Taboo wrote:Ibrahim wrote:There is a moral absolute, and the challenge lies in interpretation. Now, you're arguing that because interpretation changes and can be subjective its the same as having no absolutes, but without absolutes why even try?
I'm arguing that, yes. What's your response? All I see is a non-response.
My response has been consistent from the outset. Without at least a belief in moral absolutes there's no reason to even attempt to construct a moral system. Atheist and agnostics never really address this and simply borrow existing moral systems that they have no real reason to follow other than convenience.
Why not murder the homeless for kicks, or be an Objectivist, or something?
For the same reason most people don't kill the homeless for kicks:
1) I was brought up with the values of human rights (including but not limited to the right to life), and they not only feel right (in accordance with my nature), but appear to be beneficial to the good functioning of any society by both cursory and in-depth examination. Furthermore, these values are backed by the full force of the state.
So a combination of subjective preference and pragmatism, as I stated previously.
2) Cross-cultural and cross-theist occurrence of PTSD, feelings of guilt, nightmares and other mental trauma after purposeful or accidental killing indicate that for the vast majority of people murdering other people is not "fun."
The vast majority of people are capable of introspection and empathy, as noddy pointed out. The diminishing minority of people who are not (such as psychopaths) are (ceteris paribus) as likely to engage in anti-social acts regardless of whether they are subjected to religious indoctrination.
You are mistaking the effects of an age of relative plenty and peace with an inherent and vaguely defined human "goodness" that you equate to morality even though it may be contingent. You also refer to "religious indoctrination" as the alternative to this natural empathy and goodness, without stopping to consider the role of social indoctrination which inculcates moral systems based on religious absolutes and morals principles.
Now on the other hand, I would argue that at least certain influential branches of virtually all extant religions encourage or coerce people to engage in behaviors contrary to the ideals of human rights and human dignity, especially in the field of gender equality. So if anything, secular values are more conducive to the full flourishing of human rights and dignity in our society than many or all religious values.
This is one of my favorite atheist conceits: to essentially take credit for happening to live in the present. Every extant religion improved the status and rights of women, marginalized peoples and the poor, relative to the previous norm. And the treatment of such groups only improves as the wealth and security of a society increases. But you're trying to swoop in at the end of the story and claim these incremental advances based on religious principles as some kind of victory for atheism or secularism.
And don't give me inanities like "you shall not kill." That's only an absolute if really absolute. But how absolute is it? How about killing a man who is has kidnapped and is about to start raping and murdering dozens of young boys and girls, and the only way to stop him is to kill him? I find that perfectly ok to do, provided that no way to disable the man is available, and no external help can arrive in time. Would you sit and watch the rape and murder proceed?
Why wouldn't you just sit and watch the rape/murder proceed? Why wouldn't you do the raping/murdering, if you were unlucky enough for that to be your fetish? I take it as a moral absolute that the killing of innocents is wrong. Now yes, we run into difficulties determining
who is innocent and
how to protect them without harming other innocents etc. But at least its a starting point. The atheist has no such points of reference. Its a free for all.
It might be a free-for-all if we were all born in a cultural vacuum, with no previous historical/experiential reference points to learn from and no generational value transmission. Since that is most emphatically not the case, it is a false argument.
No, it was an effort to get you to clarify where you get your morality from if you don't believe its a free for all. And you answered: you get your morality from the prevailing culture, which bases most of its moral precepts on religious moral absolutes. So as I said previously, you are using a second-hand religious morality. Which is fine.
Even if a cultural vacuum (or approximation thereof) could be created, aspects of human nature like empathy, the self-preservation instinct, introspection and reflection would lead to a self-sustaining core of people who share human-rights enhancing ideas of acceptable behavior and they could band together and gain from protection against those who do not.
Which serves as evidence for either theory equally well. It can support you vague "we've got an instinctual morality" theory, or it can support the idea that there are moral absolutes built in to the universe and thus into human beings as well, which they will express to some extent even in a cultural vacuum.
I also cannot fail to notice that you ultimately avoided the question. Is "thou shall not kill" a "moral absolute" or does it have exceptions and caveats? Since the holy books both proscribe murder and on occasion suggest it as fitting punishment (with the New Testament as the only West-Asian religious text that does not, a fact obscured by later murder-of-apostates-friendly Augustinian and Aquinian critique and Church practice) it seems like it does have vast caveats, making it not such an absolute after all.
Luckily this is something that theologians dispensed with millennia ago, but it does pop up from time to time in many a
World Religions 101 class. Simply put, the meaning is closer to "thou shalt not murder." But, speaking from a legal point of view, I approve of the stronger wording of "kill" since, when in doubt, better not to kill someone that kill the wrong someone. Historically more governments, especially the officially atheist ones, should have borne this in mind.
