Does Objective Morality Require the Existence of God?

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Does Objective Morality Require the Existence of God?

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Post by wiploc »

The Peanut Gallery is here:
viewtopic.php?t=33976

Those who wish to comment on this discussion may do so there. Once this thread is closed, Tanager and wiploc may post there too. In the meantime, we may respond here to comments made there.

Topic: Does Objective Morality Require the Existence of God?

Tanager's position -- if I understand it -- is that objective morality is possible if a god exists, but not possible otherwise.

My own position is this prejudice: If objective morality is possible with a god, then it is also possible without a god; if it is not possible without a god, then it is also not possible with a god.

I invite Tanager to expound on his position.

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Post #71

Post by The Tanager »

I'm trying to simplify the discussion, but I don't think I'm cutting any threads of it out. It may be stalling answering some specific questions, but I think this approach may help clear up confusions leading to some of those questions. I honestly don't think I'm dodging any question you've posed, but feel free to bring back anything you felt I obviously should have answered.
wiploc wrote:Pots don't have hopes, fears, desires. They don't know or care if you smash them. If pots were aware and articulate, it wouldn't be true that potters owned them.
If pots had hopes, fears and desires it would be the creator that made them so. What they care about...what they think is good or bad...solely relies on the choices of the creator. That sounds like the creator being responsible for their morality (if they have any).
wiploc wrote:Suppose a troll could carve new trolls out of stone, and animate them, make them living people. Would that mean the first troll owned the trolls she created? Would that make them her slaves?

No, it wouldn't. Our moral sense recoils from that result. Slavery is bad, immoral, and creating people doesn't mean you own them.
Ownership and slavery are two distinct concepts, but you seem to be treating them as the same here. Our moral sense recoils from slavery, but not ownership.

In my view God owns us, but does not control our actions like we think of with slavery. God gives us free will to obey the moral law created in us. That is what I think the scorpion god scenario misses, by the way. We recoil at the thought of scorpion god making us do stuff against our will; that's recoiling at the slavery part, not the ownership part.
wiploc wrote:So owners can create moral obligations if they are gods, but not otherwise. This sounds like special pleading, a logical fallacy. "Here's the rule, but it only works for me, not for you."

Can you explain why gods can own people but non-gods can't? How can this claim be defended so that others can understand and agree with it, so it becomes more than your personal opinion?
I did not say that only gods-as-owners can create moral obligations.

(1) I said owners create moral obligations...any kind of owner.
(2) I then said that on theism, God is the owner.
(3) I then said that on atheism, no individual is owned by any other being (or every individual owns themselves, or perhaps 'every individual has sovereignty over themselves').
(4) So,

(a) on theism God can create moral obligations on everyone
(b) on atheism every individual can create moral obligations for themselves.

I don't see special pleading here.
wiploc wrote:
Quote:

What is the objective standard that judges your utilitarianism as truly the best moral result?
Best for all. The greatest amount of happiness. The happiest people.

Our utilitarian desire is better than the egoist desire because...it is utilitarian? Or are you saying the utilitarian desire is better because more utilitarians exist than egoists and so following utilitarian desires will factually create the most happiness? Or some other nuance?

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Post #72

Post by wiploc »

The Tanager wrote: I'm trying to simplify the discussion, but I don't think I'm cutting any threads of it out. It may be stalling answering some specific questions, but I think this approach may help clear up confusions leading to some of those questions. I honestly don't think I'm dodging any question you've posed, but feel free to bring back anything you felt I obviously should have answered.
I've seen discussions where people didn't do that. They followed up on every fractal issue. If the first post addressed a single point, the third post addressed nine, and the fifth addressed thirty-seven.

Focusing on main points of interest is necessary if the readers and participants are to follow the discussion and remain interested in it.


wiploc wrote:Pots don't have hopes, fears, desires. They don't know or care if you smash them. If pots were aware and articulate, it wouldn't be true that potters owned them.
If pots had hopes, fears and desires it would be the creator that made them so.
There's no reason to believe that.


What they care about...what they think is good or bad...solely relies on the choices of the creator.
Not necessarily.


That sounds like the creator being responsible for their morality (if they have any).
I demur.


wiploc wrote:Suppose a troll could carve new trolls out of stone, and animate them, make them living people. Would that mean the first troll owned the trolls she created? Would that make them her slaves?

No, it wouldn't. Our moral sense recoils from that result. Slavery is bad, immoral, and creating people doesn't mean you own them.
Ownership and slavery are two distinct concepts, but you seem to be treating them as the same here. Our moral sense recoils from slavery, but not ownership.
We recoil from owning people. Owning people is slavery.


In my view God owns us,
But you can't say why. It's just a bald assertion. There's no reason for anyone to agree with you.


but does not control our actions like we think of with slavery.
So you'd be okay with white people owning black people so long as the owners didn't tell the "pots" what to do?


God gives us free will to obey the moral law created in us.
I don't know why we can't decide for ourselves what is good. Why do we need someone to inflict morality on us, to do it to us. I don't even see what the appeal of that is supposed to be.


That is what I think the scorpion god scenario misses, by the way. We recoil at the thought of scorpion god making us do stuff against our will; that's recoiling at the slavery part, not the ownership part.
Boy, I recoil from the idea of somebody deciding for me whether I'm supposed to torture babies, someone arbitrarily defining right and wrong regardless of whether I agree.

You say you're not okay with the scorpion god deciding right and wrong for us, but you are still defending his right to. If he's god, if he's the creator, then--according to you--right and wrong are his decision. And if we see he's made a mistake, we're still supposed to go along with his perverse dictates.

To address your point, suppose the scorpion god wants us to torture each other. He doesn't make us do it; he just decides that that's what's right for us. That wouldn't be "ok" with you, but, since you want to be moral, you'd feel it was the right thing to do anyway, the moral thing to do.

That seems so wrong to me.

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Post #73

Post by The Tanager »

Sorry for the crazy delay. Life got busy.
wiploc wrote:But you can't say why. It's just a bald assertion. There's no reason for anyone to agree with you.
Your approach for this thread has been to accept my beliefs on their face and then try to show how the logic I've used can be used against my ultimate conclusion, hasn't it? You've said something along those lines over and over. This is a different critique and is irrelevant to the discussion we've been having. I've been arguing that if my theism is true, then human morality is objective and that if atheism is true, then human morality is subjective. For those claims, I don't need to prove theism or atheism is true and I don't need to prove that God actually does own us, whether I think there is a good case for it or not.
wiploc wrote:Quote:

wiploc wrote:
Pots don't have hopes, fears, desires. They don't know or care if you smash them. If pots were aware and articulate, it wouldn't be true that potters owned them.

tanager wrote:
If pots had hopes, fears and desires it would be the creator that made them so.

wiploc wrote:
There's no reason to believe that.
Remember that we are using this as an analogy of my view. God creates humans out of nothing. God is responsible for every facet of what it means to be a human at the start. This would include any natural moral sense. Just like a pot has a certain handle, shape, etc. all due to the choice of the creator. Everything about the pot is the choice of the creator, whatever it has. If you want to add the attributes of hopes, fears and desires to the pot, then this would be from the choice of the creator as well.
wiploc wrote:We recoil from owning people. Owning people is slavery.
We recoil from the slavery part, which is controlling something against their will. Work is voluntarily putting yourself under some level of control and authority by another person, but that's not slavery. In my view, God owns humans, but does not control them against their will (i.e., enslave them).
wiploc wrote:So you'd be okay with white people owning black people so long as the owners didn't tell the "pots" what to do?
I'm not sure why this is a critique of my view. The idea of ownership I'm talking about would not apply between a white person and a black person just by taking out our idea of slavery from the relationship. White people didn't create and don't sustain black people like I'm saying God does with humans.
wiploc wrote:I don't know why we can't decide for ourselves what is good. Why do we need someone to inflict morality on us, to do it to us. I don't even see what the appeal of that is supposed to be.
This is the whole debate. Is morality objective or subjective? On my theism, morality comes from outside of us (is "inflicted upon us") from a figure with real authority over us (as our owner) and so it is objective and binding. On atheism, we do decide for ourselves what is good and so morality is subjective.
wiploc wrote:You say you're not okay with the scorpion god deciding right and wrong for us, but you are still defending his right to. If he's god, if he's the creator, then--according to you--right and wrong are his decision. And if we see he's made a mistake, we're still supposed to go along with his perverse dictates.
The only way you would deem it a mistake is if the scorpion god made you so that you would/could think it is a mistake. And, in that, scorpion god would be responsible for your moral sense of outrage against his dictates.
wiploc wrote:To address your point, suppose the scorpion god wants us to torture each other. He doesn't make us do it; he just decides that that's what's right for us. That wouldn't be "ok" with you, but, since you want to be moral, you'd feel it was the right thing to do anyway, the moral thing to do.

That seems so wrong to me.
In this scenario, scorpion god creates two drives within us. (1) that we not feel "okay" about torturing each other and (2) to obey it's dictates. This scenario presents a dilemma between these two drives we have since they directly conflict here. The scorpion god seems to me to be acting irrationally here by giving us a command that goes against the very nature it gave us. It's an irrational moral command.

So, I'm not sure why this is a critique of my view. This does not counter my view of God because God gives us a moral nature that is in line with His moral commands because both come out of and reflect His nature.

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Post #74

Post by wiploc »

I'm back home, done with my wanderings for the year. I'll try to respond to your future posts faster than I have been.


The Tanager wrote:
wiploc wrote:So owners can create moral obligations if they are gods, but not otherwise. This sounds like special pleading, a logical fallacy. "Here's the rule, but it only works for me, not for you."

Can you explain why gods can own people but non-gods can't? How can this claim be defended so that others can understand and agree with it, so it becomes more than your personal opinion?
I did not say that only gods-as-owners can create moral obligations.

(1) I said owners create moral obligations...any kind of owner.
(2) I then said that on theism, God is the owner.
(3) I then said that on atheism, no individual is owned by any other being (or every individual owns themselves, or perhaps 'every individual has sovereignty over themselves').
(4) So,

(a) on theism God can create moral obligations on everyone
(b) on atheism every individual can create moral obligations for themselves.

I don't see special pleading here.
You said that owners create moral obligations, and then--without justifying the claim--you said that humans can't have owners other than gods.

When you make a distinction without justifying it, that's special pleading.

Suppose I was to do the special pleading, suppose I said you can have moral obligations without gods but not with them. You could see the special pleading then, right?


wiploc wrote:
Quote:

What is the objective standard that judges your utilitarianism as truly the best moral result?
Best for all. The greatest amount of happiness. The happiest people.

Our utilitarian desire is better than the egoist desire because...it is utilitarian?
It results in more people being happy. You can hardly argue that that's a bad thing.



Or are you saying the utilitarian desire is better because more utilitarians exist than egoists
No, I never said anything like that.



and so following utilitarian desires will factually create the most happiness?
I'm okay with this part.



Or some other nuance?
I think happiness is good. I think making people happy is good. It's even what I mean by "good."

You think, as near as I can tell, that following orders is good. You say you aren't okay with that in the case of the scorpion god, but you still think it is, in some weird sense, morally good. From where I sit, that seems arbitrary, pointless, and perverse. Why not just call the good things good instead of the "not okay" things?


I did not say that only gods-as-owners can create moral obligations.

(1) I said owners create moral obligations...any kind of owner.
(2) I then said that on theism, God is the owner.
(3) I then said that on atheism, no individual is owned by any other being (or every individual owns themselves, or perhaps 'every individual has sovereignty over themselves').
(4) So,

(a) on theism God can create moral obligations on everyone
(b) on atheism every individual can create moral obligations for themselves.
Some of the parts I'm having trouble with:

(1) I don't know of any reason to believe that owners can create moral obligations.
(2) I don't know of any reason to believe that a god--if one existed--would own us.
(3)(a) In this actual godless world, slavery is too common.
(3)(b) If atheism made us sovereign over ourselves, then we would own ourselves, and--according to you--"owners can create moral obligations...any kind of owner." Emphasis added. So, according to your own logic, a world without gods can have moral obligations just like a world with gods.

So I don't see that you are making progress toward your goal of showing how worlds with gods are compatible with moral realism but godless worlds aren't.

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Post #75

Post by The Tanager »

wiploc wrote:You said that owners create moral obligations, and then--without justifying the claim--you said that humans can't have owners other than gods.

When you make a distinction without justifying it, that's special pleading.

Suppose I was to do the special pleading, suppose I said you can have moral obligations without gods but not with them. You could see the special pleading then, right?
I think you are conflating two things here. The generally accepted principle I appealed to was that owners can create obligations on what they own. We, of course, are focusing upon moral obligations, which is one type of obligation. I did not say there was an exception to this rule, that only one kind of owner (God) can create (moral) obligations.

I then talked about a second issue. There is an additional question as to whether or not ownership exists given certain worldviews. And I don't just mean a claim of ownership (like in slavery). We are specifically talking about whether human beings can be said to be owned in virtue of the worldview itself.

If my brand of theism is true, then God owns humans because He created and sustains us. In that ownership God has decided to grant us free will, so the type of ownership is not slave ownership. This just follows from what my theistic worldview says, so there isn't special pleading here.

If atheism is true (as far as I can tell), no human (or non-human) naturally owns another. I think that just follows from an atheistic worldview, so there isn't special pleading there. I could be understanding atheism incorrectly, but you didn't seem to disagree with the above statement. You don't seem to believe that humans are naturally owned by other beings. Correct me if you disagree.

If all the above are true, then (a) if theism is true (or I could say "on theism"), then God can create objective moral obligations on humans. And if all the above are true, then (b) on atheism, you can either say 'every individual creates moral obligations for themselves' or 'there are no moral obligations on anyone.' I think those two statements mean the same thing in an atheistic context. But that is subjective morality, not objective morality.
wiploc wrote:It results in more people being happy. You can hardly argue that that's a bad thing.
Whether I would say it's bad or not is irrelevant; Egoists do. It does not matter if more people are made happy; that has nothing to do with good and bad for the egoist. On egoism, an action is bad only if it makes you less happy. But you are trying to prove that the utilitarian desire is objectively better than the egoist desire. If my worldview is true, the utilitarian desire in humans is objectively better than the egoist desire in humans. I don't see how that is the case, if an atheistic worldview is true.
wiploc wrote:Quote:

and so following utilitarian desires will factually create the most happiness?


I'm okay with this part.
But there is a difference between saying something is factually the case and that it ought to be the case.
wiploc wrote:I think happiness is good. I think making people happy is good. It's even what I mean by "good."

You think, as near as I can tell, that following orders is good. You say you aren't okay with that in the case of the scorpion god, but you still think it is, in some weird sense, morally good. From where I sit, that seems arbitrary, pointless, and perverse. Why not just call the good things good instead of the "not okay" things?
I do not think that just following orders is good. I do think humans following the orders of the paradigm of human goodness is, by definition, good. That's probably confusing, though, so in other words, humans are made in a certain way by God to think certain things are good. This same God then commands humans to act in the ways they think are good. There's nothing extraordinary about this. Of course, we will think commands that reflect what we are naturally made to feel are good are good commands to be followed. These kinds of commands are deemed by us to be good commands to follow. To follow bad commands is not moral. But this isn't really saying much, we are just making explicit the logic already there.

In the scorpion god thought experiment, the situation is different. In this scenario humans are made in a certain way by scorpion god to think certain things are good. This same god then commands humans to act in the ways they think are bad. This is what I called scorpion god just being irrational or cruel. Of course, we will think commands that reflect what we are naturally made to feel are bad are bad commands. (This is what I mean by saying I wouldn't be okay with it). These kinds of commands are deemed by us to be bad commands to follow.
wiploc wrote:Some of the parts I'm having trouble with:

(1) I don't know of any reason to believe that owners can create moral obligations.
(2) I don't know of any reason to believe that a god--if one existed--would own us.
(3)(a) In this actual godless world, slavery is too common.
(3)(b) If atheism made us sovereign over ourselves, then we would own ourselves, and--according to you--"owners can create moral obligations...any kind of owner." Emphasis added. So, according to your own logic, a world without gods can have moral obligations just like a world with gods.

So I don't see that you are making progress toward your goal of showing how worlds with gods are compatible with moral realism but godless worlds aren't.
I don't see why I need to offer reasons for (1) and (2), from what you see as our goals in this discussion. You said you would take my logic and use it against me. (1) and (2) are asking me to prove the premises my logic is built upon. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do, it's just the complete opposite of what you said you were doing in this thread. You said you'd take my argument for theism being compatible with moral realism and use that exact same logic to argue for atheism being compatible with moral realism.

In (3a), slavery does exist, but that's not the point. The point is that slavery is a false claim to ownership of one human over another. That is, if atheism is true, slavery is unnatural, in the sense that slavery is not instituted by nature apart from subjective human wills. Slavery is a human convention, not something built in to our natures, our births. Some kids are not naturally born slaves and others baseball players.

In (3b), the obligations would only be an obligation for one's self to follow because that is what they own; they don't own other people. That's subjective morality.

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Post #76

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The Tanager wrote: Sorry for the crazy delay. Life got busy.
wiploc wrote:But you can't say why. It's just a bald assertion. There's no reason for anyone to agree with you.
Your approach for this thread has been to accept my beliefs on their face and then try to show how the logic I've used can be used against my ultimate conclusion, hasn't it? You've said something along those lines over and over. This is a different critique and is irrelevant to the discussion we've been having. I've been arguing that if my theism is true, then human morality is objective and that if atheism is true, then human morality is subjective. For those claims, I don't need to prove theism or atheism is true and I don't need to prove that God actually does own us, whether I think there is a good case for it or not.
Your claim is that X is possible if and only if Y is true.

Sometimes we render X as "objective morality." Sometimes we call it "moral realism."

Y is gods' existence.

So, something like, "If gods existed, then objective morality could exist; otherwise, not."

I can't refute that thesis by claiming that gods don't exit. That would be like arguing that, "If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs," is false because we don't have ham. Our not having ham doesn't affect the fact that we could have ham if we had it. Likewise, the nonexistence of gods doesn't affect whether gods could produce objective morality if they did exist.

So we may as well stipulate for the sake of argument--on and off, when it's convenient--that gods exist.

Your argument runs something like this:

1. A god exists.
2. This god created the rest of the universe.
3. This creator god sustains the rest of the universe, keeps it in existence.
4. Therefore, this god owns us.
5. Owners get to create objective morality for their property.
6. Therefore, gods get to create objective morality for humans.
7. Therefore, we are morally obliged to obey gods.

At times, the first three steps seem to conflate, thus: 1. A creator/sustainer/god exists.

You are correct about me giving a pass to the first one or three steps. I am not concerned--in this discussion--to point out that we have no reason to believe in a creator/sustainor, or any kind of god. But I'm all about pointing out that the other steps are non sequiturs.

There is no reason to believe that a creator/sustainer would own us.
There is no reason to believe that owners determine morality.




wiploc wrote:Quote:

wiploc wrote:
Pots don't have hopes, fears, desires. They don't know or care if you smash them. If pots were aware and articulate, it wouldn't be true that potters owned them.

tanager wrote:
If pots had hopes, fears and desires it would be the creator that made them so.

wiploc wrote:
There's no reason to believe that.
Remember that we are using this as an analogy of my view. God creates humans out of nothing. God is responsible for every facet of what it means to be a human at the start. This would include any natural moral sense. Just like a pot has a certain handle, shape, etc. all due to the choice of the creator. Everything about the pot is the choice of the creator, whatever it has. If you want to add the attributes of hopes, fears and desires to the pot, then this would be from the choice of the creator as well.
wiploc wrote:We recoil from owning people. Owning people is slavery.
We recoil from the slavery part, which is controlling something against their will. Work is voluntarily putting yourself under some level of control and authority by another person, but that's not slavery. In my view, God owns humans, but does not control them against their will (i.e., enslave them).
wiploc wrote:So you'd be okay with white people owning black people so long as the owners didn't tell the "pots" what to do?
I'm not sure why this is a critique of my view. The idea of ownership I'm talking about would not apply between a white person and a black person just by taking out our idea of slavery from the relationship. White people didn't create and don't sustain black people like I'm saying God does with humans.
wiploc wrote:I don't know why we can't decide for ourselves what is good. Why do we need someone to inflict morality on us, to do it to us. I don't even see what the appeal of that is supposed to be.
This is the whole debate. Is morality objective or subjective? On my theism, morality comes from outside of us (is "inflicted upon us") from a figure with real authority over us (as our owner) and so it is objective and binding. On atheism, we do decide for ourselves what is good and so morality is subjective.
wiploc wrote:You say you're not okay with the scorpion god deciding right and wrong for us, but you are still defending his right to. If he's god, if he's the creator, then--according to you--right and wrong are his decision. And if we see he's made a mistake, we're still supposed to go along with his perverse dictates.
The only way you would deem it a mistake is if the scorpion god made you so that you would/could think it is a mistake. And, in that, scorpion god would be responsible for your moral sense of outrage against his dictates.
wiploc wrote:To address your point, suppose the scorpion god wants us to torture each other. He doesn't make us do it; he just decides that that's what's right for us. That wouldn't be "ok" with you, but, since you want to be moral, you'd feel it was the right thing to do anyway, the moral thing to do.

That seems so wrong to me.
In this scenario, scorpion god creates two drives within us. (1) that we not feel "okay" about torturing each other and (2) to obey it's dictates. This scenario presents a dilemma between these two drives we have since they directly conflict here. The scorpion god seems to me to be acting irrationally here by giving us a command that goes against the very nature it gave us. It's an irrational moral command.

So, I'm not sure why this is a critique of my view. This does not counter my view of God because God gives us a moral nature that is in line with His moral commands because both come out of and reflect His nature.

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Post #77

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The Tanager wrote: Sorry for the crazy delay. Life got busy.
wiploc wrote:But you can't say why. It's just a bald assertion. There's no reason for anyone to agree with you.
Your approach for this thread has been to accept my beliefs on their face and then try to show how the logic I've used can be used against my ultimate conclusion, hasn't it? You've said something along those lines over and over. This is a different critique and is irrelevant to the discussion we've been having. I've been arguing that if my theism is true, then human morality is objective and that if atheism is true, then human morality is subjective. For those claims, I don't need to prove theism or atheism is true and I don't need to prove that God actually does own us, whether I think there is a good case for it or not.
Your claim is that X is possible if and only if Y is true.

Sometimes we render X as "objective morality." Sometimes we call it "moral realism."

Y is gods' existence.

So, something like, "If gods existed, then objective morality could exist; otherwise, not."

I can't refute that thesis by claiming that gods don't exit. That would be like arguing that, "If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs," is false because we don't have ham. Our not having ham doesn't affect the fact that we could have ham if we had it. Likewise, the nonexistence of gods doesn't affect whether gods could produce objective morality if they did exist.

So we may as well stipulate for the sake of argument--on and off, when it's convenient--that gods exist.

Your argument runs something like this:

1. A god exists.
2. This god created the rest of the universe.
3. This creator god sustains the rest of the universe, keeps it in existence.
4. Therefore, this god owns us.
5. Owners get to create objective morality for their property.
6. Therefore, owner gods get to create objective morality for humans.
7. Therefore, we are morally obligated to obey gods.

At times, the first three steps seem to conflate, thus: 1a. A creator/sustainer/god exists.

You are correct about me giving a pass to the first one or three steps. I am not concerned--in this discussion--to point out that we have no reason to believe in a creator or any kind of gods. But I do get to point out that other steps non sequiturs.

Steps 2, 3, 4, and 5 are unsupported. There is no reason for us to think they are true. Or, if we're conflating 1, 2, and 3 into 1a, and stipulating to that, then 4 and 5 are unsupported. There is no reason to believe that a creator/sustainer would own us. There is no reason to believe that owners determine morality.






wiploc wrote:Quote:

wiploc wrote:
Pots don't have hopes, fears, desires. They don't know or care if you smash them. If pots were aware and articulate, it wouldn't be true that potters owned them.

tanager wrote:
If pots had hopes, fears and desires it would be the creator that made them so.

wiploc wrote:
There's no reason to believe that.
Remember that we are using this as an analogy of my view. God creates humans out of nothing. God is responsible for every facet of what it means to be a human at the start. This would include any natural moral sense. Just like a pot has a certain handle, shape, etc. all due to the choice of the creator. Everything about the pot is the choice of the creator, whatever it has. If you want to add the attributes of hopes, fears and desires to the pot, then this would be from the choice of the creator as well.
wiploc wrote:We recoil from owning people. Owning people is slavery.
We recoil from the slavery part, which is controlling something against their will. Work is voluntarily putting yourself under some level of control and authority by another person, but that's not slavery. In my view, God owns humans, but does not control them against their will (i.e., enslave them).
wiploc wrote:So you'd be okay with white people owning black people so long as the owners didn't tell the "pots" what to do?
I'm not sure why this is a critique of my view. The idea of ownership I'm talking about would not apply between a white person and a black person just by taking out our idea of slavery from the relationship. White people didn't create and don't sustain black people like I'm saying God does with humans.
wiploc wrote:I don't know why we can't decide for ourselves what is good. Why do we need someone to inflict morality on us, to do it to us. I don't even see what the appeal of that is supposed to be.
This is the whole debate. Is morality objective or subjective? On my theism, morality comes from outside of us (is "inflicted upon us") from a figure with real authority over us (as our owner) and so it is objective and binding. On atheism, we do decide for ourselves what is good and so morality is subjective.
wiploc wrote:You say you're not okay with the scorpion god deciding right and wrong for us, but you are still defending his right to. If he's god, if he's the creator, then--according to you--right and wrong are his decision. And if we see he's made a mistake, we're still supposed to go along with his perverse dictates.
The only way you would deem it a mistake is if the scorpion god made you so that you would/could think it is a mistake. And, in that, scorpion god would be responsible for your moral sense of outrage against his dictates.
wiploc wrote:To address your point, suppose the scorpion god wants us to torture each other. He doesn't make us do it; he just decides that that's what's right for us. That wouldn't be "ok" with you, but, since you want to be moral, you'd feel it was the right thing to do anyway, the moral thing to do.

That seems so wrong to me.
In this scenario, scorpion god creates two drives within us. (1) that we not feel "okay" about torturing each other and (2) to obey it's dictates. This scenario presents a dilemma between these two drives we have since they directly conflict here. The scorpion god seems to me to be acting irrationally here by giving us a command that goes against the very nature it gave us. It's an irrational moral command.

So, I'm not sure why this is a critique of my view. This does not counter my view of God because God gives us a moral nature that is in line with His moral commands because both come out of and reflect His nature.

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Post #78

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The Tanager wrote: Sorry for the crazy delay. Life got busy.
wiploc wrote:But you can't say why. It's just a bald assertion. There's no reason for anyone to agree with you.
Your approach for this thread has been to accept my beliefs on their face and then try to show how the logic I've used can be used against my ultimate conclusion, hasn't it? You've said something along those lines over and over. This is a different critique and is irrelevant to the discussion we've been having. I've been arguing that if my theism is true, then human morality is objective and that if atheism is true, then human morality is subjective. For those claims, I don't need to prove theism or atheism is true and I don't need to prove that God actually does own us, whether I think there is a good case for it or not.
Your claim is that X is possible if and only if Y is true.

Sometimes we render X as "objective morality." Sometimes we call it "moral realism."

Y is gods' existence.

So, something like, "If gods existed, then objective morality could exist; otherwise, not."

I can't refute that thesis by claiming that gods don't exist. That would be like arguing that, "If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs," is false because we don't have ham. Our not having ham doesn't affect the fact that we could have ham if we had it. Likewise, the nonexistence of gods doesn't affect whether gods could produce objective morality if they did exist.

So we may as well stipulate for the sake of argument--on and off, when it's convenient--that gods exist.

Your argument runs something like this:

1. If a god exists, then these things follow:
2. This god created the rest of the universe.
3. This creator god sustains the rest of the universe, keeps it in existence.
4. Therefore, this god owns us.
5. Owners get to create objective morality for their property.
6. Therefore, owner gods get to create objective morality for humans.
7. Therefore, we are morally obligated to obey gods.

At times, the first three steps seem to conflate, thus: 1a. If a creator/sustainer/god exists, then these things follow:

You are correct about me giving a pass to the first one or three steps. I am not concerned--in this discussion--to point out that we have no reason to believe in gods or creators. But, once I've granted your premise, I do get to point out that other steps don't follow.

Steps 2, 3, 4, and 5 are unsupported. There is no reason for us to think they are true. Or, if we're conflating 1, 2, and 3 into 1a, then 4 and 5 are unsupported. There is no reason to believe that a creator/sustainer would own us, and there is no reason to believe that owners determine morality for the things they own.

Steps 6 and 7 are unsupported because they depend on 4 and 5, which are also unsupported.

So, your argument contains either four or seven steps, and what you've established so for is step 1:

1. If a god exists, then:

and nothing follows. You haven't established any of the other steps.

So now, if I understand your latest move, you are asking me to stipulate to steps 2 thru 6. In that case, your argument could reduce to this:

1b: If god exists and can dictate our morality so that we are morally obligated to obey him:
2b: Then we are morally obligated to obey him.

That's not even an argument. "If I'm right, then I'm right," is not an attempt to justify your thinking so that others can agree. That's just you restating your claim once again. You think we're supposed to obey gods, but even after all this time, these many attempts, and all my coaxing, you can't begin to say why.

We have made no progress at all. I think it's time for you to admit that you don't have a case.



wiploc wrote:Quote:

wiploc wrote:
Pots don't have hopes, fears, desires. They don't know or care if you smash them. If pots were aware and articulate, it wouldn't be true that potters owned them.

tanager wrote:
If pots had hopes, fears and desires it would be the creator that made them so.

wiploc wrote:
There's no reason to believe that.
Remember that we are using this as an analogy of my view. God creates humans out of nothing. God is responsible for every facet of what it means to be a human at the start. This would include any natural moral sense. Just like a pot has a certain handle, shape, etc. all due to the choice of the creator. Everything about the pot is the choice of the creator, whatever it has. If you want to add the attributes of hopes, fears and desires to the pot, then this would be from the choice of the creator as well.
On your theory, god elected my atheism for me? It was none of my choosing? Do I have that right?



wiploc wrote:We recoil from owning people. Owning people is slavery.
We recoil from the slavery part, which is controlling something against their will. Work is voluntarily putting yourself under some level of control and authority by another person, but that's not slavery. In my view, God owns humans, but does not control them against their will (i.e., enslave them).
wiploc wrote:So you'd be okay with white people owning black people so long as the owners didn't tell the "pots" what to do?
I'm not sure why this is a critique of my view. The idea of ownership I'm talking about would not apply between a white person and a black person just by taking out our idea of slavery from the relationship. White people didn't create and don't sustain black people like I'm saying God does with humans.
My cousin kept me from falling to my death in the mountains. He sustained me. Does that mean he owns me and gets to dictate my morality? I understand your answer to be something like, "No, because that was mere earthly sustaining. Here on earth, you have never experienced any sustaining like god's sustaining. Therefore you cannot know anything about divine sustaining. The sustaining that you are familiar with does not create ownership. It does not come with the ability to dictate morality."

So why are we talking about it? At first, god's sustaining is like early sustaining. But, once I point out that the sustaining we know doesn't entail ownership and moral dictates, then god's sustaining is no longer like earthly sustaining. That's a two-step, an equivocation, an X plus not-X, a contradiction. It doesn't help your argument.

You might as well claim that god has an "X factor," as to claim that he has a characteristic that's like sustaining but not really.



wiploc wrote:I don't know why we can't decide for ourselves what is good. Why do we need someone to inflict morality on us, to do it to us. I don't even see what the appeal of that is supposed to be.
This is the whole debate. Is morality objective or subjective? On my theism, morality comes from outside of us (is "inflicted upon us") from a figure with real authority over us (as our owner) and so it is objective and binding. On atheism, we do decide for ourselves what is good and so morality is subjective.
How would gods get "real authority" over us? That's the whole debate.

But you're asking me to take it as a given.

If you have any reason to offer in justification of that belief, I ask you to share it with your readers.


wiploc wrote:You say you're not okay with the scorpion god deciding right and wrong for us, but you are still defending his right to. If he's god, if he's the creator, then--according to you--right and wrong are his decision. And if we see he's made a mistake, we're still supposed to go along with his perverse dictates.
The only way you would deem it a mistake is if the scorpion god made you so that you would/could think it is a mistake. And, in that, scorpion god would be responsible for your moral sense of outrage against his dictates.
So Jehovah is responsible for my moral outrage against his behaviors as described by the Christians. How does this help your argument?



wiploc wrote:To address your point, suppose the scorpion god wants us to torture each other. He doesn't make us do it; he just decides that that's what's right for us. That wouldn't be "ok" with you, but, since you want to be moral, you'd feel it was the right thing to do anyway, the moral thing to do.

That seems so wrong to me.
In this scenario, scorpion god creates two drives within us. (1) that we not feel "okay" about torturing each other and (2) to obey it's dictates. This scenario presents a dilemma between these two drives we have since they directly conflict here. The scorpion god seems to me to be acting irrationally here by giving us a command that goes against the very nature it gave us. It's an irrational moral command.

So, I'm not sure why this is a critique of my view. This does not counter my view of God because God gives us a moral nature that is in line with His moral commands because both come out of and reflect His nature.
God says not to kill, and yet he kills. Any person with a god-made logical nature will see the contradiction.

God saddles us with the desire not to believe promiscuously; our beliefs should have logical justification. And yet the strongest justification you can come up with is something like, "If it's true, then it's true; and people should stipulate the 'it's true' part."

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Post #79

Post by The Tanager »

wiploc wrote:Your claim is that X is possible if and only if Y is true.

...

Your argument runs something like this:

1. If a god exists, then these things follow:
2. This god created the rest of the universe.
3. This creator god sustains the rest of the universe, keeps it in existence.
4. Therefore, this god owns us.
5. Owners get to create objective morality for their property.
6. Therefore, owner gods get to create objective morality for humans.
7. Therefore, we are morally obligated to obey gods.

...

So now, if I understand your latest move, you are asking me to stipulate to steps 2 thru 6. In that case, your argument could reduce to this:

1b: If god exists and can dictate our morality so that we are morally obligated to obey him:
2b: Then we are morally obligated to obey him.

That's not even an argument....
It seems to me that you have shifted in thought from the first statement to your formulations of my argument. This is a shift from "possible" in the first statement to no mention of "possible" in your formulations. I think this is part of the cause of your confusion on what my argument actually has been. Here has been my thought process all along:

1. You and I both believe moral realism (or objective morality) is true for humans.


2. Let's see what worldviews that, if true, can adequately account for moral realism.

(2a) If theism is true, then objective morality is logically possible.

It is possible that God created the universe, sustains it and owns human beings (just like humans automatically own their inventions) thereby allowing God to place obligations on us (just like we may place obligations on our inventions, if we choose). There is nothing logically inconsistent there. If these things are true, then our belief in moral realism make sense, because God places those obligations upon us. So, theism is still a live option for grounding moral realism. At this part of the "argument" we are assuming the facts according to the theistic worldview in order to analyze the logic.

This has been your focus of critique. You have said that the logic that I have used can then be used to show that atheistic worldviews lead to objective morality as well. This is not true.

We have talked about four atheistic worldviews in this thread.

(2b) Godless Normative Realism (or Moral Platonism).

I have said multiple times that this atheistic worldview would lead to objective morality, if its foundational tenets are true. But it does not do so by the same logic I provided for how theism gets there. Abstract moral properties, according to this worldview, do not create the universe, sustain it and have ownership over human beings like we are there inventions. I said early on that I thought this view had other serious flaws. You said you think it does as well, so we didn't discuss this further. We both struck it off as not a viable candidate to ground moral realism in our world.

(2c) Physical Reductionist Moral Realism

The same thing in (2b) applies here in full.

(2d) Your utilitarian account

Since we both agreed the previous two atheistic worldviews weren't viable candidates, I asked if you had a different atheistic view that could account for objective moral truths and you were proceeding, for a little while, to try to show why your utilitarian account does and I critiqued why your view did not appear to lead to objective morality. My critiques were not questioning the foundational facts of your worldview, but whether given your beliefs as true, if they logically accounted for moral realism. Your atheistic view, as far as I can tell, does not claim that the utilitarian ethic created, sustains or owns human beings. Therefore, you aren't using the same logic that got me to my conclusion concerning God and objective morality.

(2e) Generally speaking

You have tried to say that there could be an atheistic view using the same logic of ownership. You have noted ideas of slavery, etc. and I have shared why those are not ideas of ownership (not a different kind of ownership than in my argument; it's not an equivocation) based on the tenets of a general atheistic worldview. Atheism does not naturally lead to an idea of humans being owned by other beings. Therefore, the same logic I used for theism leading to objective morality cannot get general atheism there.

This section (2) has been what you have been critiquing and, therefore, what I have been responding to.


3. Here we have the deeper issue of whether we have good reasons to believe the beliefs posited by theism or godless normative realism or a physical reductionist moral theory (or some other theory that actually logically leads to objective morality).

Lately, your critiques have turned here. I'm fine talking about this, but I don't want it to get conflated with what was happening earlier when you were saying stuff like:
wiploc wrote:When a theist offers a reason to believe that objective morality can't exist in the absence of gods, the same logic would show that it can't exist even with gods. When a theist offers reason to believe objective morality can exist in the presence of gods, the same logic shows it can also exist in the absence of gods.
This critique looks at logical consistency, assuming the beliefs of the worldviews are true. This is what you've been asking me to respond to. I've responded to it. If we take my theistic worldview at face value, objective morality logically follows (it's not begged from the beginning like your formulation of my argument claims it does). If we take your atheistic worldview or a general atheistic worldview at face value, subjective morality logically follows. We don't get to those conclusions by using contradictory logics.

If you want me to argue for my actual theistic beliefs being true (from means other than morality and best explanation types of arguments), then the discussion is going to turn to cosmological arguments and the like, which is not what I thought you wanted to talk about here. So, please let me know what part of the conversation you want to talk about and let's stick with that for awhile. I don't care which section we talk about, or even if you want to talk about the various levels at the same time, but I do care that we keep straight exactly what is being talked about. Once I know what you would like to do in this regard, I can address some of the other things you've recently written (or continue to leave it off to the side if you want to focus down on one point).

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Post #80

Post by The Tanager »

I know...you haven't even responded to the last one, but I've been thinking about this more...

The more I've been thinking about this, I think there is a distinction that needs to be made between moral values and moral duties. I think theism, if true, is logically consistent with both. God builds moral values into reality, but also gives moral duties to its creations. I know you have questioned that, I'm just summarizing a distinction here.

I'm not sure the atheistic worldviews we've discussed can account for both. As I've already said, I think godless normative realism (moral platonism) and a physical reductionist theory can account for the existence of moral values, if we are just looking at logical possibility. But I'm not sure they can account for moral dutiesfor humans, even if they correctly account for moral values.

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