IS and OUGHT

[Dubious]

...if he did take it he must obviously have given it away!

Pretty funny.

Yes, he must have. But then, what can you expect from a man who thought he was "beyond good and evil"?

He never made "good and evil" that personal as to think he was beyond it. That is only your prejudice, among many others, in choosing to believe something so ridiculous...which only proves how desperate you are to believe it; but really not so strange when considering how beyond ridiculous is your total, literal acceptance of beliefs that go back 2000 years when the universe wasn't even the size of the solar system!

[Immanuel Can]

...if he did take it he must obviously have given it away!

Pretty funny.

Yes, he must have. But then, what can you expect from a man who thought he was "beyond good and evil"?

He never made "good and evil"...

I think that's true.

He never became an "ubermensch" either. He talked a big game, but delivered very little.

[Dubious]

Pretty funny.

Yes, he must have. But then, what can you expect from a man who thought he was "beyond good and evil"?

He never made "good and evil"...

I think that's true.

He never became an "ubermensch" either. He talked a big game, but delivered very little.

More than enough to completely piss you off!

[Immanuel Can]

He never made "good and evil"...

I think that's true.

He never became an "ubermensch" either. He talked a big game, but delivered very little.

More than enough to completely piss you off!

Vastly amusing.

No, he was a toothless tiger...all roar, no bite. No thinking Theist takes Nietzsche to heart...except as a critic of Atheism, at which he has proved surprisingly useful.

[Astro Cat]

Too simple.

Right now, it's considered a "protest" to set your city on fire. Kids are shooting each other in schools. The American economy is the worst it's been in half a century, we've had our first worldwide pandemic, we have abortion on demand, and pornography in streets and schools, the collapse of academic rigour and the press selling out to the government, completely avoidable war in Ukraine and a debacle in Afghanistan, rape gangs and oil dependency on Russia, totalitarian China buying up the developing world and much of the developed world...and things are just "different."

Yes, they're different alright. But the direction doesn't seem good.

Yes, not good indeed (for the most part, we obviously do not agree about abortion). But point me to an era that hasn't been rife with atrocity, an era where everybody at the time wasn't saying "this is the worst it's ever been" somewhere. You couldn't even point to the pax romana or the Islamic Golden Age or the Enlightenment. Point me to a time where things were better in a significant way and I shall do my best to convert to Christianity (a little joke, considering doxastic voluntarism isn't true).

Of course things get better and worse in different ways in an ebb and flow. I don't deny that things look grim for western civilization right now for a multitude of factors. We needn't look that far back to get to really disastrous stuff like World Wars. The point is, though, that atheism (which is not even a worldview; though atheists have worldviews) is not to blame. Horrible things have happened throughout human history and will probably continue to happen.

Well, I would say, what was your experience with that? What do you feel inclined to share?

My experience with Christianity was rife with having too many questions people around me couldn't answer. That isn't to say that no Christian could answer them in a respectable manner (even if I might still disagree), but my experience was one disillusionment after the next and feeling the need to figure things out on my own, which I eventually did.

I've always been a sensitive person, so one of the things that always bugged me the most was the concept of an eternal Hell and just never got satisfactory answers to that when I was still asking them naively (and then it was too late when I started asking them skeptically, as even the better responses did not convince me). The Problem of Evil and the problem of Hell were probably the single greatest contributors to my deconversion.

What is the difference between a world with moral truths and one where there are not?

Quite a lot, I would say.

If this is a world with moral truths, then why is there so much suffering caused by people onto other people?

Ah, that's quite a different question, really.

If there are speed limits, why doesn't everybody drive at 60 mph? The fact that everybody goes 70 or 80 doesn't mean there isn't a speed limit. It means that people are the kinds of creature that very often don't obey speed limits.

What good does the existence of the "truths" do that makes a better world than a world where there is no such concept?

As I say, quite a lot. For one thing, it makes possible ideas like "rights." I probably don't need to tell you how crucial a concept that has been in the past, or is likely to stay in the future. It also makes possible a concept like "justice." And it delivers us from having to accord equal value (or rather valuelessness) to actions that are morally reprehensible. It also gives us grounds to appeal unjust treatment, and to speak of a justified limit to punishment, even when punishment is warranted. And it gives us a basis to form common human projects around values that everybody is obligated to recognize as "good," such as the right to freedom of conscience, or the universal franchise.

I could go on, but that seems a pretty good start.

1) What an interesting example you've brought up, because you will not find a speed limit in the universe (of the arbitrary sort, not talking about the speed of light in a vacuum or that sort of thing). Humans invent them and enforce them. If nobody enforced the limit, then it might as well not be posted and might as well not exist -- because it doesn't exist outside of humans. As you note, some humans choose to disregard them anyway and nothing about the universe stops them from doing so unless other people do.

2) Rights are another thing that do not exist outside of humans, regardless of which view on rights you have (either rights are bestowed by a government -- I do not like this one, or rights are things a government promises not to interfere with -- this is the one I like). In order for rights to matter whatsoever, those with the power have to value them. If they don't value them, they can and will just shrug and say "what rights" and do as they please.

Rights are what happens when a society reviews their aggregate values and when they get a majority (in number, power, or both) to agree on some values, they agree to protect those values with force. That's what rights are. When the Constitution says that I have a right to speech, it means that in aggregate, the amendment writers and enough Americans share a value that agrees that speech ought to be permitted ("If I value liberty, then speech ought to be permitted" is a relevant hypothetical imperative here).

Guess what? If enough Americans changed their mind about that, they could amend the Constitution and *poof* goes the "right." If enough Americans didn't have the value of caring about Constitutional processes, they wouldn't even have to do that, they could just ignore it (just like drivers could ignore a speed limit sign that in principle isn't being enforced in any way -- because it is a construct). Rights, like moral beliefs and speed limits, are human constructions, not human-external "truths." (Also sorry I put so many things in terms of the US, it's just what I know most comfortably).

The universe doesn't care if humans can voice their opinions or not. It allows them to in that it doesn't bar it. That doesn't mean that humans ought to be able to voice their opinions, it just means they're capable of doing so. It is other humans that come along and prevent that "right" by exercising power (imprisoning political prisoners, etc.) because that's what their values lead them to do. And people that value being able to voice their opinions will exercise what power they have to prevent someone else from preventing speech. That's all that rights are: the universe allows something, people with similar values promise to use power to prevent anyone from stopping the exercise of that thing the universe allows. That's it.

What would be different in a world where something is "true" about whether one should be altruistic?

Accountability.

Even if moral realism were true (and for the sake of argument I'm treating that sentence as if it were cognitive), someone would still have to value truth to even care.

Yep. But truth is also a moral value, not just an epistemic one.

Heh, but do you see the problem here? Let me paint the picture of two worlds, World 1 and World 2. For the sake of argument I'll pretend that moral realism is cognitive in some way to speak about it here, and let's say that in World 1, moral realism is true. In World 2, moral realism is not true/noncognitive.

In World 1, it is true that people ought not to murder (and this hurts my brain, because I have no idea what that means). Not just due to hypothetical imperatives stemming from values, but it's just true "out there in the universe" that one ought not to murder. In World 1, someone could ostensibly make some kind of cogent argument to demonstrate its truth to someone. The moral realist says, "great, now nobody is going to murder since we can show that you shouldn't murder." Yet in the same breath, the moral realist acknowledges that people are still going to murder. What's the point?

In World 1, someone has to give a shit about truth in order to listen to the argument that one ought not to murder: they have to value that. If they don't, they could even acknowledge that it is true and still carry on with their murdering. Now you say that valuing truth is moral (I am not sure that it is, but sure, let's roll with that), can you see the catch-22 in trying to argue towards someone that they ought to value truth? How do you make that argument to them unless they already value truth?

So in World 1, we end up with some people that don't murder because they value not murdering, and some people that murder because they don't value not murdering: and there's nothing that can be done to change that by making any kind of rational arguments to people (because they just either value truth and value listening to logical moral arguments or they don't).

Doesn't that look exactly like World 2? In World 2, "moral truth" is a nonsense utterance. People either value not-murdering (and so they don't murder), or they don't value it (and so they might murder). Since doxastic voluntarism is false, people don't think about this and go "hey, I could value whatever I want, even murdering my neighbor to take their stuff!" because they can't help what they value, and most humans are predisposed to value altruism in aggregate.

In both worlds, whether or not you murder comes down to whether you happen to possess certain values, and in both worlds some hard doxastic voluntarism is false. So the best you can do in either world is talk to people and try to convince them, try to propagate your own value system, but it will always depend on whether they value listening to you; and it will always depend on whether they even value whether what you're saying is cogent or valid.

You say that World 1 has "accountability," but what's that? What if those that "do wrong" don't give a shit about that because they don't value it? What good does it do, what difference does it make?

On my view, World 1 is indistinguishable from World 2 at first glance; but is problematic because it is not parsimonious: it posits the existence of a special kind of truth (an "ought" that lives outside of hypothetical imperatives) that no moral realist I've ever met seems to even be able to elucidate. A special kind of truth that doesn't seem to make a difference even if it did exist!

Well, maybe I'm assuming wrongly: but I was thinking you'd have a moral perspective on the phrase, "love whom you want," and maybe a view about the tenability of slavery or setting people on fire, or pedophilia. I thought you'd be inclined to say that such things "ought not" to be done.

But I don't know what to say to you if they don't have that impact. I guess you're getting the world you bargained for. At any rate, you've undermined your power to object to any of that, since there are no grounds for objecting.

Of course I say things like setting people on fire ought not to be done. But I properly conceptualize what an "ought" even is in the first place: I understand it's not something about the universe, but rather something about my values that makes me say that. When I say to someone "you shouldn't set that guy on fire," I'm saying that I value not setting people on fire, and furthermore it's implied that I value using force to satisfy that value (I will call the police; which I can do, because society in aggregate shares the same value).

I haven't undermined any kind of power to enforce my values. This is what "oughts" have always been. Many of us have values to enforce our values, that's the way that it is. We nod in approval when a killer is taken in handcuffs because we value the enforcement of our values.

It has always been the case and will always be the case that whomever holds the numbers and power will set the values for the society.

An American thinks that?

Yes, even representational democracies/democratic republics are still two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner, so to speak. The trick is getting the wolves to hold values that value the sheep. As I said above, everything that we value here in the US is still just an aggregation of similar values. If those values change -- which they did, mind you, for instance abolition -- then even the Constitution can change. Nothing stops people from just in aggregate deciding to ignore the Constitution, either: which I posit they do every day. (A really stupid example is that I think the Establishment Clause is very clear, that "In God We Trust" is an establishment of monotheism over polytheism or nontheism, yet we still post the stupid phrase all over our cash: in aggregate we choose to ignore the Constitution or interpret it in very pretzel-y ways to get what we want).

If tomorrow Americans woke up and decided they didn't like the Constitution and that they could just ignore it, that could happen: they wouldn't even have to go through Constitutional amendment processes (since they wouldn't value them!), they could just straight up ignore it. The only thing keeping things like constitutions alive is the mutual aggregate valuation of them and the power to protect them from minority non-valuations.

I'm sure there were plenty of people in 30's/40's Germany that absolutely did not value what their government was doing, and many indeed exercised what little power they had against it.

Again, this is the world that we see. "Moral realism" doesn't seem to do anything if it exists.

...this world contains everything that the moral realist "warns" about should moral realism fail to be true!

I don't think it does, actually. Certainly it "contains" many evil things. But there are also astonishingly good things, especially as products of values like charity, truth-telling, justice, human dignity, property rights, and so on.

But that isn't something unique to World 1. World 2 would have charity, truth-telling, human dignity, property rights, and so on as well because people value those things in aggregate. If World 1 is supposed to be "better" somehow than World 2, we need to understand why World 1 still contains all the nasty things that, supposedly, the universe says "ought" not to happen. Because that's what moral realism says.

What does it even mean for the universe to say something ought not to happen if that thing just happens all the time anyway? What's the point? What does it even mean for the universe to have something about it that it "ought" not to happen?

But to an altruist, yes, those events are wrong, infuriating, terrible.

But they are deluded, you must say...

In the noncognitivist picture, it doesn't mean you can't get outraged.

It means you can't do so for any good reason, or to any effect, though. It's all just power, you said.

No, holding values and enforcing one's values (if one values enforcing them, anyway) is not delusion. Being outraged isn't delusional, it's following one's values.

It doesn't mean you can't demand and instantiate action against something. And before you point it out, of course defenders of slavery could get outraged as well (at abolition), and demand and instantiate action (for slavery as a practice) as well. And that is what we see when we look at history and reality, yes.

And your conclusion is that the enslavers were every bit as right or wrong as the abolitionists, because none of them were right or wrong?

My conclusion is that it's nonsensical to say either is "right" or "wrong" outside of the formulation of a hypothetical imperative.

Let me put it this way. Let's say that there is this idea called color realism. A color realist holds the belief that there is something about reality that says pink is the best color and that you ought to do things like get your phone case in pink, or your toothbrush, or your backpack, whatever. A color realist would say that when given the choice, you have done right by choosing whatever pink thing and you have done wrong by choosing whatever non-pink thing.

The color realist says that this isn't coming from your mind, that there is something about the universe that means you ought to choose the pink phone case.

If someone says, "that's nonsense, I don't know how to even cognize what about the universe you're even talking about; people choose a pink phone case because they prefer it, they have a value about what color aesthetically pleases them in this instance," the color realist might respond in a shocked manner, "are you telling me that choosing the pink phone case is every bit as right or wrong as choosing the green case?"

Haven't they missed the crux of the non-color-realist's argument? Obviously the non-color-realist's very argument is that there is nothing about the universe that cares whether you pick the green case or the pink case, obviously their argument is that it's only the "right" choice if the chooser has that value.

Hmm, now imagine that the color realist skeptic noticed that every color realist they've ever asked can't provide a cogent explanation for what it means for a color-ought to exist in the universe, what it would mean for something about the universe to mean they ought to choose pink over red They might start to wonder whether color realists even know what they're talking about!

But so what? Put that on a sign, and nobody needs to care: "Astro Cat hates slavery." Plausibly, she does. What does she want from anybody else for that?

But I think we both realize that's not at all the spirit of protest. The spirit of protest is to provoke the presumed conscience of the "oppressor," by pointing out her/his "oppressiveness" in such a way as is supposed to shame her/him. It's to demand a slice of the public agenda, as if one had some high moral ground from which to command it. It's to put a moral imperative to one's society, or, to spin the cliche, to "speak truth to power."

All vain and silly, if your worldview is correct. Nobody should believe a word of it, if they're smart.

I have already explained that we can make arguments and appeals to peoples' values; that sometimes perspectives and information spark belief revision. This objection is already answered in my last post, which we're getting to just below, so let us look below.

Let me give an example. Let's say that I'm really into trying to save the environment, so I form the hypothetical imperative "I value the environment, so I ought to use ethanol gas to prevent drilling." Seems perfectly rational.

I don't see why. What do we "owe" future generations? So long as I get my life to come out fine, let the world burn when I'm gone. Is that "morally" the wrong view?

You'll need to show me why.

You are still asking the wrong questions towards my view. (You ask, "is that 'morally' the wrong view?" knowing full well that my response will be "the question itself is wrong").

What do we owe future generations, you ask? That depends on our values. Someone that values future generations is going to care about them and try to leave the world a better place as best as they can, and try to convince others to do the same, and try to use power (enact laws) to enforce this value. Those that don't have the value will try to do the opposite, or simply take no action.

So this is an easy question to answer. You ask why you should care (and I suspect this is hypothetical because I suspect you do care about future humans)? The response is this: well, do you care? If you do, that means you hold the requisite value, then I can make arguments that might lead you to care more through belief revision. If you don't, there is nothing I can do about it because you can't will yourself to care. My only option is to use force at that point: passing laws that might prevent you from littering, for instance, without suffering consequences. (And you could try to pass laws to prevent me from doing that, such as laws that prevent regulations!) It will come down to whether more people with more power align with our respective values or not, as it always has, and as it always will.

I strongly disagree. If the moral realist doesn't even know what they're saying when they say "It is true that we ought to do x,"

They do, of course.

But the moral skeptic, since he has rejected God, has no time for the truth of their answer either.

I am not sure what you mean by this. Surely you grant your opponents the assumption of good faith when they show they deserve it, I hope. Or do you assume that non-theists are just such because they're not really seeking truth? That would be poor sportsmanship, at best.

The bottom line is actually ontology...worldview...presuppositions. That is why ontology always precedes ethics. You can't say what's "good" and "bad" to do with anything until you have agreed what real entities there are in the world. There can be no moral debate over the status of leprechauns, unicorns or fairies. So if the entities in the moral equation are merely mythical, then the moral conclusions no longer matter, and can no longer be compelling.

The assumption (and it's a pure assumption) that reality is an amoral landscape has serious consequences for a person's ability to take any moral precept seriously. Likewise, the assumption that the world is a God-given gift, handed in stewardship to human beings who are called to account for what they do, sets up the world as a stage of moral action and moral imperatives.

But it's at the assumptive level that the division happens. It's not actually in the realm of particular ethical questions themselves.

I can't help but to feel like all of this is just so much shuffling to avoid the question, though. The question is, "how does an 'ought' correspond to reality outside of a hypothetical imperative?'"

What is it about the universe that makes it so that one shouldn't murder (ostensibly)? If such a thing exists, why is it still possible to murder?

I understand what it means when the universe says I can't travel faster than ~300k km/s via acceleration because the laws of physics just don't allow for that. But that's not what we mean if we were to say I "shouldn't" do that.

So what does it mean when we say we "shouldn't" do something? What corresponds to reality about it? This should be a simple question. If moral realism is cognitive and true, the moral realist should have an answer to this. Yet none I've ever met or read or anything of the sort ever do! Isn't that curious?

[Immanuel Can]

But point me to an era that hasn't been rife with atrocity, an era where everybody at the time wasn't saying "this is the worst it's ever been" somewhere.

I'm sure that's true.

But what's unprecedented is the scope of the evil. It's never been truly global before, nor on the level of a universal problem. The issue is not that we are getting so much more wicked -- we always had that in us -- but that we are continuing to increase our power very rapidly, so that the magnitude at which evil operates is continually increasing.

Of course, there's a limit to that. It's when we truly wreck the world. In the Pax Romana, the Romans had not the capacity. Nor did anyone, really, until the last century. But now, we certainly do.

We can afford fewer mistakes with evil now, because every single one is magnified continually as our power grows. And, if I can guess, at some point, one really bad mistake takes off the planet, if there is no divine intervention. But there will probably be several significant events of more regional disastrous magnitude before that one happens.

According to Jesus Christ, it takes mankind, temporarily unfettered from divine intervention, only seven years to bring the whole planet to the point of universal death. (Mark 13:20)

Well, I would say, what was your experience with that? What do you feel inclined to share?

My experience with Christianity was rife with having too many questions people around me couldn't answer. That isn't to say that no Christian could answer them in a respectable manner (even if I might still disagree), but my experience was one disillusionment after the next and feeling the need to figure things out on my own, which I eventually did.

I've heard a similar story before.

The kid who wants to ask questions is not able to find answers, not necessarily due to deliberate unfairness or stonewalling on the part of the local adults, but because the local adults are themselves not fully informed on the issues, and are intimidated by the question and unable to know how to find the answers -- which leaves the young person with the mistaken impression that there are no answers to be had, and occasions a kind of crisis of belief.

Was that what happened to you?

I've always been a sensitive person, so one of the things that always bugged me the most was the concept of an eternal Hell and just never got satisfactory answers to that when I was still asking them naively (and then it was too late when I started asking them skeptically, as even the better responses did not convince me). The Problem of Evil and the problem of Hell were probably the single greatest contributors to my deconversion.

It's odd...the problem of evil was essentially what made me a Christian. I was reading a lot of very secular, skeptical stuff at the time, and I became overwhelmingly unimpressed with what appeared to me to be the cowardice and lame answers offered by the Atheist set. They were so dry on that question that eventually I decided I had to look into the Christian answers, if only to eliminate any possibility there were answers there that the Atheists lacked. After I encountered Jesus Christ through my own private reading, I saw He had answers the secularists I was reading clearly lacked completely.

So I guess your Sunday School teachers failed you, and the Atheist writers failed me. The noteworthy difference, perhaps, was that whereas you were looking to ordinary folks for answers, I was reading many of those the Atheists regard as their "greats," who should have had some decent answers if any Atheist did. To this day, I never met an Atheist who could explain the existence of evil without simply trying to explain it away -- as in saying that evil doesn't really exist (it does, of course), or that it's not so bad (it is), or that it's only some people, not all of us who have a problem with evil (it's everyone), or that it's just a regrettable side effect of our under-evolved condition (what cold comfort that one is!).

But to actually face the fact of evil, and to offer an actual explanation and remedy...for that, it takes somebody like Jesus Christ. Lesser minds cannot tackle that one.

What is the difference between a world with moral truths and one where there are not?

Quite a lot, I would say.

1) What an interesting example you've brought up, because you will not find a speed limit in the universe

Oh, you'll find all kinds of limits in the universe...not just of speed, but of morality.

2) Rights are another thing that do not exist outside of humans,

Locke didn't agree with you about that. Nor do I.

In order for rights to matter whatsoever, those with the power have to value them.

No, in order for rights to be respected those with power must value them. Not to exist.

The rights will still exist and be due (ought, if you like) even when those in power completely disregard them. And they will answer for what they do.

When the Constitution says that I have a right to speech, it means that in aggregate, the amendment writers and enough Americans share a value that agrees that speech ought to be permitted ("If I value liberty, then speech ought to be permitted" is a relevant hypothetical imperative here).

If that were all, then there could be no such thing as a "tyrannical regime," or a regime that had violated the rights of its own citizens. But we all think there are such things, and we all think we can point to some.

Rights, like moral beliefs and speed limits, are human constructions, not human-external "truths."

No, actually. The human constructions are the laws and constitutions, not the rights. And such laws and constitutions are judgeable by the degree to which they respect the intrinsic, God-given human rights we all possess.

The moral realist says, "great, now nobody is going to murder since we can show that you shouldn't murder."

I have yet to meet a moral realist who thinks that.

What a moral realist thinks is that people will, in fact, want to murder. That's why the precept exists in the first place: because people will want to violate it, not because they won't. Furthermore, some will try to murder, and some will succeed. And when they do, we all need to know what to think of that action, and what is an appropriate, just response to it. But every moral realist knows darn well that people want to murder sometimes...that's why he thinks it's important we be able to tell them why they ought not to, and why we need a way of making it hard or painful for them to do so.

Not because it's not a temptation to murder: but because it is.

So you've totally missed the rationale behind moral realism there.

In World 1, someone has to give a shit about truth in order to listen to the argument that one ought not to murder: they have to value that. If they don't, they could even acknowledge that it is true and still carry on with their murdering.

You mean like the Nazis did? Indeed so.

And just what do you non-cognitivists say at the Nuremburg Trials, when the Nazis are on deck in front of you? You say, why did you kill so many people, and they say, "It wasn't objectively wrong. Our society approved, and our powerful men urged us on. Besides, don't you know that all moral virtue is just a construct? So you people have no right to judge us; we were just doing our jobs."

Got an answer for them?

Now you say that valuing truth is moral (I am not sure that it is, but sure, let's roll with that), can you see the catch-22 in trying to argue towards someone that they ought to value truth? How do you make that argument to them unless they already value truth?

It's not a catch-22 at all, for the simple reason that people do not always do what they ought. Some value truth, but all too many value lies. Still, as with the case of human rights, truth exists whether one believes in it or not. And one always, in the end, pays the price for refusing to deal with reality.

Truth is a very, very hard thing. It never yields. Those who throw themselves against it always end up broken as a consequence.

In both worlds, whether or not you murder comes down to whether you happen to possess certain values,

Whether or not you obey or violate the moral law is never decided by the law itself. Nobody ever thinks it is. What the objective moral law decides is only whether or not you're right or wrong now, and how you will fare in the Judgment when it comes. Nothing else.

You're trying to figure out how the law can make people good. It never does. What it does is show them what "good" is, so they can realize how woefully evil they sometimes are being. And then, both they and we can do something about that.

That's the whole problem you're struggling with, really. You are thinking that moral realism aims at making people behave. But whether or not people behave well is not a function of law, but of volition, as you say. What moral realism says is that we have a metric for knowing where we stand on the scale of righteousness...and what God thinks of where we are.

You say that World 1 has "accountability," but what's that?

Everything has accountability. We are all going to face God.

That's accountability.

When I say to someone "you shouldn't set that guy on fire," I'm saying that I value not setting people on fire...

I have to say that I hope you're saying much more than that. I hope you're saying that setting people on fire is actually evil, and that God will judge all those who do so, even if man fails in his duty to exercise any justice in that case.

"I don't like it" is one terrible way to try to convince anybody not to burn your friend to death.

An American thinks that?

Yes, even representational democracies/democratic republics are still two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner, so to speak.

Ah. So your theory is that the American Revolutionaries were just as wicked and corrupt as old King George, is that it?

Well, that's a surprising view for an American.

The trick is getting the wolves to hold values that value the sheep.

Nietzsche has the answer to that.

He agreed with you...that all morality really is, is the sheep trying to convince the wolves not to eat them. But Nietzsche thought the right thing was for the wolves to wake up and have lots of mutton.

I'm sure there were plenty of people in 30's/40's Germany that absolutely did not value what their government was doing, and many indeed exercised what little power they had against it.

Actually, there were vast numbers of Germans who went right along with it. You should read the book "HItler's Willing Executioners," by Dan Goldhagen. He gives plenty of data showing what great numbers of Germans went along, either actively or passively, with the anti-semitism that was culturally ubiquitous in Germany and made possible the Holocaust. In fact, as Goldhagen shows, Hitler could never have done what he did at all without such help.

I don't think it does, actually. Certainly it "contains" many evil things. But there are also astonishingly good things, especially as products of values like charity, truth-telling, justice, human dignity, property rights, and so on.

But that isn't something unique to World 1.

It has nothing to do with WW 1, actually. It's just a general historical fact.

What does it even mean for the universe to say something ought not to happen if that thing just happens all the time anyway?

It means that it's evil. It means that we know it's evil. And it means that if we do it, we will be doing evil. It reminds us to organize our society so as to prevent such evil, as much as that may be achieved. It tells us what should be done to punish evil and to restore justice in the case of evil. And it reminds us that when we do evil, we will answer to God for all the evil we do.

Those are awfully important functions. That's plenty of work for objective morality to be doing.

But to an altruist, yes, those events are wrong, infuriating, terrible.

But they are deluded, you must say...

In the noncognitivist picture, it doesn't mean you can't get outraged.

It means you can't do so for any good reason, or to any effect, though. It's all just power, you said.

No, holding values and enforcing one's values (if one values enforcing them, anyway) is not delusion. [/quote]
The values have to be. They aren't objective.

Being outraged isn't delusional, it's following one's values.

But being outraged is delusional.

Because according to your thinking, there is no sufficient grounds for feeling outraged. No actual "injustice" has ever been done you. So what right have you to your outrage?

And there is no objective reality to your values either. What's truly objective is only that you happen to hold some; but that does not make them right or non-delusional. So, if you were thinking straight, you wouldn't be outraged at all. Your outrage isn't justifable.

Get ahold of yourself, girl: we can't have you having emotional fits that are unrelated to objective reasons!

It doesn't mean you can't demand and instantiate action against something. And before you point it out, of course defenders of slavery could get outraged as well (at abolition), and demand and instantiate action (for slavery as a practice) as well. And that is what we see when we look at history and reality, yes.

And your conclusion is that the enslavers were every bit as right or wrong as the abolitionists, because none of them were right or wrong?

My conclusion is that it's nonsensical to say either is "right" or "wrong" outside of the formulation of a hypothetical imperative.

Basically what I said. The enslavers were right, since they had a hypothetical imperative.

Let's say that there is this idea called color realism.

Inapt analogy. Morality and aesthetics are quite different issues. Nobody ever has to justify their love of pink. Nobody thinks they should...well, except perhaps for your interior decorator, but what does she know of ethics?

Let me give an example. Let's say that I'm really into trying to save the environment, so I form the hypothetical imperative "I value the environment, so I ought to use ethanol gas to prevent drilling." Seems perfectly rational.

I don't see why. What do we "owe" future generations? So long as I get my life to come out fine, let the world burn when I'm gone. Is that "morally" the wrong view?

You'll need to show me why.

What do we owe future generations, you ask? That depends on our values.[/quote]
It most certainly cannot.

We cannot possibly "owe" anything simply by mistakenly believing we do. If I mistakenly think I've overdrawn my account by $100, that does not at all imply I actually owe the bank that money, if I have not, in reality, overdrawn.

Now, I may mistakenly pay it: but then, I am the fool. And I'm out my $100. The bright fellow keeps his accounts straight, and thus never wrongly imagines he owes anybody anything in the first place.

So this is an easy question to answer.

I wish you'd answered it in a way I have any reason to believe, then.

I strongly disagree. If the moral realist doesn't even know what they're saying when they say "It is true that we ought to do x,"

They do, of course.

But the moral skeptic, since he has rejected God, has no time for the truth of their answer either.

I am not sure what you mean by this.

I mean you are mistaken about what moral realists think. In fact, all the way through this response, we can find errors on that score. I already mentioned the bizarre suppostion that moral realists might think objective laws would actually make evil impossible. Nobody thinks that.

And I mean that God is the basic grounds for all objective morals. Ultimately, they come from Him, because of his own nature and will. That's what makes all sin so serious: all sin is a kind of violation of God's name, a blasphemy against the Creator, a defiant charge against the possibility of His justness, a rebellious declaration by the creature that she or he doesn't even have to give God the time of day, and is free to perform whatever wickedness her or his heart may choose.

We'll all see how that works out for such people. But my task, as a Christian, before that time, is to say to as many people as I can, "Don't do that: you won't like the result."

Surely you grant your opponents the assumption of good faith when they show they deserve it, I hope.

Of course. And I know even people who regard themselves as Atheists who are genuinely interested in truth. I have friends like that. But a sincere searcher will not remain an Atheist long. For his Atheism will require of him acts of bad faith that an honest man simply cannot sustain. And God has a way of speaking to us all, reminding us that we know far more than we want to admit we know.

The bottom line is actually ontology...worldview...presuppositions. That is why ontology always precedes ethics. You can't say what's "good" and "bad" to do with anything until you have agreed what real entities there are in the world. There can be no moral debate over the status of leprechauns, unicorns or fairies. So if the entities in the moral equation are merely mythical, then the moral conclusions no longer matter, and can no longer be compelling.

The assumption (and it's a pure assumption) that reality is an amoral landscape has serious consequences for a person's ability to take any moral precept seriously. Likewise, the assumption that the world is a God-given gift, handed in stewardship to human beings who are called to account for what they do, sets up the world as a stage of moral action and moral imperatives.

But it's at the assumptive level that the division happens. It's not actually in the realm of particular ethical questions themselves.

I can't help but to feel like all of this is just so much shuffling to avoid the question, though.

No, it's not. It's an effort to get to the bedrock underneath objective morality.

And when we make that effort we find that ontology shapes ethics. It cannot be otherwise. What we suppose to exist will limit and define what we think ethics can consist of.

Even Nietzsche understood this. And he was no friend of mine, of course. But read his "Parable of the Madman," and you'll see it.

The question is, "how does an 'ought' correspond to reality outside of a hypothetical imperative?'"

Answer: it corresponds to God.

Can I make it more clear than that?

What is it about the universe that makes it so that one shouldn't murder (ostensibly)?

Its status as a purposeful creation of God.

God gave you life. Nobody has a right to take it away from you. Anybody who does, is afoul of God, who gave you the right to live. And he has stolen from God a life which was owed to God. So he will answer to God, if not to man.

John Locke said all this, long ago.

If such a thing exists, why is it still possible to murder?

Because, again, laws are not preventatives.

Your question is parallel to, "How come it's 32 degrees, when I put a thermometer outside: why do I have a thermometer, if it's still possible for water to freeze?"

I understand what it means when the universe says I can't travel faster than ~300k km/s via acceleration because the laws of physics just don't allow for that. But that's not what we mean if we were to say I "shouldn't" do that.

No, it's not. Morality is not a function of physics. It's a function of our status as being creatures of, and belonging rightfully to God.

So what does it mean when we say we "shouldn't" do something? What corresponds to reality about it? This should be a simple question.

It is, and I trust I've answered it amply.

It means that thing is wrong, and we should know it's wrong, and we shouldn't do it, and we should organize our society to stop it, and we should punish and prevent those who want to do it, and that we will all answer to God if we don't.

That's plenty. There's the answer.

The objective moral law is the thermometer. Don't ask it to change the temperature for you. Get busy on stoking the fire or putting on a coat, so you won't freeze to death.

[Astro Cat]

Oh IC, I was really hoping you would bring our friend Euthyphro into the discussion. This will be fun (I love this subject), when I get another minute.

[Age]

But point me to an era that hasn't been rife with atrocity, an era where everybody at the time wasn't saying "this is the worst it's ever been" somewhere.

I'm sure that's true.

But what's unprecedented is the scope of the evil. It's never been truly global before, nor on the level of a universal problem. The issue is not that we are getting so much more wicked -- we always had that in us -- but that we are continuing to increase our power very rapidly, so that the magnitude at which evil operates is continually increasing.

Of course, there's a limit to that. It's when we truly wreck the world. In the Pax Romana, the Romans had not the capacity. Nor did anyone, really, until the last century. But now, we certainly do.

We can afford fewer mistakes with evil now, because every single one is magnified continually as our power grows. And, if I can guess, at some point, one really bad mistake takes off the planet, if there is no divine intervention. But there will probably be several significant events of more regional disastrous magnitude before that one happens.

According to Jesus Christ, it takes mankind, temporarily unfettered from divine intervention, only seven years to bring the whole planet to the point of universal death. (Mark 13:20)

Well, I would say, what was your experience with that? What do you feel inclined to share?

My experience with Christianity was rife with having too many questions people around me couldn't answer. That isn't to say that no Christian could answer them in a respectable manner (even if I might still disagree), but my experience was one disillusionment after the next and feeling the need to figure things out on my own, which I eventually did.

I've heard a similar story before.

The kid who wants to ask questions is not able to find answers, not necessarily due to deliberate unfairness or stonewalling on the part of the local adults, but because the local adults are themselves not fully informed on the issues, and are intimidated by the question and unable to know how to find the answers -- which leaves the young person with the mistaken impression that there are no answers to be had, and occasions a kind of crisis of belief.

Was that what happened to you?

I've always been a sensitive person, so one of the things that always bugged me the most was the concept of an eternal Hell and just never got satisfactory answers to that when I was still asking them naively (and then it was too late when I started asking them skeptically, as even the better responses did not convince me). The Problem of Evil and the problem of Hell were probably the single greatest contributors to my deconversion.

It's odd...the problem of evil was essentially what made me a Christian. I was reading a lot of very secular, skeptical stuff at the time, and I became overwhelmingly unimpressed with what appeared to me to be the cowardice and lame answers offered by the Atheist set. They were so dry on that question that eventually I decided I had to look into the Christian answers, if only to eliminate any possibility there were answers there that the Atheists lacked. After I encountered Jesus Christ through my own private reading, I saw He had answers the secularists I was reading clearly lacked completely.

So I guess your Sunday School teachers failed you, and the Atheist writers failed me. The noteworthy difference, perhaps, was that whereas you were looking to ordinary folks for answers, I was reading many of those the Atheists regard as their "greats," who should have had some decent answers if any Atheist did. To this day, I never met an Atheist who could explain the existence of evil without simply trying to explain it away -- as in saying that evil doesn't really exist (it does, of course), or that it's not so bad (it is), or that it's only some people, not all of us who have a problem with evil (it's everyone), or that it's just a regrettable side effect of our under-evolved condition (what cold comfort that one is!).

But to actually face the fact of evil, and to offer an actual explanation and remedy...for that, it takes somebody like Jesus Christ. Lesser minds cannot tackle that one.

What is the difference between a world with moral truths and one where there are not?

Quite a lot, I would say.

1) What an interesting example you've brought up, because you will not find a speed limit in the universe

Oh, you'll find all kinds of limits in the universe...not just of speed, but of morality.

2) Rights are another thing that do not exist outside of humans,

Locke didn't agree with you about that. Nor do I.

In order for rights to matter whatsoever, those with the power have to value them.

No, in order for rights to be respected those with power must value them. Not to exist.

The rights will still exist and be due (ought, if you like) even when those in power completely disregard them. And they will answer for what they do.

When the Constitution says that I have a right to speech, it means that in aggregate, the amendment writers and enough Americans share a value that agrees that speech ought to be permitted ("If I value liberty, then speech ought to be permitted" is a relevant hypothetical imperative here).

If that were all, then there could be no such thing as a "tyrannical regime," or a regime that had violated the rights of its own citizens. But we all think there are such things, and we all think we can point to some.

Rights, like moral beliefs and speed limits, are human constructions, not human-external "truths."

No, actually. The human constructions are the laws and constitutions, not the rights. And such laws and constitutions are judgeable by the degree to which they respect the intrinsic, God-given human rights we all possess.

The moral realist says, "great, now nobody is going to murder since we can show that you shouldn't murder."

I have yet to meet a moral realist who thinks that.

What a moral realist thinks is that people will, in fact, want to murder. That's why the precept exists in the first place: because people will want to violate it, not because they won't. Furthermore, some will try to murder, and some will succeed. And when they do, we all need to know what to think of that action, and what is an appropriate, just response to it. But every moral realist knows darn well that people want to murder sometimes...that's why he thinks it's important we be able to tell them why they ought not to, and why we need a way of making it hard or painful for them to do so.

Not because it's not a temptation to murder: but because it is.

So you've totally missed the rationale behind moral realism there.

In World 1, someone has to give a shit about truth in order to listen to the argument that one ought not to murder: they have to value that. If they don't, they could even acknowledge that it is true and still carry on with their murdering.

You mean like the Nazis did? Indeed so.

And just what do you non-cognitivists say at the Nuremburg Trials, when the Nazis are on deck in front of you? You say, why did you kill so many people, and they say, "It wasn't objectively wrong. Our society approved, and our powerful men urged us on. Besides, don't you know that all moral virtue is just a construct? So you people have no right to judge us; we were just doing our jobs."

Got an answer for them?

Now you say that valuing truth is moral (I am not sure that it is, but sure, let's roll with that), can you see the catch-22 in trying to argue towards someone that they ought to value truth? How do you make that argument to them unless they already value truth?

It's not a catch-22 at all, for the simple reason that people do not always do what they ought. Some value truth, but all too many value lies. Still, as with the case of human rights, truth exists whether one believes in it or not. And one always, in the end, pays the price for refusing to deal with reality.

Truth is a very, very hard thing. It never yields. Those who throw themselves against it always end up broken as a consequence.

In both worlds, whether or not you murder comes down to whether you happen to possess certain values,

Whether or not you obey or violate the moral law is never decided by the law itself. Nobody ever thinks it is. What the objective moral law decides is only whether or not you're right or wrong now, and how you will fare in the Judgment when it comes. Nothing else.

You're trying to figure out how the law can make people good. It never does. What it does is show them what "good" is, so they can realize how woefully evil they sometimes are being. And then, both they and we can do something about that.

That's the whole problem you're struggling with, really. You are thinking that moral realism aims at making people behave. But whether or not people behave well is not a function of law, but of volition, as you say. What moral realism says is that we have a metric for knowing where we stand on the scale of righteousness...and what God thinks of where we are.

You say that World 1 has "accountability," but what's that?

Everything has accountability. We are all going to face God.

That's accountability.

When I say to someone "you shouldn't set that guy on fire," I'm saying that I value not setting people on fire...

I have to say that I hope you're saying much more than that. I hope you're saying that setting people on fire is actually evil, and that God will judge all those who do so, even if man fails in his duty to exercise any justice in that case.

"I don't like it" is one terrible way to try to convince anybody not to burn your friend to death.

An American thinks that?

Yes, even representational democracies/democratic republics are still two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner, so to speak.

Ah. So your theory is that the American Revolutionaries were just as wicked and corrupt as old King George, is that it?

Well, that's a surprising view for an American.

The trick is getting the wolves to hold values that value the sheep.

Nietzsche has the answer to that.

He agreed with you...that all morality really is, is the sheep trying to convince the wolves not to eat them. But Nietzsche thought the right thing was for the wolves to wake up and have lots of mutton.

I'm sure there were plenty of people in 30's/40's Germany that absolutely did not value what their government was doing, and many indeed exercised what little power they had against it.

Actually, there were vast numbers of Germans who went right along with it. You should read the book "HItler's Willing Executioners," by Dan Goldhagen. He gives plenty of data showing what great numbers of Germans went along, either actively or passively, with the anti-semitism that was culturally ubiquitous in Germany and made possible the Holocaust. In fact, as Goldhagen shows, Hitler could never have done what he did at all without such help.

I don't think it does, actually. Certainly it "contains" many evil things. But there are also astonishingly good things, especially as products of values like charity, truth-telling, justice, human dignity, property rights, and so on.

But that isn't something unique to World 1.

It has nothing to do with WW 1, actually. It's just a general historical fact.

What does it even mean for the universe to say something ought not to happen if that thing just happens all the time anyway?

It means that it's evil. It means that we know it's evil. And it means that if we do it, we will be doing evil. It reminds us to organize our society so as to prevent such evil, as much as that may be achieved. It tells us what should be done to punish evil and to restore justice in the case of evil. And it reminds us that when we do evil, we will answer to God for all the evil we do.

Those are awfully important functions. That's plenty of work for objective morality to be doing.

But to an altruist, yes, those events are wrong, infuriating, terrible.

But they are deluded, you must say...

In the noncognitivist picture, it doesn't mean you can't get outraged.

It means you can't do so for any good reason, or to any effect, though. It's all just power, you said.

No, holding values and enforcing one's values (if one values enforcing them, anyway) is not delusion.

The values have to be. They aren't objective.

Being outraged isn't delusional, it's following one's values.

But being outraged is delusional.

Because according to your thinking, there is no sufficient grounds for feeling outraged. No actual "injustice" has ever been done you. So what right have you to your outrage?

And there is no objective reality to your values either. What's truly objective is only that you happen to hold some; but that does not make them right or non-delusional. So, if you were thinking straight, you wouldn't be outraged at all. Your outrage isn't justifable.

Get ahold of yourself, girl: we can't have you having emotional fits that are unrelated to objective reasons!

And your conclusion is that the enslavers were every bit as right or wrong as the abolitionists, because none of them were right or wrong?

My conclusion is that it's nonsensical to say either is "right" or "wrong" outside of the formulation of a hypothetical imperative.

Basically what I said. The enslavers were right, since they had a hypothetical imperative.

Let's say that there is this idea called color realism.

Inapt analogy. Morality and aesthetics are quite different issues. Nobody ever has to justify their love of pink. Nobody thinks they should...well, except perhaps for your interior decorator, but what does she know of ethics?

Let me give an example. Let's say that I'm really into trying to save the environment, so I form the hypothetical imperative "I value the environment, so I ought to use ethanol gas to prevent drilling." Seems perfectly rational.

I don't see why. What do we "owe" future generations? So long as I get my life to come out fine, let the world burn when I'm gone. Is that "morally" the wrong view?

You'll need to show me why.

What do we owe future generations, you ask? That depends on our values.[/quote]
It most certainly cannot.

We cannot possibly "owe" anything simply by mistakenly believing we do. If I mistakenly think I've overdrawn my account by $100, that does not at all imply I actually owe the bank that money, if I have not, in reality, overdrawn.

Now, I may mistakenly pay it: but then, I am the fool. And I'm out my $100. The bright fellow keeps his accounts straight, and thus never wrongly imagines he owes anybody anything in the first place.

So this is an easy question to answer.

I wish you'd answered it in a way I have any reason to believe, then.

They do, of course.

But the moral skeptic, since he has rejected God, has no time for the truth of their answer either.

I am not sure what you mean by this.

I mean you are mistaken about what moral realists think. In fact, all the way through this response, we can find errors on that score. I already mentioned the bizarre suppostion that moral realists might think objective laws would actually make evil impossible. Nobody thinks that.

And I mean that God is the basic grounds for all objective morals. Ultimately, they come from Him, because of his own nature and will. That's what makes all sin so serious: all sin is a kind of violation of God's name, a blasphemy against the Creator, a defiant charge against the possibility of His justness, a rebellious declaration by the creature that she or he doesn't even have to give God the time of day, and is free to perform whatever wickedness her or his heart may choose.

We'll all see how that works out for such people. But my task, as a Christian, before that time, is to say to as many people as I can, "Don't do that: you won't like the result."

Surely you grant your opponents the assumption of good faith when they show they deserve it, I hope.

Of course. And I know even people who regard themselves as Atheists who are genuinely interested in truth. I have friends like that. But a sincere searcher will not remain an Atheist long. For his Atheism will require of him acts of bad faith that an honest man simply cannot sustain. And God has a way of speaking to us all, reminding us that we know far more than we want to admit we know.

The bottom line is actually ontology...worldview...presuppositions. That is why ontology always precedes ethics. You can't say what's "good" and "bad" to do with anything until you have agreed what real entities there are in the world. There can be no moral debate over the status of leprechauns, unicorns or fairies. So if the entities in the moral equation are merely mythical, then the moral conclusions no longer matter, and can no longer be compelling.

The assumption (and it's a pure assumption) that reality is an amoral landscape has serious consequences for a person's ability to take any moral precept seriously. Likewise, the assumption that the world is a God-given gift, handed in stewardship to human beings who are called to account for what they do, sets up the world as a stage of moral action and moral imperatives.

But it's at the assumptive level that the division happens. It's not actually in the realm of particular ethical questions themselves.

I can't help but to feel like all of this is just so much shuffling to avoid the question, though.

No, it's not. It's an effort to get to the bedrock underneath objective morality.

And when we make that effort we find that ontology shapes ethics. It cannot be otherwise. What we suppose to exist will limit and define what we think ethics can consist of.

Even Nietzsche understood this. And he was no friend of mine, of course. But read his "Parable of the Madman," and you'll see it.

The question is, "how does an 'ought' correspond to reality outside of a hypothetical imperative?'"

Answer: it corresponds to God.

Can I make it more clear than that?

What is it about the universe that makes it so that one shouldn't murder (ostensibly)?

Its status as a purposeful creation of God.

God gave you life. Nobody has a right to take it away from you. Anybody who does, is afoul of God, who gave you the right to live. And he has stolen from God a life which was owed to God. So he will answer to God, if not to man.

John Locke said all this, long ago.

If such a thing exists, why is it still possible to murder?

Because, again, laws are not preventatives.

Your question is parallel to, "How come it's 32 degrees, when I put a thermometer outside: why do I have a thermometer, if it's still possible for water to freeze?"

I understand what it means when the universe says I can't travel faster than ~300k km/s via acceleration because the laws of physics just don't allow for that. But that's not what we mean if we were to say I "shouldn't" do that.

No, it's not. Morality is not a function of physics. It's a function of our status as being creatures of, and belonging rightfully to God.

So what does it mean when we say we "shouldn't" do something? What corresponds to reality about it? This should be a simple question.

It is, and I trust I've answered it amply.

It means that thing is wrong, and we should know it's wrong, and we shouldn't do it, and we should organize our society to stop it, and we should punish and prevent those who want to do it, and that we will all answer to God if we don't.

That's plenty. There's the answer.

The objective moral law is the thermometer. Don't ask it to change the temperature for you. Get busy on stoking the fire or putting on a coat, so you won't freeze to death.
[/quote]

By your own words "Immanuel can", you keep proving absolutely true just how much of a hypocrite you really are and how much you contradict your own self.

Most of your own beliefs about God and christianity are the exact opposite of what God and christianity say and teach.

Some of what you say could not be any further away from what the actual Truth of things are exactly.

[Astro Cat]

IC, I'm going to try to do some compactification here as each of our responses are getting longer and longer. I'll do my best not to crop out anything important and I'll try to simply consolidate similar points together, out of order (but such that the number of "response paragraphs" decreases).

But what's unprecedented is the scope of the evil. It's never been truly global before, nor on the level of a universal problem. The issue is not that we are getting so much more wicked -- we always had that in us -- but that we are continuing to increase our power very rapidly, so that the magnitude at which evil operates is continually increasing.

Of course, there's a limit to that. It's when we truly wreck the world. In the Pax Romana, the Romans had not the capacity. Nor did anyone, really, until the last century. But now, we certainly do.

We can afford fewer mistakes with evil now, because every single one is magnified continually as our power grows. And, if I can guess, at some point, one really bad mistake takes off the planet, if there is no divine intervention. But there will probably be several significant events of more regional disastrous magnitude before that one happens.

According to Jesus Christ, it takes mankind, temporarily unfettered from divine intervention, only seven years to bring the whole planet to the point of universal death. (Mark 13:20)

I agree that the power of humankind to cause disasters is more of an existential threat today than it was; but the question we were pondering was whether atheism leads to debauchery and suffering because of something intrinsic about atheism (such as moral antirealism of whatever stripe, like noncognitivism). I don't think that it does, and that humans are better able to destroy themselves has nothing to do with that.

I've heard a similar story before.

The kid who wants to ask questions is not able to find answers, not necessarily due to deliberate unfairness or stonewalling on the part of the local adults, but because the local adults are themselves not fully informed on the issues, and are intimidated by the question and unable to know how to find the answers -- which leaves the young person with the mistaken impression that there are no answers to be had, and occasions a kind of crisis of belief.

Was that what happened to you?

...

It's odd...the problem of evil was essentially what made me a Christian. I was reading a lot of very secular, skeptical stuff at the time, and I became overwhelmingly unimpressed with what appeared to me to be the cowardice and lame answers offered by the Atheist set. They were so dry on that question that eventually I decided I had to look into the Christian answers, if only to eliminate any possibility there were answers there that the Atheists lacked. After I encountered Jesus Christ through my own private reading, I saw He had answers the secularists I was reading clearly lacked completely.

So I guess your Sunday School teachers failed you, and the Atheist writers failed me. The noteworthy difference, perhaps, was that whereas you were looking to ordinary folks for answers, I was reading many of those the Atheists regard as their "greats," who should have had some decent answers if any Atheist did. To this day, I never met an Atheist who could explain the existence of evil without simply trying to explain it away -- as in saying that evil doesn't really exist (it does, of course), or that it's not so bad (it is), or that it's only some people, not all of us who have a problem with evil (it's everyone), or that it's just a regrettable side effect of our under-evolved condition (what cold comfort that one is!).

But to actually face the fact of evil, and to offer an actual explanation and remedy...for that, it takes somebody like Jesus Christ. Lesser minds cannot tackle that one.

Yes. I was a little more rambunctious in my questioning than the locals were prepared to handle, which did lead to the perception that therefore there weren't high-level thoughts on the matters. Easy for a kid to think. This is what I meant when I said that I didn't get my questions answered when they were asked naively, so it was more of an uphill battle when they were asked skeptically.

As for the difference between Sunday School teachers and "the greats," I've often found myself not that impressed by "the greats" (yes, even among -- maybe especially among atheists, if we consider the New Atheists). I think the greats are better at elucidating arguments and points (again, not the New Atheists, can we forget about them for now?) but are just as prone to weird thinking as the rest of us. Michael Shermer wrote a popular book on how this could be the case that (for whatever reason) fell amongst my eclectic reading as a... was I a teen? As a younger woman. That always resonated with me.

For instance, you keep bringing up things that Nietzsche thinks and says, and to a point I get it because he is considered a "great," but I also don't really care what he said because the things you mention he said I feel are often coming from a totally different view than I have, so I think he's wrong on some things. Likewise I often quote Plantinga, being a favorite apologist of mine and a man with whom I've corresponded with semi-frequently because I think he's interesting and clever: but not clever enough not to be wrong.

It feels smug to type that I guess, because who am I? Yet, big shrug, I still think Nietzsche and Plantinga are wrong about stuff, and I think I can explain why when I think so.

When the Constitution says that I have a right to speech, it means that in aggregate, the amendment writers and enough Americans share a value that agrees that speech ought to be permitted ("If I value liberty, then speech ought to be permitted" is a relevant hypothetical imperative here).

If that were all, then there could be no such thing as a "tyrannical regime," or a regime that had violated the rights of its own citizens. But we all think there are such things, and we all think we can point to some.

Rights, like moral beliefs and speed limits, are human constructions, not human-external "truths."

No, actually. The human constructions are the laws and constitutions, not the rights. And such laws and constitutions are judgeable by the degree to which they respect the intrinsic, God-given human rights we all possess.

The moral realist says, "great, now nobody is going to murder since we can show that you shouldn't murder."

I have yet to meet a moral realist who thinks that.

What a moral realist thinks is that people will, in fact, want to murder. That's why the precept exists in the first place: because people will want to violate it, not because they won't. Furthermore, some will try to murder, and some will succeed. And when they do, we all need to know what to think of that action, and what is an appropriate, just response to it. But every moral realist knows darn well that people want to murder sometimes...that's why he thinks it's important we be able to tell them why they ought not to, and why we need a way of making it hard or painful for them to do so.

Not because it's not a temptation to murder: but because it is.

So you've totally missed the rationale behind moral realism there.

Ok, reading my own post there, I must have been trying to make some other point because I don't think that moral realists think that its existence would prevent evil. I'm not sure what I was smoking there for a minute (I suspect I was beginning some point, distracted myself, and didn't finish it: I do this a lot). So you're right, that portion of my post does miss the rationale, granted.

And just what do you non-cognitivists say at the Nuremburg Trials, when the Nazis are on deck in front of you? You say, why did you kill so many people, and they say, "It wasn't objectively wrong. Our society approved, and our powerful men urged us on. Besides, don't you know that all moral virtue is just a construct? So you people have no right to judge us; we were just doing our jobs."

Got an answer for them?

Yes, the answer for them -- since they're on trial -- is that now those that value life have the power and that they will be prevented from committing genocide. Those that value stopping genocide will do so if they have the power.

Justice is another issue that's probably another subject, but it does come down (again) to values. I do not value retribution theory of justice, for instance, so I would disagree with punishments solely meant to cause suffering even to Nazis. Now those that ran the Nuremberg trials certainly instituted punishments that were retributive in some cases (e.g. death penalty, though there are some arguments that aren't retributive, again getting off topic), so there is another case of people having power with different values than my own. This is the way the world is.

It's not a catch-22 at all, for the simple reason that people do not always do what they ought. Some value truth, but all too many value lies. Still, as with the case of human rights, truth exists whether one believes in it or not. And one always, in the end, pays the price for refusing to deal with reality.

...

Whether or not you obey or violate the moral law is never decided by the law itself. Nobody ever thinks it is. What the objective moral law decides is only whether or not you're right or wrong now, and how you will fare in the Judgment when it comes. Nothing else.

You're trying to figure out how the law can make people good. It never does. What it does is show them what "good" is, so they can realize how woefully evil they sometimes are being. And then, both they and we can do something about that.

That's the whole problem you're struggling with, really. You are thinking that moral realism aims at making people behave. But whether or not people behave well is not a function of law, but of volition, as you say. What moral realism says is that we have a metric for knowing where we stand on the scale of righteousness...and what God thinks of where we are.

The catch-22 is in terms of making arguments to try to convince somebody: I was saying it's a catch-22 to try to convince someone to value truth. They have to value truth in order to be convinced in the first place.

So it sounds like we agree that the difference between World 1 (where moral realism is true) and World 2 (where it is not) is not in convincing people: the worlds are indistinguishable there, because in both worlds, it just depends on the values the target happens to have.

Now it seems as though your argument is that the difference between World 1 and World 2 is in there being consequences for doing ought-nots or failing to do oughts. Specifically, consequences from God. Yet here we must bring in our friend Euthyphro for questioning.

Perhaps God metes out consequences because God has preferences and then has the power to enforce those preferences (the first horn of Euthyphro). But that isn't moral realism! That's just exactly what I've been saying: someone (God) forming a hypothetical imperative based on their values and then enforcing them with power. God just has the biggest guns and the rest of us brought a knife to a gunfight, so to speak. Surely this can't be what "moral realism" is about, because in this case an "ought" still doesn't exist mind-independently, it's just a really big and powerful thing enforcing its values.

(Ugh, have to talk about justice again in a side comment: if God punishes after the fact with no rehabilitative effect -- e.g., burns someone in a lake of fire just so they experience pain because they themselves caused pain with no rehabilitative purpose to the pain, then it is the case that God values retribution theory of justice. This was one of my biggest problems with God as a little girl because I found retributive theory of justice gross then and I find it gross now; it's just two wrongs not making a right. That isn't justice, to me. Such a god is an irredeemable monster to me.)

So what about the other horn of Euthyphro? If God commands things because they are right (rather than them being right because God commands them), then we have a few things to consider. One interesting side problem is that God would not then have aseity since God is relevantly dependent on some transcendental, external thing (whatever it is that makes some things right and some things wrong) which God just obeys. That seems like another topic though, and one that goes hand in hand with what I call the aseity-sovereignty problem. But we're here to talk about morality, not aseity, so excuse the wandering thoughts here (I think I'm just pointing out that this horn of Euthyphro is usually unpalatable to most theists).

If God commands things because they are right, then there is something about the universe outside of God's control that makes murder wrong (ostensibly). But this is where noncognitivity comes in again: I don't know what it means for there to be something about the universe that makes murder wrong. Does it mean that the universe has a preference: that the universe prefers people not murder? It can't be that because the moral realist will say "it's not a preference, it's a truth." But truth requires a correspondence to reality. What is the correspondence? We can't point to God unless we're just going back to the first horn of Euthyphro; so what is it?

Consider the following statements:
S1) Astro Cat thinks that gouda is better than provolone.
S2) Gouda is better than provolone.

Now, I think that S1 is non-controversially propositional, and in this case is true. What it means to be true is to have some correspondence to reality: in this case, it corresponds to reality that Astro Cat has a particular property, a state of mind, regarding cheeses. However, what if we ask about the status of S2: is it propositional? I do not think that it is, as written: if it is stating that there is something about the universe that makes gouda better than provolone, we don't find any correspondence to reality because we don't know what it means for "is better" to correspond to reality the way that we know "Astro Cat has the property of thinking something" corresponds to reality. I would say S2 is not propositional, has no truth value, and is cognitively empty.

Now consider:
Q1) Astro Cat thinks that she ought to go on charity runs.
Q2) Astro Cat ought to go on charity runs.

Why do these look so similar to the preferential statements S1 and S2? Similar to S1, I think Q1 is noncontroversially propositional (and again true): we can elucidate what about it corresponds to reality, which is again that Astro Cat has some property, some state of mind. We "check" reality and see that there is something there that corresponds to the statement. Yep, there's Astro Cat, she does indeed have that property. (And I am not saying only material things can correspond to reality, perhaps it will surprise you to know I am not an ontological materialist; this is just the example I used).

Now what about Q2? Why does it look so cognitively empty in the same way S2 is? What does it mean for there to be something about the universe that Astro Cat ought to go on charity runs? I don't know where (again, don't necessarily mean physically where) to check for correspondence, I don't know how to check for correspondence, I don't know what there is that is even supposed to be corresponding to reality about this utterance. If we try to flail around and just say "there is a truth about the universe that Astro Cat ought to go on charity runs," we have just used the word "truth" without using a theory of truth like correspondence theory: we have used the word in a meaningless way that doesn't communicate anything. So what is going on if someone insists that Q2 is propositional and true, where is the correspondence?

In the second horn of Euthyphro, if God is just obeying some set of moral truths, what it means for an "ought" to exist must still be elucidated upon. Worse (for the theist), since God is just obeying them, God isn't really part of the explanation. So the theist that takes the second horn of Euthyphro might as well not even mention God at all, since God is just another pawn on the board like the rest of us in this case.

In neither horn of Euthyphro does the theist come out successfully explaining how an "ought" corresponds to reality: either God is the source of the oughts (and so we still just have something forming hypothetical imperatives with oughts and then enforcing them, which is not moral realism), or God is not the source of the oughts and we might as well have never mentioned God in the first place. Which is it?

Being outraged isn't delusional, it's following one's values.

But being outraged is delusional.

Because according to your thinking, there is no sufficient grounds for feeling outraged. No actual "injustice" has ever been done you. So what right have you to your outrage?

And there is no objective reality to your values either. What's truly objective is only that you happen to hold some; but that does not make them right or non-delusional. So, if you were thinking straight, you wouldn't be outraged at all. Your outrage isn't justifable.

Get ahold of yourself, girl: we can't have you having emotional fits that are unrelated to objective reasons!

Outrage is a feeling, the same way that feeling fuzzy and happy is a feeling. I prefer certain kinds of music that make me feel things, I prefer watching films and playing games that make me feel. I laugh, I cry (a lot, I'm a cryer when anything remotely sad or awe-inspiring happens), I get angry, and so on. Our preferences lead us to feel things, and that includes our moral preferences. There's nothing delusional about being outraged over someone going against your values than it's delusional to cry to sad song.

Let's say that there is this idea called color realism.

Inapt analogy. Morality and aesthetics are quite different issues. Nobody ever has to justify their love of pink. Nobody thinks they should...well, except perhaps for your interior decorator, but what does she know of ethics?

One of the best uses of analogy is to show why something isn't analogous. You say morality and aesthetics are different issues, but what is the difference between a favorite color and a distaste for murder? I am not asserting they're the same, I'm asserting it's useful to elucidate exactly how they are different.

Can you tell me why the universe can't have a fact about it that makes pink the best color?

We cannot possibly "owe" anything simply by mistakenly believing we do. If I mistakenly think I've overdrawn my account by $100, that does not at all imply I actually owe the bank that money, if I have not, in reality, overdrawn.

Now, I may mistakenly pay it: but then, I am the fool. And I'm out my $100. The bright fellow keeps his accounts straight, and thus never wrongly imagines he owes anybody anything in the first place.

Valuing altruism is to value doing things that aren't always in our own best interest. That is what it means to value altruism. We don't really control whether we value it or not, either.

And I mean that God is the basic grounds for all objective morals. Ultimately, they come from Him, because of his own nature and will.

If they come from God's will, that's the first horn of Euthyphro.

If they come from God's nature, that's the second horn of Euthyphro.

You cannot have both at once. There is no third horn (though I know some theists insist, mistakenly, that there is). If you insist so, then we will probably have to get into the aseity-sovereignty problem (of which Euthyphro is a microcosm).

The question is, "how does an 'ought' correspond to reality outside of a hypothetical imperative?'"

Answer: it corresponds to God.

Can I make it more clear than that?

Yes, it must be clearer than that; but most of the above is about that. I'm just doubling down on the fact that this is not adequately answered as of now.

Now, you say things like:

What is it about the universe that makes it so that one shouldn't murder (ostensibly)?

Its status as a purposeful creation of God.

God gave you life. Nobody has a right to take it away from you. Anybody who does, is afoul of God, who gave you the right to live. And he has stolen from God a life which was owed to God. So he will answer to God, if not to man.

That sounds like the first horn to me (that what God commands is good because God commands it). But then I refer to my long paragraph above where I point out that this is still just God having a value and then enforcing that value (it's not moral realism): God just has the biggest guns.

[Astro Cat]

IC I fear that my post is long and bloated. If you find it cumbersome to respond to, don't worry about it and just let me know. I will try to type a tl;dr version if so.

If you feel up to it though, then go ahead.

[FlashDangerpants]

You don't have support for an argument that humans cannot invent rights.

Yeah, I do. You never asked for it.

It's this: "rights" need proof. Locke had a rationale for them. But his is premised on Protestantism. Nobody since Locke has been able to invent any such rationale. So he's all we've got. Most modern codes of human rights depend on Locke, but don't take his assumptions -- so much the worse for them, because it leaves them with no basis. Both the US constitution and the UN Declaration of Human Rights parrot Locke. They also know there's no other place to go.

If you think you can get "rights" a different way than Locke did, then I'm all ears. Let's hear it.

That's my argument.

Why do "rights" "need" "proof" "?"
They need broad agreement, they only apply where there is will to obey and to enforce. But "proof" ... I see no requirement and I don't see what it even would mean to "prove" a "right".

[Astro Cat]

You don't have support for an argument that humans cannot invent rights.

Yeah, I do. You never asked for it.

It's this: "rights" need proof. Locke had a rationale for them. But his is premised on Protestantism. Nobody since Locke has been able to invent any such rationale. So he's all we've got. Most modern codes of human rights depend on Locke, but don't take his assumptions -- so much the worse for them, because it leaves them with no basis. Both the US constitution and the UN Declaration of Human Rights parrot Locke. They also know there's no other place to go.

If you think you can get "rights" a different way than Locke did, then I'm all ears. Let's hear it.

That's my argument.

Why do "rights" "need" "proof" "?"
They need broad agreement, they only apply where there is will to obey and to enforce. But "proof" ... I see no requirement and I don't see what it even would mean to "prove" a "right".

I sense a fellow noncog. Suh bro.

[Iwannaplato]

Why do "rights" "need" "proof" "?"
They need broad agreement, they only apply where there is will to obey and to enforce. But "proof" ... I see no requirement and I don't see what it even would mean to "prove" a "right".

And then also...who has proved rights exist or that 'the following rights exist.....'?. Proofs are for math and symbolic logic and the like.
If nothing else history should make everyone question whether rights have been proven - by any secular or religious method, and how did these proofs go in reality?

[FlashDangerpants]

Yeah, I do. You never asked for it.

It's this: "rights" need proof. Locke had a rationale for them. But his is premised on Protestantism. Nobody since Locke has been able to invent any such rationale. So he's all we've got. Most modern codes of human rights depend on Locke, but don't take his assumptions -- so much the worse for them, because it leaves them with no basis. Both the US constitution and the UN Declaration of Human Rights parrot Locke. They also know there's no other place to go.

If you think you can get "rights" a different way than Locke did, then I'm all ears. Let's hear it.

That's my argument.

Why do "rights" "need" "proof" "?"
They need broad agreement, they only apply where there is will to obey and to enforce. But "proof" ... I see no requirement and I don't see what it even would mean to "prove" a "right".

I sense a fellow noncog. Suh bro.

I've never been quite sure if you can be both a non-cog bro and an error theory simp, or if the moral skeptic is required to pick a lane. If the latter, then I would choose the Mackie over the Ayer one (I honestly don't know any post Ayer non-cog stuff though, so I am relatively ignorant). The actual reason though is mostly because I have too little self control to play with the boo/hurrah and not just take it all too far and misbehave.

I do tend to prefer simpler arguments if they are adequate to the task though, and the arg from queerness for instance is overkill in my view. So I am in general a moral skeptic because I think Berlin's argument for pluralism is entirely sufficient to demonstrate that there cannot be a singular cohesive monolithic morality without internal contradiction unless an elimintavie reduction of absurd proportions is carried out. To that I simply add (against the advice of Berlin) that if it doesn't resolve contradictions, it isn't knowledge. Thus no moral knowledge could exist.

We've never really had enough anti-realists active at any time to have a frothy civil war over which version is best. I think Pete Holmes might be a non cognitivist. Usually conversation on such matters is drowned out by Vegetable Ambulance, but he appears to be on vacation, sunning his bits, no doubt recharging to launch some new war against reason in the autumn.

[Sculptor]

Why do "rights" "need" "proof" "?"
They need broad agreement, they only apply where there is will to obey and to enforce. But "proof" ... I see no requirement and I don't see what it even would mean to "prove" a "right".

And then also...who has proved rights exist or that 'the following rights exist.....'?. Proofs are for math and symbolic logic and the like.
If nothing else history should make everyone question whether rights have been proven - by any secular or religious method, and how did these proofs go in reality?

Rights cannot be submitted to the same sort of scrutiny that a scientific theory can; they cannot be "proven" in any meaningful sense.
You might want to compare them to arbitrary goals. But those goals are also unprovable.
For example we might assert that people ought to have the same opportunities. You can establish that as a right. But as you will notice where such a right exists, nowhere has it ever been implemented.
Equality under the law. Fine, a great idea (i think), which would help people feel they were a valued member of the society which expects much if them. Yet once again, no where does this exist, though the right is asserted.
I wonder if ANY right has ever managed to penetrate to a majority of people who would benefit from it.

What would "proof" even look like? What would be the criteria of proof?