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I'm not arguing that. But the fact is, for us to have an agreement on what is "moral", there has to be a source to define it. If everyone disagrees on what it is....we don't have that. We may find "what works", or how to get along...but that doesn't mean we have morality.
So what, if it works?
I still don't get it and you still haven't answered my post :
Quote:
Originally Posted by personne
I don't understand the question
Unless you don't read the tacit meaning "for the biggest amount of people and more and more as centuries past", the answer is within the question : because it works.
Truly no irony in my comment, I don't understand how one can ask the question, in that manner anyway.
To believe that it shouldn't be "what works for most" and that it evolved and will evolve to work for even more people is to base that somehow, "something" would want a moral system that doesn't work for most people. Why would they want that?
You won't convert me and I won't either, that is for sure, not even trying to.
But please answer me because I truly don't understand. Why is it so important to you to rely on God ? Are the sentences "there are no answers" (yet) or "I don't know" so frightening? Because that's what it looks like to me. A terrible fear of the unknown, so much fear that you feel better rationalizing the unrationnable rather than face it, rather contradict yourself and be dishonest (which might be a sin, I don't know) than try to do actual soul searching.
So if it is not that, please enlighten me so that I can at least attempt to understand (using empathy, that human quality we have that tells us what is right/wrong, because I clearly miss the god-gene so it's all I can rely on)
Vizio, if your God said that you had to torture babies solely for personal enjoyment or pleasure, would it be moral ?
I don't expect an answer, though.
He'd say yes if I remember correctly from his past posts. Plus...if someone believes the Old Testament God is a decent being, they'd have to believe that morality stems directly from Yahweh so what is good and bad changes depending on what Yahweh decides it is (unless they believe much of the Old Testament is metaphorical or something).
My favorite part of the Bible is the section on the Tower of Babel. I think someone should make that into a cartoon that consists of the following -
It's ancient times. Everyone is working hard, but many of them are smiling. They don't have much except each other, but that's enough for them. Confidence soars. Hatred stemming from racial and cultural differences is absent. President Kennedy in a deer skin robe steps up to a stone pedestal and repeats the following before a massive crowd:
"Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the tower? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? We choose to build the tower. We choose to build the tower, not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
Then Yahweh flies down in a Godzilla costume and stomps on everything.
Vizio, if your God said that you had to torture babies solely for personal enjoyment or pleasure, would it be moral ?
It would be interesting to consider the incident of Abraham and Isaac in this regard. God tested Abraham's faith to see if he would literally kill his son at God's request. Abraham passed to the test, presumably because he truly was prepared to kill Isaac. Christians breathe a sign of relief because God let Abraham off the hook at the last minute, but there are several deep lessons here.
The point is to trust the word of God and act faithfully, even to the point of doing something that would otherwise be a horrible sin. A quote from the Christian webpage above: "God's command to Abraham was not wrong, for God has the right to take human life (see the article on God's moral authority) and therefore had the right to command Isaac's death." If given a similar test today, I wonder how many Christians would feel that they could obey God, no matter how extreme the test might be? And what if God had not let Abraham off the hook at the last minute? I think the Christian answer has to be: The killing of the child, in this case, could not be a sin, since it was at the request of God.
As I see it, this is one of many reasons why I think that the fundamentalist religious mindset can be dangerous. Putting one's full faith in God, even in situations that might otherwise seem immoral (e.g., God asks you to fly a plane into a skyscraper) can lead, ironically, to the most extreme from of complete moral relativism. If morality is always just exactly what God says it is, then presumably any act could be justified as moral, so long as one believes that God said to do it.
Oddly enough, a form of "moral absolutism" based on science would be more absolute that "absolutism" based on God because God's determination of what is right is ultimately a matter of God's whims - independent of any truly absolute moral structure implied by natural laws, human nature, etc.
Personally, I would much prefer morality based on reason. Human reasoning can be messy, and a "science of morality" might always involve significant problems and grey areas, but I think its better than morality based on unwavering faith in any traditional theistic conception of God.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 02-23-2015 at 10:35 AM..
You know I think I understand. But rather than surmise can you perhaps suggest what you mean by that and how society would bring in that science? Are you noting perhaps that morality will directly be instilled into populations and learned through purely derived empirical and 'scientific' evidence? Will we have say scientifically derived schools of morality? Will this be a jump to maybe a 'brave new world' ?
You know I think I understand. But rather than surmise can you perhaps suggest what you mean by that and how society would bring in that science? Are you noting perhaps that morality will directly be instilled into populations and learned through purely derived empirical and 'scientific' evidence? Will we have say scientifically derived schools of morality? Will this be a jump to maybe a 'brave new world' ?
Concerning your specific questions:
Sciences are born when a critical mass of scientists become convinced that a particular set of questions, or types of questions, can be framed in the form of a scientific theory and investigated empirically. At the moment I don't think that we have this critical mass, and there don't seem to be many detailed theories to get the ball rolling. I think that a big part of the problem is that, in the current mindset, the default idea is that moral values are personal values - not the kinds of things that can be investigated by science. But this is just historical tradition, not any sort of ironclad logical limitation. Science has not taken a serious shot at this, but new technologies are bringing new approaches within our reach. New methods for gathering and analyzing statistics can play a role, as well as brain scanning technologies.
The key idea is that we ought to be able to measure "human flourishing" to some degree, and sample population of people who have different sets of moral codes to see if there are correlations between moral codes and flourishing. If flourishing is, indeed, measurable, then presumably science can measure it, and if there are, in fact, correlations between flourishing and various moral codes, then presumably scientific analysis can tease these correlations out of sociological data. There will obviously be controversy and different schools of thought within the scientific community. The "soft" sciences tend to be messy, and this would probably be one of the softest of the soft sciences, but still potentially informative.
Scientific evidence is rarely so overwhelming that it is completely beyond all possible doubt, and when a topic is controversial, even overwhelming evidence and scientific consensus can fail to provoke social consensus amongst those who don't like the theory (e.g., the theory of evolution, and global warming are two on-going examples), so if your reference to a "brave new world" in meant to suggest a universal moral code imposed by government - beyond the moral codes that are already routinely imposed by government - then I'm not sure what to say, except, I doubt that a science of morality would play any absolute role. Realistically, people will cherry-pick and point to the data they like. But, as messy as it is, I'd rather see this approach (scientific schools of thought) than just relying on the idea that God determines morality, and whatever God wants must be right.
Just a heads up. Harris has been critiqued for being philosophically naive as well as anti-philosophy. I believe the term is "scientism". Many of these critiques, I agree with. Regardless, you have to consider the anti-philosophical source and listen to voices that disagree with Harris and believe that science isn't equipped to deal with philosophical questions, nor should it be.
Just a heads up. Harris has been critiqued for being philosophically naive as well as anti-philosophy. I believe the term is "scientism". Many of these critiques, I agree with. Regardless, you have to consider the anti-philosophical source and listen to voices that disagree with Harris and believe that science isn't equipped to deal with philosophical questions, nor should it be.
Thanks mordant. I certainly didn't want to imply that Harris's approach would be popular, or even that it would, in the long run, necessarily succeed. But I think the approach has merit, and is worth taking seriously.
I would like use this opportunity to clarify a couple of points. If, as a matter of fact, there cannot be anything like a "science of morality" then I would be curious to hear what atheists would suggest as a way of thinking rationally about morality. Are atheists forced to be radical moral relativists? If there cannot, even in principle, be a science of morality, then on what basis could an atheist argue that any given act is immoral? I could be wrong (so please help here), but it seems to me that the moment an atheist applies standards of reason to arguments about morality, the implication is that something like a science of morality should be possible, in principle. How can a principle like "Act compassionately" be "better" than "torture and kill children whenever possible" if there is no reason to say that one is better then the other? From what I've seen, atheists routinely point to things like "survival of the species" or "game theory" or some notion of a neurological predisposition for certain kinds of behavior, given the fact that we are social creatures, etc. The basic idea, as far as I can see, is that if morality is not God-given, then we have two basic choices: (1) morality is purely a matter of convention (radical relativism) or (2) morality - at least in some broad brushstroke fashion - is implied by the brute facts of reality.
Some atheists will be pure relativists, and that's fine, but speaking for myself, I just don't buy pure relativism. There will, of course, need to be some logical "givens" in any science of morality, just as there are in any science. Those who do physics generally accept, without deep debate, that there is such a thing as objective data. Philosophers of science might argue the point, but physicists, as such, don't generally engage this debate within physics. A science of morality will have to accept something roughly like "human flourishing is a measure of goodness" and "suffering is a measure of badness" and there will no doubt be debates over what, exactly, counts as flourishing or suffering, but this wouldn't necessarily prevent some sort of scientific investigation from getting started. As time goes on, someone might offer a radically different basis for measuring moral value, but every science lives with the possibility of radical paradigm shifts.
I don't want to ignore the philosophical concerns. There are deep philosophical reasons to be skeptical of the possibility of objective moral values, just as there are deep philosophical reasons to be skeptical of the existence of the external world. But routinely reject solipsism because...well...just because we do. We can prove that solipsism is wrong, but we don't let this prevent science from progressing. Similarly, we probably can't ever prove that radical moral relativism is true, but that shouldn't prevent us from pursuing a science of morality based on natural principles.
Is there anything you believe to be universally considered immoral? Is it always immoral for anyone to torture babies solely for personal enjoyment or pleasure?
Why on earth do you feel it is necessary to qualify torturing babies by the phrase "solely for personal enjoyment or pleasure?" Do you REALLY believe it is EVER moral to torture babies?????
Yeah, just what we need ... another 1.7 billion people competing for increasingly rare jobs, when damn near a third of the population lives in an impoverished condition already. We're going to breed ourselves into extinction.
But hey, who cares as long as we can still cram every human being into the state of Arkansas - as long as they don't mind living out their lives standing shoulder to shoulder, nose to tail, with the four people standing in front, behind, and on both sides.
However, you're turning this into an abortion debate and those will almost certainly get deleted.
It's really starting to become a one-trick pony - abortion gets brought up every single time a debate like this erupts. Fortunately, it's legal ... but that's a whole other debate.
Religion doesn't seem to stop people from having an abortion given that 7 of 10 women who get one declare an affiliation with a religion. Atheists only represent perhaps 8 or 9 percent of the total population - do you think we're the only ones in the clinic's waiting room?
I wasn't "debating" it at all Shirina...YOU are debating it. I never even mentioned the word.
~~I stated that no subjective moral code, regardless of basis, was any better or worse than any other.
~~You then responded that I was, "completely wrong about this", and that, "religion is a TERRIBLE place to obtain one's morality". Then you cited instances where people following religious moral codes hassled people and gave examples of people being being killed or allowed to die.
~~I then supported my statement by noting secular moral code (laws) that has allowed more killing than anything EVER, that is commonly opposed by religious codes. I never discussed or debated the pros or cons of that type of killing, just that it does occur...and, as per the subject of the thread, is sanctioned by many secular codes while proscribed by many religious codes.
YOU were the one that went on and on about, population VS limited space & resources, religious girls, capabilities, welfare & birth control, etc.
THEN, as strange as it was, you said, "Fortunately, it's legal ... but that's a whole other debate."
No Shirina...that IS the debate that comports with the thread subject, annnnnnnd, my point: That "The Law" (the secular moral code) sanctions this ultra-prolific killing, as opposed to the religious moral codes that condemn it....just as religious codes sanction killing that secular codes proscribe...again, illustrating that subjective moral codes are no better or worse than each other regardless of basis be it secular or religious.
If, as a matter of fact, there cannot be anything like a "science of morality" then I would be curious to hear what atheists would suggest as a way of thinking rationally about morality. Are atheists forced to be radical moral relativists? If there cannot, even in principle, be a science of morality, then on what basis could an atheist argue that any given act is immoral?
I hope that there can be a kind of "science of morality", if only because we have to figure out how to confer a morality similar to ours, upon human and super-human level artificial intelligences that most people who are knowledgeable about AI believe will emerge sometime in this century, potentially soon enough that we'd better get cracking on the problem posthaste if we wish to survive, much less thrive, as a species in the shadow of such intelligence.
On the other hand, I am a fairly radical relativist based on simple observation. Mores have radically changed over the past few hundred years. Looking simply at how society regards women alone is enough to blow your hair back. Take someone from 1750 and transport them here to 2015 and they would presume that 100% of women have become harlots and witches, given how they dress, are on a relatively equal footing with men, have careers, educations, aren't defined as mere housekeepers and baby factories, etc. This would be in opposition to what such a person of antiquity would regard as "the natural order" and "common sense" and "biblical sobriety".
Putting these things together I don't believe there is, "out there" somewhere, a "thing" called "morality" that we can deduce, analyze, and quantify, and therefore algorithmically impart to thinking machines.
Instead there is an ever-morphing emergent consensus of what is moral in the here and now. There is no inherent definition of good or evil, right or wrong, only degrees of (dis)approval for certain actions which are ideally, but not necessarily, grounded in what makes most people feel safe, happy and free.
Therefore the best answer to the conundrum of how to impart morality to an AI that I have heard of is this: take twenty or so of the best examples of empathy, compassion, ethics and good character that humanity has produced in the last century of so ... your Einsteins, your Schwietzers, and so on ... and simply instruct the computer as follows: (1) your purpose is to serve humanity; (2) conduct yourself in this service as these twenty humans would -- and most particularly, don't do anything they wouldn't do.
With this as a starting point we might occasionally update that list of examplars to reflect changing times and needs, just as society effectively does for itself. Or hope that with that initial list, the AI has figured out how to do it for itself ... given that by then we will have lost control of the programming.
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