Your debating style is that you are right and anyone who disagrees is wrong.

It is unproductive.

You win.

This premise is not true.

There is left and right, up and down, wet and dry without an authority, why does this distinction need one?

It's not morality that concludes our values, its our values which determine our morality. Because we want happiness by nature, there are better and worse ways to achieve it when living in large groups.

chiefs aren't the same as regular folks...come on, that's a universal truth that you should be arguing for your side, the powerful are always above the laws that the rest of us have to live with.




Pretend I spelled decay correct.





Which would be how morality would evolve yes?




So you believe that reason and morality are separate? Does this mean that reason is your authority for morality?



Sometimes its just a joke

I am not debating you.

You haven't got the knowledge base to debate the topic. You haven't got the set of skills necessary to make a solid logical and reasonable construct.

Like I said earlier, it would take years and study and a desire to understand how to formulate idea's without contradiction for you to gain the skill set to work your way up a philosophical system from a starting premise. Your brain got broken somewhere along the line. Superstition had something to do with it.

It is unproductive to you, surely, to have me tell you are wrong, but sometimes I just have to point out drivel when I see it and I haven't got the next few years free to teach you how to see why.

So morality is an individual science. It changes with the person?

People in India see poor people and for them morality is to let them suffer.

They are culturally influenced. The question is did this grow from their religion, or did their religion grow from their culture?

Sorry for wasting your time.

Thanks for trying.

Translation: "I'm way out of my league, so I'll turn the tables and make him feel like he is." Well played...I think.

Oh and how bout coming up with a new slang term for God, the whole zombie mystical dragon lord warrior thing is getting old, not offensive, just old and repetitive. I'm sure you can think of something waaaaaaaay better than that.

Yes, that's the exact translation.

Good one.



The thing is, my uninspired dotard, your Gods don't deserve better than that.

i'm so disappointed

It is amusing how deficient the 10 commandments are in terms of representing a complete recitation of moral imperatives. In fact, only two have traditionally been codified in the realm of criminal law, and those two are also arguably the only two that actually have to do with morality (namely don't kill or steal). But no gods before me; no graven images; no taking god's name in vain; keep sabbath holy; honor mother and father; no adultery; no bearing of false witness and no coveting the neighbor's house really have nothing to do with morality and none of those forbidden actions are against the law anywhere in the US.

EDIT: now that i think about it i suppose bearing false witness is against the law.

That's one way sure




I believe we can use reason to generate an objective morality. That's different than basing our morality on an "authority". Water is hydrogen + oxygen not because someone says so. In the same way murder is not wrong simply because someone (or something) says so, rather its because it harms our collective happiness and we can prove that it does.



Yeah I know it was, but it was a good opportunity to spell out a little of the logic.



No, quite the opposite. I'm saying there's a fact of the matter as to what kind of actions best serve our collective well being. That's why I'm not a cultural relativist. I think some cultures have their morality wrong.



Not sure where you got that idea. In India the idea of giving to the poor is much more commonly accepted than it is here, which is how so many beggars are able to survive.



Religion and culture are not two separate things. Religion is a subset of culture.

in your OP you implied that we all agree your definition of morality exists. i don't.

the good or bad of behavior comes from context. it does not exist as an intrinsic property of the behavior itself.

So Hitchens was wrong when he said morality evolved?

Because your definition of morality is that the situation determines the morality.

stealing is considered wrong because it's socially detrimental, not because there is some sort of evil floating in the air waiting to attach to the action.



it's not that simple. that might work in some cases, but in others different schemes have apparently been more beneficial. for example some species have evolved to take a single mate for life.



our sense of the wrongness of an action either comes from our evolved instinct and/or common sense learned from experience.



if you're going to use evolution as part of your argument you should study what is known about animal behavior more. virtually everything humans think of as moral behavior exists at least in
a simplified form somewhere else in the animal kingdom, including altruism.

A physical truth s much different than a moral truth. Should we clone humans is a moral issue, whether or not we can is a science issue, they exist seperate.





In order for a morality 'to be wrong' doesn't there have to be a right way? Who gets to decide that any cuture is wrong?




Hmm. The Indian's I have talked to said that the poor are considered to have lived a bad previous life and are paying for their past sins.
We had a group of them stay at our church for a week and I talked to a coupe of thems a few times about their country.Plus I have two friends who were missionaries. AND I saw Slumdog.



I would argue that religion is a foundation of culture, not a subset.

no reason to think it didn't, although it's probably more a matter of social selection than individual. hitchens was probably referring to social evolution.



the context meaning primarily the nature of the consequences determines it.

What about stealing to feed your family?





If you were in charge of writing down the framewrok for how to evolve a species, this would be a dumb thing to write down.
It goes against the basic premise of evolutionery survival of the species.




Ah yes, common sense, it is just right to think something is right or wrong. Which works very well as long as there is a right and wrong to compare it to.
Without a foundational right and wrong meter, then common sense is a little too subjective.




And yet no one would expect any animal to act in a moral fashion. Cherry picking certain traits in animals while ignoring the rest of thir behavior is like giving a Catholic priest who molested a kid a pass since he also helped the poor.

If he was referring to morality, then you would say he was wrong?



If the consequenses determine the nature of an act...then how is this different than the so called argument that Christians are moral because we fear hell?

a moral truth reduces to a physical truth when you take the time to break it down to specifics.

Yea it's weird how almost every country that was founded on these principles has done so well...

I guess they didn't realize how bad it was to use Judeo-Christian morals in their countries underpinnings.

Really too bad how aweful the countries that actively denied these principles have done so bad. I mean really really bad.
Like by a factor of 100

No, a moral truth by everyone elses definition is a truth on it's own, regardless of the circumstances.

Unless you hold that there are no absolutes of course.

moral judgments are frequently subjective. i already said that.



again it's not that simple. it's not hard to imagine an environmental situation that would favor mating for life with limited procreation, particularly
if there are limited resources available.



it works very well if there is a pattern of consequence to compare it to.




tell that to lassie

I'm arguing that they are the same in that there is a right answer that can be discovered.



Yes, there is a right way. I'm proposing that we can generate an objective standard for what's right based on what best serves our collective well-being. Then we can show how things like suicide bombing do not serve our well-being.



But I'm married to one! Yeah some Hindus think they are paying for their past sins, but that doesn't mean you mistreat them.

has anybody but you said that?




duh

this whole discussion is quite interesting, but i'm not sure if we're talking about prescriptive (motive-based) morality or descriptive (action/results-based) morality, or both.

i don't think that we can really talk about the cause or root of morality until we really get at what we're dealing with when we make a moral decision, is all.

So we all got together and decided that X is wrong. This allows us as a society to enforce this subjective morality on each other.
And if someone argues that X is not wrong, it is the majority that decides that they are wrong?





Not mistreat them, just allow them to suffer on their own..a passive mistreatment if you will.

But if you married an Indian woman, then you have a better insight than me and I concede.

Yea I admit this is kind of unfocused.

I was hoping to hear the Hitchens argument that morality evolved as crow pointed out many many threads ago.

Instead I'm in a circular reasoning explanation that since man decides something is right, that makes it right.

I hold that there is a fixed standard that is outside our views, opinions or decisions.

I don't think this is an original idea..but if it is than I am officially copyrighting it now and no one can use this without paying me royalties





Absolutely sure?

bg - just curious....do you more or less assume evolution to be true or are you just indulging the idea for the purpose of debate?

im also curious about this thing you said



can you elaborate on this? do you feel that without religion there can be no culture? what exactly do you mean by culture in this context? would you extend religion to just a general idea of some sort of spirituality or sense of something greater than self in this case or do you specifically mean organized religion?

just interested in some of your ideas is all.

Again you atheist only do the right thing because you fear the consequences?

Knock it off, that's us christian's motives!



You win

as far as i am concerned you need a God for this to be true. most atheists duck out and dodge this and call me dirty names and accuse me of being a moral nihilist when i bring this up.

without a god we have no rubric by which to measure the "rightness" or "wrongness" or actions. there is no difference between raping and killing a child and donating everything you own to the poor.

this does not mean that we can't agree to eliminate certain behaviors or actions in order to live together though.

this also does not explain why i think raping and killing a child is a horrible thing to do. that i can't explain.

Things adapting to changing environments...sure. Dog breading teaches us that we can evolve a breed.

The root cause of all animals, life and man..no




vb was trying to say culture was the main thing, and religion was just a subset..a part of.

I would argue that history shows us that the religion of a people defines their culture much much more than the reverse.
James Michner once wrote; "If my husband was born with a different religion, he would have been a different man" in the book about the Aztecs.

Do we really have any examples of a society founded completely devoid of a religion?

i guess that what i'm getting at is that sometimes we might achieve a positive result through base motives, or do something "bad" for the "right reasons." if either of these situations occur, are we acting morally or immorally?

generally, i'd say that if we're following the model by which we're evaluating moral action in terms of results, we end up with some sort of utilitarian calculus, and that anything resembling absolute moral truth (as in religion) wouldn't really need to play any sort of part in the game. if we're talking about motivation, though, then i think that your initial argument holds more water, in that the results of our actions are going to be to some extent out of our control, and all we can really concern ourselves with is the idea that we ought to try our best to hold to some sort of pre-existing moral framework. if the latter is the case, then i would still argue that god wouldn't be necessary for developing such a framework, but i could see how a religious framework might function just as well as any other and stand on equal footing with a more secular one.

First, it's not wrong just because we decide it is. If it's actually wrong (i.e. it does more harm overall than good), we can discover this. We might be incorrect sometimes. We might disagree sometimes. But over time with further investigation, we can get it right, because there is an answer.

There are plenty of areas where things are pretty obvious for us and there is widespread agreement -- like murder. And then there are gray areas where we don't all agree -- like abortion. It's not necessary that we presume absolute certainty about these things prematurely, only that we're asking the right question, which I think is pretty close to "is this good for us?"

i can't think of any but im not an anthropologist.

if religion is one of the pedestals upon which a culture stands, what are some other ones?

wow im dragging this way off topic. ill stop after this.

I think you are more intellectually honest than most, and this is also the way Michael Onfray feels.

To be honest I think you can believe this and still be a 'good' person. But it's kind of like the idea that "I am all for a full dictatorship, as long as I'm the dictator."
I think you would also agree that you would rather have a person who holds to a moral code over a nilihist when it comes to picking a babysitter for your kids.

Sam Harris once said:

And



So I guess he's with you as well.

I wasn't arguing that religion is a small or insignificant part of culture, just that culture includes things like religion, and also nonreligious collective customs, habits, and knowledge. But that is a bit of a tangent.

doesn't this require an insanely complex utilitarian calculus? i guess my personal stance is that it's just not feasible to answer this question very often when we're talking about the issues that lead to intense moral debate, and that we need to look elsewhere in order to negotiate the tough issues.

Aren't you basically saying though that since some things are actually wrong, that our judgements, searchings and asking of questions is just trying to matchup our decisions to something that exists outside of our lives?

Kind of hard for either of us to decide what value amount each thing holds. So let's let this one go?

for the record i hold rape to be the worst crime a human can commit against another, worse than murder in my opinion. i just used that as an example because its almost universally accepted that rape is "wrong".

Yea, probably a bigger area than I really want to explore, as I stated above to vb.

Maybe a new thread?

I think we agree more than disagree about this.

Thanks for bringing some focus to this.

I never thought you would feel different, but would you agree that by holding to a nihilist worldview, you are unable to judge someone that does this?

is there really a difference between "rape is wrong because god said so," "rape is wrong because it inhibits the free will of another," and "rape is wrong, period."?

when it comes to the "easy" moral questions, i think that it's clear that any sort of semi-reasonable prescriptive moral framework is going to say that rape, murder, etc. are wrong, and i might be even tempted to argue that it's the easy moral questions that lead to the development of such frameworks in the first place.

Sometimes it's practically complicated to determine, I agree. But in the vast majority of cases it isn't, which is why we mostly agree on most moral cases. I don't think we can rightly change our standard when it gets difficult though, we just need to look more closely for the answers.



Well that's a funny way of putting it, and I think I have to clarify because that borders on misunderstanding. Searching for the truth is in a way the process of "matching up" your thought with the way things actually are -- but that's not something that "exists outside of our lives", since the truth of the matter in this case is quite within our lives.

Can you hold that the 'answer' to a tough issue is already a reality?

Or only that the answer is one that must be decided on?

Is there already a morality in existance that is our higher noble goal to seek?

Or just a decision that has an expiration date?

Sam Harris doesn't thinks so:



He is argueing the reverse of your opinion.

i think that i might still be a little unclear on what you exactly mean by morality.

like, do you mean a system so detailed that it would be able to say "it is morally better to eat blue jellybeans than red jellybeans on a wednesday?" or are you talking about one that is only able to say "rape, murder, and theft are wrong," or something similar to that?