Posted: Mar 28, 2012 3:34 am
promethean wrote:Objective MoralityDo you believe that some actions actually are right and some things are actually wrong (objective morality) or do you think morality is simply a cultural, social or evolutionary convention? Do absolute objective moral values exist? This question is very challenging to the atheist to answer in either the affirmative or the negative. If objective moral values do exist then where do they come from? If we are simply animals whose existence is the result of blind chance how can we have objective moral weight? There is no logical foundation on which these moral laws can be based.On the other hand if there are no objective moral values then we have no basis by which to criticise actions as evil (or wrong or immoral) or to commend actions as good (or noble or just). If morality is just culturally derived conveniences then the cannibal is equally valid as the human rights activist in their analysis of what constitutes good and evil. Many atheists seem to profess just such moral relativism, again to quote Dawkins “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.”
I think this is quite muddled. The full picture of live positions is far richer that you'll have it, so giving us an either/or between objectivism and convention is starting out from a place of poverty. Morality remains challenging for the theist and the atheist both, because it's not clear which among the available positions, if any, our pretheoretical notions of morality favour. Now when you ask "where do they come from?" I hope you have a substantial answer from your theistic perspective, because if the level of answer is merely "God", then the atheist can quite easily reply with "the universe"; the available level of explanation will tend to be pretty important when the theist and the atheist are offering competing explanations. Next, it's not at all clear on what descriptive facts our "moral weight" supervenes: you clearly think it must supervene on supernatural nonmoral facts about where we come from (that we're God's creations maybe), but what's not clear is whether this is so or even if it's a viable position. The atheist who is undecided about morality hasn't done anything like identify moral facts with theistic ones, so until the theist can offer reasons for making such identifications, the atheist need not throw morality out with theism.
The analogy between morality and law is pretty well-known and little's clear as to why it should worry the atheist too much.
promethean wrote:On the other hand if there are no objective moral values then we have no basis by which to criticise actions as evil (or wrong or immoral) or to commend actions as good (or noble or just). If morality is just culturally derived conveniences then the cannibal is equally valid as the human rights activist in their analysis of what constitutes good and evil. Many atheists seem to profess just such moral relativism, again to quote Dawkins “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.”
Unless an atheist is an eliminativist, it's hard to see why he or she can no longer criticise the morality of others. It looks like you're saying that atheists have to be a certain kind of normative relativist who can't criticise the customs of other cultures, but then there's little reason to be this sort of relativist: because it seems to rely on the very universality that the relativist denies.
promethean wrote:However – such a position is impossible to maintain. As demonstrated by Dawkins who very quickly moves on to define religion as ‘the root of all evil’ seemingly unaware of the irony in criticising religion on moral grounds having just established that the very notion of morality makes no sense according to his worldview.
Not to defend Dawkins, but last I read the "root of all evil" wasn't really his choice for the title of his doco, anyway.
promethean wrote:In fact what most atheists (in my experience) seem to do is claim that morality is relative, but actually behave in a way that suggests they think morality is objective. The atheist who asserts moral repulsion when they hear about a priest engaging in child sex abuse can only do so with any credibility if they believe in absolute moral values – otherwise they have no business criticising the priest. This is the first illusion erected by atheists to maintain their worldview. They realise that at rock bottom there is no basis for them to make logically binding moral judgements on others and yet they choose to ‘believe’ in their moral code all the same.
I don't think the relativist is actually at fault here. This sort of person disagrees with you that moral phenomena are at their best when place together with moral objectivism, so will typically have a different story to tell about moral repulsion and so on. It looks like you're merely begging the question here.
Really, I'd just like to see a theist here who's willing to lay out their moral arguments in such a way as to shed light, rather than load others with the burden.