I’m currently slightly engaged in a conversation in Atheist Revolution’s comments to vjack’s “If you don’t believe in an afterlife, why be moral?” question. Vjack does a great job examining various atheist moral foundations, but he can’t address them all. Because, of course, morality is relative. Yes, I invent my own morality. But so do you.
I commented to add another moral foundation that should not be overlooked: selfishness. “What?”, you say, “Selfishness is immoral!” I don’t agree. Here’s my comment:
And there’s mere selfishness, a sense of survival. Humans are social creatures, meaning that our survival depends on our ability to work together. My individual survival depends greatly on my ability to acquire things from others that I could not acquire on my own. In return for such things, I help perpetuate an exchange of goods so that my supply is perpetuated. When I interrupt that supply for myself or for others, I threaten survival of others, but also, not unimportantly, myself. This is a fundamental incentive that I carry with me and apply both directly and indirectly. In other words, I’m not going to rob a bank, even if no one in my “food chain” (i.e., chain of necessaries) has money in that bank, because I would not rob a bank that is part of my food chain. That’s establishing a general moral principle based on a single applicable situation.
This is why I can simultaneously declare it immoral for myself to kill out of greed, but moral for myself to kill in order to protect my life (and, fundamentally, the things that sustain my life).
The sheer complicatedness of applied morality in itself precludes the idea of an absolute morality, let alone the idea of an omnipotent creature that enforces such a morality in an intangible post-mortem realm, but either fails or somehow desires not to enforce that “absolute” morality in the realm in which it occurs.
Perhaps I should have anticipated it, but following my comment came the classic theist response:
Hey Procrustes, you can declare it moral, but that doesn’t mean it is. What you’re describing is moral relativism, and that’s just logically inconsistent and incoherent, and hence irrational.
It seems that, perhaps, we’re dealing with a few different variations of the term “morality,” but despite such semantics, the context indicates that we’re really talking about the question of whether we can or should define morality (rules of behavior) as transcending individual human reasoning, or as a product of human reasoning, and thus subjective, therefore relative. Thus my perhaps too lengthy response:
Indeed, I am describing moral relativism. However, just by saying it’s logically inconsistent, incoherent, and irrational does not make it so. Feel free to provide some evidence that it’s logically inconsistent and incoherent.
By the way, if there is no absolute morality, then all morality is relative. I don’t buy into the nonsense that morality is absolute (and those who do cannot seem to come up with any consistent set of those supposedly divinely-given rules or the consequences for violating them), so morality to me (and all the other rational persons of the world) is inherently relativistic.
Here’s an example of how even “absolute” morality is not absolute: God says thou shall not kill, correct? But God also says kill in certain circumstances. So, what’s the absolute? “Just do whatever God commands, as interpreted by your preferred clergyman”? If there are exceptions, it’s not absolute. What about the classic example of not telling a lie? Is it *ever* okay to tell a lie? I could overwhelm you with hypothetical situations where you’d either dodge the question or rationalize your answer, but I lack the patience to humor you.
Instead, I’ll set out a proof, and you can feel free to go about attacking it if you like.
1) There is no evidence that morality is absolute.
2) If there is no absolute morality, human morality would not exist without the presence of humans.
3) Humans exist (therefore human morality exists).
4) Human thought and reason exists independently from human to human (i.e., humans do not have a collective intelligence).
5) Morality is a concept created by human thought and reasoning.
6) Morality in concept exists independently from human to human (i.e., humans do not have a collective moral concept).
7) Therefore morality is relative.I also contend that applied morality may be treated as if it were collective among certain persons (e.g., in creating a society, rules are adopted, often based on a majority of agreed-upon interpretations of the members’ personal perceptions of what is and is not moral). But the fact that some samples of some societies may appear to agree across the board on certain moral issues does not prove that absolute morality is the cause and the application is the effect. For instance, if an African tribe practices polygamy and has no moral qualms about it, that does not prove that polygamy is absolutely moral. Obviously it is not accepted by much of the rest of the world as being moral, but if the rest of the humans in the world did not exist, polygamy would, to an alien observer, be absolutely moral to the existing humans. The fact that humans in different societies have agreed upon quite differing moral rules and freedoms without those societies succumbing to self-destruction is indicative that morality is relative and applied relatively en masse, but collectively in specified groups.
The argument that there is some external being critical of human behavior, who will judge humans upon death for their behavior, but not allowing those humans insight during their lives into what exact behavior is acceptable or prohibited, is outright nonsense, unsupported by evidence, and laughable at best. The fact that there are those who use this hogwash to manipulate other people is a testament to the fact that, indeed, there is no absolute morality, unless it happens to be human greed and corruption, which seems to be the reigning behavior among those who purport to spread the word of that very same imaginary being.
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If you’re interested, there’s a decent discussion beginning in the Reddit comments.
Tags: bible, god, human, moral, moral absolutism, moral relativism, Morality, selfishness
Even the Bible’s view of morality changes. God’s view of slavery, women, polygamy, witches, concubines, kidnapping, and rape have certainly changed over time. If we actually lived by the “unchanged morality” of the Bible, the world would be even uglier than it already is today.
Relative morality comes from many places; culture, society, philosophy, religion, and individual conscience towards humanity. It’s ridiculous to think all morality comes from the Bible. 70% of the people in the world are not Christian. And most have never read the Bible or prayed to this god. Christians can claim morality, but it is a pointless argument.
What disgusts me (among many other things) is when people quote from the Bible, refer to it, but then either ignore contradictions within or rationalize them away. Why not rationalize away the concept that homosexuality is bad when you can rationalize away the concept that you must stone people to death for working on Saturday?
Sometimes I think it might be good for bible thumpers to spend a few years living by the strict edicts, uninterpreted, of the bible. I think by the end of it, they’ll have willingly killed themselves off, and then the rest of us can start living our lives without their undue influence and control.
I think there was a book about this titled “The Year of Living Biblically” – my impression is this is a pretty good book about how insane it would be to really worry about mixing fabric types, worrying about whether the manscaping is Kosher, and so on.
The point is accurate, though – most people, even most Orthodox Jews, don’t follow *every* commandment in the Bible, because the time and energy expended about worrying about those rules would overwhelm most of us mortals. That said,, if the “literalistic believe in the Bible” people did, perhaps they’d be spending so much time worrying about what laws they were breaking they’d have too little time to worry about the rest of us.
The Year of Living Biblically, by AJ Jacobs. Yep.
Your latter point is where puritanism and the inquisition come into play. They rationalize their behavior like this: if I am devoting my life to making other people conform to the strict edicts (or my interpretation of them) of the bible, then I am justified in deviating from them myself, because it would be only out of necessity.
It’s like the Catholic loophole. What, I can do anything and get away with it as long as just before I die, I *honestly* accept Jesus Christ? Rock on!
What kind of morality is that?
Because, of course, morality is relative. Yes, I invent my own morality. But so do you.
I think I agree with this. For one thing at least, when people say that god can give them an objective moral foundation I just have to laugh. I forget the guys name, but one of the fools debating Hitchens, he’d continually go on saying that he can offer, through belief in god, an objective moral foundation. I wish Hitchens had challenged him to prove he had an objective moral foundation, because I see no evidence of such a thing.
As for a moral basis… Well I consider behaviour that goes against natural healthy human behaviour to be immoral. A decent range of natural healthy human behaviour can be predicted given evolutionary psychology. So something like the burka, or genital mutilation are so far outside the scope of predictable natural healthy human behaviour that we can I think declare them immoral.
There are other things too, such as diet. Given that we humans have evolved in an environment without plentiful food and therefore favouring the behaviour of eating as much as you can when you can, not doing something about rising obesity levels in developed countries we could perhaps consider immoral, if not just problematic.
I also think that as we are social beings, it is predictable that we care for each other. If we had a friend who was starving and we had more food than we needed, I think it’s predictable that we would share, and we seem to consider sharing a moral act. I think we can take this further and help other humans whom are starving and unable to support themselves via aid organizations (these organizations must aim to essentially put themselves out of business by eliminating life threatening poverty). Infact that chemical release in our bodies that results in a good feeling when we help another human is probably a good heuristic for moral behaviour.
There is also the golden rule, tit-for-tat or the categorical imperative, which doesn’t require belief in anything spiritual to be consider a sensible guideline.
I think religious people are just afraid of losing control of their own actions if they’re not told what they can and cannot do. They just can’t understand the concept that actions have consequences here on earth, and those consequences are created and applied by other human beings. You just have to decide at some point which rules you’re going to follow, if any, and prepare to accept the consequences.
The trick with religion is that you can make up any shit you like, because the only consequences you claim to care about occur after your death. The hypocrisy rears its head when the religious act in life to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, because they don’t like the earthly consequences, and in doing so, they “reinterpret” their so-called absolute morals. Just like Sanford reinterpreted God’s Law to be about self control and not eternal punishment as a result of violating strict edicts.