Talk:Argument from morality

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Thanks for getting it started :) ħuman 05:19, 9 June 2008 (EDT)

Criticisms

That's it? I personally accept the argument from morality (liked 'Mere Christianity' when read it). I feel better if these are all you've got against it. "Some Christians are immoral"? We KNEW that, in fact, it's right there in the Bible. "Some Atheists are moral"? Ditto, and would be expected, sharing the same Creator. Pragmatism - the system that Peter "the babykiller" Singer promotes (with all due respect to the learned Prof. Singer)? Altruism being beneficial to the population - that's not the point, the point is "why should I care"? Etc., etc. OrthodoxBeliever (talk) 05:47, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

It is a valid point about morality's existence being a separate question from how people comport themselves. ListenerX^TalkerX 05:59, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Meaning? OrthodoxBeliever (talk) 14:10, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

That I cut the relevant bullet points from the article. ListenerX^TalkerX 00:27, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Oh yes, thank you. Now it's more concise, and slightly stronger. I guess I have no objections on the text of the article, given this wiki's stated slant.

Still, I see a major problem with the "contr-argument from evolutionary psychology". It may explain why people feel compelled to act morally (many don't, BTW). It does not explain WHY I, as a rational agent, shouldn't just transgress these pressures from soulless natural forces and act as would be better for my egotistic goals. Why should I care about population? I'm not mentioning the conceit that morality works differently from other instincts - I liked how Lewis put it, but it's certainly possible he's dead wrong (being last-century humanities type, he may just lack the background). If the answer is "for fear of consequences", than the morality degenerates to the famous eleventh commandment, "thou shalnt get caught". OrthodoxBeliever (talk) 08:08, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

I think you are missing the point. Evolutionary psychology tries to trace how human thought processes have developed; the idea is that these selection pressures, over time, produced brains that developed certain general moral ideas. There is no sharp distinction, in this view, between what evolution produced and the "rational" products of one's moral thought. ListenerX^TalkerX 08:21, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Tell me: are your thoughts the result of your reasoning or "selection pressures"? If the first, can't you just go against "pressures"? If the second, the whole enterprize of moral reasoning (e. g. the notion of guilt or moral culpability) kind of becomes moot - "Darwin/neurons/quanta did it". Which some people argue, I guess, but it just sounds like bollocks. OrthodoxBeliever (talk) 09:48, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Both. Evolution and natural law shaped my brain, so that determines what my reasoning will be, but that does not make it any less my reasoning. To hack up a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer, just because people cannot will what they will does not mean they cannot do what they will. ListenerX^TalkerX 04:55, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm not buying this, so the argument from morality is compelling to me. So there. OrthodoxBeliever (talk) 06:44, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Who needs arguments when you have emotive faith? ListenerX^TalkerX 07:10, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

People will believe whatever they want to believe. People choose what they believe, then go shopping for "arguments" to "prove" what they already believed. Whole load of bullshit is a boring waste of time, no matter what you call yourself. Sarah Parker (talk) 07:13, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Now that is an ad hominem; one cannot discount an argument solely on the basis of people's motivations for making it. There are whole scores of scientific studies that make people laugh due to the sheer obviousness of their conclusions. ListenerX^TalkerX 07:19, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Most "arguments" I see are just a load of bullshit to make people feel intellectually superior. Sure, if you want to prove a mathematical theorem, an argument is appropriate. But outside science and similar fields, life is a lot more wishy-washy, and it's silly to pretend that the methods that work in the hard sciences or math can be applied to politics or art or philosophy or literature or religion or culture or so on. I'm an electrical engineer; but if I have a problem in my relationship with my girlfriend, I don't think for a minute that engineering is going to help me. It requires a completely different skillset. Sarah Parker (talk) 07:23, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

E pur si muove. To argue is to be human. To think oneself correct is to be human, and that permeates all kinds of argumentative arenas, not least of which are politics, ethics, religion, morality, law, et al. (And that's the most philosophical you're going to get from me at 2:30am.) Blue (is useful) 07:34, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

(EC) I think that does apply to informal arguments as well. One thing that annoys me immensely is when a shyster makes a perfectly valid argument with an ulterior motive and I find myself having to support the one while denouncing the other. For example, I recently read an article decrying rape in the U.S. army; but behind the veneer of sympathy and tear-jerking anecdotes, you could see the author seething with fury at the army and at the U.S., for very different reasons. One cannot let that dreck make one think any better of the rape. ListenerX^TalkerX 07:37, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Let me try to reboot a discussion a bit. What about rational thought, doesn't it guide your behaviour? OrthodoxBeliever (talk) 05:33, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes, among other things. ListenerX^TalkerX 06:08, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

So, can't you transcend "evolution and natural law morality" (whatever you mean by it) by using reason?

Being more presumptious: apparently, "rational" alternative is to suppose morality evolved as an adaptive measure, being behavior beneficial to the population. Question: as a rational agent, why should I care about "the population"? Wy can't I just resist atavistic urges and simply care about my own chosen utility function? (Note that people actually can and do, yet are usually labaled "wrong"). OrthodoxBeliever (talk) 08:05, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

And BTW: there's no real contradiction here: it's reasonable to think that societal norms "evolve" more or less naturally yet there is an objective moral law defined by God (I'm not sure "defined" or "created" is appropriate here: one view is that God IS the ultimate Law, by definition of "omnibenevolent"). Sort of like humans both evolved and has been created - there is no real contradiction here. Otherwise I don't see how we can compare norms from different societies: even most relativists would agree e. g. that female genital mutilation is wrong(...er than "civilised" practices), and Holocost was wrong. But...but... both practices had communities supporting them, didn't they? OrthodoxBeliever (talk) 08:05, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

You are still making a false division between "rational" thought and the products of evolution. Being a "rational thinker" does not allow one to flout natural law, which includes the chemical processes by which the brain operates; also, it can be expected that people will evolve to be more rational, since the ability to reason correctly can be an evolutionary advantage. ListenerX^TalkerX 06:32, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

"Otherwise I don't see how we can compare norms from different societies..." Is it all or nothing? Also, contending that because morality has evolutionary origins that you should care about "the population" on a psychological/phenomenological level is a category mistake. You do not need to think in those terms to carry out moral behavior. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 06:50, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Of course I can't. That's the point: supposed evolutionary origins don't explain why is it "proper and right" to carry out moral behavior. Nor doesn't "social contract" or some such. At best, it explains why one should not get caught.OrthodoxBeliever (talk) 12:56, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes it does. One should behave morally as part of one's duty to society. It's moral behaviour that holds society together. The morality we have ended up with has been fine tuned by evolutionary pressure to be the best achievable for the current society. It's not about being caught at all. Jack Hughes (talk) 13:40, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

I disagree that a man living alone in the wilderness would have no need of any ethics at all. However, I also disagree that evolutionary psychology has nothing to say on the question of morality: it shows us the consequences of behaving in an anti-social way, so that a rational person, knowing those consequences, would usually decide not to behave that way. Many of the Bible's teachings are relayed in the same manner (e.g., "pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall"). ListenerX^TalkerX 03:50, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

Evolutionary theory can explain why we have a "moral sense," so to speak, but not what we should do with it. It is descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. The argument from morality is really just an instance of the argument from adverse consequences. If you want a great argument for moral skepticism that doesn't require prescriptive moral relativism, read J.L. Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 04:08, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

How does creatio ex nihlo imply omniscience?

As topic. I got the omnipotent part, but not the omniscience. Making the world and starting population has no implication any knowledge in sociology or economics or even ecology. [[User:K61824|]][[User_talk:K61824|]] 02:30, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

It is not clear to me why creatio ex nihilo (missing 'i' in the article, it appears) implies even omnipotence. Couldn't you have a creator who is powerless to change anything after an initial creation? Both the necessity of omnipotence as well as the necessity of omniscience are not clear to me. Nullahnung (talk) 03:19, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Just For The Lulz ...

... might the argument of morality be reduced to the large but repetitive set of "and therefore God" arguments? "MORALITY -- and therefore God!" I was educated by Jesuits, you see, and so find theological arguments amusing. -- Greg Goebel (MrG) ^{— Unsigned, by: 75.166.76.161 / talk / contribs}

Three problems with the argument from morality

There are three problems with the argument from morality. The first is the assumption that receiving morality from god makes that it objective, or least more authentic than morality arising from social contract or personal empathy. The second is the assumption that an objective morality implies the existence of a divine lawgiver; perhaps the moral law is simply a natural feature of the universe, like physics of mathematics, that humans simply needed to reach a certain point in our evolution in order to become conscious of and invent a language in order to describe. The third problem is that even if we accept that objective morality can only come from god, or at least that a divinely ordained morality would be more legitimate, the argument for morality isn't actually an argument for the truth of god's existence. Instead the argument from morality is an argument for for why we should want God to exist ^{— Unsigned, by: 96.244.117.170 / talk}

Yes, that is what the article says. ☭Comrade GC☭^{Ministry of Praise} 22:56, 30 July 2019 (UTC)