thomyum2 wrote: ↑Thu May 28, 2026 7:51 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu May 21, 2026 4:16 am
thomyum2 wrote: ↑Thu May 21, 2026 3:37 am
To be continued.
I've read your response carefully, and can see you're working through the issues with great thoughtfulness. And I realize you're not done, so I don't want to jump the gun. But maybe I can offer a couple of tentative caveats, as you continue.
It’s been more than a week since you responded and I’m only just now getting some time to think through this some more. I recall Wittgenstein once said “
This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.’” and I often take that as consolation for my slowness.
Not a problem at all.
You're right: often a quick answer is not, perhaps, the best-thought-out answer. I'm appreciating your pacing and thoughtfulness...for me, it's yielding a very rewarding conversation. So I'm quite content to move at a pace at which both of us are able to think clearly and be perfectly fair to one another. It's what philosophy should be like, I think.
All this is still a work-in-progress for me, but I do want to continue the conversation and to offer a few more thoughts before too much more time elapses. Also, it seems like this is a better spot for what we’re talking about than the environmental ethics thread, so I’ve moved it over here.
That's quite fine. It came up on the environmental thread because the original poster could not offer any grounds for his supposition that humans owed non-humans, or the environment, or even each other anything. I was pressing him on that a bit, and he was a bit annoyed that I was: but that was the original relevance that led us into these grounding issues.
They work well in either locale.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu May 21, 2026 4:16 amYou rightly understand the nature of my question: what is a secular reason for morality. And you rightly see that secularism offers no such reason. It cannot explain why we must do/not do this or that. The stock response I get to this is something along the lines of, "Well, secularists are still often moral, so maybe that's as good as it needs to be." But that just begs the question, and requests another: if human beings have some sort of conscience, some sort of impulse to be moral, how does such a thing get explained in secular terms? And again, it cannot be.
So here’s my position on this: reason cannot derive truths out of nothing – there has to be a premise or starting point of something that is believed without proof or prior chain of reasoning, some foundational belief that is based either on first-hand experience or acceptance through faith or trust and that is not contingent upon something else.
Agreed. These are what are traditionally called "first principles," or "founding suppositions."
We all have to begin with a kind of personal commitment to set of beliefs. That is as true for the secularist as the religious or ideological person. The secularist has to assume something like, "The material world is all that really exists," perhaps, or "The current state of the world is the result of an unguided, directionless, progressive evolution initiated by a cosmic explosion." Whatever he chooses, it's going to be something he hasn't proved -- he wasn't around to see whatever started this little show, nor were scientific instruments in place to record it. He's going to have to say, "This is what people I respect have told me happened, and I have chosen to believe them." That's an act of faith, just as much as the religious person who says, "This world looks to me to have the hallmarks of Creation in it." Neither can manufacture absolute proof; rather, they operate by some sort of indicative evidence, plus faith.
So our first question to form a first premise would be something like, "Do we live in a world that is more likely to have been created by an Intelligence, or in the kind of accident-plus-time world that is supposed in most current secular accounts? And the answer to that question is going to delimit what kind of deductions can be made from the evidence around us, from which we form our second premise.
If the world has been created by God, we would expect certain features: order, of course, and complexity, of course...but also intelligibility and plan...even things like a teleological purpose or an inherent meaning to the creation. There would logically be a divine intention for such a world, and one could get that intention right or wrong...which would suggest we look for truth, and also for meaning, and something like morality, as well. But that would be a deduction from that first premise, of course. A different premise yields different expectations.
If the world was the product of a cosmic happenstance or accident of some kind, what we should expect changes. It would be surprising to find order and complexity coming out of a pure accident like the Big Bang, say. But if they are observable, we'd need a secular explanation. It would be even more surprising to find out this order was intelligible to some particular beings accidentally created. But maybe we can find an explanation for that, too. What we would know not to expect would be any teleological purpose or meaning: accidents, happenstances, explosions in the cosmos do not impart or imply meaning or a particular direction to what's here. It would be surprising to think that a cosmic explosion, or a black hole, or an impersonal other such thing "intended" anything by our being here. And truth...well, how would we know that truth was a thing we should seek, if being deluded was more comforting? And as for morality -- and here's the cruncher -- how would we ever expect an accidental universe to contain such realities as some things that are to be understood as "right" and others that are to be understood as "wrong"? It's just not the kind of thing one expects from an accident.
That is the case whether one is religious or secular. Reason enters the picture not to create the foundation, but only to derive the precepts or specifics of the moral code once the foundation is established.
Right. But the first premises, the first principles, are quite different, and they imply quite different entailments. I submit to you that a secularist has no reasonable expectation of there being any such thing as morality, on the basis of the worldview he declares he believes in as his first premise.
What I’m suggesting is that many people who don’t take a position of faith in God, still accept morality on faith,
This, I think, is exactly right. But here's the problem: the version of morality that most secularists accept tends to be a slightly-weakened version of whatever religious morality was already circulating in his particular society. For instance, he might agree that murder is immoral, but make exceptions for abortion, euthanasia, or the killing of enemy combatants. That murder is immoral, he's acquired from a Jewish or Christian moral ethos; his view will not be held in Islamic lands, for example. And as you say, he takes it for granted...just as he took his first principle on faith.
But here, the secularist has made an additional weakness in his thinking. Whereas the Theist is able to start working deductively from his first premise, the secularist has now had to generate
two assumptive premises: first, his belief in an accidental universe, and then his adoption of a morality that has no logical or deducible basis in that first premise.
...and that starting point (from which moral principles can be derived through reason) is the basic premise that other persons have rights and which my duty is to respect.
That is another example of what I'm talking about, for sure. If the first premise is that the universe and all it contains, including human beings, came into being by way of cosmic accident or happenstance, then how do we deduce from that that we have some duty to "respect" some set of "rights" that others have? How do we get there, from that first premise? I can't see any way we do. So again, the "rights" are completely assumptive, and not consonant with the worldview we've posited, and so is our supposed "duty to respect" these "rights." Reason, logic, sequential deduction...these things have not even had a chance to get going yet, because we're still dealing from another level of unfounded belief.
The basic sense of this is that if I ask a person to respect my life and avoid harming me, then my reciprocal duty is to do the same.
Why? That doesn't at all seem obvious or deductive.
If, in asserting it, we were drawing on something like, "Love your neighbour as yourself," then we'd only be borrowing in an unwarranted way from the Christian worldview, not from anything inherently secular. And if we aren't drawing on anything at all, why would "reciprocation" be a more obvious or right thing to do than seizing the advantage of non-reciprocal exchange? Indeed, in many cases, one can get oneself ahead precisely by NOT reciprocating, so long as one's non-reciprocation goes undetected or unpunished. In a secular world, why must one not do that?
This is articulated in different ways – e.g. the Golden Rule, the commandment to love one’s neighbor, the declaration that all men are created equal and have certain rights, etc.
These are all Christian artifacts, though. What makes a secularist obligated to assume them?
But these all boil down to the fundamental notion that persons have rights, and in having rights also have reciprocal duties.
I'm all in favour of the idea that when we have rights we also have responsibilities. Good on you for keeping those scales balanced; many people forget that the two go together. Nevertheless, I'm puzzled by the secularists' confidence that either of these things -- the rights and the responsibilities -- actually exist at all. I see nothing in his worldview that rationalizes, empowers or warrants such a deduction.
So to summarize it in a little different way, it seems to me secular people can and do hold these foundational beliefs in righteousness, goodness, justice, love, even in the absence of a professed faith in a supreme being. In a sense, these things are equivalent to God for secularist (again, Tillich’s "ultimate concern") even though secularists don’t articulate it as such. I don't find it problematic to not to have a specific 'explanation' that we have a duty, since it is foundational in itself and is intuitively taken as true.
I agree...they do this. But we're still stuck with the problem that nothing in their first principles, nothing in their beliefs about what the world is or how it came into being, connects to that belief. Again, it seems obvious to me they've merely responded to social programming by a Christian or perhaps Jewish ethos, and adopted beliefs that are unharmonious with their own first principles.
So while I'm glad most secularists live like Christians, I'm concerned that, for the secularist, no rationale connects their present actions with their first principles. It seems obvious to me that when they really start to believe their own first principles, they will find there is no reason at all for them to feel obligated to persist in believing in any particular morality, rights or responsibilities; and when incentives are big enough, they will have no reason not to abandon such beliefs immediately. And I don't think that bodes well for the future.
This is exactly what Nietzsche discovered. He declared the death of God first; and then he declared the end of morals. There was strict logic in his deduction there. And if he discovered it, how long will it take other secularists to perform a similar deduction?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu May 21, 2026 4:16 am
But there's a deeper problem with that observation. It may be that people do X or Y. But that does not grant durability, authority or moral force to their doing of X or Y. And this is easily seen with reference to two of humanity's oldest habits, prostitution and slavery. Both are, by the morality you and I recognize, immoral; but both are also ancient practices of the human race. The fact that people do them, even when the majority of the world did, doesn't move them from the category of the immoral to the moral, does it?
And deeper still: there's a huge difference between being moral for reasons one understands, and behaving in certain ways for no reason one can possibly understand. The religious person can say there is authority and intent behind moral precepts -- whether that religion gets them right or wrong -- but secularism cannot even establish that much. There is no authority or intent behind the moral habits the secularist practices...only habituation, which is no stronger than habit.
I agree with you that the fact that a person, or a majority of people, do something does not determine what is moral or not – I’m very much against the relativist argument that morality is subjective or purely cultural.
Good thinking. I agree.
But I think it’s important to distinguish here between moral foundations versus the particular moral precepts or codes or laws that are derived from them and apply to specific individual or historical circumstances. To use your examples of prostitution and slavery, I see two possibilities here: 1) a person who engages in these could be amoral (i.e. have no foundational belief in the obligation not to harm others); or 2) they could be moral but not recognize their obligation to refrain these things because of reasoning or cultural norms. For example, they may consider the particular person to be an ‘other’ or non-human and therefore not someone to whom they have an obligation; or they may recognize a moral obligation but simply fail to understand that their actions are causing harm (e.g. they may rationalize prostitution as mutually consensual, or slavery as being beneficial to persons who would otherwise not have a means to live).
Again, I agree. People do rationalize in this sort of way.
So I hope you see what I’m getting at here – that the foundational duty to be moral is rooted in a fundamental commitment to how we recognize and treat others, which is something that transcends whether a person is religious or secular.
That's what I'm questioning. I don't think it is at all secular. I think it's another case of the secularist being culturally habituated to a way of thinking about the world that is harmonious with the Theistic one, but logically disjointed from any secular first principles.
The secularist has assumed the axiom, "Thou shalt treat others as thou art treated" gratuitously. Nothing in his own worldview requires such a commitment out of him. He's simply borrowed it, but without the grounding that makes it compelling to the Theist.
However, the particulars of time and place, culture and situation, are variable - which actions or behaviors could cause harm in one situation may not do so in another.
Well, yes: the term "harm" is controversial -- what one person considers "harm" may not be "harm" in the view of another. And there's the very real likelihood, in the absence of any fixed conception of "harm," that each agent will simply use his own preferences as the definer of "harmfulness." This would leave the "harmed" person devoid of grounds to protest.
So to respond to your statement about the different between “being moral for reasons one understands, and behaving in certain ways for no reason one can possibly understand” – yes, we do very much need reason to help us ‘understand’ the consequences of our actions and to be able to know how are actions affect others, but I don’t believe that the basic sense of duty to not harm others is something that can be proved by rational argument or needs to be understand. A person with a moral sense can learn to change their behavior, but an amoral person won't become moral by hearing an argument.
Well, there is no cure for a truly amoral person, of course. But we're more considering a logical and rational person, are we not?
So what's important is whether or not a line of thought shows non-harming behaviour to be morally-imperative or not. And a Theistic worldview gives reasons for such an imperative; but how do we get any from the secular worldview? Does it go something like,
"The universe began by accident, and is without teleology, meaning and morals; but you should not harm your neighbour."
How does that make a lick of sense?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu May 21, 2026 4:16 amThe "endowed by his Creator" and "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are not mere rhetorical flourishes. The men who wrote the document believed they had force -- decisive force, in fact. And they were borrowing freely from John Locke, who laid out the reasons why all men must have the three fundamental rights (including property, rather than pursuit). His explanation, if you look it up (as I have) is that on what Locke called "The Great Day," God will judge men for their deeds; consequently, and logically, therefore, it is God who gives life, God who grants liberty, and God who bestows property -- all with the view that a man may live, make choices, be a steward of God's creation, and then return to God an answer for his responsibility at the Great Judgment. Consequently, Locke argued, any man who deprives another of either life, liberty or property is working against God, defying God's purposes, and harming himself. He will face his own accounting for what he did to other men and women, and how he either respected or restricted the "inalienable" properties God had bestowed on all...the right to life, to liberty and to property.
This works for a Christian. A Christian can say, "I know why I recognize these fundamental rights, and why it is my obligation to be moral." The Christian worldview fits the Christian ethic. And the same remains true, even if secularists argue they don't believe in that worldview; right or wrong, it still is logically the grounds for the Christian ethic. There's consistency there.
By contrast, a secularist can only say, "I don't know why anybody has to be moral...I feel like it, but I don't know why." The secular worldview does not fit any ethic at all. It fits amorality. It offers no logical grounds why any ethics are obligatory at all. There's no judgment, no Judge, no duty to a particular teleology or plan, and no kind of code. The secularist can borrow from others, but not logically. His own worldview tells him he's lying to himself, pretending things are moral, when really, nothing ever is. And as Nietzsche told him, he might well be better to get over it all and become a kind of superman or
ubermensch, somebody "beyond good and evil," who doesn't even worry about such things. But he's too scared or too habituated to do so, perhaps.
"The respecting of God is the beginning of wisdom." So says the Bible. But it's also the beginning of morality. If there is no God, then neither do right and wrong exist. There is, as Nietzsche insisted, only "the will to power" as exercised by different people with different levels of courage. But power, not truth or rightness, is what determines what gets passed off as "good" or "evil," though both are mere ruses used by the weak to control the strong. And that's the end of the secular story.
I find your interpretation of the Declaration in this context a little confusing, but don't want to get into that and take things off track.
Please feel free to ask. My intention is to be clear, but I'm moving rather quickly in the above. If there's anything I have not made sufficiently clear, please feel free to ask at your leisure.
But in this discussion, you bring up the idea of ‘judgment’, and you’ve also used ‘compelling’ – and that a moral argument needs to be able have ‘force’. This raises a lot of thoughts for me about the nature of freedom and how a person can truly act morally if their freedom is compromised by threats of force or judgment or otherwise ‘compelled’.
That's my fault, and a side-effect of my word-choice. I always struggle to find a synonym for something that appeals to the right-thinking conscience, but cannot be mistaken for an invoking of coercion or violence. I need a word stronger than mere "reasoning," but less potentially authoritarian than "demands" or "compels" or "forces."
The idea I'm trying to capture is the "force" that our own consciences exert on us when we know what we ought (or ought not) to do in a moral situation. The word "duty" always sends people spinning, because then they think I mean some sort of enforced drudgery, whereas what I mean is the imperative inducements of the personal conscience. But we do need some word to capture the sensation we have when we know the right thing to do, but doing the right thing is going to turn out to be hard, unwanted by us, or to our personal loss. Conscience does have a kind of "force," though its the soft force of recognition of a moral imperative, rather than some kind of external coercion.
If morality is based in ‘love of neighbor’, then that is something that must be given freely – acts performed under compulsion or out of fear of possible punished and not acts of love at all.
This is the confusion of meaning I'm trying to avoid. I don't mean compulsion, or lack of freedom, or the threat of punishment. What I mean, again, is that when we hear the commandment, "Love thy neighbour," our own consciences make us aware we are in the presence of a true moral imperative -- something that we
ought to do. We realize that there's something intrinsically good in practicing that, something that's severely lacking if we were to say the opposite, "Thou shalt shaft thy neighbour."
But what is it we are recognizing? We are recognizing a correspondence between the axiom that is quoted to us, and the universal moral law. And when we feel such a correspondence, we feel compelled...duty bound...obligated...in debt...to obey that axiom. (We may not; but when we do, we also sense we are violating something sacred.)
Let me wrap us by tying this to the ‘beginning of wisdom’ citation (which I think is more often translated to ‘fear of God’ rather than ‘respecting of God’ - this is echoed in the hymn saying “’twas grace that taught my heart to fear”).
You are quite correct. But "fear" is old English, taken from the KJV; and most people today associate it with something like terror or anxiety, whereas in the old English, it referred to a
sense of reverential awe. So I updated the translation, just to avoid misunderstanding.
...people have an inner sense of the urgency and necessity of doing what is right, even without believing in God .
Christians would call this "conscience." They would say that all men have one, so it's unsurprising. But they would also point out that conscience can be subverted by acculturation or ideology, unfortunately, so that things which we ought to know are right may appear -- depending on the culture or ideology into which a person has been indoctrinated -- as wrong, and wrong things may appear to be right. And I think examples of this sort of reversal-of-conscience-through-acculturation abound, and are not hard to produce.
But conscience, when it's functioning aright, is the faculty God has given all of us to sense the requirements of the universal moral law.
So in this sense, it seems to me that this sense of right and wrong is a fundamental and ‘self-evident’ part of human nature, and can precede faith as well as result from faith, and is why I argue that morality can serve as a foundation for both secular and religious and isn’t something that requires a metaphysical explanation.
I hope I've made clear why I think this is not the case.
But to reiterate: the secularist's first principles do not align with his belief in any morality. The secularist may behave morally -- as indeed, many do -- but he cannot derive any warrant for his belief in morality from his own first principles. And so his commitment to morality cannot become durable or well-founded. At some point, he'll find that he's free to disbelieve in it entirely, as Nietzsche found.
Appreciate your patience; look forward to discussing more.
Likewise. Your reflections are very profound and insightful. I'm enjoying the conversation.