Moral objective values...

[whisperit]

[font=Verdana]In one of his papers, Dr. William Lane Craig (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lane_Craig) argues moral objective values is to say something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. If God does not exist, what is the foundation for moral objective values?[/font][/url]

[Danmark]

I was annoyed when Danmark continues to troll me.
I am also annoyed when Keith makes back hand personal insults.
Am annoyed that moderators aporove of Danmark's trolling me and Keith using outside references to insult people.
I am impressed that Danmark can make such illogical claims and nobody asks his to defend that. He must have some elevated status that I do not know of.

You did say the Nazis could be seen as not wrong if they didn't have laws against genocide, and questioned if it was wrong to completely wipe a race out in self-defence. It is not suprising that it could be taken as justistification for genocide.

The discussion of objective morals reminds me of a famous debate known as the Hart-Fuller debate at Harvard. Hart made good arguments for the point of view of a postitive law theorist. 'A judge interpreting such a law from a positivist viewpoint would look to a definition of the words in the statute.' Fuller makes the argument for natural law.
'The natural law view believes that the creation of law should be based on natural laws or common morals. Laws are viewed based on purpose, not on meaning of the words.'
[quotes from Wikipedia] There is much more to that debate of course. Here's a site to the 50th anniversary of the debate:
http://www.law.nyu.edu/conferences/hartfuller
[you may be amused to note that 'replied' is twice represented by 'replayed']

I think it's important to point out that a legal positivist can also be a moral objectivist, as long as he wants to keep morals and law separated. In fact, it seems that in the following quote Hart is employing morality to support legal positivism:

"What surely is most needed in order to make men clear sighted in confronting the official abuse of power, is that they should preserve the sense that the certification of something as legally valid is not conclusive of the question of obedience, and that, however great the aura of majesty or authority which the official system may have, its demands must in the end be submitted to a moral scrutiny"

I agree. I remember when I studied this in some depth more than 30 years ago, the more I looked, the more the two factions were in agreement, at least on a pragmatic level. It's more the process they disagree with.

[JohnA]

Is this your new: convict someone of murder without a legal base???

Be careful, I said that there was no positive legal base for the convictions. There was no applicable written law, on basis what which all the necessary convictions could be carried out, and thus some were based on so called natural law.

I am still lost in your apparent (to me) confusion.

Convict someone of murder without a written legal law, but natural law?

What is natural law? As far as I know this is the laws of nature (scientific laws).

Help me here instantc, I am really not sure what you are arguing here.

Johnny boy,

Here's is an excerpt from a relevant article that explains the situation nicely:

"they (Nazis) were held responsible for atrocities committed against any civil population even if their crimes had been in accordance with the laws of the country where those crimes had been perpetrated. In other words, the world community did not accept excuses such as : "I only implemented national laws", or "I just did as I was told". The world community held that there are basic human rights of which individuals cannot be deprived by states or by political leaders."

The basic human rights referred to hereby are known as principles of natural law. Even though they are now codified, that hasn't always been the case. Thus, some of the convictions were made on basis of commonly understood moral principles, not written law. It becomes evident from here that things like murder are deemed wrong even when they are not prohibited under the law in a given situation.

That is not a good opening.
Your referral to me as a 'boy' and 'not using my username' can be seen as insulting by some. I do. I am unable to report this past to a mod for some reason.

I am still not sure what you are saying.
Are you saying they were convicted by international law (human rights) because there was no law in their country? Are you saying that natural law just exists and people do not first discuss this (how to form laws, for what to form laws, natural law can not be "discovered" or "found" but "created" by authority)?
If so, how does that support your claim that murder is not unlawful killing?

Well, I disagree. I think that we have public squares were we discuss these things to mutually decide if they are good or bad. Based on that we can action law (once a decision has been made in the public square). I have never heard of any court that convicts someone based on no law.

So your were quote mining previously?


It is so funny that you bring up human rights when you reject the EU human rights that protects people's right for innocent till proven guilty.

Have your cake and eat it, again?

What about the 9 million babies that die every year. Are you saying that you can go to prison for murder just because you are doing nothing about it and there is no law against it.

Instantc,
Please. No more of these ridiculous arguments. None of them are sound. I am not willing to debate this type of nonsense anymore.

[JohnA]

I was annoyed when Danmark continues to troll me.
I am also annoyed when Keith makes back hand personal insults.
Am annoyed that moderators aporove of Danmark's trolling me and Keith using outside references to insult people.
I am impressed that Danmark can make such illogical claims and nobody asks his to defend that. He must have some elevated status that I do not know of.

You did say the Nazis could be seen as not wrong if they didn't have laws against genocide, and questioned if it was wrong to completely wipe a race out in self-defence. It is not suprising that it could be taken as justistification for genocide.

Am against apartheid, any form of it - blacks can be racists and practice apartheid as well. The thinking part.
Am for gay rights. The thinking part.
Am pro choice. The thinking part.

By "the thinking part," you are saying racism for example, is not wrong at first glance, only by careful analysis could you conclude that it is wrong due to the harm to survival fitness?

I do not know for sure is there is objective morals - evolution does give us something that is trotted to help survival...

[rearranged]

...There is no such thing called objective moral law. That is Danmark being an obscurantist probably trading to avoid using objective moral values (values are always subjective)

Right, so there is no such thing as objective moral value since value are always subjective. You are sure there is no objective moral laws but not sure on objective morals, so what is the difference between objective morals and objective moral laws?

Killing is not wrong. Murder is wrong, always. Killing that max extinction / suffering , and min survival in a population for a population would be wrong (due to evolutionarily ethics and empathy).

So genocide is wrong, but could be seen as not wrong, where it is legal for example? i.e. there is a distinction between being wrong and seen as wrong?

Morality = ethics and empathy. Sources are Evolution, society, thinking.

I agree with you here.

What more is there to say. Nobody knows if there is such a thing as objective morals. It is a human subjective construct. We did get something from Evolution to help us survive - but given the extinction rate and no. of extinct species to date, am not sure how effective it is. Some form of morality has been observed in other animals too. I think morality is the wrong word to use. And I think illogical claims should be called out, same for back hand insults.

I do think you are overly agressive and a tad over sensitive as far as illogical claims or insults goes, but I am guessing there is some history between you guys that I am not aware of.

You did say the Nazis could be seen as not wrong if they didn't have laws against genocide, and questioned if it was wrong to completely wipe a race out in self-defence. It is not suprising that it could be taken as justistification for genocide.

Actually no. Buy yes if you quote mining me. But please send me the quote where I said that ONLY the lack of a law would be sufficient to justify genocide. Please, send this and I will give you $10,000. Can you do this, without quote mining? Or you can apologies and take your accusation back. Danmark would not apologise, because his options are never fiction, they are always fact, because non-existent Jesus probably told him.
A race ( or any group or individual) should and could be wiped out (or locked up) if they threaten the survival of the bigger population. That is why we have prisons today. That is why we have laws like murder today. That is why soldiers can kill other people in war.. That is why people can kill other people in self-defense.
I am not quite sure what you are trying to say here or accuse me of. Can you be clear here please?

By "the thinking part," you are saying racism for example, is not wrong at first glance, only by careful analysis could you conclude that it is wrong due to the harm to survival fitness?

Maybe you should read this thread and my posts on this. I can see how you are attempting again at straw manning me using quote mining.
Morality = ethics and empathy. The sources are (in this order)
1. Evolution - min extinction and max survival
2. Society - we form laws
3. Thinking - we discuss things on the public square.

If an individual, a group (any group, however you want to define it) is trying to wipe out the bigger population of that same species, then our evolutionary ethics and empathy will kick it and try to prevent this. We (human animals) are here today, and we got here without society (laws) and thinking (discussing things on public squares). And that is the evidence for me that evolution did and have given us something to help with the survival of the our population/species.

Early human societies grew bigger and probably formed some form of punishment for behavior that would max the extinction, min the suffering / survival of that society. That is how laws were born. Not everything were in in in the first pass.

Slavery, discrimination against woman, gay rights, race segregation, abortion, genocide, etc. were ones that were not that easy to just outlaw. This was probably because of some middle eastern desert shepard had a book that said there was nothing wrong with it.

But human animals could reason, and talk. So, we also formed public squares to discuss these 'harder' topics and how they should be legalised. We are still discussing gay rights and abortion, which is a joke. These should be obvious: legal rights, pro choice. But I am sure you have a different opinion, HENCE this is what i mean by THINKING.

Do you think apartheid is wrong? And if so, why? Is it only wrong when whites do it against blacks, or is it wrong the other way around as well?

Right, so there is no such thing as objective moral value since value are always subjective

No, what I am saying is that using 'objective moral value' is wrong grammatically. It is illogical. It's like saying there are 'married bachelors'. Each word is valid and logical on its own, but not if you string them together.

You are sure there is no objective moral laws

Again, each word objective moral laws is valid, but saying 'objective moral laws' exist, is rubbish. That implies some person or being created laws, made them objective. So, are these law applicable to this being as well? If so, then this being could not have created these laws, but the other way around - which is clearly a contradiction. if not, then these laws are subjective for the being, so can not be objective for all. But Danmark KNOWS the answer. He KNOWS that 'objective moral laws' exist. He just can not tell us how he knows this. It is one of these where he KNOWS when not asked, but does not KNOW when asked. This is typical in responses from him where he accuses (straw man), make claims (assertion fallacies). This is quite easy to explain given his law background, and it is easy to see which side he was on (defense vs prosecution). That is the ultimate biased grounded in fallacies. Maybe you should ask Danmark and we can all remove the guess work.

but not sure on objective morals

You are straw manning me again.
I said many times already that morality = ethics and empathy.
We got that (ethics and empathy) from evolution. If you want to call that objective then yes be my guess. There is something that we got from evolution, or something that evolved.
Do you agree?
What is your definition of objective morals? Do they exist, can not back it up with evidence and a peer reviewed scientific journal?

so what is the difference between objective morals and objective moral laws?

Again, I explained this already. I have made assumption as to what I think Danmark is referring to when he is claiming (without any evidence) that 'objective moral laws' exist.
Evolution is not a being - that is one difference. Another difference is the use of the word law; evolution is not a being, not an authority. And it seems like evolution has not applied these 'objective' empathy / ethics the same for each species, or the same for all living things: life eats life to survive.

So genocide is wrong, but could be seen as not wrong, where it is legal for example? i.e. there is a distinction between being wrong and seen as wrong?

Again, I have covered this already. If a group of a human population wants to destroy the whole population then it would not be seen as wrong to destroy this group.
Since I do not have a real world example of this, I am using the words 'seen as' because I have not seen it. I am speculating. And for that I offer evolution as my basis of speculation and also the tribal nature of humans and the societal nature. Given that Scientists are fighting bacteria all the time to keep the human race going, I do not see any reason why we would not defend our-self if a section of our spices wants to wipe the whole. Do you?

I agree with you here.

I have repeated that so many times to the same users as well. Maybe read my whole post before you repond, and read the history of my posts on this subject. It would save me time and you.

I do think you are overly agressive and a tad over sensitive as far as illogical claims or insults goes, but I am guessing there is some history between you guys that I am not aware of.

Right, so people can troll me, accuse me and make empty claims, and I should just say: YES SURE. I wasted time now explaining my position against just because of these users that straw man me. And the irony is that they wasted your time as well. You may not value your time, but I do value mine.

[JohnA]

I was annoyed when Danmark continues to troll me.
I am also annoyed when Keith makes back hand personal insults.
Am annoyed that moderators aporove of Danmark's trolling me and Keith using outside references to insult people.
I am impressed that Danmark can make such illogical claims and nobody asks his to defend that. He must have some elevated status that I do not know of.

You did say the Nazis could be seen as not wrong if they didn't have laws against genocide, and questioned if it was wrong to completely wipe a race out in self-defence. It is not suprising that it could be taken as justistification for genocide.

The discussion of objective morals reminds me of a famous debate known as the Hart-Fuller debate at Harvard. Hart made good arguments for the point of view of a postitive law theorist. 'A judge interpreting such a law from a positivist viewpoint would look to a definition of the words in the statute.' Fuller makes the argument for natural law.
'The natural law view believes that the creation of law should be based on natural laws or common morals. Laws are viewed based on purpose, not on meaning of the words.'
[quotes from Wikipedia] There is much more to that debate of course. Here's a site to the 50th anniversary of the debate:
http://www.law.nyu.edu/conferences/hartfuller
[you may be amused to note that 'replied' is twice represented by 'replayed']

No new content. All I see here are:

1) Accusation (positivist) - straw man
2) Claims (Objective moral laws exist) - assertion fallacy

And

3) Uncivil (An attempt to discredited me - spelling) - ad hominem

Danmark, please. Can you add something to the OP?



Danmark just sent me this e-mail:

John, it is clear you are not a native English speaker. I admire anyone who tries to communicate in a 2d language. But I think some of your efforts make you sound worse than you wish to appear. If you'd like, when you come to a difficult sentence or phrase, if you send it to me, I will send a private message in return with an attempt to put your words into clearer English.

For Example, you wrote:

"Your referral to me as a boy and not using my username can be seen as insulting by some. I do. I am unable to repay this past to a mood for some reason. "

The first sentence is easy: "You refer to me as a child. Don't you agree that is insulting?" might be better and less confrontational. Just a thought.

The second is more difficult, but I think you mean to say:
"I won't respond in kind." or "Why would you refer to me this way?" Just guessing because the language is unclear and susceptible to many meanings.

I am not sure how to classify this. Would it be 3) Uncivil, or would this be 4) Trolling.


Maybe Danmark in all his wisdom can tell us.

[otseng]

[Replying to post 359 by JohnA]

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[JohnA]

[Replying to post 359 by JohnA]

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He sent me another infuriating e-mail. I have mentioned and raised the fact Danmark is trolling me. It seems to me that this is allowed because the mods are not doing anything about it, other than issuing warming to me.

[instantc]

[Replying to post 359 by JohnA]

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He sent me another infuriating e-mail. I have mentioned and raised the fact Danmark is trolling me. It seems to me that this is allowed because the mods are not doing anything about it, other than issuing warming to me.

His previous message seemed like a kind and helpful offer to me, just because you get infuriated doesn't mean that others are necessarily doing something wrong.

[JohnA]

[Replying to post 359 by JohnA]

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He sent me another infuriating e-mail. I have mentioned and raised the fact Danmark is trolling me. It seems to me that this is allowed because the mods are not doing anything about it, other than issuing warming to me.

His previous message seemed like a kind and helpful offer to me, just because you get infuriated doesn't mean that others are necessarily doing something wrong.

Really, nice tactic instantc. This beats your false claims of dishonesty. Maybe you should follow his advice! It is your 3rd language, is it not? I can explain fallacies to you. I can also explain law and rationality to you. I did so many times. So is that why you struggle, refuse to respond to posts where you are being patently conclusively wrong?

http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... 742#608742

"Here's the problem, everything thinks they are wonderful and other people are bad. it's better for you to stop comparing yourself with others. "

Does that apply to you and Danmark too?

[McCulloch]

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Johnny boy,

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[Bust Nak]

You did say the Nazis could be seen as not wrong if they didn't have laws against genocide, and questioned if it was wrong to completely wipe a race out in self-defence. It is not suprising that it could be taken as justistification for genocide.

Actually no. Buy yes if you quote mining me. But please send me the quote where I said that ONLY the lack of a law would be sufficient to justify genocide.

But I didn't claim you said "ONLY the lack of a law would be sufficient to justify genocide." So why would you expect me to be able to quote you saying that? I can however quote you saying Nazis could be seen as not wrong if they didn't have laws against genocide.

"Genocide is against law and international law (and UN protects it).

The Nazi's may not have had this genocide law.
The Nazi's may have thought that these group of Jews wanted to destroy them or the world.

So, there are reasons why genocide would be seen as 'not wrong'."

Or you can apologies and take your accusation back.

How about you apologize for accusing me of quote mining.

Danmark would not apologise, because his options are never fiction, they are always fact, because non-existent Jesus probably told him.

Doesn't his non-theist tag tell you that he doesn't believe in Jesus?

A race ( or any group or individual) should and could be wiped out (or locked up) if they threaten the survival of the bigger population. That is why we have prisons today. That is why we have laws like murder today. That is why soldiers can kill other people in war.. That is why people can kill other people in self-defense. I am not quite sure what you are trying to say here or accuse me of. Can you be clear here please?

I am saying what you said could be taken as justistification for genocide.

Maybe you should read this thread and my posts on this. I can see how you are attempting again at straw manning me using quote mining.

Again with this accusation. I was asking for clarification.

Morality = ethics and empathy. The sources are (in this order)
1. Evolution - min extinction and max survival
2. Society - we form laws
3. Thinking - we discuss things on the public square.

Which is why I am asking you, if you thought racisim is not wrong at first glance, only by analysis, by discussing things on public square for example, could one figure out that it is wrong?

If an individual, a group (any group, however you want to define it) is trying to wipe out the bigger population of that same species, then our evolutionary ethics and empathy will kick it and try to prevent this. We (human animals) are here today, and we got here without society (laws) and thinking (discussing things on public squares). And that is the evidence for me that evolution did and have given us something to help with the survival of the our population/species.

Early human societies grew bigger and probably formed some form of punishment for behavior that would max the extinction, min the suffering / survival of that society. That is how laws were born. Not everything were in in in the first pass.

Slavery, discrimination against woman, gay rights, race segregation, abortion, genocide, etc. were ones that were not that easy to just outlaw. This was probably because of some middle eastern desert shepard had a book that said there was nothing wrong with it.

But human animals could reason, and talk. So, we also formed public squares to discuss these 'harder' topics and how they should be legalised. We are still discussing gay rights and abortion, which is a joke. These should be obvious: legal rights, pro choice. But I am sure you have a different opinion, HENCE this is what i mean by THINKING.

Surely here you are talking about convincing other people that racism is wrong, as opposed to figuring it out that racism is wrong.

Do you think apartheid is wrong? And if so, why?

Yes, apartheid is wrong, because I seriously don't like what they are doing.

Is it only wrong when whites do it against blacks, or is it wrong the other way around as well?

Wrong both way round.

No, what I am saying is that using 'objective moral value' is wrong grammatically. It is illogical. It's like saying there are 'married bachelors'. Each word is valid and logical on its own, but not if you string them together.

Again, each word objective moral laws is valid, but saying 'objective moral laws' exist, is rubbish. That implies some person or being created laws, made them objective. So, are these law applicable to this being as well? If so, then this being could not have created these laws, but the other way around - which is clearly a contradiction. if not, then these laws are subjective for the being, so can not be objective for all.

Why then did are you disagree when I stated there is no such thing as objective moral value since value are always subjective?

But Danmark KNOWS the answer. He KNOWS that 'objective moral laws' exist. He just can not tell us how he knows this. It is one of these where he KNOWS when not asked, but does not KNOW when asked. This is typical in responses from him where he accuses (straw man), make claims (assertion fallacies). This is quite easy to explain given his law background, and it is easy to see which side he was on (defense vs prosecution). That is the ultimate biased grounded in fallacies. Maybe you should ask Danmark and we can all remove the guess work.

Objectivists, at least those who knows better, accept such laws as self-evidently true axioms, and only defend it as such.

but not sure on objective morals

You are straw manning me again.

I can quote you:

"I do not know for sure is there is objective morals - evolution does give us something that is trotted to help survival..."

I said many times already that morality = ethics and empathy.
We got that (ethics and empathy) from evolution. If you want to call that objective then yes be my guess. There is something that we got from evolution, or something that evolved.
Do you agree?

I do agree, and I don't want to call that objective.

What is your definition of objective morals? Do they exist, can not back it up with evidence and a peer reviewed scientific journal?

By objective morals, I mean moral that are independent from any agency/mind. They do not exist and as such there is no evidence for it in peer reviewed scientific journal or otherwise.

Again, I explained this already. I have made assumption as to what I think Danmark is referring to when he is claiming (without any evidence) that 'objective moral laws' exist.
Evolution is not a being - that is one difference. Another difference is the use of the word law; evolution is not a being, not an authority. And it seems like evolution has not applied these 'objective' empathy / ethics the same for each species, or the same for all living things: life eats life to survive.

To recap, moral comes from evolution, it's up to us to decide if we want call it objective or not, but we cannot use the word law since evolution is a process as opposed to a law giving agent?

Again, I have covered this already. If a group of a human population wants to destroy the whole population then it would not be seen as wrong to destroy this group.
Since I do not have a real world example of this, I am using the words 'seen as' because I have not seen it. I am speculating.

So you are saying genocide can be justified as self defence, the term "seen as" only refers to the lack of an real world example of such?

And for that I offer evolution as my basis of speculation and also the tribal nature of humans and the societal nature. Given that Scientists are fighting bacteria all the time to keep the human race going, I do not see any reason why we would not defend our-self if a section of our spices wants to wipe the whole. Do you?

Defend is fine, defend with violence is fine too, I am not sure about complete destruction of a society no matter their intention.

I have repeated that so many times to the same users as well. Maybe read my whole post before you repond, and read the history of my posts on this subject. It would save me time and you.

I did, it didn't make sense which is why I am asking for clarification. You got annoyed with people saying you are justifying genocide, then say follow it up by saying it's okay in self defence.

Right, so people can troll me, accuse me and make empty claims, and I should just say: YES SURE. I wasted time now explaining my position against just because of these users that straw man me. And the irony is that they wasted your time as well. You may not value your time, but I do value mine.

Well I still don't understand you stance fully, you should spend more time in explaining it. There is a difference between misunderstanding you and strawmaning you. The first is a mistake, the latter malicious.