the way we relate to God (obediently or not) and thus we do "good" when we love God and obey him, and "bad" when we deny him or do things for our own selfish desires. In essence we either become the right tool for the job (hammer for nail) or the wrong one (sponge hitting the nail). So any law is not inherently good in itself, but is merely a means to improve our ability to love God and enjoy his creation. Ever come across that before?

Prof

I'm off to bed so I don't have time for a full reply. Don't know when I'll get to it this weekend. But just a quick comment:

That's the initial confusion that pretty much everyone holds when first encountering the idea of Desire Utilitarianism. Remember, we aren't evaluating the utility of acts but the utility of desires themselves.
A good desire is one that tends to fulfill other desires; a bad one tends to thwart other desires.

Take two people. One wants to rape the other. The desire to rape will entail the thwarting of the victim's desire. Hence the desire to rape has the tendency to thwart desires (other people's - rape victims). Hence: it's a bad desire.

Replace it with different desire: the desire to respect the autonomy of other people. The desire that sex be consensual.

If both those people have those desires, how many desires are being thwarted? None. Those desires do not have the tendency to thwart other people's desires. Just the opposite: you've replaced a bad desire-thwarting desire (rape) with desires that tend to fulfill each other's desires.

Another angle to get a grip of the idea is to imagine you have a machine with a "knob" for The Desire To Rape. It increases or decreases the prevalence of the Desire For Rape in a society. In the "Zero" position - if no one has the desire to rape other people - there is neither the desire of a rapist being thwarted (because they don't have the desire), nor the desires of victims being thwarted. As you turn the knob "up" to increase the prevalence of The Desire To Rape (with people acting upon it) you have more and more desires being thwarted in the society. Right?

So "Rape=Bad Desire" (equals "Immoral"). Same for Slavery (for instance). The desire to enslave other people is a desire that tends to thwart other people's desires (the enslaved). Turn it down and you have fewer and fewer desires being thwarted. Replace it with a "good" desire, e.g. the desire for consensual contracts: I choose to do a job for you; you pay me money for my work. Both desires are fulfilled.

Hence we have reasons to promote in others the respect for one another's autonomy (in which we can fulfill more desires). And reasons to
discourage the desire to rape, enslave (or steal etc)...as those desires tend to thwart desires.

(This actually is a cool way to bridge the is/ought "gap"...although I have not specifically gotten into that).

Hope that makes things more clear.

But the result is objectively right and wrong desires. Because there would be facts about which desires actually would have a tendency to thwart other desires and ones that would have the tendency to fulfill other desires.
And, unlike the question-begging, double-standards of theistic morality, even a God's opinion couldn't change those objective facts. If God said "The desire to rape is good," then he'd be objectively wrong.

Cheers,

Prof.

Elfman

First I want to hank you for your time. You have made me seriously think about this in ways I have not before. So thanks. :jump:

But how does setting up a system (we determine for ourselves) or criteria to judge morals have any impact on whether or not something is actually good or bad? Its like saying, I have determined that fat people are bad and skinny people good. Now I can judge fat and skinny people by categorizing and labelling them, but this doesn't make them good or bad in any way.

Trappist monk Thomas Merton put it this way:

In the name of whom or what do you ask me to behave? Why should I go to the inconvenience of denying myself the satisfactions I desire in the name of some standard that exists only in your imagination? Why should I worship the fictions that you have imposed on me in the name of nothing?

Any system grounded in our personal criteria meets the fate of irrelevance. It isn't real. It is contrived. How then can their be any absolute given this criteria? (haven't heard back, but I assumed you agreed their was one based on earlier comments.)


I agree....authority is not what establishes that a thing is good. Moral obligation is between agents, not things. It does not seem to make sense to say that just because I say to my son that he needs to clean his room that I have, in any real way, made messy rooms objectively less good. And yet, my son ought to do as I ask. We live with that reality every day. He ought to obey me unless what I am asking him to do is wrong in some way because I am his father. Now one could come up with lots of reasons why a clean room is a "good" thing such as that I dont want him to be a slob, I have a guest staying in that room and want the guest to feel welcome, etc.... But those reasons dont make a clean room "morally" good, they just are reasons that give legitimacy to my command. They make my command non-arbitrary. They provide a foundation for why I want what I want. But none of that makes clean rooms morally good in and of itself. My contention is not that God's commands make a thing good or bad in itself, but that obedience to God is good because we were made for a certain purpose - to love God and enjoy his creation - and that which encourages us towards that end is therefore good. that which does not encourage us towards that end is not good. Because I do not think God would ask me to do a bad thing, (not being his nature), I assume that his commands are then for my own good. I am not saying that what God commands is therefore good no matter what it is he commands. That would be circular. I agree. Sorry if I was not clear. There is a distinction though.

Well, he doesn't have a higher authority. But that is besides the point. I understand your point (a fair one)....you think I am saying that "goodness" comes only from authority, but since God has no higher authority he therefore cannot appeal to being good on the same basis. So how do I know that God is good? I think it is a fair question. I cannot say that He is good because he cannot be any other way, because that would be circular. I can appeal to the character traits of God as expressed in the bible...self sacrificing, loving, merciful, just, holy, etc... Those seem pretty good to me and might be a place to start. But really we have now moved the question from why something is good, to why do we call something good. And that fails to answer the real question because it moves it all towards subjectivism.


What is the nature of God? I think the question might be above my pay grade. :devil1:


I don't think we quite have it at all. Why is a thing wrong for us to do? Because it is against our reason for being, it is in opposition to why we were made and for what we were made. As a perfect authority figure asks us to do things, a moral incumbency is placed on us. It has weight. If there is no moral grounding in the person and purposes of God, then what are you left with...ethical systems attempting to sort out meaning in a world made for something it can never understand.

Ethicist Richard Taylor explains:
A duty is something that is owed....but something can be owed only to some person or persons. There can be no such thing as a duty in isolation....The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain, but their meaning is gone.


If I accept that it is an absolute that torturing babies for fun was wrong....

If he could....but he wouldn't be able to so the rhetorical question isn't a counterfactual, it wouldn't be possible. And if God could do it, then it would not be made good if the assesment of an absolute moral were accurate.

I do agree that "good" cannot be whatever God wants it to be, but I also do not believe that God can pick bad. So I believe that God only picks good as a matter of who He is. Thus, what he picks will be good (NOT BECAUSE HE PICKED IT) but because he cannot pick otherwise.

Here is an analogy: Think of a machine that only picks out blue m&m's from a jar of muticolored m&m's. That it picks only blue ones does not make the m&m's blue, it is just that it only can pick blue ones because thats its programming.



I hope I have given some in this email. In summary, there are character traits for God that seem good, like justice, that God seems to have as best as I can tell. I can intuit some moral truths like we ought not to punish the innocent and let the guilty go free. And things like that seem rather universal. It is not just my personal perspective, it is grounded in something that isn't my opinion or it wouldn't be anything more than my opinion.


Justifiable reasons? Most seem self evident so that even a nonbeliever agrees with them. For example, "murder is wrong." Without guessing about God's reasons for it being wrong, you and I could come up with many pragmatic reasons against murder and few in favor of it. I do not understand why God does all that he does. Some rules seem intuitively good, others do not seem to have a reason I can understand. But none that I can see are intuitively evil to me. Not one. Different cultures will look at the bible and have different issues against the moral rules expressed in the bible....our culture would say that God's views on sexuality are out of date but that the love and forgiveness are ok, a middle eastern culture may think that God's rules on sexuality (as expressed in the bible) are not strict enough and that all the forgiveness stuff is crap. I think I'll trust God to determine the best course for me as I think he has a better idea for the context of why I am here.

He has goals, he makes rules based on what will achieve those goals. He tells us that He is good. He has demonstrated that through self sacrifice for us. He has shown mercy and love and justice so I am inclined to believe that his purposes are good. God does not seem to be arbitrary other than in his doctrine of election.