Astro Cat wrote: ↑Tue Jul 26, 2022 6:27 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 21, 2022 11:06 pm
...
Well, I don't know you beyond your typed words here, so I can't rightly say what you'd do. I imagine you'd probably take some sort of moral code that you preferred, and try to follow it. You might even be a very nice person, by the standards of somebody else's moral code, too. Most people will choose simply to follow something approximate to whatever they've been raised to believe is good or bad, usually with a little extra laxity thrown into it, in their own particular case. That seems to be human nature.
But if you decided not to do that...say you realized that Atheism warrants no moral codes at all, and decided to act on that...then there wouldn't be any line of thought that would impede you from whatever it is you decided to do on that basis. So, if you were a psychopathic narcissist, say, there would be neither anything to prevent you from acting on that, nor would there be any objective standard to which your society could refer when it came to stopping you or penalizing you for whatever you did.
Absent any rational basis for stopping you, or for you stopping yourself, all your society could to is resort to force of a totally arbitrary kind. Having decided they "don't like" your recreational activities, say, or even if they didn't like some legitimate or harmless action of yours, they could incarcerate or abuse you as much as they had power and will to do...and there would exist no standard to which you, or anyone else, could appeal to tell them, "I don't deserve what you're doing," or "It is enough." You wouldn't have any objective rights, there would be no objective basis of judgment, and there would be no grounds for any appeal; because arbitrary punishment is just that -- arbitrary.
So, in a nutshell, you could do anything you could find a way to get away with. And your society, if they caught you, could reward or punish you, or do nothing at all, on the basis of whatever they felt like doing. On both sides, there would be no actual, objective standard of right and wrong or justice or rights to which any person could refer. Any such thing, like all moral precepts, would simply be arbitrary -- and underneath them, as Nietzsche said, would be nothing but "will to power," rather than truth.
The main thing that I wanted to dispute here is the "if you decided not to do that..." bit. I don't think that goes down the way that you somewhat portray it. It seems to me that some hard form of doxastic voluntarism is false: people do not get to just consciously will themselves to hold certain values or to cease holding certain values.
People do go through belief revision processes that can affect their values (e.g., anecdotally, when I deconverted from Christianity, a few of my values did change over time: consider the easiest one, "I ought to go to Church on Sundays"). They don't seem to consciously do this though. This is because you don't really control what convinces you or what doesn't convince you. If I told you there is an invisible dragon in my garage right now, I imagine that no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't force yourself to
truly believe me. Likewise, if you encounter some very powerful argument or proof, you might find yourself unable to deny that you're persuaded.
Well, Cat, we have to separate two kinds of claims here:
1. Rational consistency,
versus
2. Psychological probability
You are quite rightly pointing out that the probability is that psychologically, people will believe or unbelieve things in particular ways. You point out that they're unlikely to do so by pure will, and more likely to be psychologically "drifted" into a new position, so to speak. Some element of one's changing psychological position is "unconscious," as you say, and can't be done by some exercise of force. Fair enough.
However, I was speaking of #1. That is, the question of what Atheism rationally permits. And as I said, in regards to psychological probability, I think most people will continue to "drift" along, just believing in moral schemes for which Atheism provides no legitimative grounds. But my point is that if they decide to do otherwise, then they will find no resources in Atheism that resist such a move. And that's fairly easy to show.
Now, will people continue indefinitely to believe in morality, a morality their Atheism tells them is irrational? Perhaps: but only to the extent they don't take their Atheism seriously, and don't reason through what it implies, or the extent to which they happen not to see that they have any interest in amorality.
But will that last? I think not. You can't forever convince people never to follow through on the logic of their basic ontological assumptions. If they think the world is essentially amoral, a place in which moral judgments have no objective, rational integrity, then how long can it be until that starts eroding their conviction that they should not always act in their own perceived interests? Not all that long, I think.
So I think that "oughts" are only sensible in the form of hypothetical imperatives (if I value x, then I ought to do/not to do y). When we make moral statements, we're building hypothetical imperatives based off of our values: "If I value altruism, then I ought to consider signing up for that charity run." We don't choose the values we build moral beliefs from, they exist as some combination of nature and nurture. They get revised over time as we are exposed to new information, new perspectives, etc.; but when they do change, it's not because we're deciding them to.
Here's the problem with that theory: "hypothetical imperatives" are only instrumentally useful. They tell me, as you say, what I "should" do, if I want X to happen. But it's not hard to come up with totally immoral imperatives from an instrumental basis.
For example, "If I want my race to dominate, I ought to exterminate the Jews." Or "If I want to control the political landscape, I should have all my opponents shot." Or "If I want to own Cat's television set, I should break in and steal it on a day when I know she's at work." Or, "If a woman refuses my advances, and there's nobody around, and I'm stronger..."
So why did I lose the value leading to "I ought to go to Church on Sundays" but kept values leading to "I ought to care about other people?" I think because I held these values for different reasons: I only valued church contingently on my belief that specifically Christian theism was true, whereas my valuing other people is more primal, more core to my being. It was possible for the the first set of values to change because it was contingent on something being true which was possible to become convinced otherwise. I don't think it's possible for the second set of values to change (barring brain damage or something) because it's a set of values based solely on feeling a certain way: it's not contingent on something else being true*.
Harbal and I were talking about that.
From a Christian perspective, we would say that human beings were "created in the image of God," and thus have an innate awareness of objective morality. This is called "conscience," of course. And everybody has one. Even people in whom it functions less well have one. Perhaps only outright psychopaths don't -- but we can't say for sure, in their case. We just know they don't respond to it; but maybe they still have a conscience.
By contrast, church on Sundays is merely a cultural form. There's no reason it would be embedded in the innate conscience, though it might well be embedded in habits acquired through socialization.
(* -- ok, caveat, I suppose it's contingent on the people in question not being utter bastards, e.g. Nazis or similar, but even then I can't help but to feel some empathy for them: maybe they didn't know any better, maybe this is all they ever knew, maybe they were coerced, etc.)
Well, that's charitable, for sure. At least, it's charitable to the Nazis, if not so much to their victims. But psychological studies also have shown that conscience can be corroded...and remarkably fast.
I remember reading about a study of South American torturers, who had conscience about what they were doing only the first or second time they were commissioned to do it; and afterward, they were able to torture people at will, then go home and kiss their wives and play happily with their kids. But we've all experienced that to some degree, I think: the first time we do something that bothers our conscience, it bothers us twice as much as the second time; and the third and fourth times, considerably less. Within seven or eight recursions, we barely think about it anymore. And that's one of the really dangerous things about a society in which morality is not thought to have any objective reality in the first place. Thinks can "go south" very quickly.
In any case, as a moral noncognitivist in general, most of your post paints this picture that's supposed to sound really negative to the reader...
Does it? I merely meant to be realistic.
If "oughts" have some correspondence to reality outside of hypothetical imperatives as per the moral realists, it seems as though the onus is on them to explain how that is even cognitive, because to me it looks like such statements are a reference without a referent. What is an "ought" and where does it correspond to reality?
Now you're at the core question. But it's a very serious one. If "ought" does not correspond to anything in reality, then what is its force? Why should you or I be concerned about it at all?
But that is the very world that Atheism posits as the real world.
That's the point.
Per Atheism, there is no fact in reality that can be tied to an "ought," as Hume said -- at least, not to an "ought" that is more than instrumental or mechanical, as in "If you don't want to burn, you
ought to get out of the sun now," or "Once we've hit the air filter three times with a wrench, this car
ought to start." Those "oughts" however, have no hint of moral content in them. They don't pass a value judgment on the rightness of tanning, or say that a car is immoral if it does not start on cue.
But let's take one that does. "People
ought to be able to love whom they want."
That is presented as a moral claim, is it not? It's clearly not merely mechanical (as in, if the parts fit), or instrumental (as in, if we want to avoid marches and demonstrations that are inconvenient). The force that such an axiom wants is objective and moral (as in, if you don't allow this, you people are tyrants and haters, and those are bad things to be).
But what validity can a claim made on objective moral basis be, if we live in a world with no objective morality? Then the claim thins out considerably, amounting to no more than an "I want."
And who needs to care what you and I might want?
