Harbal wrote: ↑Thu Nov 02, 2023 12:56 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Nov 01, 2023 11:50 pm
Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Nov 01, 2023 11:10 pm
Could you give some examples of justice systems that are oriented to respond to objective moral facts,
Originally, all of them.
If you go back to the most ancient sources, such as the the Justinian Code, or the Laws of Hammurabi, or the
Torah, you see this in abundance. Objective morality is always tied to the authority and sacredness of the gods or God. If you even go to more recent codes, such as the English Common Law or the Declaration of Independence, you find the same thing: the reasoning behind the laws is tied to reverence for the Creator.
I was under the misapprehension that our modern law was more to do with fairness and justice in respect to the citizen, rather than reverence for the Creator, but without researching the individual laws of a particular legal system to discover the thought behind them, I can't confirm that.
I can confirm the religious origins of law. And if you check out the history of law, I promise you'll find things as I say about that. It'll be one of the first things you find out if you consult even a totally secular book on the history of law. As skewed ideologically skeptical, it may go on to try to say, "We've gotten rid of all that," somehow; but I'm certain you'll find it won't deny the origins law actually has. It's just too easy to verify.
I do find it hard to imagine God being mentioned much in our modern law making processes, though. Still, I can't say he isn't.
Well, He
was explicitly mentioned in law at least up to the middle of the last century, in the West. But you're not wrong to suppose that many such references have been arbitrarily expunged in the last few years.
There's an "Enlightenment" metanarrative, in particular, that invites modern people to imagine that the 18th Century, in particular, managed to sever our tradition from all metaphysical content, and provided that we should continue on something like "pure rationality" afterward. However, that's historically fraudulent: the truth is that the 18th Century, like every other century, proceeded on a partial and confused basis -- some people bought into the "enlightenment" idea, particularly affluent, elitist, academic Westerners, but not the majority of people. The "drip down" effect would prove slow, gradual and partial...pretty much up to the '60s, when challenges to the smug and self-confident "enlightement" narrative began to appear from within secularism itself.
But to summarize, the problem with merely wiping out mention of the Grounds of laws while trying to retain the laws themselves is that the authority behind those laws is now invisible...and essentially absent. Today's lawmakers tend to 'float' laws on nothing but legislative fiat: that is, the law is said to be right because it's the law.
Of course, that's embarassingly circular reasoning. What people really want to know, and need to know, is "Is this law just?" or "Is this the right and fair law?" or "Why should I respect this law, other than that you'll hit me if I don't?" And this floating conception of law cannot respond to any such questions.
IC wrote:Harbal wrote:And given that these objective moral truths never change, how do we account for the fact that laws often do?
That's easy. That's because human laws, at their best, are attempts to reflect the objective moral principles in code form. At their worst, they turn out to be merely subjective and arbitrary dictates of men who wish to represent their will as objective, whereas they are only asserting their subjective wills. But the whole reason we can judge such forgeries at all is with reference to the standards they ought to have reflected, and have failed to do; that is, by reference to the concept of an objective, universal, ideal code of moral truth.
Ah, so it isn't that society can't function on law that is formulated on subjective and arbitrary dictates of men, it's just that you don't like the way it functions when that is the case.
Of course a society can function on subjective and arbitrary laws: it's called "dictatorship." That's when somebody just "dictates" laws to you, and you have to follow them because of the power they will wield against you if you fail to do so.
Not a recommended arrangement, of course.
So let's start at the beginning: How can we human beings know what is genuinely objective moral truth when it is presented to us as such?
There are various ways, but some more important than others.
The first way is that there are natural regularities in our makeup that show us that certain things are harmful to the way we are designed, and certain things are helpful to it. For example, that which helps us to reproduce our society and grow turns out to be the right thing for us to do. That sort of revelation-in-nature is available to everybody, if they are prepared to read nature. So one does not even have to be religious in any sense to get some hints from that direction.
But they're only hints, of course. And they're broad things, like that which tends to flourishing, for example. The problems with them are twofold, at least: first, that they have to be deduced, and something's not always right with the deducer. The second is that even when they are correctly deduced, they tend to cover only very broad cases, leaving too many details to be worked out for us to generate a code of behaviour out of them. But what they do give us is a starting point: the realization that we live in an orderly, purposeful, teleological universe, and hence there is a God who has designed it. This "natural law" kind of knowledge is universal: all ancient cultures throughout history have had it. And even today, the vast majority of people (96% of the world's population, according to CIA Factbook) thinks it's at least possible, and more often likely, that there's a God.
But that's clearly not enough. Even if the smartest among us could deduce the right moral laws from natural observation, how would we know that they were really right? I mean, there are some convincing frauds around...gurus, shaman, autocrats, ideologues...and some philosophers, among them. How would we, the average Joes, know which of these conflicting sources, all of which sound very sure of themselves, and perhaps too sophisticated for us to even follow, we should regard as telling us the moral truth?
So there are only two courses left: one is that
we don't know anything about morality. We have an annoying faculty called "conscience" that inexplicably bothers us about it, but like reading from nature, and like the gurus, we can't tell when it's leading us right or wrong. Subjectivity is clearly treacherous, too: because different people come to wildly different and sometimes seriously conflictual conclusions...and we just can't afford to live in a place that operates like Ukraine or Gaza all the time, where subjective disputes are settled merely by who has the most tanks and who fires the last rocket.
So there's another course: God, presuming He exists, would be capable of being more explicit with his instructions than what we have in nature, and could give us the criteria for judging among the gurus, and could impart to us standards that would allow us to judge when our own subjective feelings or consciences were leading us right or wrong. So the question, then, comes down to a simple one:
has God spoken? If He has, where would it be, and how would we know it when we found the right source of moral information?
But here I pause, because I've given a lot to chew on here, and I owe you a response to this lot of stuff before I suggest anything further, I would say.
