cakrit wrote:

Spinozasgalt wrote:I'm not a moral nihilist or a subjectivist. I think pyrrhonian skepticism is a better position, but I find myself leaning tentatively towards a new kind of naturalism in metaethics.

I don't do normative ethics (yet).

Yesterday, I didn't know what the hell you were talking about. I started reading about metaethics and normative ethics just so I could start a different thread focused on moral theories. The more I read, the harder it was for me to agree with any one position. After spending about 3 hours mostly on meta ethics, the closest match I could find was pyrrhonian skepticism (dogmatic, nonetheless!).

Can you please explain to me how Pyrrhonian skepticism is dogmatic?

Errm..... Pyrrhonian Skepticism? Meta ethics? Normative ethics? Subjectivism? What the........ eh?



Brain frazzled.....

The bunny's pancake is trying to kill this diabetic via hyperglycemia, but I like it anyway.

Perhaps this will help, for starters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-ethics

You can tell I have not under any circumstance had any philosophy lessons in my life, can't you? As far as this atheist is concerned, the answer to everything in life is a little thought, some chocolate, birdwatching, oodles of Jeremy Clarkson on TV, a quick dollop of 1980s pop music, exercise, a smile & a laugh and considered action.

dglas wrote:The bunny's pancake is trying to kill this diabetic via hyperglycemia, but I like it anyway.

Perhaps this will help, for starters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-ethics

From your link:

A question of the first type might be, "What do the words 'good', 'bad', 'right' and 'wrong' mean?"

Good =


Bad =


Brits will understand - just Google or YouTube 'Mr Blobby' and you'll soon understand why!

Right = Jean-Michel Jarre concerts

Wrong = Ray Comfort and that bloody banana.

Well, perhaps I can help. I'm sure I'll be corrected if I make any errors.

Pyrrhonian Skepticism
"Skeptic" is not just a word that means one critical of or doubting or denying a given idea. It is also philosophical tradition, presumably having its recognized beginning in a gentleman named Pyrrho of Elis (360 BC to 270 BC). While he did not write anything himself, his ideas were presented by others, most notable Sextus Empiricus (in "Outlines of Pyrrhonism"). The basic tenets of Pyrrhonism suggest that there is a barrier between us and certain knowledge. This has implications for our understanding of our relationship with reality (and the implications thereof).

The following (in italics) is not from Wikipedia:
A quick note on philosophical skepticism and scientific skepticism. The use of the word "skeptic" these days, except when used disingenuously by denialist of various sorts, has been largely assimilated by "scientific skeptics." The most noteworthy difference between philosophical skeptics and scientific skeptics is the scope of skeptical inquiry. Adherents of NOMA (Non-Overlapping MagisteriA), scientific skeptics often limit the scope of inquiry to verifiable claims, often setting aside claim not admitting of empirical verification as meaningless or inconsequential.

Meta_Ethics & Normative Ethics
In philosophy, study of ethics is broken up into various categories. Perhaps the best way to characterize this is to indicate what questions each asks.

Here's Wikipedia's listed distinction between these two:
"While normative ethics addresses such questions as "What should one do?", thus endorsing some ethical evaluations and rejecting others, meta-ethics addresses questions such as "What is goodness?" and "How can we tell what is good from what is bad?", seeking to understand the nature of ethical properties and evaluations."

So, perhaps a little more accessibly:
Normative Ethics: Is this good? Is this what we ought to do or to be?
Meta-Ethics: What are we doing when we use words like "good" and "ought?"

Subjectivism
According to Wikipedia: "Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical belief that ethical sentences reduce to factual statements about the attitudes and/or conventions of individual people, or that any ethical sentence implies an attitude held by someone. As such, it is a form of moral relativism in which the truth of moral claims is relative to the attitudes of individuals[1] (as opposed to, for instance, communities)."

There are countless subtleties not expressed here, which I'm sure some will hasten to point out.
Does this help?

Sort-of, but it's 02:30 here and I must go to sleep so my brain can return to a state of optimal functioning to learn some new philosophy facts!

I'm just going to give you some points and ideas here. I think it's great that you went and read up on the subject. Those articles will probably acquaint you with the topic more efficiently than I could do. Seeing the extent of your knowledge after one night of reading, I don't think it'll take you long to get a good grasp of things.

cakrit wrote:Yesterday, I didn't know what the hell you were talking about. I started reading about metaethics and normative ethics just so I could start a different thread focused on moral theories. The more I read, the harder it was for me to agree with any one position. After spending about 3 hours mostly on meta ethics, the closest match I could find was pyrrhonian skepticism (dogmatic, nonetheless!).

There's usually a divide between dogmatic and pyrrhonian moral skepticism (Stanford's use of terms). Basically, the dogmatic moral skeptic tends to claim something to the effect that moral knowledge or justification is not possible (it can also be about truth-aptness etc, but I'll stick with epistemological moral skepticism for now). A pyrrhonian is different. They doubt the claims of the dogmatic moral skeptic as much as they doubt the claims of say moral realists. Theirs is the kind of general skepticism you'll find from many on this board.

Reading below, I think you fit best into the dogmatic camp, but be sure you don't take the "dogmatic" as a slur on the arguments of those skeptics. On this forum the word just tends to carry that connotation.

cakrit wrote:But it's not that simple. I believe the following:
i. There are objective moral properties and these properties are reducible to entirely non-ethical properties (namely, the survival of our species). This is simple Naturalism.
ii. The objective moral properties can not be known (omniscience is needed). Therefore, no moral belief can be fully justified. This is dogmatic Pyrrhonian skepticism*.
iii. As a result, we are free to choose whatever normative ethics theory we like, in full knowledge of its limitations.

If you believe i. then that puts you firmly into the moral naturalist camp with me. That may cause problems for ii. given that the reason for doubts about attaining knowledge of objective moral properties is usually that they don't reduce to non-ethical properties (such as natural facts), which some think would make ethical properties some type of object we've never observed. If you can find your way from non-ethical properties to ethical properties without falling foul of the is-ought problem, then moral naturalism succeeds.

If you were to keep i. then chances are you'd eventually have to get rid of ii. and iii., so I think it's down to your own choice of what you find more convincing. If you change i. to read something like this:

i. There may be objective moral properties, but these properties are not reducible to non-ethical properties.

Then you can keep ii. and iii. and you'll be heading towards "error theory". So if you wish to remain a skeptic of this type, I would suggest reading J.L. Mackie's works in ethics.

cakrit wrote:Does this make sense to you? I can't read everything on ethics in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Wikipedia in one night, but I'd like to keep this thread going for a little longer.

I have a feeling that when you were writing i. you were intending it to say what I've suggested you amend it to. If so, I think your view, while needing some details, is looking pretty consistent. Considering you've only read these things in the past night, I think you've done remarkably well.

Hopefully I've suggested some suitable areas of research or at the very least given your brain a workout. This will probably be my only substantial post on this topic for a little while, simply because time constraints, but I hope you've enjoyed reading about the topic.

dglas wrote:There are countless subtleties not expressed here, which I'm sure some will hasten to point out.

I think you did well to provide that information. As you say, there are many subtleties to these views, but Wiki is good for the bare-boned facts of this subject. It's where I started, so they must be doing something right.

Spinozasgalt wrote:...the reason for doubts about attaining knowledge of objective moral properties is usually that they don't reduce to non-ethical properties (such as natural facts), which some think would make ethical properties some type of object we've never observed. If you can find your way from non-ethical properties to ethical properties without falling foul of the is-ought problem, then moral naturalism succeeds.

I need to elaborate. I believe that objective moral properties are not effectively reducible to natural facts. In theory they are, provided that:
- I have access to all natural facts for all alternative futures, all the way until the end of time.
- I have the ability to objectively determine the preferred future.

So:
i. I am theoretically able to determine with absolute certainty whether torturing children for sexual pleasure endangers our survival as a species.
ii. Since I am not omniscient, I have no way to state with absolute certainty that torturing children for sexual pleasure endangers our survival as a species. As a result, there is no way for me to fully justify my position on the matter.
iii. Since no position can ever be fully justified, I am free to choose my own normative morality theory.

Therefore, I choose a mixture of utilitarianism, contractualism and whatever else makes sense and I can strongly support my personal position that torturing children for sexual pleasure is wrong. My limited faculties in predicting the future may be quite sufficient for such extreme cases, so my position is most likely a fact (which I could never hope to prove). More difficult moral dilemmas would have a greater chance of not corresponding to a fact.

dglas wrote:

cakrit wrote:

Spinozasgalt wrote:I'm not a moral nihilist or a subjectivist. I think pyrrhonian skepticism is a better position, but I find myself leaning tentatively towards a new kind of naturalism in metaethics.

I don't do normative ethics (yet).

Yesterday, I didn't know what the hell you were talking about. I started reading about metaethics and normative ethics just so I could start a different thread focused on moral theories. The more I read, the harder it was for me to agree with any one position. After spending about 3 hours mostly on meta ethics, the closest match I could find was pyrrhonian skepticism (dogmatic, nonetheless!).

Can you please explain to me how Pyrrhonian skepticism is dogmatic?

Actually, I was mistaken. The version of moral skepticism I have described as most sensible to me is "Dogmatic skepticism about moral knowledge", the claim that nobody ever knows that any substantive moral belief is true. It is called dogmatic, because it is quite absolute.

You can see the differences between the various versions here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-moral/

Having looked over your post, I would say you fit almost perfectly into epistemological moral skepticism. Your primary doubts are about knowledge, whereas error-theory is about the object of that knowledge. I can't think of specific authors who might be of help to you in this regard, but as you're reading Stanford, I'm sure they'll mention a few in their bibliography.

coito ergo cum laude wrote:When did you first decide that you were an atheist, and why?

Decide?
Well I was raised as a Christian, so accepted that. Until I was about 15 or so. At that point, due to a church group given question about where "we" were in our belief, I began to ask myself why I believed, in order to better understand and thus hopefully bolster my belief.

What I found though was that the only reasons I believed were empty appeals to authority; my parents and elders, minsters etc.had always told me 'our' religion was true. No actual reasoning/evidence to support that however. I asked around but long story short I started losing my faith (because that's all it really was) from then on.

I didn't really decide that I was an atheist, that is that the label was an accurate one for me, until I read The God Delusion. When I realized that I had been one for many years.
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paarsurrey wrote:
I have also a little question.

The Atheists conduct like dealers of the Science and the Scientists.

You are saying that atheists talk about and rely on science a lot? That is only true of some atheists, it is definitely not a part of atheism itself.

paarsurrey wrote:When they are in the lab of the "Scientific Method" working on a premise or a theory or some principle and they observe some error in their end result; how they are ultimately convinced that they have found out the error and the outcome is now error-free?
With what error free scale they match the result?

Huh?

When a probable "error", by which I take it you mean something that differs from the hypothesis, then it is checked. Is the 'error' repeatable? If so it is tested to see what affect it has on the hypothesis, and the hypothesis is revised and altered as necessary.

Anyone who decides that something is definitely error free, or becomes "ultimately convinced" is not doing proper science. In that regard it never ends.
None of that has anything to do with atheism at all.
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paarsurrey wrote:
Did it occur to you once that you always existed and you were not born of any mother or father?

Occur to me? Sure.
But like my previous religious beliefs I examined them. Unlike my previously baseless of a god, my previously beliefs that I was born were verified (and improved upon) so I then had a RATIONAL belief that I was born to human parents.
_________________

paarsurrey wrote:
What is an observable reality? Please

It's all that stuff we experience through our senses. You may have noticed it from time to time.
It;s the same stuff that when you pay attention to it you DON'T bump into the coffee table, and when you fail to you do, and bruise you knee.

As individual personal experience can differ, and any one individual may have a skewed view (delusions etc.) this is best examined by many, pooling their results and comparing them in order to get the most reliable consensus view (and explanations thereof) This is best exemplified by Science, as science IS this most rigorously attempted.
__________________

paarsurrey wrote:
It means the reality may be outside the faculty of observation. If the observation is impaired or if one is in a state that one is unable to observe; the reality would be there but one cannot perceive it.

What mistakes one person can make; a group of persons could also make.

Sure. But then nothing reliable can be ascertained in such a case. Science and reason does the best it can. Any hypothesis or theory is considered the best APPROXIMATION of the truth as could be ascertained, at best.
Science 'accepts' that what ever it now holds as the best explanation (never "the TruthTM") may be altered, improved upon or even replaced, as new data becomes available and is examined, and even that perhaps the truth may never be ultimately known, and again even that all we have may be far from the actual reality that exists out there.
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paarsurrey wrote:
In other words they have to verify if their observations are attuned with the nature; if these are not in consonance with nature then there must be some error over there; to minimize the error the go on checking with nature.

Something like that.
This effort is a never ending one.
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paarsurrey wrote:
I think it was quite natural for you, in my opinion. Does it mean that if you sometimes know of reasons into existence of the Creator- God Allah YHWH (not Jesus); you will reverse to your previous position very promptly.

You mean if we are presented with sufficient evidence to support the God (or Allah, Zeus, Goblin...) hypothesis?
Sure, no problem, at least for me. My position is that of a Reasonist. Present the reasoning, I will access it as best I can, and reach conclusions accordingly. I am ONLY an atheist in that I have yet to hear any remotely good reasons for any such hypotheses.

Seeing we're asking atheists questions, I'd like to ask one from one non-believer to others. Those of you who didn't grow up without religion but who lived in a religious environment as children, how did you make up your mind that what you were hearing was lies? Maybe I'm playing devils's advocate here but I didn't have some scientific proof that convinced me that religion was wrong, or rather that all the confusing beliefs I was being fed were wrong, it simply didn't make sense to me.

One of the things that I've always fought about and even with university professors about is something that believers throw about and that we shout at them to produce 'evidence' for is that sometimes you just 'know' that something is right or wrong. And before someone starts screaming about 'evidence' my decision to throw religion and religious teachings our was based on that. I didn't know anything about scientific methods and 'original courses' or 'critical thinking' or 'research' all I had was what made sense to me. I was a young child when I asked how it was possible to cover the earth in water, or to part a sea and have dry land under the parted water, or to provide thousands of people with food and water from what could be found in the desert without leaving any evidence of them having been there. I even showed my parents a puddle and said that if you blocked the water of either side of the puddle you'd have a mess of mud at the bottom and that chariots and thousands of people passing through there would leave an even bigger mess. They said "it was a miracle" so is it not possible that there are other aspects of our world view that we can just 'know' are right or wrong? Why does there always, for everything that we accept as 'truth' why does there always have to be 'evidence.'

And I know this is going to get me into trouble for being "irrelevant" but when our government was doing all the things that they were doing to the dark population in our country, I told my parents that it was wrong, and that it made no sense to treat people like that, and that the treatment of the people that was being dished out would lead to a mass of uneducated people turning to crime in order to make a living and, when I said that to my teachers, they said that "there is no evidence to prove that it will happen" so how could I predict something without any scientific evidence to back my "belief." But I was right wasn't I? So maybe I'm right about other things that just make sense to me as well, and maybe there are millions of other people who just "know" that something is wrong or right and who aren't hurting anyone by simply having personal "knowledge."

I'm not saying that believing in god and the afterlife and all that nonsense is right, of course it doesn't make sense, and it doesn't make sense because we can see no evidence for the existence of either god or the afterlife, but does it really hurt if people just "believe" that they will go to heaven when they die? If they're not sending people to blow themselves up, or not blowing up abortion clinics, etc, if they just believe in it and feel better for believing it, what harm is there?

And no, I'm not becoming religious, I am just asking questions for the philosophers to stimulate more discussion. And please try to reply without invoking insults, I'm not in the mood to fight, I'm really too old and unwell to deal with insults.

Why do atheists say "theist" when they really mean "Christian"? Why do atheists phrase questions about the christian god as if he were the only one? For example "Why doesn't God heal amputees?" or "Does God hate shrimp?", or "Yet another question about God?" Why do atheists sometimes confuse atheist with irreligious skeptic? Why do you get pissy when a theist generalizes atheists(as I have done in this post), but you find it perfectly normal to generalize theists?

Ciarin wrote:Why do atheists say "theist" when they really mean "Christian"? Why do atheists phrase questions about the christian god as if he were the only one? For example "Why doesn't God heal amputees?" or "Does God hate shrimp?", or "Yet another question about God?" Why do atheists sometimes confuse atheist with irreligious skeptic? Why do you get pissy when a theist generalizes atheists(as I have done in this post), but you find it perfectly normal to generalize theists?

Is it possible you do not know that the trinity of monotheisms (cristianity, judaism and islam) begins with the same Abrahamic deity?

When I say "theist," I mean a worshiper in any theistic tradition, including all of the three listed above. What made you think "we" atheists were talking only about christians? When I critique theism, I am not just critiquing christianity. I am critiquing the basic idea of theism.

ETA:
Now, theists generally have something in common - their theism, and since the big-3 of theism are the dominant monothisms with the shared traditions, there are similarities that can be referenced. There is something atheists have in common, too, but it doesn't involve a mythos tradition - it is only the lack of theism (and therefore a lack of deity-based absolutism) that is a common trait. This means that while one can point at theists and have a set of dogmas and doctrines one can point to, there is only one thing you can point to as common to all atheists - lack of a deity-belief. To be more specific, I would have to know what sort of generalizations you have made about atheists.

dglas wrote:

Is it possible you do not know that trinity of monotheisms (cristianity, judaism and islam) begins with the same Abrahamic deity?

It's not possible.

When I say theist, I mean a worshiper in any theistic tradition, including all of the three listed above. What made you think "we" atheists were talking only about christians?

Cause in my experience whenever atheists mention theists, or ask theists something, you're only intended audience are the christian theists the majority of the time. In fact, when I've attempted to answer a few questions directed at theists, I was told I should've realized the OP meant christian and didn't need to answer.

weird, I thought this was "questions for atheists", not "questions for people asking questions for atheists."

Ciarin wrote:Why do atheists say "theist" when they really mean "Christian"? Why do atheists phrase questions about the christian god as if he were the only one? For example "Why doesn't God heal amputees?" or "Does God hate shrimp?", or "Yet another question about God?" Why do atheists sometimes confuse atheist with irreligious skeptic? Why do you get pissy when a theist generalizes atheists(as I have done in this post), but you find it perfectly normal to generalize theists?

Most of us come from Christian cultural contexts- its simply conditioning that leads us to assume the Christian version of God. Furthermore, what usually applies to the Christian god applies to other gods as well for the same logical reasons. Most gods, except the pre-christian, anthropomorphic gods, share the same basic characteristics- the role of creator, omnipotence, omniscience, etc. Not to mention that Christianity, Islam and Judaism all share the same ethnic-cultural root. If you're feeling left out as a pagan, well, sorry, but your type of faith is no longer present in today's world in any relevant magnitude.
As for generalizations, well, theists are susceptible to a certain level of generalization, because their behaviour and their opinions are all defined, or should all stem, from the same text - at least within their particular creed. You can generalize about Catholics, because all Catholics follow the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Atheism, on the other hand, is not an ideology, but a definition- meaning "without a belief in god". There is no basis for shared ideology, there is no standard reason for "not believing in god" that all atheists should or do adhere to.

Ciarin wrote:Why do atheists say "theist" when they really mean "Christian"? Why do atheists phrase questions about the christian god as if he were the only one? For example "Why doesn't God heal amputees?" or "Does God hate shrimp?", or "Yet another question about God?" Why do atheists sometimes confuse atheist with irreligious skeptic? Why do you get pissy when a theist generalizes atheists(as I have done in this post), but you find it perfectly normal to generalize theists?

I think that for a lot of us, I know it is for me, it's shorthand. When I say 'god' I mean all of them, any theism and any god.

Chinaski wrote:

Ciarin wrote:Why do atheists say "theist" when they really mean "Christian"? Why do atheists phrase questions about the christian god as if he were the only one? For example "Why doesn't God heal amputees?" or "Does God hate shrimp?", or "Yet another question about God?" Why do atheists sometimes confuse atheist with irreligious skeptic? Why do you get pissy when a theist generalizes atheists(as I have done in this post), but you find it perfectly normal to generalize theists?

Most of us come from Christian cultural contexts- its simply conditioning that leads us to assume the Christian version of God. Furthermore, what usually applies to the Christian god applies to other gods as well for the same logical reasons. Most gods, except the pre-christian, anthropomorphic gods, share the same basic characteristics- the role of creator, omnipotence, omniscience, etc. Not to mention that Christianity, Islam and Judaism all share the same ethnic-cultural root. If you're feeling left out as a pagan, well, sorry, but your type of faith is no longer present in today's world in any relevant magnitude.

I'm not left out. I just think you guys are putting an importance on the abrahamic god that isn't necessary. It seems you're telling christians/muslims/jews that it's their god or no god, or that their god is actually the only god. Some of you guys even capitalize it, giving it due deference.

As for generalizations, well, theists are susceptible to a certain level of generalization, because their behaviour and their opinions are all defined, or should all stem, from the same text - at least within their particular creed. You can generalize about Catholics, because all Catholics follow the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Atheism, on the other hand, is not an ideology, but a definition- meaning "without a belief in god". There is no basis for shared ideology, there is no standard reason for "not believing in god" that all atheists should or do adhere to.

Considering all the different creeds in theism, one can hardly generalize them to any degree of accuracy. In fact the only honest thing to say about them is that they all have a god belief, much like the only thing you can say about atheists is that they all lack a god belief.