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Originally Posted by
Redzeppelin
Part of our conception of the roots of morality come from our idea of human nature; you can be a Rousseau and think we're inherently good, or a Hobbes and believe that we're inherently bad. I - because of my Christian world view - tend to be more Hobbesian: human nature's default behavior is selfishness. Our views of morality are directly linked to that.
Your reasoning seems somewhat circular here, or, at least to be risking circularity. You don't believe it's possible to have morality without God because you take a Hobbesian view of humanity because you believe in a Christian God.
Just out of interest, how do you square this version of the Christian view with the parable of the Good Samaritan?
I haven't read Hobbes or Rousseau, except, the latter, in a pinch, so I don't want to damn either of them without a hearing, but their positions, at least as you lay them out here, seem simplistic and excessively polarised. All yin or all yang. In practice, don't we see evidence for both altruism and selfishness as innate, even in very young children. It always seems to me it's the very small kids, the ones who aren't self-interestedly watching the budget perhaps, who want to give money to beggars.
OK, I realise this doesn't exactly constitute a philosophical proof. :D I've been mulling over your question about what philosophy my Dad's starter explanation of democratic freedom led to. For reasons that go beyond point-scoring pedantry, the question seems clearly to require a working definition of philosophy itself or of 'a philosophy', at least. Break it down to its Greek roots to 'love of knowledge' or 'love of wisdom' and you've got something that seems clearly weighted to epistemology. This is limited, obviously, but this is where I feel your inquiry is leading, to whit, yes we don't really like the idea of murder, we wouldn't want anyone to do it to us or our loved ones, even to strangers, but how do we know it's wrong, absolutely, in such a way as allows us to legislate against it? To put it in, I think, Kantian terms, we think we know this, but how? How is this knowledge given to me? Note that Kant was a Christian, but never felt able to resort to God as an explanation. From his philosophical perspective, it isn't one because it simply removes the question to a transcendent, inexplicable realm, an unknowable realm. God is one of Kant's noumena - an unknowable, something about which we cannot have any certain knowledge. Hence, it has nothing to do with philo-sophy.
Of course, lots of religious people don't require Kant's proofs. They know what they know because they know it in their hearts, have faith etc. - even if, up to the point where proof broke down, they were quite happy to use proofs. This is, of course, the point where non-believers have very little option to throw up their hands and leave the field.
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At a collective level, yes; on an individual level, self-interest will generally be the primary motivating factor.
If you'll forgive me, zep, to say this statement lacked rigour would be kind. ;) No evidence, no rational deduction. What am I supposed to do? Just say, oh right, yeah, of course?
As it happens, I actually agree, if this was the implication, that in extreme situations such as tyranny, acts of self-interest predominate. Anyone in doubt about this just needs to read Primo Levi's accounts of life in Auschwitz. However, part of the point about those accounts, I think, is that the memories of those acts of self-interest in extremis are part of the emotional burden that concentration camp survivors carry. In other words, they feel bad about having behaved selfishly, even in this situation where they had very little choice - which implies a conscience and a deep-seated desire to do good. Not for nothing are situations like this described as 'dehumanising', I think.
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A fair statement applied to history - however, most examples of Christian misbehavior on a large scale can only be found by going back a few hundred years. Radical Islam now wears that crown proudly. I don't think America's prior history with slavery makes it a terrible country now.
Let's not get sidetracked. I'm not citing instances of past or present misdeeds in order to simply trash religion completely - even if that was my intention when I did it in a certain previous thread. The matter at hand, I think you'll agree, is the question of how we derive our morality. All I'm trying to show is that religion, far from being our only possible hope of having a moral code, is no guarantor of moral behaviour at all.
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I appreciate your fairness; both examples suggest that ideology ultimately can be warped to serve flawed and self-interested human beings who also happen to agree with a certain ideology.
Possibly. Or possibly, and, yes, I admit it, this is my view, the idea that an ideology guarantees rightness makes it much more likely that oppression will occur. Look at the Stalinist purges. At a certain point, they reach an almost comical pitch of the nonsensical in which the mere idea of this rightness is enough to drive murder and imprisonment on a massive scale - even as the precise notion of what it was people were supposed to be right about becomes indistinct. Zizek tells a story about Shostakovitch being badgered by a Kremlin official to admit certain information that could be used to condemn a friend of his as traitorous - or be condemned himself. Shostakovitch didn't have the information and went home to spend an agonising weekend imagining his time was nearly up. On Monday, as requested, he went in to see the official and was told that the man had, himself, been arrested as a traitor.
It's this kind of excess of certainty that Christopher Hitchens is talking about when he tries to claim that apparently atheistic phenomena such as Stalinism and the Khmer Rouge were actually implicitly religious. He doesn't make a very convincing case for this at all in my view, but the point does touch on something interesting, which is the way that, at precisely the point in the nineteenth century where it's becoming harder and harder to sustain religious belief philosophically, a powerful move towards certainty asserts itself, like the return of the repressed, in the form of Hegelian dialectics and, thence, Marxist dialectical materialism. It's a sign of the shift taking place that Marx went so far as to justify his system by calling it 'scientific', indicating clearly that the certainty he believed he was offering had nothing metaphysical about it. But it's a last gasp, nonetheless, one that, one might hope, utters its uncanny last post-mortem squeak with Francis Fukuyama's End of History, an attempt to justify capitalism and democracy as absolutely right on the same dialectical terms at a point when everyone really should have known better.
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The Wiccan ethical admonishment sounds nice, but I'm uncomfortable with its emphasis on will - on what I desire, what I want. It provides a mitigating condition, but its primary thrust deals with doing what one wants. That is very different from Christian theology which pretty much bypasses what an individual wants to what an individual should do. There's a difference. Acting in a way that "harms" nobody is very different than acting in a way that benefits other people. I'm not dismissing the validity of the Wiccan assertion - I'm pointing out how different it is from Christian ethics which says avoiding evil is not enough - one must actively do good.
But, as your own line of questioning seems to me to apply, how do we know what's good?
It's a bit of a sideline, but I disagree about your interpretation of 'will'. It's not necessarily synonymous with 'want'. It could just imply the future tense - do what you are going to do. This, to me, seems the right degree of ambiguity. Whether it's 'want' or 'are going to do', it's only a problem if you think that, off the leash, people are just going to go around committing acts of destructive self-indulgence (well you would think that as a Hobbesian, I guess). I think it allows a lot of room for doing good, but, crucially, doesn't insist on it. Insisting on it seems too rigid, a repression that will ultimately result in a backlash and it also removes volition in moral acts. You asked how my father's schema amounted to anything other than 'fear of retaliation', but how does a religious morality that absolutely insists on acts of virtue amount to anything other than fear of punishment and desire for reward? Where are our good Samaritans in that? The ones who actually have empathy and a moral sense, rather than just a moral rulebook? The ones who do good because they want to?
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But that's the point, b: YOU see them as harmful - but the governments/groups enacting these atrocities have defenses for them - and without a stable moral frame - a transcendant morality that exists beyond cultural differences - we have no ground from which to condemn them. If we do condemn them, we are automatically implying a standard of morality that they should acknowledge as well - but if it's simply OUR morality, what gives us the authority to condemn/judge at all?
Actually, you virtually never see these guys trying to defend their atrocities. Usually they just try to say, it wasn't me, someone else did it. That's what was being described on the news last night. The guy was either the leader of a Lords Resistance Army that had forced women to murder their own babies (I know. WTF?) or, in his version, an unwilling conscript.
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Don't you love it when that happens?
Yeah, it's almost like God talking to me. ;)
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I will - to an extent - agree with you. The Biblical injunction against lying - IMO - is suspended if my telling the truth (here comes the cliched "Jews in the cellars, Nazis at the door" scenario) will end up in the suffering and death of an innocent person.
Or Kant's notorious murderer at the door after your children example, in which he says that the obligation to tell the truth is not void. Uh oh.
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But in that instance, I have violated a "smaller" restriction in favor of the greater good - because the saving of a human life outranks truth-telling (especially truth-telling that cooperates with evil). That said, we cannot make all ethics situational - but we should clearly be using a set of noncompromising principles to guide us.
OK, maybe, but we're on more solid, potentially universal ground if we make those principles practical. If I say to a war criminal, who might, for the sake of argument, also be a member of a sect that sacrifices virgins, 'You are a criminal because God says murder is wrong.' he'd reject my argument on his own moral terms. The ground is no more solid than if I say 'You are a criminal because I just know somehow that murder is wrong.' since this man has a different conception of God from mine.
He might still try to reject it if I said, 'You are a criminal because you took the lives of people who were no threat to you and who were not willing to give up their lives', he might try a moral defense, but he'd have a harder time. The principle at work: possession is nine tenths of the law. In terms of maintaining social stability, it's a good 'un. He can recognise the terms because he can see that, if the situation was reversed, he wouldn't want the acts he committed to be committed against himself and might even consider them unjustified.
You might say, OK, but this doesn't really imply a morality, just a practical governing framework. And I might agree. I might even go on to say, what's the need for a morality at all as long as we know that we are protected from unprovoked harm? i.e. from injury or removal of our property by another person to whom we've done nothing wrong. As long as that is in place, why shouldn't people 'do what they will' and practice any moral code that suits them?
Roughly the same governing principle also occurs, of course, in the Bible: 'Do unto others as you would have them do to you.' At which point, it does rather look like a (wonderfully simple) guideline for moral action, but one that is, very much, grounded in the practical. No need for a deity to impose such a law. One can see the logic of it immediately and could derive it without reference to a deity.
Of course, to take an unHobbesian view, if you were to accept that morality is innate, the matter would be different. I'll get back to this...
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Scientists can argue away - our day to day decisions and behaviors suggest otherwise
Sorry, but, once again, you're on shaky ground philosophically, not because you're obviously wrong, but because you're simply making a bald statement without any kind of evidence.
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(notwithsanding random acts of morality that occur - with far less frequency I would suggest than in decades past).
I don't think we've got space to get into this. We'll have to agree to disagree.
"'History', said Stephen, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'" - Ulysses
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But the Bible does that as well - most people who follow the Biblical commands to give to the poor, to offer compassion to the suffering, to serve the community rather than the self - find that they are more satisfied and fulfilled than when they serve themselves.
Good. Yes, the Bible can instill morality, but that's not the point of the argument. The point is, do we absolutely need religion to give us morality?
And where are your Hobbesian monsters of self-interest now? Why are these people more satisfied and fulfilled? Why does it feel good to do good? Because God rewards good deeds with an immediate sensory kickback? Or because of an innate moral sense to which altruistic action speaks?
Don't get me wrong. I don't think we're all just Rousseauian noble savages who will be more moral the less we learn of society's ways. People do seem to require moral guidance at times. But the point is, something in them responds to this, often with a kind of relief.
This is what I said I'd get back to. Do you want to say, 'How can we have morality without a God to impose it externally?' which seemed to be your initial question, or, 'How can we have the moral sense we do, internally without a God having put it there?' I don't mind if you want to switch to the latter, but please be aware that it would seem to contradict the terms of the previous question, which depend on humans having no innate morality and therefore requiring guidance.
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Divinely inspired law has one unbeatable advantage over human-made law: it cannot be manipulated by those in power; it cannot be changed by fickle masses. Therefore, its stability is considerably higher than law established by human beings.
I'm actually slightly at a loss as to how an intelligent person such as yourself can make a statement like this. When has religion ever possessed this degree of monolithic certainty? When has Christianity? Many, but not all Christians agree that the Bible is the word of God, but doctrinal debates have continued among them long after its writing, often with very specifically moral implications.
Even if you could somehow get the entire world to agree a set of supposedly divinely imposed moral dogmas, though how you'd do this even God doesn't seem able to imagine, do you really really think that would prevent manipulation by the powerful? What about the Borgias? Selling of indulgences? Jim and Tammy Bakker? etc. etc. Why do you think Lutheranism even happened if not, in part, because of and in opposition to perceived manipulation by the existing powers that were?
Unlike you, with your sense that spontaneous acts of morality occurred more frequently in the past, I rather think we've moved on somewhat. However, that's not to say that the limited moral framework I outline is foolproof. Abuses, especially by the powerful (some of them avowedly religious people) continue to an almost incalculable extent. But, unlike you, I'm not arguing that an all-encompassing morality that will absolutely ensure nothing but moral acts is possible, let alone derived from God.
Quite the contrary. I think it's an imperfect world people by imperfect people, most likely because it was not created by a god. But, even if you don't accept this lack of a god, as you don't, you surely admit that the evidence of moral imperfection is all around, some down to the complexity and ambiguity of issues, some down to out-and-out, fully self-aware corruption.
What is the proper moral response to this imperfection? Gleeful acceptance? I think we can agree that won't do.
But I also think the assumption of a divine moral certainty is inadequate. It's not that, in the end, it allows us too much space not to continue thinking, not to take each case on its own merits. I wouldn't argue that because, as I've said, the debates continue even when one thinks one has got the word of God. It's just that, far from being our only possible source of morality, it doesn't seem necessary, for all the reasons I've given.
