Except for: which god?

Which is a pretty big one - the Christian god has a lot of different attributes, not all of which might be exampled in a 'miracle'. If god cures cancer, we might assumed there is an entity with cancer-curing powers, but then a lot of people make more assumptions - can cure all diseases, listens to prayer, is immortal, made everything, knows ultimate right from wrong, did certain things in history etc. etc.

And of course, other deities have other attributes that people assume.

Which god?

iambiguous wrote 'God' with a capital letter, this usually denotes the one God of the Israelites. the Christians and the Muslims. Certain of the Hindus and all of the Sikhs. So I guess he/she meant 'God'.

Actually I was responding to your comment, Samuel, about "which god" and not iambiguous'. You made the claim, after all.

But I don't think it matters which god you assume - if you assume a god, especially a specific god, you are putting together a whole bunch of assumptions.

I take your point, and agree that I owe an explanation for the empirical emphasis. It seems to me that from a metaethical point of view which is sceptical about moral realism, the question is why we should have any reason to expect that overarching and transcendent criteria are axiomatically preferable to provisional and fallibilistic criteria, if:

(i) the performance and history of the former in human affairs show them to be provisional and fallibilistic in any case (which is not hard to demonstrate),

(ii) there is reason to suppose that the norms of truth-seeking rational enquiry which we apply in other domains can be exploited for ethical and moral issues, with greater promise for human futures, and

(iii) the latter (provisional and fallibilistic criteria) represent a more honest and attainable goal for human capabilities (subject to the enterprise outlined by (ii)).

For example, empathising with and caring about others is generally considered preferable to its converse, and instances of this can be realised without any reference to a metaphysical or Platonic ‘good’. Where this occurs indifferently (as it does) in social contexts where the players have diverse religious and nonreligious worldviews, the desire for transcendent criteria seems oddly surplus to requirements. Agreed, this example represents a moral or ethical atomism, but it does emphasise that it takes (at least) two to be moral or ethical, and suggests that a solipsistic subjectivity is not the real issue.

But logic functions only so far in discussing moral claims. How, for example, can we use logic to ascertain whether abortion is moral or immoral in a world without God? Without a transcendental, objective font, our moral values can only be points of view. And history bears this out all too well. Moral conflicts out in the world never get resloved and the logic used to encompass Morality is pretty much impotent once the concepts are taken down off the sky-hooks.

Or so it seems to me.

My point is not that atheists, in embracing one or another form of humanism, cannot live ethical lives, but that their ethical values can only be narratives...points of view. God's ethics might be construed as a narrative in turn but it is a "story" backed up [allegedly] by omniscience and omnipotence. Not so the moral matrix of mere mortals.



What this might reflect is the manner in which we are hard-wired by evolution to seek out patterns in the world in order to find rational continuities we can use to sustain our survival. And while this capacity has worked wonders given the astonding achievements of science it has shifted in turn into areas of our life that it is far less apllicable to. Ethics, for example.

We seek to understand the most rational manner in which to differentiate what is from what ought to be but there is no corresponding logic to accomplish this. Instead, we delude ourselves into believing there is because...perhaps...it comforts us emotionally and psychologically.



In my view, the internal logic resides in dasein; just as dasein resides in vast and varied [and ever evolving] historical, cultural and experiential contexts.. And these narratives always lie somewhere between dogmaticism and scepticism.



But how does this analysis function in the world of actual ethical conflicts? How far can this logic probe the labyrinthian interactions of mere moratals before it must give over to moderation, negociation and compromise in the political sphere?

My use of the word narrative is derived from my understanding of Heidegger's Dasein.

Dasein: being there.

We are "thrown" adventitiously at birth into one rather than another historical and cultural context. And, depending on which one we land in [and they are vast and varied], we will be indoctrinated as children to view "I" and the world around us in one way rather than another.

Still we will be taught to differentiate right from wrong as though these distinctions were axiomatic. But they are not. They are merely particular narratives/stories that human communities pass down through the generations existentially.

In fact, you can see clearly how this unfolds by noting how it unfolds less and less effectively in the modern world. Unlike our ancestors, who were generally rasied in small communities...communities where there was a place for everyone and everyone was [necessarily] in their place from the cradle to the grave...the modern world is far more fractured and fragmented. We come into contact with many more conflicting and contradictory narratives and must choose between them.

But the inner child of the past still plays a powerful role here. Thus children born and raised in an orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem and children born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp run by those who practice Muslem jihad are very likely to view "is" and "ought" in very different ways.

The role of the ethicist is then to ask: is there an ethical narrative that transcends this such that these children can be brought up to embrace the most reasonable manner in which to live?

And here, in my view, it always depends on the issue.

Well, it might at the moment, but that doesn't mean it never will. Granted, we don't know it ever will, but just because we don't know now is not enough to claim that we will always have a system of ethics that is based upon narrative relativism.

One thing that is important to note is that not all situations might have 'best' answers: an ethical agent might be caught in a situation in which all possible actions have some degree of immorality, or which are all equally immoral. This does not mean that the logic of ethics has failed, but rather that it is possible for really bad situations to exist.



I do not see anything 'special' about abortion as an ethical scenario, by which I mean: I don't think that this is evidence that logic will never do the trick. Abortion has related data, and that data would be used in the logic. But it is one of the most controversial scenarios today, and I can understand that many people cannot imagine an answer to it.



Well, this too is a point of view, and in a previous post you heard mine - that ethics is logically related to free will, and the possibility of a logical set of ethics lies there. But I think it is fair to say that there is currently no known complete logical system of ethics, and so currently everything has a component of opinion. History also bears out a lot of stuff, much of which eventually changed: the earth is no longer flat, the universe no longer static, time no longer absolute (though there are still some fierce components). However, at some point for each of these ideas, it was the case that for 99% of history was filled with people believing it. Well, if logical ethics exists, we would be somewhere in that 99% (hopefully near the end, though).

Without God, you say - but I am still curious to know where God got ethics from. Did he make it up? If he did, is it just a matter of his opinion and not ours? Was it a natural truth which he saw? That would suggest a valid independent logic of ethics. I have a similar opinion for the question, Did god make maths?

Actually, iambiguous, you make me think about the way you state your claim. I think you are stating, "Without an omniscient creator of moral values, all moral values are subjective."

This claim kind of presupposes that there can be no absolute or objective things that arise without an omniscient creator. I was thinking about this because I was thinking about maths.

We've sort of been a little one-sided about this conversation. So it would be interesting, I think, if iambiguous could make a list along the lines of "No complete logical system of ethics could exist without an omniscient creator because..." and then we could also discuss the "becauses".

Firstly, can we de-emphasise the Hegelian hypersyllabic polylogosic metaphysics of periphrastic prolixitacity? I can hardly spell wheelbarrough, and a few others here are the same... though I rejoice that the writer has been well taught, and look forward to seeing the heavy artillery of philosophy wheeled up to the fray!

It appears to be asserted that all moral values are subjective(or individually indeterminate) if the individual does not believe in God or alternatively does not operate in Christian framework (but belief status not determined).

I call 'bullshit'.

An individual's moral values are constructed from birth using all the mechanisms of socialisation. Explicit teaching is a small part compared with the observed examples of parents, peers and others. Stories about happenings of other people, movies, news reports, legends and codes of conduct all play in there.

Moral values are integral to a person's development. Pleanty of people develop without God, or conversion would not be necessary in Christianity.

OK. There’s a difference between asserting (a) that there exist transcendent objective moral rules, and (b) that we can easily, or with certainty, know what they are. Thus the “performance and history . . . in human affairs" may show that we have regularly failed to discern objective moral standards (or that we have discerned them but failed to apply them) rather than that they do not exist.

Furthermore it seems to me that by describing past efforts to discern objective moral standards as “fallible”, you choose language which suggests that there is an objective standard, of which those efforts fell short. If there is no overarching standard against which to measure them, in what way exactly can we say those earlier efforts “failed”? How, for example, do we address the Holocaust, if the strongest condemnation we can offer amounts to little more than saying that This Is Not The Kind Of Thing That We Would Choose To Do?

As for “the norms of truth-seeking rational enquiry which we apply in other domains”, you seem to treat applying this in the ethical sphere as an alternative to positing objective moral truths. But, with respect, this is not correct. If we think there are or may be objectively true moral norms, why would we not seek to identify them by applying the norms of truth-seeking rational enquiry? Indeed, we only apply these norms in other domains on the assumption – as the name suggests – that there is an objective truth to seek. Galileo, for example, used the telescope to verify the heliocentric hypothesis. All that tedious lens-grinding would have been pointless unless he accepted that either the sun was, or the sun was not, at the centre of our planetary system – that there was an objective truth here to be discovered, and that than answer did not depend on the perspective or standpoint of the observer.

Indeed, it seems to me odd, if you think there are no objectively true moral standards, to apply the norms of truth seeking rational enquiry to ethical and moral questions. What truth, exactly, would you be seeking by so doing?


But we could equally ask why so many diverse societies and cultures have arrived at the same understanding of the ethical importance of empathy. This is entirely consistent with the view that the proposition that empathy is ethically valuable is objectively true, and that more than one person/society/culture had discerned this in the course of examining and reflecting upon the human person and the human condition.

Does not asking how children can be brought up ‘to embrace the most reasonable manner in which to live’ (my emphasis) inevitably not only invoke, but also imply the value of, recognisable cognitive practices of a truth-seeking and fact-seeking discourse of reason? When we appeal to forms of this human cognitive enterprise in other domains (science, history, economics, etc.), we are bound to recognise, if we are sufficiently reflective about it, that the best results we secure can count as ‘truths’ or ‘facts’ only on a provisional and defeasible basis and subject to critical reappraisal. Metaphysical and religious claims to certainty, permanence and transcendence are subject to the same constraints whether or not those who make them wish to acknowledge it. Why should we expect more than this in the domain of ethics?

I agree that ‘conflicting and contradictory narratives’ in our complex and non-traditional societies are not easy to cope with. However, since we cannot realistically expect this complexity simply to go away, the alternative is to engage children as well as ourselves in this truth-seeking and fact-seeking discourse of reason as a means of living with ambiguity in ethical as well as other domains of life. What I question is the value of searching for transcendence.

That leaves the leading question: Are all ethical narratives and the practices they entail simply interchangeable? My tentative answer is that via the rational cognitive enterprise sketched out above, we can both have preferences and arguable grounds for them. I’m prepared to cash that out in demonstrative terms, but as no one welcomes turgidly long posts, I’ll attempt to do so in another one.

imbiguous wrote:

But logic functions only so far in discussing moral claims.



This of course is always the case. But given that philosophers have had approximately 2500 years to turn the narratives into universals, it seems improbable that they will in my view.



But how does the "best answer" given a particular situation differ from an ethical choice deemed to be universally applicable? My conjecture is that, sans God, "logic" revolves more around coming up with the best answer. Although there are likely to be differing narratives here as well.



Abortion revolves literally around life and death. It generates intense emotional and psychological reactions. It is never far from a headline.

But we can choose any lesser conflict. For example, is public nudity unethical?

How can answers to questions like this be more than just shared narratives?

iambiguous wrote:

Without a transcendental, objective font, our moral values can only be points of view. And history bears this out all too well.



But each "will" is a manifestation of dasein, in my opinion. You can only choose behaviors based on how you view the world and your place in it. And to what extent can this encompass the omnisicent POV of God? If, for example, you were asked your view on capital punishment how could your values here not reflect merely the existential assessment of one particular man or women? How much more is there to know about it that no one single point of view can encompass?



Yes, but these are not moral questions. Logic prevailed here because a universal truth was able to be disclosed by one or another branch of science.

My aim is to focus on those objective truths that transcend dasein, and those subjective [intersubjective] truths that do not. What can we denote objectively and what can we only connote existentially instead.



Only God knows the answers to questions like this. But where is He to provide them?

Math and science are universal. They transcend points of view. They have to. Otherwise how could we have created a technology like this?

Moral, political and aesthetic valuations are not.

Think of it like this:

Abortion as a medical procedure and abortion as an ethical quagmire.

Why is the latter a quagmire while the former is not? Because abortion as a medical procedure needs but be fully in line with human biology. It encompasses a language that is fully in line with it too. That is why an abortion provider can espouse any conflicting or contradictory moral, political and/or religious values and still perform a safe abortion.

We don't need God to flawlessly terminate the life of a perfectly healthy fetus. We simply need to understand how the body functions. And how to make it stop functioning with respect to pregnancy. And if an abortion provider accepts that abortion should be legal, the emotional and psychological reactions can be kept to a minimum.

But imagine confronting the words, "terminating the life of a perfectly healthy fetus" when broaching abortion as a moral or ethical issue. Here the reactions...philosophical, ethical, political...are all over the board. As are the so much more intense emotional and psychological reactions. How do we make them come into alignment when what is contrued to be rational or irrational comes from every imaginable direction?

The human body is a biological mechanism that works pretty much the same for all of us. It can be understood universally. And, over the centuries, we did not need any revealed truths from God to learn how to treat it medically.

But can the same be said for the human body when it is smack dab in the middle of a moral connundrum? From abortion and stem cell research to organ donation and euthanasia, there are many different views about what is "the right thing to do". And, sans God, how could we possibly deduce the most rational behaviors of all without making endless assumptions that others counter easily enough with opposite assumptions of their own?

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.

What particular behavior however? If a child is brought up in a conservative Catholic household to embrace anti-abortion moral convictions, she can accomplish this reasonably or not. But how can it be said that being opposed to abortion is more reasonable than being in support of it? Aside from as shared a point of view?



We can't, of course. But science, history and economics revolve more around the accumulation [and the confirmation] of empirical facts. Science in particular embraces either/or. And something either did or did not take place historically. And economic policies can often be meansured in dollars and cents. At least in my own country.

Where things become more problematic is when we shift gears from either/or to is/ought.

For example, in science we [in America] argue over whether or not billions of dollars should be spent to launch Hubble2 or if the money might be better spent on something else. In history, we can argue over what constitutes progress. In economics we can argue over the extent to which government should be an active participant in the marketplace. These things never get resolved because there are so many different objectives [and results] that come into conflict.



This makes sense. I would only caution again there are limits beyond which reason cannot go in untangling the complexities.

And in establishing facts we do not necessarily establish truths in turn. For example, lots of people compile lots of facts [and statistics] to argue for or against capital punishment, gun control, hunting, pornography etc. but none these compilations allow us to establish which position is the most rational.



My point is that they are interchangable given that over time situations can change and we can see things from opposite perspectives.

But, obviously, some issues are more intractable than are others.

We argue as fiercely as ever about the role of government, prostitution, gambling, parenting, gender roles, drugs etc. But far, far fewer argue to bring back slavery or de jure discrimation or fascism.

This does not show the logical impossibility of a system of ethics. The reactions are indeed currently all over the board, just like issues of physics, and indeed maths have been, and in some areas still are. But this just shows that the current understanding is one of competing ideas.

For something to be logically impossible, it must contain a contradiction. This depends on your initial assumptions. Maybe we can start with your initial assumptions.

When I talk about ethics, I assume free will exists (there's not much evidence of this, I reckon, but when I talk ethics I assume it is true because otherwise there is no conversation). I believe ethics is contingent upon free will - it doesn't make any sense otherwise. Therefore, for someone to act morally, they must have free will.

If you want to make a further assumption and say that ethics should apply to everyone, then we must protect everyone's free will. But what happens when a contradictory circumstance occurs, where two people want different things and each might encroach on another's free will? Well, perhaps as well learn more about free will and its parameters, constraints, areas of impact, etc., we can learn more about the specifics of ethical situations.

I wold be interested to see your initial assumptions and talk about them. I think that one is: An omniscient being could create an absolute system of ethics. Personally, as I have noted above, I have problems with this assumption.
Another assumption seems to be: a universe with no omniscient being can have no absolute system of ethics. I appreciate that there is a sort of intuitive connection here, but not a fundamentally logical one. A universe without an omniscient being can have other complete logical systems. An absolute system of ethics would be a logically consistent system.

So the big question is, Can there exist a system of ethics that is logically consistent? And this depends upon your specific assumptions about ethics, and then we can work from there.

I use ‘fallible’ in the sense one finds, for example, in philosophers of science like Popper and Rescher, where it relates both to methodological exposure to critical argument and to the probability or expectation of refutation or modification. This methodological exposure applies as much to present as to past propositions, theories or standards of judgment. I understand your point, but even objectors to my position are probably unlikely not to find astrophysics superior to astrology, the periodic table to alchemy, or clinical gerontology to burning witches, in furthering our understanding of the world we live in.

The methodological defeasibility sketched out here cannot, as I see it, be decoupled from the internal logic and value-system of the rational cognitive project by virtue of which we scrutinise ethical as well as other criteria. We cannot expect a warrant that any criteria we develop to confront contemporary problems will not look radically different 100 years from now.

Many cultures (perhaps all) have elaborated in different ways on the moral (or proto-moral) constraints which can be plausibly hypothesised to have been evolutionarily necessary for our human ancestors actually to be our ancestors rather than an extinct species. The subsequent process of epigenesis, or cultural evolution, has resulted (albeit haltingly) in a considerable degree of consensus that murder and brutalisation are not conducive to human social well-being, and from a sociological and anthropological point of view I concur with considering such commitments ‘social facts’ where we find them. They are turned into ‘moral facts’ through the prism of standards we variously appeal to (human rights, the UDHR, the Golden Rule, God), but I see them in the domain of what Searle theorises as social and institutional status functions (Searle, John. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: OUP, 2010), and if they acquire a transcendental halo it is one we accord them.


Well, hopefully not, unless I’ve contradicted myself somewhere, but there might be a difference of emphasis in our arguments. ‘Positing objective moral truths’ is to me an inflationary way of characterising part of the process of defeasibility-assuming rational enquiry, and it seems to me not to capture the latter’s exploratory nature. Normatively, we aspire to form propositions of which it can be said that they are ‘true’, where this means minimally something like ‘It is the case that p’, or simply ‘p’, and it’s uncontroversial that this requires an inferential base to work from. Pragmatically, however, I think the rational cognitive enterprise can be usefully distanced from teleological assumptions that there is an abstract metaphysical object called ‘Truth’ or a Moorean one called ‘Good’.

Hi Davoz

Thank you for your reply. I confess, though, that I’m not a great deal wiser. You almost seem to make my point for me when you say this:

“. . . even objectors to my position are probably unlikely not to find astrophysics superior to astrology, the periodic table to alchemy, or clinical gerontology to burning witches, in furthering our understanding of the world we live in.”

People prefer astrophysics to astrology because there is, in fact, an objective truth about the organisation of the cosmos, and astrophysics reflects that truth better than astrology does. If there were no objective truth out there, on what basis would we prefer astrophysics to astrology?

And similar comments can be made about chemistry vs. alchemy, and gerontology vs. witch-burning.

I don’t know why you say that even objectors to your position will prefer truth to falsehood. It seems to that objectors to your position are precisely the people who will most prefer truth to falsehood, since they operate within a paradigm which holds that there are true answers to questions, and that finding true answers is important and valuable.

I remain puzzled as to how, if we hold that there are no objective moral truths, we can employ the norms of truth-seeking rational enquiry to moral questions.

I entirely accept your point that objective moral truths may be extremely difficult to identify definitively. I would say, in fact, that we can never be certain that we have definitively identified them; however pleased we may be with our progress in that direction, our moral conclusions must always be open to critical re-examination and refinement. I also agree that we can be mistaken in thinking that a particular moral position does in fact approach an objective truth, and that our efforts to discern moral truth is bounded and limited by circumstance, culture, psychology and a great deal more besides.

But none of that proves that the objective moral truth does not exist. Prior to the invention of the telescope there were many facts about the cosmos that we did not, and indeed could not, know. But those facts were nevertheless true. And I not doubt that there are still facts about the cosmos which we do not know, and perhaps cannot ever know. But they are still factually true. And our efforts at cosmological exploration can move towards truth, and uncover more unknown truth, and therefore remain worthwhile despite the impossibility of ultimate and total cosmological knowledge.

Nothing you have said persuades me that this cannot also be true of the moral sphere.

More to the point, nothing you have said really explains to me how you see the norms of truth-seeking rational enquiry can be applied to moral/ethical questions in a way that is “distanced from teleological assumptions that there is an abstract metaphysical object called ‘Truth’”. You suggest, for example, that most societies dislike murder and brutalisation because “they are not conducive to human social well-being”. We can certainly explore this and employ the usual critical and rational techniques to it, but it is not a moral proposition unless we assume that “human social well-being” is, in some meaningful sense, good. And if the response is, well, “it gratifies us” or “it accords with our instinct for survival”, we still don’t have a moral proposition unless we adopt the premise that gratifying ourselves, or satisfying our instinct for survival is, in some meaningful sense, good. If these things are not good, then it does not matter, in the moral sense, whether we murder or not.

On that view, then, while we might apply the norms of truth-seeking enquiry in the interests of our own gratification or propagation, I don’t see that we would be applying them to moral/ethical questions.

iambiguous wrote:
How, for example, can we use logic to ascertain whether abortion is moral or immoral in a world without God?

Here are a couple of possibly relevant narratives:

1. Studies have shown that pregnant wolves, during periods of stress or starvation due to lack of food caued by drought or other factors, will sometimes reabsorb their embryos

2. If nests of members of the weasel family are disturbed and the female apparently feels threatened, as mink farmers know, she will often eat her young and try to escape.

In both cases, there is apparent survival value to the species for the female to regain as much strength as possible in order to survive and possibly breed again.

Relevant questions might be:
In the human species, might there be cases where it would be it better for a young, perhaps physically, financially, and/or psychologically unprepared young woman to abort a potential baby and delay childbirth and child-rearing to a more propitious time?

Would one tend to empathize more with the distraught young woman than her unborn fetus?

Can we assume that God installed different objective moral truths in wolves and weasels than He did in humans?