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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[McTraveller]

The argument there is that if there is a Creator, it's the Creator's prerogative to bestow values on the Created; so what the Creator deems good vs evil is so, by decree.  By extension though this decree itself cannot be evaluated as "good or evil" unless that Creator is subject to some other authority.

So extending that, I will concede that in human-created constructs the value of those constructs is and can be  established by humans. I claim though that these are not "objective" classifications because they depend on the whims/preferences of humans, not based on some human-independent phenomena.

[Rolan7]

That's making a huge assumption though, and I don't mean the creator's existence.  Why would our creator's values be more important than ours?

If we're *actually* just talking about a creator then they could be limited in power or knowledge, and/or be malicious.  I can look at an ant farm and get mad at how the ants are behaving, but neither the ants nor me are correct.  I'm just more powerful.

Of course the Christian God isn't just a creator, he's the Creator.  But that involves a LOT of assumptions other than merely "it created us".

[McTraveller]

Well if a god was just more powerful than us, like we are to ants, but is subject to the same general rules - then yes their decree of right and wrong would be no different than our right/wrong applied to ants.

You are correct I was assuming a Creator like the Christian God, not just a creator like someone who builds things.  Fair point.

[MaxTheFox]

I think morality is independent of a creator or Creator, or indeed anything supernatural, but also that it is impossible to quantify in any kind of rigorous way. This is not possible to rectify. It is an inherent consequence of sapience and consciousness.

Also, only a few actions are universally good and only a few are universally evil. Most actions are very morally subjective.

Thus I suppose the answer to "is morality objective" is:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[feelotraveller]

"Denying freedom" isn't any kind of inherent thing though - that also stems from limiting procreation and/or inflicting discomfort. These are just results of evolutionary pressure. There is nothing in the laws of physics which ranks "freedom" above anything else; nor is there even a concept of freedom to begin with. Everything must adhere to the physical laws.

Without the supernatural anyone talking about "good and evil" is just blathering on ultimately about personal or group preferences.

(I am using a rhetoric debate style here, by the way.)

EDIT: addendum: without the supernatural, I propose replacing "good vs evil" spectrum simply with "destructive vs constructive (a subset of which is 'promotes vs hinders procreation')" and "pleasurable vs painful."  Perhaps also add in "sustainable vs unsustainable."

Kant's position is that although everything 'appears' to adhere to physical laws (i.e. can be explained as caused by purely physical chains of events) we also inherently possess the notion of free will - we appear to ourselves as being free.  It is unknowable whether events occuring 'as if' we have free will are caused by it (or not).  The physical chain of events would be a sufficient explanation but nothing provides evidence of it being a necessary one.  As humans appear to ourselves as free (having free will) it is necessary to treat ourselves and others as 'ends in themselves' - that is acknowledge and enable our status as free beings otherwise we are denying our own or others humanity.

Short reply because my time is limited.  If you are really interested poke me about this in a couple of weeks when I might be able to do it justice.  (Also I am recapitulating Kant not necessarily providing my own views here.)

[McTraveller]

As humans appear to ourselves as free (having free will) it is necessary to treat ourselves and others as 'ends in themselves' - that is acknowledge and enable our status as free beings otherwise we are denying our own or others humanity.

Well this is where I'd disagree with Kant - where does that necessity arise? I don't think it's "necessary" at all.  Even though he puts that condition on it, that failure to treat others as free beings denies their humanity, that doesn't have anything to do with "good or evil". It merely asserts that behavior that doesn't acknowledge agency denies the agency aspects of individuals, which seems kind of like a tautology violation, but I don't think that's related to good or evil or morality.

It's presupposing that honoring agency is "good", without any argument as to why it would be so.

[feelotraveller]

Yeah, necessary was a poor choice of words on my part.  Maybe 'we should', 'it is proper/appropriate to' (in order to be moral) treat others, and ourselves, that way.  The argument is that we should not treat others as means to our ends since this disrespects their humanity (i.e. having intrinsic value as humans).  So slavery is bad (immoral) because it uses people - the slaves - to achieve someone elses ends, the slaveowners.

(The argument and its terms are much more complicated than that (already muddied the water with that 'necessary', my bad) and as I suggested at first better to go and read it for yourself.  Trying to summarise it in a few words was always going to be prone to failure.  At least reading Kant yourself would mean your arguments are with him and not my poor takes.)

The main point I was trying to bring out was that it is possible to believe in both physical laws governing causation and free will being real without invoking a supernatural being.  I've got an inkling that the beauty of this particular take is that if you want your deity (of whatever flavour) it is easy enough to add them as 'making' humankind that way but I'll leave that to you religious folks to sort out.


BTW to say that how we treat people (e.g. denying their agency or not) is not related to morality just seems weird to me. Got to wonder what your motivation in saying that is.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As I said, I'm about to be out of contact for a couple of weeks

[McTraveller]

Mostly my point is that it’s very difficult to cone up with an objective theory of morality without an external agent (eg diety) defining it.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have a moral system without such an agent, it just means it must be subjective.  Even the Kant argument - it fails to give a reason why it’s morally superior to treat people well. The reasons cannot be derived from “first principles” so to speak.

[Frumple]

Eh... external agent defining something doesn't make it objective, though. Rather, like, the extreme opposite of objective; it's instead arbitrary, with is like subjectivity except without even a fig leaf of justification. You need some kind of mechanistic (for lack of a better word; consistent might work, too, because gods know the gods aren't) process for objectivity to kick in, generally. It's kinda' in the name, heh.

Any case, if you're content saying a divine "just is" and defines morality, there's no reason to not just cut the divine out. If god can be your first principle, so can just about anything else, including whatever system of morality you're caring to use. They're being pulled from the same aether, at the end of the day :V

It's no more difficult to come up with an agentless objective morality than it is to come up with one that has an agent, because adding an agent into the mix is literally making your proposition more complicated. The argument you're making's the same, just with an added step. You don't have to make the added step, heh, and it pretty necessarily doesn't make your theory any easier to justify or construct.

[McTraveller]

Sorry I didn’t communicate that well. What I mean by external agent is the equivalent of the external agent (logical if not physical) that gave rise to the physics of the universe. Our laws of physics are just as “arbitrary” as a hypothetical arbitrary definition of objective morality.

Or put another way, being arbitrary does not preclude objectivity.

Objectivity just means measured/determined to be the same by all relevant observers.

So in that sense, the jury is still out if morality is truly subjective or if we just don’t have the tools to “measure” it enough to get an objective measure.

Or it could even be that morality is a concept for which objective vs subjective doesn’t even apply.

[EuchreJack]

I think morality is independent of a creator or Creator, or indeed anything supernatural, but also that it is impossible to quantify in any kind of rigorous way. This is not possible to rectify. It is an inherent consequence of sapience and consciousness.

Also, only a few actions are universally good and only a few are universally evil. Most actions are very morally subjective.

Thus I suppose the answer to "is morality objective" is:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Good and Evil is easy.
Hurt others to help yourself, and you're a sick fuck that won't admit that you're evil. And will spend lots of time insisting how morally righteous you are.
Help others even if it hurts yourself, and you're probably too decent to regularly remark how good you actually are. And you'll probably
Cring at what others define as "moral".

Morality is ambiguous to the point of being useless, unless you're looking for a tool to beat other human beings with. Ergo, morality is basically evil.

[MaxTheFox]

I think morality is independent of a creator or Creator, or indeed anything supernatural, but also that it is impossible to quantify in any kind of rigorous way. This is not possible to rectify. It is an inherent consequence of sapience and consciousness.

Also, only a few actions are universally good and only a few are universally evil. Most actions are very morally subjective.

Thus I suppose the answer to "is morality objective" is:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Good and Evil is easy.
Hurt others to help yourself, and you're a sick fuck that won't admit that you're evil. And will spend lots of time insisting how morally righteous you are.
Help others even if it hurts yourself, and you're probably too decent to regularly remark how good you actually are. And you'll probably
Cring at what others define as "moral".

Morality is ambiguous to the point of being useless, unless you're looking for a tool to beat other human beings with. Ergo, morality is basically evil.

Quantify in the sense of "how much better is this thing than another". This I agree with.

And I disagree, Frumple. Arbitrariness is inherent to consciousness. Why fight it? Why does everything need to be elementarily-definable?

[Schmaven]

Good and Evil is easy.
Hurt others to help yourself, and you're a sick fuck that won't admit that you're evil. And will spend lots of time insisting how morally righteous you are.
Help others even if it hurts yourself, and you're probably too decent to regularly remark how good you actually are. And you'll probably
Cring at what others define as "moral".

Morality is ambiguous to the point of being useless, unless you're looking for a tool to beat other human beings with. Ergo, morality is basically evil.

Ultimately, we are the ones who have to live with our own actions, and I suppose unless we're writing a philosophy book or giving a lecture on the subject, we're better off just keeping thoughts about morality to ourselves.

It is interesting though how different people have different bases for their morality, and also how everyone would agree that stealing people's medicine just for the adrenaline rush is a bad thing to do (or going far to the extremes: rape).  So there does seem to be some objective consistencies to good and bad underlying everyone's views, despite our inability to articulate what that might be.

[McTraveller]

The point is that "everyone" doesn't agree on those. Some people really do believe that "might makes right" and self above all others, and when two "selfs" conflict, the stronger one makes right.  There's no "right" there's just "who imposed their will more effectively."

That's why we have millennia of philosophy trying to discuss it, because at some point even enforcing moral codes involves exerting might/will over others...

[Schmaven]

The point is that "everyone" doesn't agree on those. Some people really do believe that "might makes right" and self above all others, and when two "selfs" conflict, the stronger one makes right.  There's no "right" there's just "who imposed their will more effectively."

That's why we have millennia of philosophy trying to discuss it, because at some point even enforcing moral codes involves exerting might/will over others...

Do you mean to argue that some believe rape is good and not bad?  And furthermore, that such a view could be valid?