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What do people ground their ethics in without God? How do they justify it?
- Thread starter Brightstar777
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Vect
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I'd rather not have to live in a society where I have to deal with violent criminal rapists - even if that society allows me to be a violent criminal rapist - so I advocate for killing them all.
It's laziness that guides my ethics. Sinning is lot of work. Much simpler to not treat others the way I don't want to be treated.
It's laziness that guides my ethics. Sinning is lot of work. Much simpler to not treat others the way I don't want to be treated.
ATI Escapee
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I feel like this is sorta like asking why people have sex if they dont believe sex is their divine gift for being married. We are social creatures and instinctually usually feel bad when bad things happen and feel good when good things happen. Most people feel bad when they cause distress, and most people feel satisfaction when they help/contribute in some way. You normally dont have to be taught to be sad about your mom dying. In the same vein, generally people are not totally lost on how to behave morally without a divine being telling them what to do. Morality will be influenced by culture and circumstances, but Id argue that morality is also pretty innate in the vast majority of humans unless they were born with brain damage or really fucked up as a kid.
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>Morality does not require religious tenets
Wrong
The ethics you see in stories from the bible have been widely retold and adopted outside of it.
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You can't really.
The eastern philosophies also reference and point to "an order of the world" or the universe, which is very similar to theism.
Human rights, equality and pushing for freedom are all secular mutations of christian concepts.
They have no own core.
The eastern philosophies also reference and point to "an order of the world" or the universe, which is very similar to theism.
Human rights, equality and pushing for freedom are all secular mutations of christian concepts.
They have no own core.
So, Brightstar, you don't believe that the tales of the bible have long since been retold outside of it?
This seems like a pointless topic to discuss as you seem unwilling to seperate the bible from god, which a non religious person would naturally do.
This seems like a pointless topic to discuss as you seem unwilling to seperate the bible from god, which a non religious person would naturally do.
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Religious people feel that god-based morality is the same thing as what Freud called the superego which is why these discussions are doomed. They can't imagine people might have an ethic structure that doesn't stem from god because of this disconnect. "You don't believe in god? Then you can't feel bad about what you do to other people" is all you get because that's how they define the terms of the discussion.
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When I was still a fedora tipper I thought you could create workable moral systems by determining first principles from reason.
But sophistic reason can be employed to justify them as well. In a time of great need, eating your dead companion is the difference between life and death. In times of scarcity, less children means higher chances of the others surviving. Does that make these acts moral in these circumstances, or is there a deeper morality that transcends reason that makes acts always good or bad? This is the Kantian view, although I personally prefer virtue ethics to Kant.
Edward Bellamy once remarked that horses on the street avoid stepping on human corpses, and used this as evidence of a universal morality. I think its actually evidence of a universal avoidance of unpleasantness among living things. The empathy you describe above is contingent on human beings developing empathy, which I believe forms mainly as a result of breastfeeding from one's mother and, more broadly, being raised in a good environment. This is by no means guaranteed, and many human beings are born or raised to lack this quality.
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the point. It is not that theistic people think they need to be told what is right and wrong by God, but that they believe the very concept of morality is preceded by God. It is a fine difference to be sure, but important.
Cultural norms and mores influence what a given group of people find acceptable. I'd say genetics will inevitably play a big role as well. But ultimately, morality transcends this kind of relativism. Cannibalism and sacrificing children will always be bad, even in the Aztec Empire or modern Haiti. There are all sorts of good reasons for this. Cannibalism is unhealthy, killing children has little evolutionary advantage, and both are deeply distressing and dehumanizing for the perpetrators.
But sophistic reason can be employed to justify them as well. In a time of great need, eating your dead companion is the difference between life and death. In times of scarcity, less children means higher chances of the others surviving. Does that make these acts moral in these circumstances, or is there a deeper morality that transcends reason that makes acts always good or bad? This is the Kantian view, although I personally prefer virtue ethics to Kant.
Devout Muslim
kiwifarms.net
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Are you asking for specific people to give a response? Or general answers to this?
There is no real answer. Ultimately people arbitrarily choose something because they have to choose something. That is the essence of being. Atheist often get big mad about this and refuse to admit their morals are based on faith and fit into the same camp as religious morality (but with way less intellectual rigour and examination).
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You can get whatever serious answers you want by just reading the reddit thread you took this question from.
Why are you just copypasting reddit thread topics? Kiwifarms users cannot monetize here and none of this engagement will ever be useful. If you try marketing here people will simply ridicule you. People rarely follow anyone just for making thread that have replies, and even if you somehow get followers, you cannot sell your account anywhere both because shilling is worthless here and kiwifarms is an infamous website that most people are afraid to visit, let alone even create an account on themselves. What's the point of these worthless discussion threads then? You're clearly not interested in the actual discussion, because if you were, you would formulate your actual question yourself, instead of literally copy-pasting reddit.
Also thread tax just in case: High IQ people who can reason faster than the average person may have the ability to derive principles from logic and observation, where they may even try pushing as far as they can before getting push back, but they can reason themselves into literally anything from being the most good person possible to feeding children cocaine and and snorting ketamine and gunpowder. Without a divine source the only other way is to make government a divine source based on physical, legal, and financial strength, and have the government simply enforce morality according to a philosophy ideal for preserving their power.. This can work perfectly fine, and is often what happens to even theocratic civilizations as they inevitably degenerate.
Why are you just copypasting reddit thread topics? Kiwifarms users cannot monetize here and none of this engagement will ever be useful. If you try marketing here people will simply ridicule you. People rarely follow anyone just for making thread that have replies, and even if you somehow get followers, you cannot sell your account anywhere both because shilling is worthless here and kiwifarms is an infamous website that most people are afraid to visit, let alone even create an account on themselves. What's the point of these worthless discussion threads then? You're clearly not interested in the actual discussion, because if you were, you would formulate your actual question yourself, instead of literally copy-pasting reddit.
Also thread tax just in case: High IQ people who can reason faster than the average person may have the ability to derive principles from logic and observation, where they may even try pushing as far as they can before getting push back, but they can reason themselves into literally anything from being the most good person possible to feeding children cocaine and and snorting ketamine and gunpowder. Without a divine source the only other way is to make government a divine source based on physical, legal, and financial strength, and have the government simply enforce morality according to a philosophy ideal for preserving their power.. This can work perfectly fine, and is often what happens to even theocratic civilizations as they inevitably degenerate.
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- May 9, 2017
... so? That doesn't mean morality can be a coherent concept without some kind transcendent grounding.
But that doesn't require a belief in god.
A person's moral code being defined by Christianity doesn't require the existence of a god.
God of Nothing
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Couldn't have been put any better.
If anyone thinks people could have morals with atheism, they've been deliberately ignoring the genital mutilation of children going on by the same people who don't think anything is real or moral.
>muh middle-east
niggers who believe in god unironically and commit crimes still think they're going to heaven too
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unfortunately for you, that's just a cope. Fortunately for you and for everyone else, Christ is infinitely patient.
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... again, so?
You're missing the point. It's not that behaving morally requires belief in any particular religion or any religion at all. It's that words like good and evil don't make any sense as objective measures without some sort of transcendent reality.
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We don't. We kill on whim, we maintain harems of sex slaves, fuck children and have an intense hatred of pork.
Oh. Wait. No. That's a certain flavour of person who has a very deep conviction that God is real, has a very strong moral code founded in scripture and tries very hard to follow his every word.
TL;DR: Do unto others as you would do under you. I dont behave in a tolerant and civilised manner because space daddy won't give me chippendales in the sky if I'm not a good girl. I do it because if you need bribes or threats of violence to have a code of ethics, you don't have any morals or ethics.
Society doesn't work if you're at risk of being murdered. Thus societies where people have certain aversions or restrictions work better than those that do not and are more likley to survive, progress and further develop. Different configurations of taboo and prohibition can work with varying degrees of success. Some will have features in common, a prohibition of non state sanctioned killing is near universal. Others, such as forbidding children to have any other color hair at school than black in Japan because it is seen as provocative and a cause of disunity are more niche.
God doesn't need come into it at any stage. A deity certainly can come into it, and sometimes divine dictates might actually align with things that do cause civilisations to develop in a productive and harmonious way. We can see there are many times when a system of morality based on a God/Gods doesn't achieve this though, see the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies, the Flower Wars and the eternal stagnation there.
Oh. Wait. No. That's a certain flavour of person who has a very deep conviction that God is real, has a very strong moral code founded in scripture and tries very hard to follow his every word.
TL;DR: Do unto others as you would do under you. I dont behave in a tolerant and civilised manner because space daddy won't give me chippendales in the sky if I'm not a good girl. I do it because if you need bribes or threats of violence to have a code of ethics, you don't have any morals or ethics.
Society doesn't work if you're at risk of being murdered. Thus societies where people have certain aversions or restrictions work better than those that do not and are more likley to survive, progress and further develop. Different configurations of taboo and prohibition can work with varying degrees of success. Some will have features in common, a prohibition of non state sanctioned killing is near universal. Others, such as forbidding children to have any other color hair at school than black in Japan because it is seen as provocative and a cause of disunity are more niche.
God doesn't need come into it at any stage. A deity certainly can come into it, and sometimes divine dictates might actually align with things that do cause civilisations to develop in a productive and harmonious way. We can see there are many times when a system of morality based on a God/Gods doesn't achieve this though, see the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies, the Flower Wars and the eternal stagnation there.
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