SavedOnebyGrace Posted October 5, 2015 Group: Royal Member Followers: 0 Topic Count: 11 Topics Per Day: 0.04 Content Count: 4,056 Content Per Day: 15.02 Reputation: 5,191 Days Won: 0 Joined: 07/30/2023 Status: Offline Share Posted October 5, 2015 a universal moral is something i think a lot about.i'll present shortly my conclusion with an exemple: your in the jungle and you're attacked by a lion who wants to kill you.you shoot him down because he's a treath to you.you have done good, because otherwise you were dead.at the other side, it was not very good for the lion, who just wanted to eat, or who would starve. i have many other exemples of this kind of situation.my personal conclusion is that there is only a human moral law, not a universal one.I agree. Man does not have the capability to create or even recognize a universal moral law. By man's works, he may come up with a set of ethical equivalents to promote a kind of justice, but that's about it. On the other hand, our Creator can inspire man to a universal moral law (divinely inspired) that can be used on a universal level. Without God, we have ethics. With God, we have morality. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
siegi91 Posted October 30, 2015 Group: Nonbeliever Followers: 12 Topic Count: 35 Topics Per Day: 0.01 Content Count: 3,798 Content Per Day: 1.19 Reputation: 249 Days Won: 0 Joined: 08/04/2015 Status: Offline Share Posted October 30, 2015 (edited) Hi Siegi91, I'm not sure I understand your reasoning. You say that you can't see ML King as immoral because he won? Does that mean you're equating what's right and what's wrong with whoever prevails or wins? Are you saying that the good guys never lose? Surely during Stalin's reign it could be said that Stalin won, and thus what Stalin does is good. Suppose a despot took over the world, would that despot's victory alone become the moral compass for the future? I agree with you that Europe has a low view of religiosity, but that doesn't mean that it's abandoned Christian ethics. Even atheist philosophers agree that Western democracy and the concepts of equality that we hold to here are firmly rooted in Christian principles. So while it's true that Sweden and France have abandoned organised religion, they are still very much dependent on the Christian system of ethics. If however ethics were overhauled and a materialistic system of ethics were to be adopted, such as what you're espousing, then the moral landscape would change dramatically, because right and wrong will become dependent on personal preference and societal convention. Love thy neighbour isn't consistent with atheism, but survival of the fittest is... In fact love is merely an illusion according to atheism, right? Caused by parental or mating drives... You've asked a interesting question. How does one get from objective morals to a transcendent God. This is where the conversation gets a little more abstract I guess, but I'll try to answer as best I can.Morals are prescriptive, thus they tell you how the world ought to be. But just looking at the world will only show you how the world is, not how it ought to be. The source of an ought can never be inside the thing that ought to be a certain way. You cannot ask a Bavarian Eisbein how it ought to be cooked, you ask a Bavarian chef. The food just is and it doesn't contain within it's being the authority of being the right kind of Bavarian Eisbein. But some authority can give objective meaning to "the right way to cook Eisbein". So if we're granting objective morals for the sake of argument, this only makes sense if there is some transcendent moral authority. Laws require law givers. One can then go further and say that since moral laws are mentally assessed the source of morality cannot be anything less than mental itself. So I think it's reasonable to conclude that if morality is objective, that its source must be some kind of mental authority. Hi Siegi91, 1) I'm not sure I understand your reasoning. You say that you can't see ML King as immoral because he won? Does that mean you're equating what's right and what's wrong with whoever prevails or wins? Are you saying that the good guys never lose? Surely during Stalin's reign it could be said that Stalin won, and thus what Stalin does is good. Suppose a despot took over the world, would that despot's victory alone become the moral compass for the future? 2) I agree with you that Europe has a low view of religiosity, but that doesn't mean that it's abandoned Christian ethics. Even atheist philosophers agree that Western democracy and the concepts of equality that we hold to here are firmly rooted in Christian principles. So while it's true that Sweden and France have abandoned organised religion, they are still very much dependent on the Christian system of ethics. If however ethics were overhauled and a materialistic system of ethics were to be adopted, such as what you're espousing, then the moral landscape would change dramatically, because right and wrong will become dependent on personal preference and societal convention. Love thy neighbour isn't consistent with atheism, but survival of the fittest is... In fact love is merely an illusion according to atheism, right? Caused by parental or mating drives... 3) You've asked a interesting question. How does one get from objective morals to a transcendent God. This is where the conversation gets a little more abstract I guess, but I'll try to answer as best I can.Morals are prescriptive, thus they tell you how the world ought to be. But just looking at the world will only show you how the world is, not how it ought to be. The source of an ought can never be inside the thing that ought to be a certain way. You cannot ask a Bavarian Eisbein how it ought to be cooked, you ask a Bavarian chef. The food just is and it doesn't contain within it's being the authority of being the right kind of Bavarian Eisbein. But some authority can give objective meaning to "the right way to cook Eisbein". 4) So if we're granting objective morals for the sake of argument, this only makes sense if there is some transcendent moral authority. Laws require law givers. One can then go further and say that since moral laws are mentally assessed the source of morality cannot be anything less than mental itself. So I think it's reasonable to conclude that if morality is objective, that its source must be some kind of mental authority. Hallo Luftwaffe, sorry for the very delayed answer, but my life is going crazy at the moment I numbered your different points so that I do not have to fight with the quoting features (I am useless with technology). 1) I believe I I said ML King was not immoral because the cultural pre-conditions for him to win (in a free society) were available. They are a necessary pre-condition to win such a battle. Since I am not a moral realist, my "oughts" are functions of several variables, including biology, culture, customs (mora, in latin), etc. I am aware that this view will beg the question: so if ML King were fighting against slavery in ancient Greece, and lost, would he have been an immoral man, considering that the society at that time was not ready to rid slavery and slavery was an essential economical instrument for said society? I will have to say yes, even if I have to shut my nostrils to avoid the bad smell of my statement. I am not sure whether Stalin can serve as a counter-example. If doubting the leader in public sends you, with absolute certainty, to freeze to death in a Siberian gulag, then we cannot be certain if the social pre-conditions to win such a battle were available, if people could speak freely. 2) I think it is obvious that Christianity belongs to the European genome. Probably, there would have been no Christianity without Europe. On the other hand, the moral landscape IS changing dramatically, at least from the point of view of traditional Christianity, I think, when catholic strongholds like Ireland vote to introduce gay marriages, and attempts to abolish abortion in other strong catholic countries (e.g. Italy) fail all the time by popular vote, then I not sure how much dependent on the Christian system of ethics Europe really is. When you say "love your neighbor" is not consistent with atheism, I think you mean it is not consistent with naturalism, which is a smaller subset of atheism. Some atheists are indeed moral realists. But I do not think that "love your neighbor" is inconsistent with naturalism, either. The way I see it, is that the realization that it is vastly preferable to help each others and share (at least in our neighborhood), instead of trying to kill and steal until the last man stands, is a powerful form of fitness, and that is why it has been probably naturally selected. When you say we think love is an illusion: I think that an illusion is something that appears to be there, while not really being there. I believe that love is a natural adaptation and is, therefore, not necessarily an illusion, in the same way the form of my body is not an illusion. It would be an illusion if it were confirmed that there is another form of love (spiritual, for instance) and the adaptive one is just an illusion thereof. But I do not give much credence to the existence of spiritual things. 3) The problem is what chef to ask. I know you might retort that this is only an epistemological problem, but for all practical purposes that does not really tell me how things ought to be, even if they ought to be so and so. At the risk of being superficial, I expect that a conversation between a Christian and a Hindu will look something like the following: C(hristian): All men are equal (H)indu: No. People should be divided in castes with different rights and rules. C: This is absurd, Jesus said we are all equal H: My god(s) do not C; But everyone, even independently from Jesus, knows that all people should have the same rights, and should all be treated the same way H: Why? I do not. Can the Hindu be right? I doubt it, but I would not know how to win against him, even if it is very unlikely that we "ought" to divide people in castes, under the premise of objective morality. I could, at best, try to convince him by leaving the system, like C. did when he mentioned that everyone knows, even without Jesus, and posit the existence of moral objectivity that does not depend on a God. 4) I am not sure the existence of laws necessitates the existence of a giver of said laws. At least, I fail to see the logical inference. For instance, I can imagine that there are things like the laws of logic that do not depend on a giver. Or, on a giver that has any possibility to change them. siegi Edited October 30, 2015 by siegi91 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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