Morality III

Thanks for your responses. They were very illuminating in helping me understand where you are coming from. There are a few things I wanted to discuss specifically about what you said as well as perhaps clarify, and also I wanted to clarify a few of my questions that you say you didn’t understand for I think they are still important to our discussion.

Previously you said, “My current feelings on the issue is that we are moral creatures simply because being so gives us a survival advantage as a species. I don't think it's any more complicated than that. So saying that it's logical to be moral is probably about as meaningful as saying that it's logical to have hair. Whether or not you could impute a logical reason to have hair doesn't change the fact that I am hairy”.

This is where the questions arose from. It sounds as if you are saying that morals arose naturally, like hair. They are a natural part of a human being, like hair. So it appears as if an individual has no choice in the formation of any morals, but what he values is merely a product of time plus chance plus nature. Therefore, we do not make “moral” choices, but act out our natural course, simply manifesting what nature has programmed in us. In other words, we can say that morality is merely “nature taking its course”, like hair growth. You cannot decide where your hair grows, it just does. And so you do not decide what your morals are, they just are. Hence Questions 2 and 4. Morality, in the non-theistic view, is just nature taking its course. So how then does one discern between what is moral, amoral and immoral when all of them are simply descriptions of nature taking its course? It would be like saying that hair growth on one part of your body is immoral and growth on another is moral. No, they are just nature happening. There is no value judgment to any of them at all.

“The beliefs that we have formed as a result of the experiences we've had in our life provide us with the ruler that we use to make moral judgements. Just like you don't need to find some absolute invariant standard to define an inch, you don't need some absolute invariant standard to define right and wrong.”

“Based on our beliefs, formed by our past experiences, we make general rules of thumb about what we should do and shouldn't do.”

“The person making that moral judgment makes it dependent on the basis of their past experiences. You can't separate the moral judgement from the person; neither can you seperate it from the circumstances in which they find themselves making the judgement.”

Given these responses to the questions I would think it fair to say that you do not believe there to be any universal standard of right and wrong (as relates to actions), but that everything is relative to the individual. According to his nature and past experiences he determines for himself what is right and what is wrong and acts accordingly. So for some it is altruism, others masochism, for some it is loving his neighbors, for others it is eating them. Each man does what is right in his own eyes and there is no universal standard that his actions can be judged by. Is this, in essence, what you are saying?

“No religion provides such a standard (including Christianity)”.
This was your answer given in response to the question of whether or not you believe there to be any absolute invariant standard for right and wrong. Yet the Bible does make this claim, and it does so in absolute and unchanging terms. Now I by no means think that most, if any Christians, live by this standard, but that does not change the fact that the authoritative source of a religion makes the claim that there are absolute invariant standards laid out by an absolute unchanging God. But I don’t suppose our talking about non-theistic explanations for morality have anything to do with this, so I will leave it there. I just couldn’t let it go without commenting on it.

Anyway, I have once again written far too long of a blog, so I hope I have not bored you. Have a great weekend my friend.