Why are so many atheists anti-realists or relativists?

ethics is really not that hard to figure out. the slave probably wouldn't agree. those people who "disagreed" still wouldn't have wanted to be a slave either. duh? no one wants to be a slave and depending on the situation and who has the power at the time, "anyone" can end up a slave in world where slavery is condoned.

the conclusion after all the back and forth of experience that yes, you too can end up a slave not just a slaver? that slavery is not very pleasant and it's unethical. the former slaveowner who ends up a slave may have an enlightening experience that slavery sucks when you are the enslaved. therefore, some empathy may be formed or at least there is less chance of denial.

that's how ethics are formed if not done of one's volition, backlash can teach people to have to face the square truth and own up to some level of self-constraint or morality (which can be self-preservation rather than compassion for others) which is why laws exist as well as punishment. do the wrong things to others, you get slapped or they may do it to you. don't want to get slapped back, then don't start it. what goes around, comes around so if you don't like what goes around to come around to you, let's get rid of it.

 

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Some slaves didn't care about being slaves. Why? Because some were treated kindly. Thus, I have contradicted your statement. I have to agree though that the majority didn't like being slaves.

I'm learning a lot from you man. Don't think I am trying to criticize you. I am not. =]

As birch said though...

It depends on how everyone defines something. If people define homosexuals as discriminatory towards men or women (Depending), then they become immoral in consequence. It's complex but simple at the same time.

Homosexuals classified straights as being discriminatory towards them. The irony is, it goes both ways. Nothing against homosexuals. Just saying, it literally does go both ways. There is no way to rid of bias. We can only lower it.

Every sexual orientation has it's own bias. Even some homosexuals hate other homosexuals. Bisexuals hate other bisexuals. Straights hate other straights.

 

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omg, that is really hardly the point. i'm sure slaves would rather have full citizenship rights rather than have to resolve themselves to whether their slaveowner is going to treat them nicely or whip them that day.

 

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Look at my edited post man. =]

 

Interestingly, in the late western Roman Empire/early medieval Europe farmers would routinely sell themselves into slavery. The reason was that slaves paid lower taxes and were exempt from conscription under Roman law and custom then still in use. So many people have in fact volunteered historically. The practice was so common, that it evolved directly into the European feudal law and tradition, which solidified it as a social norm. Most peasants, the serfs, in European society were slaves by most modern definitions. They had to work the land, they could not own property (even the clothes on their back were legally the lord's) and they were "tied to the land" meaning it was illegal for them to move. Marriage required the lord's consent (and often a small token "gift" would need to be given to get permission) as did building a home on the land (the lord's land) that the serf occupied and it was the lord's prerogative to take as much of their produce as he wanted(actually, again, it was his property in the first place). They left them with enough food to survive because that was good business sense in the long run.

Second though, this point is like saying: "no one wants to be poor and powerless in a world where others are rich and powerful." In a market driven system, anyone can end up poor, if they lose their job and have a few unexpected major expenses. That doesn't make the market-based economics inherently immoral in the eyes of most people.

No one is happy being at the bottom rung, that's true, but not everyone who is at the lower levels of society necessarily views society as unethical...and even though some may well hold that view (just as many poor people favor radical wealth distribution), that view does not generally dominate the culture.

If such a view does come to dominate the culture then the cultural norm changes. Much as the cultural norm relating to slavery changed in the west.

 

blah blah blah. you are reaching with exceptions. the point was general. you even said it yourself, people would rather not be be on the bottom rung or with no rights or ways to take care of themselves..

cultural norm? slavery is considered bad because it sucks for the most part for those who are enslaved.

it's unbelievable how people try to find some way to justify it or minimize it as something that's just a like a particular choice of color or something. as if anything that is considered a cultural norm, somehow justifies it or is not inhumane or unethical. a society may deem murder a cultural norm and preach it's acceptable but that doesn't make it ethical just because one deems it to be. kind of sociopathic. interesting..

just because one's only choice may be between a rock and a hard place and the rock seems to be the better option, that doesn't make the situation necessarily ethical either or that is what they really want. that is kind of dishonest to paint it that way. that is what they want because that is the only better option to them more than likely.

 

Just as information wants to be free, so do people.

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I think it at least partly has to do with power.

Relativism and anti-realism are irrefutable* positions; being irrefutable, they serve as positions of power.
(Strong) atheism is also an irrefutable position.

(*By "irrefutable I mean "irrefutable for practical intents and purposes"; in a real-life situation, it is usually impossible to get a relativist or atheist to turn around his opinion on relativism or atheism within one conversation session.)

The premise is that people always desire to have some measure of power in any situation. As such, they will try to obtain this power in whatever way seems most feasible.

For some people, their atheism and relativism simply co-incide, since both offer some measure of power.

 

According to the argument from "morality is hard-wired into us", humans are also absolved from meta-ethical reasoning ...

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My degree of philosophical sophistication isn't very high by the standards of the academic profession, but it serves me well on internet discussion boards like this one.

The thing is, I didn't arrive at my disbelief in traditional theism through any concerted process of reasoning. Instead, I was born into a non-theistic home. It wasn't anti-religious though, not the least bit. My mother had a strong interest in comparative religion. What's more, my parents were Americans who met each other and married in Japan, and our home was faintly Buddhist, in an aesthetic sort of way. I distinctly remember being skeptical about the traditional Bible stories at a very early age, as soon as I first heard them, kindergarten or first grade.

I fit that description, roughly speaking. (It's up to you to decide whether you think that I conflate ethical non-realism and relativism.)

I'm pretty definitely a non-realist with regards to ethics. In other words, I don't believe in any supernaural lawgivers or think that ethical principles are inherent in the universe itself somehow. There aren't any laws of ethics analogous to laws of physics. If all human beings disappeared tomorrow, then all of human ethics would disappear with them, in my opinion at least.

My position with regards to relativism is more complex. I'm an ethical naturalist and my intellectual tendency is to derive ethics from human social instincts. So there's an element of non-relativism there, as far as individual humans are concerned, even if it's likely more species-specific than cosmic in scope. I also lean towards something of an ethical particularism, I guess.

Well, everyone has philosophical views of a sort. It's difficult for an intelligent person to avoid them. And if people have never studied philosophy, whether formally or informally, then their views are probably going to have a lower level of technical sophistication than the views of people who have.

What's interesting to me about philosophy is how far lay participants can get. Philosophy is very open to amateurs and amateurs often arrive at positions that aren't unlike those of the professionals, even if they aren't using the technical vocabulary properly. I think that's very cool. (And very unlike fields like higher mathematics, which are only comprehensible to those with advanced educations and hermetically sealed-off from lay participation.)

I think that's right. I'd try to avoid the dismissive tone though, since it's a view that I lean towards myself.

It's an ontological intuition. Ethical principles don't seem to be part of the nuts-and-bolts of the universe in the same way that physical principles are. They aren't open to observation and to experiment in the same way.

Ethical principles seem to be kind of emergent in human societies -- though something analogous can probably be observed in the behavior of social animals.

But not all Christians are theologically sophisticated, are they? It's the same point that I just made about philosophy up above. Most people have their own religious ideas, just as they have philosophical ideas. But most religious people remain untutored in the byzantine convolutions of philosophical theology.

So what we encounter are Christians making precisely the same argument that you just dismissed. Ethics is dependent on ethical laws and these in turn require a divine law-giver. Atheists don't acknowledge the law-giver, so they must be a-moral individuals who ignore the principles of ethics as well.

Christians are always accusing atheists of being immoral. Whenever a Christian evangelist tries to give personal "testimony", it's typically some variant on -- I used to be just like you, I rejected God and I happily stole, used drugs and gave in to sexual lusts. Then I found Christ, and...

So the argument that you are trying to place on the atheists' doorstep and suggesting is due to their lack of sophistication, is just their own use of an argument that the Christians taught them.

 

Oh so now I lack a moral centre because I have no time for fairy tales.
Is that the jist of the argument here?
It may well be true. I rarely consider the morality of my actions I simply act as my nature dictates.

Show me a hungry kitty and I'll feed it. Show me VF on a monitor and I'll reach for the defib. I leave the forensic details of morality to the experts who post on obscure (sorry all

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) internet forums
Works for me.

Dee Cee

 

I agree with MZ3Boy84's sentiment here...

Faure,

I must be mis-understanding you.

What do you mean by "anti-realists or relativists about morality"?
Do you mean as opposed to some sort of absolute or essentialist morality?

 

He's positing a strawman argument. I say "positing" rather than "making," because he doesn't even really specify what this argument is, but just skips straight to characterizing its foundations.

But the opposite of a moral 'anti-realist' would be a moral realist. I.e., somebody who holds that morals are real, objective things that exist on their own, independent on what anybody thinks of them.

 

Indeed. That's what I suspected, thus, the prodding for some definitions...

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haven't people noticed that when they usually ask questions like is slavery unethical, they seem to be from a position where they are not enslaved so can remain detached and unempathetic or would assume they won't be the enslaved? that's convenient so therefore can't be really trusted, can it?

does anyone think that if you asked someone who was actually enslaved that they would wax on about the ethics or possible acceptableness of slavery or do you think it would be clear to them more than likely it was unethical? does one really need the experience of being enslaved to understand that?

it's sickly sociopathic. it's almost like saying if you can get people to accept slavery or brainwash them into being used (usually leaving out "I"), then it's acceptable or "not" unethical. they just want to find some way to not face that it's basically unethical and try to find some way to justify it.

how can one take this seriously? it's like cognitive dissonance so we can play this game.

 

The situations in which infanticide was considered acceptable in Roman society are exactly those in which the child in question is not going to fit in with the pack, or present too much burden, or somesuch. There's no variance with your directives, there. If it seems weird, it's only because male heads of household were empowered with greater decision-making authority on pack interests than we're currently used to.

That may well be a truth - even, an absolute one - but there's nothing "moral" about it. It's not a statement about morals at all. It only refers to interests.

I have of course argued elsewhere that all morals are simply projections of interests and biases, but this lacks even projection. It's just naked interest.

Such an observation being closely related to the thread title - and the reasoning in support of it a direct rebuttal to the OP, supposing you care to identify yourself as an "atheist."

 

'Moral realism' is a technical term in philosophy. There's a fairly convoluted discussion here:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/moralrea/

I guess that in a nutshell, moral realism is the view that moral facts exist. That means that moral judgements are true or false statements about the world, and that they are true or false in the much same objective way that statements about the speed of light are true or false. Moral values are discovered, they aren't just created or willed into existence by human beings.

Things get a lot more complicated when it comes to characterizing the kind of reality that moral values supposedly have, and providing an account of how these facts are known and of how moral disputes can best be settled.

 

"I guess that in a nutshell, moral realism is the view that moral facts exist. That means that moral judgements are true or false statements about the world, and that they are true or false in the much same objective way that statements about the speed of light are true or false. Moral values are discovered, they aren't just created or willed into existence by human beings."

Is this to suggest that only homo sap is capable of moral behavior?
What about other (extinct) members of the genus and other higher primates?
Even ants demonstrate altruistic behavior and they ain't famed for their ability to discover the underlying truths of reality such as "moral facts exist".

Dee Cee

 

Consciousness, the axiom from which experience and knowledge are dependent, evidently requires morality, though more often than not the pitiful alms of moral rationalization, in order to function with any degree of vitality. Scarcely is moralizing divorced from human action, so one can only accept that it exists, at least in the minds of human beings. Therefor the search for an objective basis of morality begins with the recognition that ethics, as a product of the reasoning mind, is valid insofar as it is rationally consistent with the functional requirements of human beings, taking into account the fact that they are social organisms, and calculating with the tools of logic and science which behaviors are universally preferable in relation to behaviors which are not. 'Universally preferable' here refers to behaviors which do not contain any implicit logical contradictions. That they fulfill the needs of human beings without violating the law of non-contradiction.

Slavery for example is logically inconsistent. To say that slavery is okay, or is morally neutral, is to create moral rule subject to the scrutiny of logical analysis. It implies that it is preferable to think of slavery as a moral (or amoral) phenomena. However the nature of all statements of evaluation is that they are necessarily applicable universally. If we accept as a moral rule that slavery is okay, than for it to be universal (hence binding) it must apply to the slave as well. However, by definition the relationship between the slave and slave master is unilateral and, for the slave, involuntary. The slave has no power to enslave his master and is therefor prevented from acting morally. So the rule that slavery is okay breaks down because it cannot be universally acted upon. A moral rule that makes morality impossible is self-detonating.

Generosity, by way of comparison, is universally preferable. For the human organism the capacity to experience empathy is not only hardwired into its genetic makeup but it is also rationally consistent with the observable facts of reality. An individual cannot properly recognize his value without recognizing the value of other individuals. To help others is synonymous with helping oneself. The two are mutually inclusive. Selfishness, as the negation of the value of others, collapses under its own hubris. Generally speaking love, truth, and honesty are honored by the application of reason. If experienced by human beings they are as real as anything else. All that is required to understand the difference between right and wrong is a consistent rational examination of whatever can be extrapolated implicitly from the behavior of human beings.

I certainly cannot claim to have solved the problem, this is just a window into where my thinking is currently in the process of figuring out some type of objective basis for ethics, if it can even be said to exist. I pretty much aped it all from Universally Preferable Behavior: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics by Stefan Molyneux, with a few minor points of departure from his thesis. I think it is the most admirable attempt by any atheist or other thinker yet in trying account for morality without recourse to mysticism.