Denialism

Uncommon Descent preaches about materialist morality

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by

MarkH
in

BarryA drops this idiot bomb on us:

Obviously, by definition, materialists cannot point to a transcendent moral code by which to measure moral progress. Indeed, it is difficult for them to account for moral progress at all because if materialism is correct, the “is” in a society defines the “ought.”

Gosh, given that the cdesign proponentsists are all about science they do spend a hell of a lot of time criticizing materialism. Until they get their god-o-meter up and running it seems as though that this is a fundamental conflict between their stated beliefs and practice. But that’s nothing new.

What I am curious about is whether or not materialists (code for atheists) can or cannot point to a transcendent moral code by which to measure human progress? And further, can the religious? I would argue the religious, if anything, are far more incapable of pointing to a transcendent moral code. After all you must ask, which religion, which book, which interpretation? Sure they can point to all sorts of crap, but they certainly can’t agree on the moral interpretation of their scripture. They change which parts of their code they listen to in any given century (we only really take 3 of the 10 commandments seriously for instance), how can they suggest they are in possession of a transcendent morality because of their religiosity?

Then see this whopper:

On what basis do you say that the recognition of the humanity of African-Americans is “progress” unless you have held up the previous nonrecognition and the present recognition to a code and deterermined the former was bad (i.e., did not meet the code) and the latter is good (i.e., does meet the code)? In other words, when you say we have “progressed” it is just another way of saying that the previous state of affairs was bad and the present state of affairs is good. But how can you know this unless there is a code that transcends time and place by which both states of affairs can be measured. Certainly to say that things were previously one way and now they are another is not the same as saying there has been progress. Change is not the same as progress.

Now, I don’t quite get what BarryA is talking about here. Is he saying ending slavery is not progress? Or is he saying that ending slavery can only be judged as a moral good if you are religious? Because, you know, none of those religious codes prohibit slavery buddy. If anything, they encourage it, and tell slaves to be obedient. So if you guys are in charge of the transcendent code, and it’s in one of your outdated books of silly metaphors, where are your slaves? Slavery was ended in this country when many people – including many religious people — decided we could transcend dogma that defended the practice.

Here’s a job for my commenters. Leave me your transcendent materialist moral code that you can use to measure human moral progress. Mine is something like, “Progress can be measured by increasing rationality, human happiness, and abandonment of the hateful dogmas that bind us to tribalism and bigotry.”

Comments

  1. The Professor

    I have a whole category for Atheist Morality on my blog. In a nutshell, atheistic (or secular) morality is based on real-world consequences. Behaviors which produce positive, desirable results are branded as “good” and those which produce negative, undesirable results are “bad.”

    Religionists have a serious problem with the whole “transcendent moral principle” argument, because it assumes that nothing is good or bad in and of itself. Genocide, for instance, is not inherently bad, it’s only bad when it’s contrary to God’s will (and therefore wiping out the Amalekites is perfectly ok, I Sam 15:3). It is religionists, not moralists, who are unable to give any reason for morality beyond an appeal to the arbitrary whims of an absentee Judge.

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  2. Lassi Hippeläinen

    Inconvenient news for faithheads: most of Christian morale comes from atheists, more exactly from the Stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome.

    You can even finger some essential persons: much of the moral code is in the New Testament, written there by St. Paul, who could have got it from his contemporary Seneca Jr. Seneca wasn’t that hard to find – he was the de facto ruler of Rome (as the tutor of the underage Emperor Nero).

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  3. Suricou Raven

    Morality is like money: It exists only because people believe it exists. You could take apart a dollar bill atom by atom, and find not a trace of ‘currency’ in it, and yet money still exists. Just as morality, though it isn’t physical, and though there is no ‘moral field’ in the universe to decide what is and isn’t right, ist just as real as a dollar.

    Also, both would cease to exist if there were no intelligence left capable of understanding them.

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  4. carey

    We want to believe that there is a single cohesive set of ethics that can cover all situations. This is easy to believe if we think that ethics are a construct given us by a deity, but those who see humans as the result of evolution think of our primate ethics simply as adaptations appropriate to social animals living in small groups.
    We have all struggled with conflicting ethical rules. The outcome of these struggles depends on how we weight those rules, and the relative weights we apply are not constant – they differ from situation to situation. So there seems to be no global objective function that we can evaluate to point us to an optimal decision. At best we have multiple objective functions, which operate locally, with a lot of fuzziness where their domains overlap.

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  5. Brent

    Atheists accept that each person has one brief lifetime and no eternity awaits after death. This strikes some as despairing at first, but in reality it means that life is much more precious, important, rare, and valuable than anything religion offers. Infinitely so. You can also derive ethics easily from such a reverence for life because it demands a respect for all living things, human or not, when it is treasured as brief and special. Religion, however, undermines all this with its false promise of eternal life and I wonder how much it actually devalues or deemphasizes life. So atheists basis for morality is much powerful and beautiful than the “do as your told” explanation that religion offers.

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  6. coathangrrr

    So, we have at least three separate atheist conceptions of morality and ethics here, and I can name a couple more. Does that mean that moral materialists have the same problem as the theists in choosing a moral code?

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  7. Reynold Hall

    Blast! Now I have to post there! I’ll get you all for this! It’s not like I’ve got much cents left to afford my constantly giving those people two cents worth!

    At least I can thank Greg Petersen who posted at Stranger Fruit for giving me something I could modify to use in my post at UD!

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  8. MarkH

    coathangrrr,
    That’s just because we haven’t had the atheist moral consensus conference yet. We’ll get right on it.

    Although my point was that there is no way that BarryA can honestly say that atheists can’t point to something beyond modern morality (and therefore be “transcendent”) while if anything the religious have a very flexible morality, based on radically different interpretations, that have changed through time.

    I actually doubt any of the three we’ve seen so far would be considered inconsistent with each other. Each is based on a certain mixture of pragmatism, utility, and a goal of human happiness. I would only redact Brent’s respect for “all” living things to just “humans” and maybe a few other animals however, because I do not respect the right of quite a few living things to exist. Some like guinea worms, mosquitoes, and various pathogenic bacteria and viruses I’d be happy to see extinct.

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  9. G Felis

    Hmm. First, either you or BarryA need to define this term “transcendent.” This has always struck me as one of those fuzzy bullshit-magnet words, like “spiritual.” I try not to engage in any discussion where someone’s pulling a Humpty-Dumpty.*

    Here’s the thing: When a cdesign proponentist says “transcendent morality” they really mean moral laws that exist out there in the universe, separate from us, handed down to us by Gawd. So what do you mean when you use the word?

    Of course, I’m also not answering the question because I’d be wasting an awful lot of time writing my dissertation titled “Evolved Value and the Foundations of Ethical Theory” if I could sum the whole thing up coherently in a blog comment.

    —–
    *“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

    “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

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  10. Suricou Raven

    I would post, but I have managed to get my IP banned from UD. Along with my workplace IP. And my ISP cache server IP.

    I didn’t even do anything impolite on that site… just kept pointing out the flaws in their arguments.

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  11. scienceteacherinexile

    MarkH, I was thinking along similar lines as Brent, but I had envisioned putting in a clause such as “our treatment of every entity, living or not, is then based on rational, well thought out decisions”. Does that help?
    I also had thought that specifically regarding humans, that we make moral progress when we indentify at the species level, such that when we see people of different skin color, language, ideas, etc., we still see first a fellow human, and treat the other not necessarily as we would like to be treated, but in a way that we have decided based on logic, reasoning, and benefit to our species.

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  12. blog responder

    Speaking of the Stoics–those moralists were generally materialists: materialist pantheists. So materialists can even believe in God. There goes that argument. Materialists aren’t even necessarily atheists. Added to that, most contemporary atheists also believe in energy, and so aren’t materialists. “Materialists are atheists and can’t have an ethics” is simply false, and has been for thousands of years.

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  13. Pete Dunkelberg

    “If anything, they encourage it”….

    Yeah, once or twice.

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  14. tim quick

    This all Ethics 101, BUT:

    (1) Thinking Christian theists (all Catholic and many Protestants) have long ago given up voluntarism (what is good is good because god commands it) in favor of rationalism (god commands what is good because it is good). To cite just one reason to favor rationalism, voluntarism makes nonsense out of the claim that god is good. But once a religous thinker embraces rationalism and the good is independent of god, then to the “transcendent” moral code is equally available to reason and scriptural sources are mere reports on it.

    (2) Morality doesn’t require a “transcendent” moral code. The most plausible approaches to moral theory make morality a set of rules for either achieving certain desirable ends or constraining permissable forms of action – or some combination of the two. So, utilitarians argue morality involves maximizing utility – defined as happiness, preferences, or by a list of substantive goods; and Kantians argue that morality involves not behaving in ways that could not be universalized into a set of rules that everyone followed. I think Kant is right and the first project is hopeless, so. . .

    (3) Kant, though not most contemporary Kantians, did think his view involved a (more sophisticated that creationist morons could understand) kind of appeal to god. He thought god was a “postulate of practical reason”, in the sense that, one could behave perfectly morally and the outcome might not be good. God was “postulated” to make sure morality worked out given, what Martha Nussbaum has called, the fragility of goodness; i.e., given that the way the world is even when we act well things might turn out badly and we might come to a bad end despite good behavior.

    (4) In other words, we come back around to the real point of religous worries about secular morality – and it’s not about “transcendence”. The real worry is that things won’t work out well no matter how well we behave, that we may not be rewarded for our good behavior and that bad people may not be punished for theirs unless god takes care of it. Guess what? That’s true. Grow up. Doing the right thing doesn’t always work out and there are no cosmic guarantees in this life. Moral development is the process of learning to act not according to external constraints – the fear of punishment or disapproval – but based on internal convictions about what is right. In fact, as Kant recognized, if our moral code comes from outside of us we are not free. Morality is free practical reason in action. Anything else is just conforming to coercion.

    (5) My moral code is Kantian. Most broadly, I act in ways which, if a sufficient number of people go along with me, will create the kind of social world I want to live in. Would I feel better if I thought there was some external or transcedent constraint that made the best outcome inevitable? No, I’d feel like I wasn’t free, that my own efforts don’t matter, and I should just do whatever I feel like.

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  15. tim quick

    Oh, the punchline, yeah, right:

    Moral progress is progress towards that ideal social world.

    Okay, that was long but, I swear, I’m done now.

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  16. Brent

    Mark, yes, I agree completely — extending respect to “all” living things is going too far, especially with diseases. I was thinking of mostly animals so my words were inexact.

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  17. Bronze Dog

    I mostly extend my respect to living things in proportion to their intelligence.

    Dolphins? It’d suck if dolphins died out.

    I recently remember some story about this worm (and I’m pretty sure they don’t have much of a brain. More like a few nerve bundles, IIRC) that burrows into people’s feet and work their way up, growing as they feed, eventually breaking out through the skin.

    I never knew about their specific species, but I won’t miss them at all.

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  18. Caledonian

    Mark, yes, I agree completely — extending respect to “all” living things is going too far, especially with diseases.

    Why? That’s rather like admiring the elegance of a predator until seeing it hunt down and kill prey, and then wanting to wipe it out because its existence offends your aesthetics.

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  19. Ted

    Dolphins? It’d suck if dolphins died out.

    Yes, what Caledonian said. Dolphins? This may be some incredibly obvious answer, but why the love for dolphins?

    Is it because they saved that surfer off California coast from being eaten by sharks?

    On a cost/benefit basis, I’m not sure potentially spending billions is worth a California surfer.

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  20. Caledonian

    And why the hatred for Guinea worms? The worm is no less or more inherently valuable than the human whose flesh it burrows through.

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  21. Matticus Rex

    Tim Quick –

    Your treatment of Kantian ethics takes a consequentialist turn near the end: “I act in ways which, if a sufficient number of people go along with me, will create the kind of social world I want to live in.” That sounds more like Rule Utilitarianism to me.

    Kantian Ethics ask if an act can be universalized without contradiction. E.g., if I universalize a lie, the whole business of lying becomes unintelligible. So Kantian Ethics say that you shouldn’t lie because doing so creates a contradiction between your action and the universalized maxim of your action.

    You seem rather well versed in ethics. How do you address the charge that your ethical stance isn’t more along the lines of rule utilitarianism?

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  22. Mike

    As i see it, morality is a subjective and moderately arbitrary construct for all, theists and atheists alike. Even worse, morality, or fairness, will likely need to be weighted in favor of one party over another: more subjectivity, making it less fair for at least one of the parties involved.

    Animals, namely chimps under observation in the wild, have been observed to exhibit signs of morality and fairness. I fail to see where “transcendant” enters the picture. To transcendentalists, each person must know what is right. For a society, it is not that simple, so we argue and attempt to reach consensus and then write a law, which will be contested, further argued, refined, rewritten, stricken, etc. It will not be possible to please everyone.

    Reply

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