How would you define "good" or "evil" without an external constant? What does it mean to be "nice" to others, and why is that standard the measure of a person's moral merit. If criterion for acceptable behavior becomes reduced to nebulous and fluctuating emotional or empathic state, then it is equivalent to having no acceptable behavioral standard.
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Good and evil do not exist, in the reply I just gave on the other thread, I explained that we sometimes do bad things, but that that does not make us bad people.
We judge ourselves based on a set of societal norms, ethics and personal morals.
There are no absolutes to this though, and we sometimes are faced with difficult ambiguous situations. We all agree its wrong to kill another human, right? But what if the other human is in terrible pain and will certainly die slowly, is relieving their pain good or bad? There is no clear answer to that, and we must personally wrestle with what the right thing to do is. The fact we are conflicted, is evidence we don't need good/evil as absolutes, we each do what we think is right at the time and live with the consequences.
I don't see how good/evil help us make any decisions over what to do. Religion of course sets down exactly what is good/evil and right and wrong. The Bible tells us that if someone doesn't believe in god, that you should kill them, immediately. If there are towns, of unbelievers, kill them all, drag their possessions into the streets and burn them. And killing your slaves is OK too, and raping women, so long as you marry them later.
If there is no good or evil, then you cannot call religion evil, no matter what it apparently orders. You can only say it is against your personal morals (since ethics is arbitrary without absolute morality, and in some places societal norms are quite in favor of religion.) But so what? My own personal morals (as if either matter) are that my religion is absolutely true, as well as morality being objective. How are they any less meaningful than yours or anyone else's?
To say that in some utilitarian sense religion makes a worse subjective morality is meaningless, because it is recursive. By what metric can we judge metrics? In example of someone dying slowly and painfully, then the Catholic Church teaches that it is permitted to give painkillers even to the point where it would likely end his life, but not outright kill him. Here I have a clear teaching. Is this, in some fashion, better or worse than struggling over each case to find an ultimately arbitrary answer? If morality is subjective, I don't know, because there's no way to judge except personal preference.
Continuing my answer to your other post here (so this doesn't get all chopped up)...
If the worst that an unrepentant thief gets is feeling guilty, so what? If there is no objective morality, then one might as well cultivate a vae victis morality in all your children, such that they will lie, cheat, steal, and do so better than others.
That religion exists only to explain the randomness of the universe is a simplistic explanation, no? The pagans believed in harsh, arbitrary gods, who might as well dump rain or not on a village for no good reason at all. If I will hear any explanation for religion, it is that it copes with the numenous, that which cannot be explained in terms of the common and material. Is there a numenous? Perhaps I'm wrong that there is, but every culture believes in ghosts.
And seriously, no. Christianity does not teach one to despise oneself and others. Nor is that a correct description of original sin (another thing to defend, I suppose). But what of it? Even if that was so, one cannot say that one purely subjective morality is better or worse than any other.
The point of this is, if you lie, cheat and steal, you will objectively not do better than others. You dont need a religion to have laws, and breaking laws for most people leads to genrally undesirable outcomes. Humans are social animals and prefer company over lonliness, being a liar, a cheat and a theif leads ultimately to lonliness, and less optimal life chances and outcomes.
This is why we teach our children not to do these things.
Religion is not equivalent to morality, religion requires you to believe in specific things for which there is no evidence, examples are things like evil and hell. You dont need evil and hell to be a moral person, and therefore religion is surplus to human requirements.
There are no ghosts, its the stuff of childrens nightmares, believed in by people who were unfortunate enough not to have better ways of explaining what happens around them.
Note not having religion is not the same as denying the existence of god(s), or appreciating some people have a tendency to feel spiritual. Religion warps these things into a set of dogmatic rules that people must follow, or (for example) be terrified into thinking they will go to hell. The problem with that is no set of rules fits all situations, and certainly not sets of rules from thousands of years ago which are now morally bankrupt and most in the religion feel they have to ignore anyway. So this leaves the followers of religions at the mercy of whichever person has been put in charge of interpreting that religion at that time, that person may be benevolent (The Pope seems like a nice man), or they may terrorise (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader if ISIS), but their election as the literal voice of god(s) is unquestionable. Controlling people in this way is immoral.
Is there an objective standard or not? Laws are not an objective standard, because every age has had its own laws. For example, the law in one time and place punished those who freed slaves. If "do the right thing or the laws will punish you" is the basis of morality, then it logically follows that the most moral person is the absolute dictator of a despotism.
But let me try arguing on your side for a moment. One could say that certain kinds of laws are superior to another, and that a despotic government is far inferior to a healthy republic. I would agree. I would further posit that there are, as per Montesquieu, different baseis for the different governments. Namely fear for the despotism, public honor for the monarchy, and civic virtue, that is, love of one's country or patriotism, for the republic. If this is so, it implies something quite amazing about the fabric of reality, that a government based on love is superior to others. I would find this hard to believe: that a purely natural world would permit altruism to be rewarded.
But back to your post!
Religion does not require believing in things that have no evidence. I would submit that the existence of God can be objectively proven by natural evidence (this is Catholic dogma). I also submit the doctrine of original sin as provable from experience. And, if we insist on science, the positive analysis of Eucharistic miracles.
All that aside, what does it mean to be a "moral" person if there is no objective morality? I'm generally moral by my own definition, and so, I would assume, are you by yours, and everyone by everyone's. It's arbitrary, with ourselves as arbiters.
I'm curious why you seem to absolutely deny the existence of ghosts, but the existence of divine beings is permissible without religion. (And indeed, the existence or lack of divinities is not based on religion, but the reverse is true) In some cultures, ghosts are worshiped as gods. And spiritual experiences imply some kind of spirit, no?
But one more question: If there is no one set of rules that fits all situations, then by what rule(s) do we decide if a ruleset's time is over? Or, more interestingly, why not assemble the Perfect Rules simply by discarding all those which are unnecessary and adding those that are?
Thank you for the reply. If there is no absolute standard, as you posit, then why the need or tendency for "personally wrestl[ing] with what the right thing to do is"? Whether we liquidate the sick or the inconvenient has no value valence, other than state efficiency metric. I agree that men behave in displeasurable ways, but that is mere preference and not a standard of measure for "judgment" as you put it. In the absence of an absolute, then all "morals" or "ethics" are delusions (group or individual) and the only metric to which we align our behaviors would be the state as the ultimate arbiter; such paradigm then merely shifts the matrix from the mystical authority to material authority.
You seem to have forgotten we are programmed to care for others, and we even extend this to animals through anthropomorphization.
Due to the natural variation, some people are more deeply effected, and some such as psychopaths wont feel anything, but on average we are all effected similarly; we don't need religion or a state to set a moral absolute, we know what emotional and physical pain is and recognise it in others, and would seek to reduce or eliminate it through natural empathy which for most of us is innate.
TL;DR We don't need to be told it's wrong to hurt others, it's experiential. We would not liquidate the sick, we know it's wrong.
I would argue that natural impulses as morality is flawed. Imagine a race of predatory aliens that prey on each other and on other sentient races. Their "morality" would be quite different from our own. Would it be wrong?
You are positing that man is instinctually empathetic - I assume you are not arguing that there is a "programmer" :). I agree that empathy seems to be an instinctual response, but I don't think that we can conclude empathic instinct prevents harming others. Studies regarding empathy illustrate that the automatic concern for another only extends to those who are of same tribal or blood relations. To extend empathic concern towards those outside of our tribe or blood requires cognitive/intellectual reflection. From the perspective of evolutionary theory, empathic concern for those outside one's tribe is hinderance for gene propagation.
From purely intellectual perspective, if morality derives from instinctual impulse, that is propagation of the gene pool, then I would argue that liquidation of the infirm and the genetically inferior untermenschen would be a moral imperative.
I tend to think, that just as we see in the second law of thermodynamics entropy (disorder) will increase over time, yet we also see that ordered systems self-organize out of chaos (the galaxies, stars, planets, animals, plants, DNA etc.); then to think that human intellect, morality, ethics and so forth do not naturally occur out of the action of the universe, is somewhat over-stating humanities free will and self determination.
No, Im not talking about any kind of intelligent programmer, but we have morals and ethics that go beyond the scope of our immediate social circle, because that is ultimately best for humanities aggregate gene pool. Some people took a step back at some points and though to themselves 'if only we stopped killing each other continuously, we might actually get somewhere'. This isnt a human triumph over our innate empathy purely for your own gene pool, its a self-organizing certainty-of-chance, given the conditions of human development and enough time.
Ultimately we cant know for sure, but given all the information I have seen, this to me seems like the most plausible course of events. This is why its critical we arent held back by 2,000 year old thinking, because that thinking wont stop that asteroid that is going to extinct us, only humanity working as a unified force can acheive that.
I read that the self-organizing orderly systems do not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics because the seeming decrease in disorder of the localize system arises at the expense of increasing disorder of the general system. If we are subject to this immutable law without any other recourse, then continual wars strife, and conflict are a certainty of our impersonal universe; any attempt to counter such natural impulse would be futile.
If morality is instinct, then the term "morality" need to be jettisoned, as it obfuscates discussion. Instinct serves to propagate the DNA of the creature, then the tribe, in that priority. A tendency or sentiment that fosters species level propagation at the expense of the creature's or tribe's DNA propagation is not instinctual, and thus, "immoral" (if there can be such term). From the logical framework you have provided, the instinctual imperative is to place the self and his tribe above all else.
Man's fate would be no different, whether he is from a world 2000 years past or current, since his perceptual matrix would be instinctually driven. In fact, wouldn't the set of instinctual imperatives be more aligned with man 2000 years past, than the modern man, who clouded by technological smog to imagine himself above the immutable instinct of his DNA?
We seem to be in a loop. You want to prove morals come from heaven and hell; I argue morals need not come from any absolute external authority and can self organize through the action of intellectual self preservation instinct of humanity.