Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Mon Nov 07, 2022 9:08 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Nov 07, 2022 12:17 am
Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 8:14 am
Obdurate cynic? Perhaps you mean rational skeptic.
Perhaps not.
To repeat:
Even if true, non-moral premises can't entail a moral conclusion, such as: abortion is morally wrong.
I've heard your arguments, Peter. And if you believe them, you either have to become a complete amoralist or moral nihilist, or any appeal at all to moral standards coming from you will be rationally-inconsistent. I doubt you're personally amoral, so I must take you for somebody inconsistent.
We might add that the old line, which others, if not you often float, to the effect that they are "sociological phenomena" puts moral phenomena merely on par with all other such accidents of history; it fails to justify any moral assessment made therefrom.
For instance, it cannot be deduced from the fact that one person prefers no murder that I should prefer no murder. It cannnot be deduced from the agreement of two or three that I am obligated, either. So it cannot be deduced from a thousand, a million, or all the people currently on the face of the planet that I have moral obligations. All that can be concluded is that the most powerful persons or groups gets to force the others to do actions they prefer...but all are equally amoral.
Yet I have never met a single person who is able to live as if that's the truth. If you're an actually-consistent amoralist, you're the very first.
And all this dodges the question that the existence of any moral intuitions should compel us to ask: namely, if morality is all bunk, how has it come about that people have evolved an overwhelmingly strong belief that they are not? They may not agree on particular precepts, but it's a universal intuition that morality of some sort exists and is compulsory. How do we account for such a thing even existing, if we presuppose the world is nothing more than an accidental collocation of atoms propelled by some accidental original "bang" or "singularity"? What force, law or set of circumstances has created a universal belief in that which the amoralist has to believe is entirely a delusion?
The moralist may not be able to show the grounds of his moral precepts once the cynic cuts him off from appeals to God, to history, to human nature, to moral intuitions, to sociology, and so on. But that doesn't make the moralist wrong.
It just means the cynic is demanding the wrong type of evidence. He's looking for something strictly empirical, something deducible from facts-presumed-tio-be-accidental-themselves. In other words, his epistemic standard is incoherent. His demand that morality should have material grounds is no more sensible than the demand that physics should have music, or rocks should have minds. He's just looking in the wrong place, and saying, "I don't see anything."
Non-moral premises can't produce moral conclusions.
This is true. But the presumption of the cynic is that reality is composed of non-moral premises. He thinks creation "means" nothing; so not surprisingly, he simply obdurately refuses any arguments that are premised differently...such as that the creation IS a creation.
But he doesn't win much that way, because people don't have to start with his gratuitious premise. Most of us find it really compelling to think that there is meaning in things, and morals too; and that these things are not just inexplicably evolutionary patterns that "pop up" randomly in a mind severed from its evolutionary past.
Now, you don't find that. For you, Hume's argument is a complete closer. But Hume assumed there was no God, so there could be no meaning to natural facts. The only meaning, he thought, had to be an expression of the emotions of the speaker (he never even went so far as to explain why an evolved chimp would need moral emotions, nor did it seem to occur to him that emotions don't require any agreement from anybody else, and can't convey moral duty anymore than facts-detached-from-all-values can.
But if Christians are right, then abortion is wrong when nobody wants to say it is, even if the preponderance of a particular society were to say it's fine, or even if ever last human being in the world thought killing children was just jolly. It is wrong because God made parents to care for their children, and children to be cared for by their parents. That's in their design, empirically and actually. And the butchery of infants is not, under any circumstances, a neutral act. It is always a stark violation, a blasphemy, one might say, the wanton destruction of a creature made in the image of God Himself.