> This may be an important observation here. Perhaps you are projecting > your thoughts onto others when in fact, they don't share the same > belief.
The difference is that I'm admitting that my morality is subjective, and that I'm not sure it has any objective basis other than maybe instinct... except that's not objective either. Compare that with some Christians who assert that they have an objective morality derived from the Bible or given by God -- actually their subjective interpretation of the Bible that helps them rationalize why slavery is proper, why women must be subservient to men, etc. If we all said our morality is subjective, and it's a complicated mix of culture and personal experiences and whatever, maybe we could work things out more easily than each person or each faction saying my morality is the objective one, all others are wrong. Meanwhile, the funny thing is that we probably agree on some large issues. You and I might disagree on abortion, gay marriage, social services, how high or low taxes should be, but we probably agree that genocide is wrong, killing children is wrong, slavery is wrong. When we think of humans doing it today, we can't imagine anything that could justify it. When we think of people in the storybook doing it because they were ordered by God, some people say that's okay, and some people would try to excuse it today. > > I see morality as subjective, which should mean morality doesn't > > matter, the kind of thing that absolutists usually accuse moral > > relativists of thinking. But I think some of the big moral questions > > are more or less hardwired into us, instinctive. Almost everybody > > feels that it's wrong to kill, even from wildly different cultures. > > Maybe there's a positive situation that has steered humans to evolve > > an instinct against killing. It wouldn't have to always benefit the > > individual. If it benefits the species, then that can be enough for a > > trait to be caught up in evolution. > > > Unfortunately there's a huge number of exceptions, people who don't > > feel that way or are able to overcome their instincts against killing. > > That doesn't necessarily prove that it's not an instinct. Like > > homosexuality, you'd think that would be a trait that selects itself > > out of the population, but people keep doing it. Some traits don't > > have to pop up in every individual for them to serve some evolutionary > > function. > > > I've heard of studies that hint at some parts of morality being > > instinctive, but I realize it's not fully proven or supported. I'm not > > even sure how we'd go about proving that. But it seems plausible. > > > I guess even if morality was instinctive, that wouldn't mean it's > > objectively right. What if we had the instinct to rape? Would that > > make it less wrong? > > I am so impressed to hear you articulate this, I believe that these > considerations are very legitimate suggestions that morality is not > simply what humans decide it to be. But if humans can't rely on our own instincts or subjective judgments about it, what do we use as our objective yardstick for measuring right and wrong? I suspect you'd say God gives it to us or the Bible spells it out to us. And I'd say the thing you think of as God giving it to you seems to be indistinguishable from having positive feelings about an idea you have. Might as well say Tarzan is giving it to you or the Wizard of Oz is giving it to you. The Bible spells it out, and so do many other texts with competing messages, even competing supplements to the Bible like the Talmud, Book of Mormon, the Quran, etc. Unless one of those stands out as being more true than the others, how do we know which one is true, if any? To me, they all seem untrue, or at least the supernatural claims in them seem so implausible as to be not worth considering. > I consider this a fundamental contradiction of humanism. As Scruton noted: > > "In From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Roger Scruton says that > Heidegger's concept of inauthenticity and Sartre's concept of bad > faith were self-inconsistent; both deny any universal moral creed, yet > speak of these concepts as if everyone were bound to abide them. In > chapter 18, he says: "In what sense Sartre is able to 'recommend' the > authenticity, which consists in the purely self-made morality, is > unclear. He does recommend it, but, by his own argument, his > recommendation can have no objective force."" I haven't read those sources, and I don't know enough about Scruton to trust his assertions about them. Sorry. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "A Civil Religious Debate" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/a-civil-religious-debate?hl=en.
