In a world without God can ethical convictions be anything more than narratives? There is no transcendental font we can go to to differentiate right from wrong so we are left with our own understanding of ourselves in relationship to how we understand the world around us.

The famous reply is: Did God just make right and wrong up? If he did, are they right and wrong just because he/she said so? If there were/are underlying reasons - if there are things that are inherently right or wrong - then did God really make them up?

And, of course, the answer to these questions will be a bit dependent on what you think God is, so I suspect a lot of people have a lot of different answers.

I am an atheist. The physics of the universe works without the need to call upon a deity, though for a long time humans weren't sure of this. The logic of the universe might be the same, the logic of ethics included.

No need to be afraid of 'our own understanding of ourselves' and our capacity to 'understand the world around us'. We humans, as living and thinking beings, create and give meaning to the values, attitudes and ideas that sustain our existence. God is one of these constructions - and some people feel the need to identify with one or more deities. Whatever works for you. But I don't need a deity to make sense of my own existence or the values that shape my life. I have a brain for that.

Are we talking about the god that turns a woman into a pillar of salt for peeking as he destroyed her home? Are we talking about the god who ordered an old man to kill his only son and at the last minute said, "Just kidding."? I just need a little clarification. After thirty years as a police officer it is amazing the things god has been accussed of telling people.

Yes, I am an atheist myself. And do not atheists have to acknowledge then that any moral narrative is interchangable with any other? If there is no way, for example, to determine if abortion is [objectively? universally?] moral or immoral, then is not the most reasonable approach to ethics to embrace moderation, negociation and compromise as the most sensible manner in which approach it once moral/ethical conflicts give way to political and legal conflicts.

And if human ethics is just another manifestation of the logic of the universe, how is human autonomy itself not also but another inherent component? And thus an illusion.

Yes, I agree with respect to God. But some also insist the same can be said for Reason.

In other words, sans God, how does the non-believer react to a philosopher like Kant? Is there a way in which we can link our moral and ethical values rationally to Duty?

In this context, why don't we focus on the God of Abraham and Moses.

Not necessarily - that would be up to the logic we discover as we investigate ethics. It might be the case - but it might be worth reading some Sam Harris.



That is probably the biggest question. If we do not have free will, then there is really no point in talking about ethics (and we are having this discussion because that's what the maths dictates "we" do.)

If we do have free will, then ethics is an important area of study. And possibly it should revolve around what sort of free will we have; the more we know about free will, the more we can uncover about where and how ethics applies.

iambiguous wrote:

And do not atheists have to acknowledge then that any moral narrative is interchangable with any other?



By interchangable I meant they always remain narratives. Once we discuss right and wrong behavior as it relates to actual ethical values in conflict down on the ground logic only takes us in so far. And that would include the logic of Sam Harris.



If we do have free will would it not revolve largely around the manner in which each of us as individuals come to acquire a sense of self and an understanding of the world around us?

And isn't this largely embedded in history, culture and individual experiences? Don't we largely come to ascribe virtue and vice to particular behaviors as dasein?

Well, I don't know that I know the answers to questions about free will. There have been a lot of books written about it, with a lot of different opinions, but I suspect that we might learn more about humans, the brain, the self and free will the further we investigate, and perhaps at some point we will have enough information to make some solid, factual remarks which can be used to drive ethics. This is sort of where Daniel C. Dennet, Michael Shermer and Sam Harris come in: they try to perform this feat with the information available today, and are a good starting point.

But my guess is that culture, history and so forth probably play a role. How much of a role? How free is our free will (on the assumption it exists)? I reckon that's going to take a while to answer.

In the meantime, the least that someone can do is make their set of ethics logically consistent, and reflective of any data they come across.

Unless there is some new and compelling body of multifactorial social research favouring a contrary conclusion, there seem to be no valid empirical reasons for anyone to assert that the 12-15% of the global population who count in demographic estimates as ‘nonreligious’ live less morally and ethically than those who count as having a religion. It’s surprising in some ways that this might still be considered an issue.

A view that research tells us we can hold with some confidence is that, whatever our espoused religious or nonreligious worldview, the moral judgements we make of a Kantian, deontological kind are more likely to be processed through the brain’s emotional centres, suggesting ancient evolutionarily inherited dispositions, and those we make of a utilitarian or consequentialist kind are more likely to engage the decision-making processes associated with the prefrontal cortex, reflecting the complex inheritance of more recent cultural evolution. In addition, and again whatever our worldview, we are likely to make either kind of judgement according to the situation, and come to the same conclusions in many cases.

I think we might have to recognise that both deontological imperatives and utilitarian, or consequentialist, approaches can fail in universal scope in some way or another when it comes to specific instances, and that what is desirable for ethical and moral practice can only possibly be argued for according to the same norms of truth and justification that we appeal to in expecting and giving reasons for action in other domains of life. In the words of Hilary Putnam , ‘the notions of truth and validity are internal to practical reasoning itself’ (Ethics without Ontology, Harvard University Press, 2004: 72), and we have no obvious way of doing better than this, however fallibilistic and provisional the outcome.

I can see no objection to construing such reasoning in terms of ‘narratives’, as Iambiguous does, but I would like to see such narratives conforming to the desiderata of cognitive practice Putnam refers to. Sam Harris, in The Moral Landscape, offers a series of reasons why such narratives should not be regarded as simply interchangeable.

McFate wrote:

What do we assume when the 'physics of the universe' don't work and science cannot explain their non-working.

I refere to miraculous cures etc.

Well, when some inexplicable happens, it is inexplicable. But that doesn't mean it is suddenly "outside physics", it just means we don't know how it happened.

I wonder what Hume would have been like on an online forum...?

You're perfectly right, of course. But, with respect, the question raised by the original post is not "can people be good without God?", but something more like "can good be good without God?"

If there is no overarching, transcendent standard against which actions can be tested to see if they are "good" or not, what does it mean to say that they are good? Does it mean anything more than saying that they confirm to some rule or principle whose only validity is that I have chosen it, for entirely subjective reasons, as my standard of goodness?

FANTASTIC! A real discussion of the principles of ethical reasoning.

I don't know Kant from Hegel, but I have been trained in one or two other areas.



There may be no transcendent fog, er font but we can say with certainty that methods exist of operating and making ethical judgements despite varying views on the existence of God.

Firstly, what do we mean by the terms? I take you mean ethical convictions to mean the moral or other guidelines on which a person bases ethical judgements. 'Convictions' means that person's internalised ones, not the general social view of what they ought to be.

Narratives means stories or sequences of events or reasoning, which implies they come from a point of view. Its pretty clear that Christian 'ethical convictions' are grounded in narratives, to wit the multiple narratives of the Bible.

Is this where we start?

Well, they’re grounded in narratives in the sense that we encounter them first of all through the narrative, and we appeal to the narrative to support and justify them. But I think a Christian ethicist would say that the narrative is not the ultimate ground; we can look past the narrative by asking questions like “why is this story told?” or “why is this story canonised?”, and we can also ask questions like “why do we appeal to this story, rather than that contrasting story (both given to us in the tradition) in connection with such-and-such a moral issue?” And the answers to questions like this will tend to suggest that the stories are told, and remembered, and canonised, and appealed to, because they [are found to] illuminate some underlying truth about the human condition or the nature of things. Hence the stories aren’t the ground of the ethical conviction; they’re the way we understand/remember/communicate the underlying ground. And I dare say that this is true of non-Christian and non-religious ethical traditions as well.

I was puzzled, I admit, by iambiguous’s use of the term “narrative” in the original post. I understood him to be asking whether each person’s ethical convictions are anything more than a story that he tells himself, i.e. something purely subjective and with no claim to being an ethical standard beyond the fact that he has decided that it shall be. But perhaps I was projecting onto him the question that I wanted him to ask, rather than the question that he intended to ask.

Yes, thats why I felt we needed to be clear on what the question meant.

mcfate,

Inexplicable to you and to scientists, in their role as scientists, and to physicists as well but not to those who believe in miracles; they have a perfectly satisfying explanation.
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Hume would probably have been a verbose bore.

Well, as long as "perfectly satisfying" involves making a whole lot of assumptions about how they were caused, if some other power did it, which power specifically, etc. Mind you, we have the same arguments about things which are explicable. We might be heading too far away from the thread topic, though, I don't know.

Not a whole lot of assumptions at all, just one: God did it.