I have a PhD in History, but profess to be poorly skilled in philosophical debates about the nature of 'being'. So for the time being, to use a poor pun, I will post comments without philosophical sophistication, using merely the attributes I have learned from being (there it is again) part of a human society, and having studied the conduct of human societies as an historian/sociologist. The politics of religion vs secularism (or the other way round) are moot, it seems to me. A great example comes from a story in this morning's SMH, where Sydney's Catholic Cardinal George Pell is quoted as sayig that the lives of people without (religious) faith have ''nothing beyond the constructs they confect to cover the abyss, that "a minority of people, usually people without religion, are frightened by the future", and in summary "'It's almost as though they've … nothing but fear to distract themselves from the fact that without God the universe has no objective purpose or meaning. Nothing beyond the constructs they confect to cover the abyss.'' Pell concluded that life without God was ''life without purpose, without constraints''. For full details, see: http://www.smh.com.au/national/faithles ... 18cg3.html

I'm amused that Pell assumes that someone like myself (a non-theist) is "frightened by the future"; after all, fear of being damned to hell (or its equivalent) is one of (many) reasons that people are drawn to worship a deity, whom they hope will spare them from damnation. As for non-theists living "without constraint", this implies the assumption of inherent amorality and immorality outside of a Divine Judaic-Christian code. I'm well aware of the Ten Commandments, but moral principles existed before they were codified - in a particular religious form - by Moses. And moral principles continue to evolve, both within the churches and secular society. The commandments may have been set in stone, but they were carved at a particular point in time by humans acting, perhaps with the best of intentions, on behalf of a God they imagined to be real (it was real to them, no doubt).

The historical logic of Pell's absolutist position is that pre-colonial Indigenous peoples who lived beyond the reach of the churches had no moral compass and, without recourse (in this case) to a Christian God were doomed to behavioural impropriety and (as non-believers) rendered failures to ascend into heaven. The Pell tolls for thee.

Just for the record, I have never said that I don't accept the proposition.


Fair enough. Granted, the proposition, lay out the irrefutable logical steps which produce that conclusion.

Okay, I will continue to beat this poor simple horse to death:
If no person is born with superior rights to any other person, such as rights to control the nonaggressive actions of another person, (as we have stipulated), the Golden Rule should prevail as an ethical standard because:
1. No person possesses a right initiate an action toward any person who doesn't want that thing done to them.
2. Mathematically, two or more people, each having no, zip, zero, rights to control the actions of another person, acting together still have zero rights to control that person. Another way of putting it is that if I don't have a right to run your life, I can't delegate the right to run your life and tell you what to do or not do, to a third party calling itself some kind of a street gang or a government.
3. In practice, what this means to the secular person is that if you lie to, cheat, bully, control, and/or steal from other people despite them not wanting you to, (much less round up people and murder them, as the Nazis did) you will not necessarily go to Hell, but you will be considered to be unethical, and people may try to avoid you.

There might possibly be a best way to behave, but that doesn't mean that we know what it is, and it doesn't mean that everyone will follow it. So far there's no really great evidence that says there is a best way to behave that, at the bottom of it, isn't just someone's opinion. But, also, there isn't any good evidence that there isn't a best way to behave that is objective - not just someone's opinion but a logically recognisable truth, like 2 + 2 = 4.

However, there are groups of opinions which roughly agree with each other, and have agreed throughout a lot of history, indicating that these opinions of behaviours are perhaps "built in" to human behaviour and/or emotions. This indicates that there might be a case for general agreement of opinion, but still doesn't raise it to anything more than agreed upon opinion (like taking a vote). A vote is still subjective, but it is subjective by statistics.

iambiguous wants to know if there can be an objective system of ethics without an all-knowing being. The argument goes: an all-knowing being knows everything, therefore if an objective system of ethics exists, it will know what it is. But humans are not all knowing, so they may never be able to figure out what this system is on their own. That is, if it even exists.

That, I think, is most of it. But all of us have some sort of basic assumptions: about human nature, about how complex ethics is, and so on. And these tend to colour our arguments.

How can we ever sort through all of this complexity, uncertainty and marbled ambiguity in order to establish a moral order based on the most rational assesments of all?

There are a few ways to look at this assumption:
(a) nobody has any superior rights to anybody else, or
(b) nobody has any rights at all

The difference between (a) and (b) is that in (a) we assume that there are some sort of rights. How do we find out what these rights are? How do we define them? If we do find some way to qualify them, we can then use logic to discover if (a) is true, that there are no 'superior' and 'inferior' sets of rights. To make a logically consistent system (on that wouldn't break down in certain situations) we would have to make sure that none of the rights interfered with any of the others, or that the rights had a specific hierarchy. So in the end we would have a certain set of rights that were inalienable, and perhaps which had a particular order of precedence. This is the big journey to discover an objective, consistent system of ethics. But by no means does (a) automatically imply the Golden Rule: it implies that rights have specific characteristics which define them as rights and that it might be possible to discover what they are. But it doesn't imply what the rights are, and there is a lot of work to ensure that they are logically consistent.

If we look at (b), it is very easy to state that no one has the right to kill another person. However, from the same assumption we are unable to say if someone has the right to life, to food, to freedom, or to anything at all. There are no rights whatsoever. Does someone have an obligation to help another person in need if they are able? Hard to say: the person in need doesn't have any rights to speak of. So this creates a moral vacuum. If someone does help someone else, this might be construed as "nice", but this is a subjective assumption based upon the idea that helping people is "good", which is not implied by a lack of rights.So (a) gives us room to search for a consistent theory of ethics, but does not guarantee that there will be one and what it is like. (b) however, leaves us wallowing in a moral vacuum.

There are a few ways to look at this assumption:
(a) nobody has any superior rights to anybody else, or
(b) nobody has any rights at all

The difference between (a) and (b) is that in (a) we assume that there are some sort of rights. How do we find out what these rights are? How do we define them? If we do find some way to qualify them, we can then use logic to discover if (a) is true, that there are no 'superior' and 'inferior' sets of rights. To make a logically consistent system (on that wouldn't break down in certain situations) we would have to make sure that none of the rights interfered with any of the others, or that the rights had a specific hierarchy. So in the end we would have a certain set of rights that were inalienable, and perhaps which had a particular order of precedence. This is the big journey to discover an objective, consistent system of ethics. But by no means does (a) automatically imply the Golden Rule: it implies that rights have specific characteristics which define them as rights and that it might be possible to discover what they are. But it doesn't imply what the rights are, and there is a lot of work to ensure that they are logically consistent.

If we look at (b), it is very easy to state that no one has the right to kill another person. However, from the same assumption we are unable to say if someone has the right to life, to food, to freedom, or to anything at all. There are no rights whatsoever. Does someone have an obligation to help another person in need if they are able? Hard to say: the person in need doesn't have any rights to speak of. So this creates a moral vacuum. If someone does help someone else, this might be construed as "nice", but this is a subjective assumption based upon the idea that helping people is "good", which is not implied by a lack of rights.

So (a) gives us room to search for a consistent theory of ethics, but does not guarantee that there will be one and what it is like. (b) however, leaves us wallowing in a moral vacuum.

Okay, I will continue to beat this poor simple horse to death:
If no person is born with superior rights to any other person, such as rights to control the nonaggressive actions of another person, (as we have stipulated), the Golden Rule should prevail as an ethical standard because:
1. No person possesses a right initiate an action toward any person who doesn't want that thing done to them . . .

2. Mathematically, two or more people, each having no, zip, zero, rights to control the actions of another person, acting together still have zero rights to control that person.

3. In practice, what this means to the secular person is that if you lie to, cheat, bully, control, and/or steal from other people despite them not wanting you to, (much less round up people and murder them, as the Nazis did) you will not necessarily go to Hell, but you will be considered to be unethical, and people may try to avoid you.

I’m going to stop you there, Tom. This doesn’t follow from your starting premise.

Your starting premise is that no person has greater inherent rights than any other person. But we can easily conceive of an ethical framework in which I have the right, in certain circumstances, to do a certain action to you regardless of your wishes, and you have the right in the like circumstances to do the same action to me regardless of my wishes. In this framework neither of us has greater inherent rights than the other, and yet we both have the right to do something to another person who doesn’t want it done to them. Hence your point number 1 does not follow from your starting premise.


Your have two premises here, Tom. The first is that person A has no right to control the actions of person B and, as pointed out, you haven’t logically established this premise. The second is the moral principles can be the subject of mathematical calculation. You’ve made no attempt at all to support this premise, and it’s not intuitively appealing. Consequently your conclusion no. 2 is not logically established.


Ironically, most people- including me - would agree with your third conclusion. But I’m afraid it doesn’t follow from your starting premise. Most people would support this conclusion by arguing that murder, cheating, bullying etc are unethical in themselves. Thus they will arrive at an agreement with your third conclusion without necessarily accepting either your starting premise (though, as it happens, I do accept it) or either of your first two conclusions.

I believe that I have provided a systematic, logical reason why those things I mentioned are unethical- because they do unto people that which they don't want done to themselves . . .

If you believe that lying to others is unethical, what reason do you provide.

This is not to say that all lies or infractions of the Golden Rule are equally egregious and require eternal ostracism, or any punishment at all, but simply that the Golden Rule advances an ethical system that holds the promise of promoting peace and happiness to a greater extent than other ethical systems do, witness Buddhist societies versus Judeo-Christi-Islamic societies that rely on Old Testament edicts.

That's not a sufficeint basis for ethics, Tom. If I commit a murder, I won't want to be detected, tried or punished, but that wouldn't make these things immoral. I won't necessarily want to pay sufficient taxes to provide the basics of life to those who are unable to provide them for themselves, but that's not enough to prove that such taxation would be unethical. I might not want to have to pay tuition fees to attend university, but that's not enough to make charging tuition unethical. I might not want you to tell my wife that I am having an affair with her sister, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it would be unethical of you to tell her.

I accept that treating people as they wish is a signficant ethical consideration, but as the primary foundation for a comprehsensive ethical system it is simply inadequate.


I assign an inherent ethical value to truth, from which I derive a strong preference against lying (and a strong preference in favour of education, and other ethical preferences).


You think Sri Lanka is more peaceful and happy than Sweden? For that matter, you think Buddhist ethics rests on the Golden Rule? Have the high values that Buddhism attaches to compassion and enlightenment not come to your attention? Have you not come across the Five Precepts?

If there is a religious system which lays more stress on the Golden Rule than any other I suggest it is not Buddhism, but Confucianism. Sadly, historically Confucian societies are not the exemplars of peace and happiness that your theory requires them to be.

(a) nobody has any superior rights to anybody else, or
(b) nobody has any rights at all

The difference between (a) and (b) is that in (a) we assume that there are some sort of rights. How do we find out what these rights are? How do we define them? If we do find some way to qualify them, we can then use logic to discover if (a) is true, that there are no 'superior' and 'inferior' sets of rights. To make a logically consistent system (on that wouldn't break down in certain situations) we would have to make sure that none of the rights interfered with any of the others, or that the rights had a specific hierarchy. So in the end we would have a certain set of rights that were inalienable, and perhaps which had a particular order of precedence. This is the big journey to discover an objective, consistent system of ethics. But by no means does (a) automatically imply the Golden Rule: it implies that rights have specific characteristics which define them as rights and that it might be possible to discover what they are. But it doesn't imply what the rights are, and there is a lot of work to ensure that they are logically consistent.

Okay, let's continue to assume for the sake of argument that no person by virtue of royal blood or any other factor, possesses greater or different rights than any other person, and see how this relates to the Golden Rule as a proposed logical etihcs. And let's start with the easy part first, where we are probably in agreement:

1. If Joe Zealot murders a doctor because he performs abortions, Joe has performed an act which the doctor doesn't want done to himself, although the abortion was voluntary and the doctor was not doing something that his patient did not want done to herself. Leaving the life of the fetus aside for now, I think that we can agree that what Joe did was unethical.

If we look at (b), it is very easy to state that no one has the right to kill another person. However, from the same assumption we are unable to say if someone has the right to life, to food, to freedom, or to anything at all. There are no rights whatsoever. Does someone have an obligation to help another person in need if they are able? Hard to say: the person in need doesn't have any rights to speak of. So this creates a moral vacuum. If someone does help someone else, this might be construed as "nice", but this is a subjective assumption based upon the idea that helping people is "good", which is not implied by a lack of rights.

Say we agree that Joe Zealot did not possess a right to murder the doctor. What if instead, Joe said to the doctor, "I'm hungry, and instead of murdering you, I demand that you give me some food." Again, Joe is performing an action that the doctor does not want done to him, and is violating the ethics of the Golden Rule. The same would be true in the other two examples. Whether it would be whites claiming that they have a right to food produced by blacks, or a government demanding that it had a right to food produced by some in an area where it claims authority, these claims to rights remain illegitimate.

It could, but there would still be competing concerns. As I see it, there are two versions of the Golden Rule, both of which are compatible with "do unto others etc.":
- one where people look after themselves (i.e. the onus is on me to survive despite the actions of others, but everyone else is in the same boat). In this case, for example, one might think it okay to steal food, but they would agree it was fair if their food was stolen; either they didn't lock it up, or the other person deserved it through sheer hard effort of managing to find it and remove it, despite whatever precautions were in place.
- one where people look after each other (if they don't want their food stolen, they won't steal other people's).

What if two people want to control the same property?

What if I don't want to be discriminated against (for the colour of my skin, sexuality, whatever) but other people want to - they only want white people in their cafe, or no gay people marrying? Who gets to control the action of the others - whose "don't want" is the most valid?

What if there are starving children on my lawn, but I don't want to give up my huge excesses of food? Can they make me? Is there an ethical imperative?

If Joe Zealot murders a doctor because he performs abortions, Joe has performed an act which the doctor doesn't want done to himself, although the abortion was voluntary and the doctor was not doing something that his patient did not want done to herself. Leaving the life of the fetus aside for now, I think that we can agree that what Joe did was unethical.

And if all that comprises human consciousness is obliterated for eternity what does it mean to speak of an "objective ethics"?

Then he rationalizes the killing by insisting, "the doctor will no longer be able to kill another baby." Or he notes that in killing the abortionist it will discourage other doctors from doing so. And, thus, in the end, there will be fewer babies killed. He sees himself as a moral hero!!

My point in my previous post was that "no person having superior rights to anyone else" did not automatically lead to the Golden Rule. If it does, there are some steps that haven't been established here. So when we assume no person has superior rights, we still have to define what rights, if any, there are, before we can go around assuming the Golden Rule. When you talk about Joe Zealot and the doctor, you're still assuming the Golden Rule follows as a direct logical consequence of everyone having equal rights, but we can't know that because we don't know what the rights are and how to define them.

The alternative is that no one has any rights whatsoever:
[quote=mcfate"]If we look at (b), it is very easy to state that no one has the right to kill another person. However, from the same assumption we are unable to say if someone has the right to life, to food, to freedom, or to anything at all. There are no rights whatsoever. Does someone have an obligation to help another person in need if they are able? Hard to say: the person in need doesn't have any rights to speak of. So this creates a moral vacuum. If someone does help someone else, this might be construed as "nice", but this is a subjective assumption based upon the idea that helping people is "good", which is not implied by a lack of rights.

Say we agree that Joe Zealot did not possess a right to murder the doctor. What if instead, Joe said to the doctor, "I'm hungry, and instead of murdering you, I demand that you give me some food." Again, Joe is performing an action that the doctor does not want done to him, and is violating the ethics of the Golden Rule. The same would be true in the other two examples. Whether it would be whites claiming that they have a right to food produced by blacks, or a government demanding that it had a right to food produced by some in an area where it claims authority, these claims to rights remain illegitimate.

It could, but there would still be competing concerns. As I see it, there are two versions of the Golden Rule, both of which are compatible with "do unto others etc.":
- one where people look after themselves (i.e. the onus is on me to survive despite the actions of others, but everyone else is in the same boat). In this case, for example, one might think it okay to steal food, but they would agree it was fair if their food was stolen; either they didn't lock it up, or the other person deserved it through sheer hard effort of managing to find it and remove it, despite whatever precautions were in place.
- one where people look after each other (if they don't want their food stolen, they won't steal other people's).

What if two people want to control the same property?

What if I don't want to be discriminated against (for the colour of my skin, sexuality, whatever) but other people want to - they only want white people in their cafe, or no gay people marrying? Who gets to control the action of the others - whose "don't want" is the most valid?

What if there are starving children on my lawn, but I don't want to give up my huge excesses of food? Can they make me? Is there an ethical imperative?

The Golden Rule makes the assumption that no one possesses rights to do unto other that which they don't want done to themselves. I agree with this, and go beyond this to say that I do not see any evidence for anyone having any rights at all.

If we look at (b), it is very easy to state that no one has the right to kill another person. However, from the same assumption we are unable to say if someone has the right to life, to food, to freedom, or to anything at all. There are no rights whatsoever. Does someone have an obligation to help another person in need if they are able? Hard to say: the person in need doesn't have any rights to speak of. So this creates a moral vacuum. If someone does help someone else, this might be construed as "nice", but this is a subjective assumption based upon the idea that helping people is "good", which is not implied by a lack of rights.

I agree with you that there is no evidence for a thing such as a "right". But this does not directly translate into the Golden Rule, as I said above:



In fact, we could go even further. If there are no rights whatsoever, then it doesn't matter if someone doesn't have the "right" to kill someone else - they have no "rights" to self-defense, to complain, no way to prove that it shouldn't be done - that would involve them invoking some sort of right, such as "I have the right to live without disturbance".

I am not saying there is evidence for rights - in fact I said defining rights was inherently problematic. I am saying that no one having any rights does not logically lead to the idea of the Golden Rule, and, even if it did, the Golden Rule is still problematic in its consistency.

Through logic, first pondering the most fundamental components about what ethics is and what it requires if it is to exist, and working from there to see what axioms we can find.

I tend to think,
(i) ethics is a system which preferences particular behaviours over others
(ii) an ethical agent requires free will (in whatever capacity it might exist)
(iii) it is always preferable to check every behaviour against the judging criteria of the system of ethics (if you don't run a behaviour by the ethical criteria, what they are, the agent cannot tell if the behaviour has any ethical ramifications)
(iv) it is therefore always preferable to maintain behaviour which allows us to check our behaviours against ethics (that is, you should not put someone in a position where they are unable to make ethical decisions [take away their power of reasoning, for example, which includes lying to them, brain damaging them, restraining them, killing them, etc.])

These are my assumptions about ethics, and I do not think that they are baseless. Can they discover the most preferable behaviour in every circumstance? Maybe - but the more complicated the circumstance (such as say, abortion or murder in self-defense or whatever), the more difficulty in 'doing the maths' to discover the answer.