If.
So?
People generally hold that stealing is morally wrong. So paying for or otherwise acknowledging what you receive or have is seen as necessary for moral conduct.
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Hitchens' moral challenge
- Thread starter Syne
- Start date
If.
So?
People generally hold that stealing is morally wrong. So paying for or otherwise acknowledging what you receive or have is seen as necessary for moral conduct.
"Immorality is the active opposition to morality" -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality
You can't get much more obvious than that. Subverting a person's morality is an "active opposition" to that morality, so it is tautological that subverting a person's morality is immoral.
I realize that many non-believers may have a hard time understanding that a believer doesn't necessarily have any really solid reasoning to support their morals, just belief. This is one of the reasons that purely authoritative moralities, such as law, exist, as not everyone can be expected to realize a general morality on their own. Sure, a non-believer may assume that the believer would just adopt their own reasoning, but that is an erroneous assumption. I mean, how many times have non-believers ridiculed the seeming inability of a believer to think or reason for themselves?
In essence, subverting the moral basis of a believer is very much like removing all law without anything to immediately fill the authority vacuum.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
And this is how the delusion is perpetuated. "Stealing is wrong" is a fine moral code, but the perversion of this is the notion that everything you get must have been taken from someone who must be compensated or at least acknowledged. It's interesting that primitive societies have no conception of personal property.
A person (in this case, you) cannot be meaningfully grateful to a non-person (in this case, the Universe).
Ever tried actually thanking your shoes for keeping your feet warm and safe?
With that kind of relativism, atheists are also not morally/ethically superior, given that they acknowledge that which only exists within their own moral code.
As far as I understood, mundane moral behavior was never the goal of religions.
There is a popular notion in the West that religion is essentially all about "making one a better person" - in the mundane sense; there is the idea that religion is all about adopting some kind of practice and beliefs that will make it easier for one to be a functional person in the mundane sense, and that all the religious specifics are just accessoires.
But at least traditionally, religions have not held on to such notions.
No. Those silly people believe they belong to the land, not the land to them!
No, the point is that your vocabulary is beyond you. You write like a person who has a thesaurus open on his desk. That wouldn't be a big deal if your intellect was up to the task of implementing those words. Sadly, it is not, and we're left with clumsy writing that often doesn't make any sense.
But agreeing with a divine source is not a moral statement or action, and disagreeing with divinity does not preclude a non-believer from agreeing with a moral act or statement. For example, a believer could say they believe in charity because God tells them to; the non-believer does not have to agree with the divine basis of the moral act to agree with the act itself.
You misunderstand me: I know what these words mean, I simply did not know how you meant them, because you often misuse words. Undermine is a great example of this.
I'll ask again: how does one undermine another's moral basis?
[/quote]So you can see that your accusations about word usage, grammar, etc. are only your erroneous trolling. If you had any intent to do anything but blindly gainsay and attempt to inflame, you would probably have taken the very small step of looking up these simple words for yourself. But here it is anyway, just for your education. Apparently you still need more. [/quote]
Read above.
Strawman. I asked you how one subverts or undermines another's moral basis. You said undermining someone's moral basis is immoral itself. How does one do this?
"You really should know some vocabulary" is an indictment of your Word of the Day vocabulary.
Again, you use the word "subvert" incorrectly. Actually, you use a bunch of words incorrectly here. To disagree with someone's moral basis is not to subvert it, understand? Disagreement does not equate to subversion or perversions.
So, again, your answer to the challenge is no answer at all.
If we posit that free will is necessary for ethical behavior,
then determinism does preclude an ethical worldview.
For starters, by saying something to the effect of
"You're full of shit and you really really owe it to me to believe and do as I tell you."
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
This is also the evolutionary perspective! We evolved to fit our environment, therefore we should expect to be in a place that meets our basic needs. We should take it for granted.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
We could be living under either scenario and yet we do practice ethical behavior. We could be deterministically ethical and other people could be deterministically unethical.
Not unless the the person making that statement has some sort of authority over the person whom they are addressing. And even then, it would depend on the character of the person being spoken to to allow their moral basis to be subverted.
And of course, this has nothing to do with anything. Disagreement is not subversion, and disagreement is all we were talking about.
As I noted above to Sarkus, the goal of religion isn't necessarily improved mundane functioning. So making external behavior to be the deciding criterion is misplaced to begin with.
Secondly, how can we, with any scientific precision, measure how compasisonate, fair, courageous etc. people are in their daily lives?
And look where such an attitude has lead.
No, as you are refuting the validity of certain of their "morals" not their whole basis for any morality, whether good or bad in your view. Certain "moral" points having no "godly basis" doesn't imply that their entire morality doesn't either, and thus leaves any virtue it may have intact. IOW, it can be considered moral to attack specifically perceived immoral points while not undermining the basis for any existing and valid moral points.
Undermining the entire morality is an indiscriminate opposition, even to those things which can be agreed to be moral.
And without some basis, whether faith or sound reasoning, you have no morality. How would you define your morality if all of your reasoning were proven completely false? The human tendency for justification and confirmation bias could easily lead anyone without a moral basis as restraint into considering the ends to justify any means.
Hard determinism precludes accountability or agent responsibility. And a belief in a strict determinism has been found to negatively impact moral behavior.
I understand logic just fine. That's why I have such an easy time recognizing silly illogic and trolling when I encounter it.
Let's go ahead and suppose that's true, for the purposes of this thread.
What you've missed in your haste to troll, is that the implications cut both ways - for a believer to "affirm the basis of his ethical system" is necessarily for him to attack the basis of the ethical system of all non-believers, and all believers in alternative theologies. This is then clearly immoral, as per your insistence, and so you haven't managed to construct an ethical act that is available to believers but not to non-believers. The situation is, in fact, perfectly symmetric, just as Hitchens contended.
Oh dear... I recommend you try to stay out of the deep end. You're already in way over your head without getting into things like determinism.
No, that's silly. If a believer "honestly agrees" with an atheistic, "pragmatic" basis for ethics, then he is clearly stating that he doesn't not honestly hold any theological basis for his own ethical system, and so is disqualified from the category of "believer."
What you could assert is that a believer is capable of recognizing that there are alternative bases for ethical systems that produce workable results. But then, so could an atheist. There is no asymmetry here.
I think you'll find that atheists don't generally have well-developed, complete, detailed logical systems of ethics that precede their morality. And not do theists.
In fact, I think you'll find that most atheists hold that people have moral sense and intuition to begin with, and then use reasoning together with those to fill out unclear areas. And that this process works the same way in the religious: the morality precedes the religion, which exists to codify it. This is suggested by the broad similarity between ethical systems corresponding to varied theologies and atheism. The idea that morals require some (theological) "basis" to be "built upon" seems to be peculiar to certain theists, and specifically the ones with a chip on their shoulders regarding atheism. People from backgrounds where they are not hammered with this idea from an early age tend to find it somewhat bizarre.
All of which is to say that you can strip away the religion, or the reasoning however defined, without challenging the underlying morality. That is, this:
seems a silly assumption. Do you really believe that a given religionist would suddenly become unclear on whether it is immoral to kill, or rape, or steal, if he were to encounter serious doubts as to his theology? I don't. I contend that he probably knew all those things were wrong well before he came to possess any recognizable theology. Indeed, human history is replete with people shifting between different theologies (or none at all) without any apparent consequences for their moral systems.
The only exceptions beingthe odd, specific bits of religious "morality" that aren't shared by any other ethical system (you shouldn't eat such-and-such a food on such-and-such a day, etc.).
None of which is to say that there aren't certain authoritarian personalities out there who'd experience severe psychological stress if their theological worldview were seriously challenged. But in practice this isn't much of a problem, because those are exactly the people who ensconce themselves in many layers of defense mechanisms which render such serious challenge effectively impossible (at least, at the hands of any advocate for atheism).
Finally, let's note that your whole premise in the OP - that theists are can recognize the "pragmatic" functionality of atheist ethical systems - argues directly that the final ethical system doesn't depend on the theological "basis" (or lack thereof) in any strong way, and so there is no inherent impact on said ethical systems in challenging said "basis," whatever it may be.
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I write like a person who has a naturally large vocabulary, but I wouldn't expect you to know the difference. Obtuse people, such as you seem, very often have trouble making sense of things, as much is beyond them. Of course it may just be a serious confirmation bias.
No, but validating someone's morality is. By definition, a believer's morality can only be validated by affirming their faith. It is immoral to oppose an entire morality indiscriminately. A non-believer would have no choice but to assert a charitable "act of God's will" is not by a god's will, and thus deny the believer's motivation for charity. Without the motivation there is no morality.
I've already shown that I used "undermine" correctly, so this is only a trolling diversion of your own poor comprehension.
Someone trying to convincing you that all the reasons you think something to be moral or not are completely erroneous is undermining your morality. If successful, whatever you may hold to be moral would be completely indefensible by you.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
Where? More productive crops? AIDS treatments?
No, you speak like a typical internet troll who has almost no grasp on the language he speaks. I'm not the first to point this out about you, either.
That's simply not true. As I demonstrated, a non-believer is perfectly capable of agreeing with a believer's moral actions. They can both agree murder is wrong, that theft is wrong, that lying for personal gain is wrong. At no point must the believer agree to a divine warrant for their moral foundation.