Quaestiones

[m_francis]

Elsewhere, the Usual Suspects brought up a perennial question, and it amused me to take the counterarguments and the sed contra from what seem at first unlikely sources.

De moralitate atheorum

Question: Whether those who do not believe in God may act morally.

Objection 1. It would seem not, because  as Jean-Paul Sartre held in "Existentialism is a

Comments

[ext_230065]

This is splendid, and makes one realize how much convenience hyperlinking and modern formatting can introduce into the medieval disputation format. (I particularly like the split coloring of Prudence.)

soul=anima=life

[marycatelli]

And yet you get silly fantasy writers talking about perfectly normal humans, fully functional in every respect -- including conscience! -- and claim they have no souls.

They seem to have a very primitive sort of notion of soul, like a tribe that believes a giant can put its soul in hiding to protect it, or one's soul is an external animal.

Piers Anthony, oddly enough, had it right in the first Xanth novel: a manticore, coming to the Magician Humphrey to learn if it had a soul, was told that only a soul would have the faculties to ask the question, so it had to have one, by dint of having asked. Later, he treats it as a detachable sort of thingee that can even be torn in half. . . sigh

(what a tangent. 0:)

[anonymous]

Not trying to start something, but wasn't Voltaire a deist?

[superversive]

Voltaire claimed to be a deist, but it may have been protective coloration. Rousseau once observed that while Voltaire claimed to believe in God, he really only believed in the Devil, because he blamed his version of God for everything that went wrong in the world.

Protective coloration?

[misterpengo]

I suppose it's possible, but that doesn't seem like the easiest case to make. Maybe his coloration was just that good.

That said, I think the thrust of M_Francis' point goes through whether or not Voltaire was a deist.

[marycatelli]

It's also possible that he believed that belief in Theism was necessary for morality and is advocating it on that basis. This would entail believing atheism would render them immoral as well as Deism.

Honest atheist

[martinjt]

lukeprog at commonsenseathism.com seems clear that he is working on how atheists can be moral but would, I think, agree that they don't seem to have a leg to stand on.

And to be clear for the inevitable atheist objecting. The point is not that atheists are immoral monsters rather that they do not have a logicalbasis for being moral.

Is there an honest atheist?

[ilion7]

"And to be clear for the inevitable atheist objecting. The point is not that atheists are immoral monsters rather that they do not have a logicalbasis for being moral."

And -- 'atheists' being for the most part intellectually dishonest -- it doesn't matter how many times, nor how clearly (as here), the point is explicated ... the little pretend-atheists of the world will whinge that we've called them bad names.

Re: Is there an honest atheist?

[martinjt]

The vast majority of mankind has not spent 10 minutes of their lifetimes wondering "why" something is good and true. Of the remainder the vast majority (present party included) have numerous unchallanged presumptions on "why" and "what" that they ( I am) only relatively better than the totally unthinking ones.

My brother and my niece are atheists. Neither seem to be so due to any strong intellectual commitment though they would deny that. My brother blanches and leaves if God/atheism/religion is raised as a subject. My niece was so mishandled by my sister that she has rejected God simply because my sister is Catholic.

I find it hard to accuse them of being dishonest as the weight of their problems keep them from being able to even look.

[whswhs]

This argument looks as if it might be equivocal in the meaning of "morality."

* Are we referring to morality as a cultural and institutional element of human societies, descriptively, or are we referring to morality as something that we are obliged to follow? It is a factual truth that nearly all human societies have moralities, and have effective methods of getting most people to adhere to them. Why this should be so is a partly empirical and partly philosophical question. The Christian may suppose that they exist because God has implanted a moral sense in human beings (even in human beings who are not Christians, as in this belief system Christianity is not simply the arbitrary belief system of one particular culture); the naturalist must suppose that they exist because they favor long-term survival, both for themselves and for their human hosts. (Presumably a morality could make its host mildly dysfunctional by making them devote effort to infecting others with the morality; an acute morality would kill too many of its hosts and

There are other candidate moral systems.

[marycatelli]

Please provide these counter-examples.

Re: There are other candidate moral systems.

[whswhs]

Ancient Greek moral beliefs of the Homeric era (speaking of Nietzsche). Ancient Greek moral ideas of classical Athens, with, for example, the assumption that sex with a woman, a boy, or a slave was natural, but sex between two adult men was a perversion (some of the most abusive epithets in Greek, such as eurypygon and katapygon, refer to a man who accepts the "passive" role in homosexuality), and the assumption that there was a natural tie between democracy and pederasty. Buddhist ethics as taught by Gautama. The partially Buddhist ethics of samurai era Japan. Objectivism.

Re: There are other candidate moral systems.

[m_francis]

It is instructive that the Buddha was canonized as St. Jehosaphat [iirc] when his story began to circulate in Christian Europe. There are obvious differences: Christianity preaches social justice, Buddhism preaches a withdrawal from the world. Things like that.

Bushido is more akin to European codes of chivalry than to a system of morality. Professional engineers also have a code of ethics. It does not constitute a separate moral system.

You may be confusing a moral system with a set of specific commandments meant to cover all possible situations, as is the case with Qur'an, Confucianism, et al. If we instead adopt the Aristotelian-Christian POV of rationalism, we can see that such things are easily explained.

Or is burning widows on the husband's funeral pyre "moral" because that is the custom in one place, but not another.