Astro Cat wrote: ↑Thu Jul 28, 2022 3:09 am
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)
Immanuel Can wrote: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.
Astro Cat wrote:
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.
Immanuel Can wrote:
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.
Immanuel Can wrote:
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.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:But to an altruist, yes, those events are wrong, infuriating, terrible.
But they are deluded, you must say...
Astro Cat wrote: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!
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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?
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote: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.
Immanuel Can wrote: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.
They might start to wonder whether color realists even know what they're talking about!