If an apologist claims you can't justify objective morality under atheism, the solution isn't to try to come up with a way. Rather it's to demonstrate that you can't have objective justification under either perspective. If an apologist claims their morals are objective because they come from god, than their standard is dependent on their opinion that doing what god says is good.... There is no answer they can give that won't ultimately lead back to some subjective opinion they hold
There is no objective justification under either perspective, but you're wasting your time trying to demonstrate that to a religious person. They will never believe that their morality is anything other than objective.
@@exiledfrommyself Their biggest issue is learning the difference between morality and laws. What their g0d is actually handing down to them are laws (rules/orders). Objectively, you are or aren't following a law. But, even a g0d would have created a law based on their own subjective bias. For example... It didn't have to create pigs, make them so tasty, and then make a law against eating them. It subjectively chose to.
@@antoniopratt1893 You say "can't", but that's exactly what people do. Yes, it can lead to some declaring they're a superior race, who justifies gncdng and enslvng others, like in the OT.
I'm a Christian here, love this channel as it really gets my gears going. The point Joe raises about the ineffability of God is actually quite interesting and I too have never heard of that objection until he outlined it, but it does make sense. I believe in the omnipotent, omniscient (all the other omni's) God but at the same time we (as Christians then) do have to balance that knife's edge of knowing so much about him that it eventually leads to us knowing nothing at all.
As an evolved ape, with further thousands of years colored by culture, is there any mystery why there’s a range of morals with a few that seem super useful for survival like no-murder? If we define ought as some kind of universal, yeah I could see why that’s difficult to do.
The ought doesn't need to be universal. It needs to be objective, to fill the is-ought gap. But, that's the problem Hume found with the gap. Everyone just fills it with subjectivity, so the ought isn't objective.
If humans generally have peferences for particular moral positions (boo murder), it seems like there must be reasons for this. As it happens we don't need to guess about that, because we have evolutionary game theory that explains why we have these preferences in terms of functional benefits to us and our society. So there are objective reasons for these impulses. Is that moral realism? I think one of the common misconceptions we have about physicalism in particular is that the physical is just about objects or states of affairs. 'Is' statements. There's more to it than that though, the physical also includes space and time, and therefore spacial relationships, physical causation and physical processes. Evolution is a physicalist account of a generative process, so generative processes are physical. Game theory shows that goal oriented behaviours also emerge from physical states and processes. Does that mean we do actually get ought from is?
Also, you have to eat from an apple tree, because without that, you wouldn't know what is right or wrong since you have no idea about anything before that...
To say that divine command theory is not subjective because God is analogical is to say it is also not objective because God is analogical. It solves a problem, but makes it worthless.
This doesn't require an extended, complex and intellectualy masturbatory response. It is simple: Religion derives its moral framework from humanity, which, by definition, predates religious systems. As a human construct, religion is shaped by our ethical principles rather than the inverse. Thus, the derivation of morality flows inherently from human experience to religious doctrine. Discussion concluded. Next question.
The discussion was really interesting i dont get why you're insulting them for it. "Religion derives its moral framework from humanity" is just begging the question. You're pulling yourself out of the hard parts of the discussion by the bootstraps. You can't take religious theology seriously while immediately supposing that god cannot exist.
@sixghill1925 Ah, the indignant response of one who believes themselves cornered. I find it endlessly amusing how the critic sidesteps the actual argument, choosing instead to clutch fervently to "religious theology" as if those two words, when strung together, suddenly endow superstition with intellectual heft. "Religious theology," you say, which prompts the question: is there another kind? If one takes the term seriously, then theology is merely the study of God-a bit of academic embroidery around the stories of those whose beliefs predate reason. To address the notion of "begging the question," the only question truly begged here is why one should lend even a sliver of credibility to claims of divine moral monopoly. Morality did not emerge, fully formed, from a mountaintop lecture or a stone tablet as so many like to imagine. Morality grew from human experience, from cooperation, empathy, and the realization that societies function best when people behave decently toward one another. Religion entered that stage much later, claiming authorship of virtues it barely understands and, in many cases, often contradicts. You suggest that we cannot engage with theology without assuming God exists. How splendidly convenient for you, and how woefully self-defeating for any honest discourse. No other field demands we assume the truth of its claims before engaging with them. We need not assume unicorns gallop in the fields to study mythology, nor dragons soar above the clouds to appreciate folklore. Theology, despite its self-important airs, deserves no special exemption from the scrutiny we apply elsewhere. Religious defenders often wield these rhetorical diversions to escape the "hard parts" of the discussion, as you so ironically put it. Yet the hard part lies in facing reality without divine training wheels, deriving our principles from our shared human experiences rather than the dusty edicts of ancient texts. When one moves beyond fairy tales, morality becomes no less compelling-indeed, it becomes more vital. Only then can we speak of morality not as a cosmic decree but as a universal human endeavor, one that needs no deity to validate it.
@@MAurelius-h8s sorry, you're being really cringe and boring and im not interested in replying to you seriously. hopefully you get a bit more self awareness and intelligence. im not even religious and dont like religion, but your pontificating adds nothing interesting.
@@sixghill1925 It is I that is bored - How disappointing, yet entirely predictable. When reason falters, and engagement proves too taxing, hurling empty insults is often the refuge of the intellectually cornered. I'm content to leave this discussion here, as it's clear meaningful discourse was never your aim. Farewell.
Moral values are not an academic logic issue. They are a practical political issue and a practical political solution to a practical political problem - how do we live socially, because it is necessary for humans to live socially since individual humans are useless at real self-sufficiency, particularly when young or elderly, and so we ought to abide by the rules of social living. As far back as archaeologists have looked, they have found humans living socially. Morality is the rules of social living, encompassed by the Do and Don’t versions of the Golden Rule which have been independently known to different societies across the globe. Getting an ought from an is requires a practical political process, not an academic logical one. David Hume was not talking about whether we ought to tidy up the garden. He was talking about how we ought to behave towards other people. Morality is not a solo gig. If you are living alone on a desert island you have no need for moral values though you still need other ethical values. As soon as another person arrives on the island and you have to live socially, then you need moral values, you need to abide by the rules of social living. Social living is necessary therefore we ought to follow the rules of social living. Moral obligation is grounded in the non-optional reason of the necessity of social living. What are termed universal moral values of Do and Don’t, are political as they deal with power relationships, be they physical, economic or psychological (though not every culture considers them universal, but we generally do in Western democracies). The most political thing you can do to another person is terminate their life without their permission. Secular Humanists are firstly humans, with the same intelligence and brain power, the same ability to empathize and reason as humans have had for hundreds of thousands of years. Christians and other theists are firstly humans, with the same intelligence and brain power, the same ability to empathize and reason as humans have had for hundreds of thousands of years. The common denominator in the humanist values of Secular Humanists and Christians and Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucianists etc etc, is that we are all humans and humans are a social species and we live socially because social living is necessary for our survival and prosperity as individual humans are useless at real self-sufficiency, particularly when we are young or elderly, and so we ought to abide by the rules of social living. What humans actually do is too often not what humans ought to do but we do live socially and that can only be best done in a state of mutual peace by abiding by the moral values that are the rules of social living. Alleged gods are not required.
@@japexican007we humans make the laws ideally to reflect our empathy. speeding is dangerous for the pedestrian and the driver, and we have decided that we should protect people from the consequences of speeding. that is a different question to whether the morality of an action is based on what a god says (which is that god's subjective judgment), or is it inherently bad and god has no deciding power in morality.
Both statements are missing a preface to the second half of the statement which the "does God say..." and "does the law say..." I only bring it up not say your point doesn't stand but the reason it hits the point harder by redressing why the x says y is wrong. "Is y wrong because x says it or DOES X SAY y wrong because it is wrong?"
@@zucc4764 "is an action right because it is commanded by the gods, or do the gods command it because it is right?" Replace gods in that statement with the government and that is a valid question that hits at the point. Take criticizing the government for example "is it wrong to criticize the government because it is commanded by the government, or does the government command it because it is wrong?" You rightly pointed out in your comment that speeding is illegal because it is a danger to society and therefore wrong. So speeding isn't wrong just because the law says so. But criticizing the government does seem to inherently be a danger to society and therefore isn't wrong outside of the government's mandate. So, it is wrong only because the government says so. Did I explain myself clearly?
To a religious person: *Harmless things become bad if god says he doesn't like it and what's worse is that harmful things become moral and even good if god tells you to do it*
I think the theist would respond that if God says something is bad it is definitionally not harmless, even if you don't understand how it is harmful. Likewise if God says something is good, then it is definitionally not harmful regardless of whether or not you understand how it is not harmful
@@sordidknifeparty Well I've heard apologists defend mass murder, slavery, & rape.... They generally agree that those actions do cause harm and that they're wrong, but suddenly become okay with it if they think god told people to do it
@LilySage-mf7uf I can make an atheist argument for all those too. Does that make atheism bad too, or just the atheists who use their beliefs to justify their bad actions?
Let's see if we can simplify this. The fundamental question theists can't answer is how an impossible and contradictory being (God) can even exist. And until theists can do so (and not with magic), then we have no reason to entertain any claim they make nor indulge in philosophical word games. And so, it's thus likely that morality is actually atheistic. (Even if you believe in God, it's likely that she is a human invention and not real.) Let's keep in mind that it is the theist who is making the extraordinary claim and has to provide extraordinary evidence, not the atheist. I think we let theists get away with not having to explain God because of our cultural indoctrination to the idea of God when we are children. It is perfectly acceptable for the atheist to answer "I don't know, but we're using the tools of science to try to find out." BTW, we have some interesting ideas involving evolved social behavior.
Ok, so “You ought to tidy the garden.” Yes, that implies there is a garden. The problem is still “Why ought you tidy that garden?” In a way it’s circular. You’re just starting at a different point. You’re still left with, “There is a garden, so you ought to tidy it.” Well, why? That ought still doesn’t come from the existence of the garden, and the existence of the garden isn’t caused by that ought. The ought still comes from within the one saying you ought to tidy it. Somebody else might prefer an untidy garden, and say “you ought not tidy the garden.”
I’m replying to myself here because my phone won’t let me edit my comment. Those two aren’t the only possible oughts. Another person might prefer a burned garden, and say “you ought to burn the garden.” Another could say, “You ought to destroy the garden,” not having a preference as to how. Another could say, “ you ought to make the garden larger.” My point is there are countless possible oughts for a given is.
@@Nutterbutter123Something about the RUclips app on iPhone. Maybe I’m just missing it, but there doesn’t seem to be an edit option anywhere. When I’m at home, I go to my computer to edit if needed, but I’m not at home.
Even in a theistic sense morality is only the subjective preferences of a deity, not because something is inherently wrong or right. Objective morality simply doesn't exist.
@@alena-qu9vj That's my point, that every religion teach immoral things that is objectively wrong if you ask ANYONE. I have never heard of humans doing that without a reason (as I have stated in my first comment) because everyone thinks that is immoral! However they do it because some psychos found it more impactful to put it in the rules of gods.
@@dorkception2012 On the other hand, many an innocent child has been unalived in the name of (non religious) human rights, and as Madelein Allbright nicely put it in the case of Iraq children: "it has been worth it"... Your crusade again religion is almost fanatically religious and makes you blind to the same faults of the other side.
I don't think it matters if a god or gods exist. The point is that a religious person still has no authority to tell me that he/she knows what the god wants us to do.
@@japexican007 The evidence necessary to demonstrate that any god ever revealed anything to anyone has never been found. The evidence necessary to demonstrate that humans routinely claim that god shares their personal opinions is ubiquitous.
Even if God comeback to Earth and says something is good and you should do it, it doesn’t solve the Euthyphro dilemma (what makes something good). That’s one of the objections for DCT. Religion can be compatible with moral objectivism but that is just saying that they think there is a true and false value of the moral judgment. It says nothing that morality has to be based on empirical evidence.
@@j.d.4241 The dilemma of "what makes something good" isn't just a logical question that can be explained plainly through rationality and made into some universal definition. What makes something good can only truly be good when a person have lived and experienced good in his/her life - but also experienced how their actions have exhaulted 'good' on to others. This is why the commandments in the bible isn't just "objective" and "universal" written truths about "what's good". When you read the bible as something independent of you - then you read it in a rational "objective" manner - where it have no value of telling you what's good. But if you read it as something deeply internal and apart of you (you've experienced what's good in the bible in your own life) - then it have value for telling you what's good. This doesn't only apply to reading the bible, but to everything you read and experience. Alex would call this a form of emotivism. But "Good" isn't something purely rational or logical phenomenom. It has to be felt, experienced and acted upon with soul, body and mind IN the world we live in. But surely "good" existed in the world before you were born, and it surely existed after you're gone - So isn't "Good" something external - that are given through our experiences of the world? Who or what is giving/gave us the concept of Good?
You must be talking about Islam when you refer to slavery and rape. Otherwise that's a very underdeveloped and not well thought out rebuttal of the Christian God
@@EyeMixMusic It's moral because those actions are a punishment from God. It's like if your mother told you to spank your little sibling while they are gone if they act up. That doesn't then give the child the authority to spank their siblings for any reason just because they feel like it. Besides, let's say for the sake of argument that the Bible is morally inconsistent. Can you give me an argument for why the Bible ought to be morally consistent without employing the is ought fallacy? Can you give me an argument for why we ought not do the things you claimed are immoral that God allowed? (Jenno -side, grape and forced labor) If not, your objections are unfounded and can be laughed away.
This conversation gets so close to my logical proof of God's non-existence: 1) Divinity is by definition (at least in part) necessarily inconceivable, or ineffable as Alex puts it. Only the mundane has the potential to be completely conceivable. 2) Humans can only conceive within the constraints of their own human conception. 3) When humans attempt to conceive of God, they are only doing so insofar as they can conceive of the mundane. Attempting to conceive of the humanly inconceivable aspects that make God divine is necessarily beyond their conception. Therefore God is not divine to humans. When claiming divinity we are claiming something of which we cannot even conceive in order to claim it. This contradiction prevents even the postulation of God/divinity. He doesn't exist to us.
does someone necessarily have to conceive of something in order to claim it? Can someone not claim "There exists a force that I cannot explain or imagine", which we would regard as God?
@nikolasnash7288 you are free to claim whatever you like e.g. triangles have 4 sides. All the ingredients of the claim can be perfectly conceivable in isolation, but what does the claim refer to? Surely that matters. The answering of that question inherently requires conception, at least in potential. There are: 1) things you didn't conceive of before that you do now, 2) things that you may conceive of that you don't yet, 3) even the notion that "there are conceivable things that nobody will ever conceive of" has potential conceivability. But to make a claim, where all the individual ingredients are perfectly conceivable, but which refers to something that must be at least in part inconceivable (the part that makes it "divine") - to you, what is that inconceivable element? The answer must necessarily be conceivably nothing, making the it the very definition of an empty claim. So yes, it is possible to make empty claims. Any conceivable elements of an otherwise empty claim are fine, but the totality of those will always be normal mundane stuff. No divinity.
@@dvillegaspro No, I mean like the Israelites who were practicing slavery. Weird how he skipped banning that bit but made sure we knew we'd be killed for gathering firewood on the holy day.
Getting an ought from an is: if normative "oughts" are limitted to what is actually possible, AND something is modally necessary in a specific situation, I think that modally necessary "ought" is necessary and "is" what "ought" to be done because that is the only possible course of action in that instance.
If I say X is wrong because X causes harm to others, they would say it's just your *opinion* that causing harm is wrong But they don't seem to realize that nothing changes by adding god to this If they say X is wrong because god has declared it to be wrong, than it's just based on their *opinion* that it's wrong to do what god has said not to do....not to mention their *opinion* that god exists in the first place
"Never believe that religious people are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The religious person have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Here's another way to get an "is" statement from an "ought to" statement: 1."ought" statements are statements about the moral disposition of actions. Amoral actions are not considered in "ought" statements, you may take an action which is amoral, it is permissible to take an amoral action, but you never "ought" to take an amoral action. Therefore if it is true for any given subject that you ought to do something, it is the case that that subject is morally significant . I think it's worth noting that statements in this form do not work in the other direction. For example, if I make the statement that a given subject is morally significant, it does not follow that I ought to take any particular actions either for, against, or neutral to the subject
You didn't solve the problem. "Therefore, IF it is true for any given subject that you ought to do something" You haven't given a justification for why we ought do anything. You've just said that IF it is true that we ought to do something than it is the case that the subject is morally significant. You haven't demonstrated that we ought or ought not do anything. You can't, because no fact about the natural world can tell you what we ought or ought not do.
I see morality as an objective ermgent behaviour stemming from the evolutionary advantage that being a social animal gives us. We had a form of morality long before we had language to describe it.
I see this argument misunderstood all the time. It is not what God decides is good that determines good, it is God's nature that determines what is good. God does not arbitrarily decide what is wrong, something is wrong because it contradicts God's nature. Remember, for most Theists, God is a logically necessary being. Meaning there is no possible world where God could not exist, or could be any different. If God can not possibly be any different than he is, than morality can not possibly be any different than it is. Now you can of course disagree with his existence, but it is a logically sound grounding for morality.
Well put. It does seem to be trying to hand wave the argument away. That said, it leaves Christian’s at least, with the problem of god’s nature being quite clearly contradictory and arbitrary in scripture that undermines an unchanging god in the first place. Other than scripture, how could they know what god’s nature is? Without a god to present, anything we say about it is conjecture and arbitrary, so I think we are still justified in saying so even if we are skipping the middle bits of how we got there.
This still doesn't mean we should follow morality that stems from whatever god is being moral. You comment is still an IS that an bought cannot be derived from
One realization that I've had about people is we seem to have a tendency to oversimplify complicated things and overcomplicate simple things. Morality's quite simple in my mind. Human beings are capable of suffering. Suffering is undesirable so we ought not to be responsible for it. When we can look at another and understand the simple fact that they are really a variation of you, there will no longer be a need for commandments, rules or laws. We'll be able to intuitively navigate the landscape of morality.
I've always thought this too. Just from a few objective facts of physical reality (we feel pain and don't like it, we have empathy, we're a social creatures) you can pretty much generate all the major moral positions, because it's really just a word we use to describe how we feel about the actions and behaviours of people and how they impact other people. It's not much deeper than that and there doesn't need to be some grand universal "truth" grounding it for it to be the way things are.
So the pain that a person endures classifies the thing under good or bad? What if I steal? Am I causing any pain? What if I overexploit the resources of the earth? Am I causing any pain? What if I kill my baby when it’s 3 weeks old, is it ok because it doesn’t cause any pain? We choose to base our morality under something always, but it doesn’t mean necessarily that it exists objectively
@@monstermonquey9442 Correct. WLC has pointed that Sam Harris does this by equating goodness with physical wellness. I've seen Micheal Shermer do the same. It's very superficial reasoning. Obviously, so many moral questions don't involve suffering or have straightforward answers as SaffronHorizon thinks.
@@monstermonquey9442 I thought it was pretty obvious that I was just giving examples? You can extrapolate from there a whole host of other things that at their basic level were associated with our earliest survival mechanisms as a social species. Happy to clarify further
@@monstermonquey9442Not all pain is physical, it can also be emotional and mental. Obviously stealing will hurt the person youre stealing from financially, and if theyre poor enough youre denying them the chance to survive by taking away their ability to acquire sustenance. Again, overexploitation causes pain, because you are ruining the environment, causing pain to animals in that environment as well as your fellow man by depriving them of resources that you decided to greedily hog. It is a myth that babies dont experience pain, this was believed to be true back then but studies show that babies actually experience pain. Heck, even plants can experience something similar to pain. What is pain physically? Its a signal our body sends to our brain to tell us to get the hell out of that situation which causes you pain. Frankly, the idea that you dont consider the things you just gave as examples shows that you yourself need to evaluate yourself morally before debating others on morality.
When trying to derive an ought from an is, are we allowed to assume the truth value of the is statement? If so, I can think of exactly one ought you can get from an is. 1. It is the case that objective moral laws exist, where a moral law is a statement about what you ought to do. 2. Therefore you ought to follow objective moral laws. Now this is completely definitional, it's pretty much just saying if it is true that there are things you ought to do, then you ought to do those things , and relies on assuming that objective laws exist. Without that assumption, I don't believe that you can ever make an is to an ought statement. I can think of one more very serious problem with this. And that is that even if you could confirm the truth of premise one without question, and accept that the conclusion follows from the first premise, there would never be any way for a finite being to ever know what moral statements were objectively true and which ones weren't, which leaves us in precisely the same position we are on the front side, namely having to use our own subjective rationality to decide what is and isn't moral.
Apologists think they can win moral arguments if just keep uncharitably asking "why why why" The same thing can easily be done to them: Why is going against god wrong ? Any answer they give will merely be their subjective opinion
People desire not to be harmed, so if your actions are causing harm than of course people who don't want to be harmed are going to take steps to prevent you from doing that....this occurs regardless of whether gods exist or not
@@okkomp since when do people follow the same regulations? Religious people break the law constantly and are activly trying to enforce their laws upon others. Have you read the laws in their books? I will never follow a paw that tells me i should unalive somebody for insulting my imaginary friend nor to enslave somebody for not sharing my views, which every religion has
your eyes are blinded by the god of this world I pray the Father would open your eyes to the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ, my friend 1 Corinthians 15:1-4
There is no good reason to deny the existence of objective morality, just as there is no good reason to deny that the external world objectively exists.
As a Classical Theist who is Catholic many of the comment sections including the Alex here misunderstand at least the position of Classical theists. God’s commands are not an arbitrary set of rules but rather a set of properties that correspond to being which is inextricably linked by goodness. Goodness is being and the nature in which Goodness flows from is the very fount of Goodness itself.
There you go: embrace the tautology. God = goodness is the same as saying god = god. True but unenlightening. Of course this formulation eliminates the possibility of god being omnipotent since doing evil is now impossible for god. What's that... god can do everything consistent with its nature so it's still omnipotent in that way? Slick move but just another tautology, i.e. god can do anything god can do. True but not just unenlightening, it is literally the same for everything that exists.
@@WDRhine I didn’t say Goodness = God, and also your formation of your “omnipotence” isn’t coherent since omnipotence doesn’t entail logical impossibility. CS Lewis says: “His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. you may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense, this is no limit to His power. meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words "God can". it remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities.” And St. Thomas who says: “Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.” And evil is a privation of being, if you studied any sort of classical theism or neo platonic thought you would know this. Also please cut out the passive aggressive oozing from your comment if you want people to take you seriously
@@hap1678 It is not intrinsically impossible to do evil so if god can't do it then god is not omnipotent, even within your highly-customized definition. What you call passive aggressive is just your cognitive dissonance at having your "Classical" theism exposed for the bilge water it is. Theism is the only area of study without a subject that can be demonstrated to even exist. Putting 'classical' in front of it, even with a capital letter, doesn't change that.
@@hap1678quoting two scholars doesn't make those "philosophers" correct. Besides, what is logically impossible about God being or performing evil? You didn't dispute or disprove the other commenter, you brought up several separate points, which, in this discussion, are irrelevant.
@@hap1678and ancient Greeks, who knew actual early Christians, believed those Christians explained omnipotence as all powerful, which, considering that's a Greek phrase, probably understood what it means better than you or I do, making boulders is logically possible, so is lifting boulders. So, if God can create a boulder he cannot lift, he cannot be all powerful, if he cannot create a boulder he cannot lift, he cannot be all powerful, in any definition of all powerful. Lifting stone is not logically impossible, neither is a boulder being formed from stone logically impossible. And choosing to be incapable of something, and then making himself capable of it, does not count.
This reminds me me why Samuel Beckett said that language is an inadequate vehicle for communication. Definitions are a real problem because we all internalise them slightly differently based on factors such as cultural milieu and personal experience. For example, if I asked 100 people from as wide a range of cultures as possible if a given action was honourable, we would probably have high levels of agreement on some actions and low levels on others. Is killing a woman honourable? Is killing a woman honourable if she brought shame on her family? Is it honourable to kill someone that you have never met before? Is it honourable to kill that same person if they are part of an army invading your homeland? You will get varying levels of agreement on the above questions.
It's ironic that the ones who say that rely on *Divine Command Theory* (the hallmark of terrorism) Under their perspective, any action no matter how vile can be called moral simply by saying *"god told them to do it"*
6:10 No, it's not at all fair to say that most people have moral realist intuitions at all. Honestly that made me stop wanting to watch this video. I really think you need to listen to what some anti-realist philosophers have to say on this topic. I would really strongly suggest looking into some of Lance Bush's criticisms regarding this claim.
It seems to me that one clear is you can get from an ought is as follows: 1. You objectively ought to do X. 2. Therefore it is the case that objective moral laws exist This could perhaps be considered the trivial case
@@TheHuxleyAgnosticI'm not sure what you mean. The first premise is just a hypothetical "ought" statement Which we assume to be true for the sake of seeing if we can derive an "is" from it. So in other words the first statement says if we assume that it is true objectively that you ought to do anything, then it must be true that objective statements about morality exist, since the first premise is such a statement. This is no way demonstrates, nor does it attempt to demonstrate, that statements such as "you ought to do X" can be objectively true, rather it simply acts to demonstrate that there are certain "ought" statements which if assumed to be true yield deductively certain "is" statements as a consequence. Is that a little more clear?
@@sordidknifeparty Well, the is-ought problem is exactly the opposite ... to get an objective ought from an objective is, without filling the gap with subjectivity. So, you're assuming the very thing that's in question.
@@TheHuxleyAgnosticI addressed the "ought from an is" argument in a different comment. In this one I'm addressing a separate question that Alex posed as to whether it was possible to get an is from an ought.
@@sordidknifeparty But the entire point is to stick with pure objectivity. Simply asserting stuff, with no actual grounding in objectivity, can get you whatever answer you want, any which way. Assertion: pizza is objectively good ... therefore you objectively ought to eat pizza. It totally misses the point of the problem.
Absolutely every single "true creator" claimed to exist by theistic groups are rejected by other theistic groups in the same fashion as you reject Yahweh. How would you even know you aren't as incorrect as you claim the Jewish people are?
I have concluded that the idea of morality being subjective or objective is a bad way of framing this issue, to the point of being a category error. If you reject the notion of God, then morality is better seen as a complex combination of culture and evolved social behavior, which can not tidily be stratified as either objective or subjective. And if you want to propose God as the giver of objective morality, then you must first show how what is an impossible and contradictory being can even exist, otherwise we have no reason to consider that claim (see my other comment).
"If you reject the notion of God, then morality is better seen as a complex combination of culture and evolved social behavior" Is it though? I suppose we ought to define exact what we mean by "morality" here. If you mean "moral codes" then yes, I would agree. However, if you mean that something is good or bad, I think those concepts can exist independent of the human race. Also why do you define God as impossible and contradictory?
@@Ψυχήμίασμα It's not that I am defining God as impossible and contradictory, but that theists define God in impossible and contradictory terms and then dismiss those as "mysteries" or "things beyond human comprehension." Or at least some do. Do you disagree with this? What I am saying is that before God can be posited as an explanation for anything, theists must first provide an adequate description (model) of such a being. I used to think morality had to be objective because subjective morality seemed untenable; but so then did objective morality when I thought about it. I now think that framing morality this way is overly simplistic and misleading, even a category error, because I think morality should be better explored as the complex interplay of factors such as evolved social behavior and culture. I suppose you could define some things as "good" outside of human subjects, but other things could still be subjectively "good", and I think that helps illustrate my point.
/genuine initial reaction to thumbnail b like Damn, you got that Ashton Kutcher interview? Don't hold back big dawg, ask him the hard questions about why he in on the sex slave trade
Religious folks think that their morals are granted by God but then pick and choose which ones to obey. If you compromise on your "objective" morality, then surely it becomes subjective...
Just because we pick and choose doesn't mean the law isn't still there. People bend and break the law all the time that doesn't suddenly mean the law is gone
@@ededwards7226 Which is why the important ones have made it into actual law and the others have been dismissed through revision. Truly timeless texts, they are..
They can, but ultimately, they will restrain themselves to end up exactly like the one who dint have a moral code and enjoyed whatever. At the end, we are all doomed to the cosmic cool down. 😊
Debates like this should be headlined: only for Christians or atheists with the Christian background. It is notorious how both sides ignore all the other concepts of God and/or transcendent in their repetitive circle ranting.
"Oughts" and "is" ? I follow the advice of the famous Yorkshireman who put it this way: "'ere all, see all, say nowt. And if thee ever does owt for nowt, do it for thisun."
There is no "ought". There only is a "how I would like it to be". Consider: there is a state of "what is". What exists. Any state of "what ought to be" is either identical... or is is different from that. If it is identical... there is no need for an "ought"... everything _is_ as it _ought to be._ If it is different... it does not exist, at least not in the same way as this "state of what is".
Morality is objective because its logical to be good. Thats why logical actions including self defense are "good". Is logic objective, depends on the definition
Morality is more of an emotional than logical thing. You have to "feel right" to be able to act good. No amount of logic can make a intelligent evil psychopath to be good.
@alena-qu9vj ah huh. So how do "good" people who don't experience emotion pre-hawk rationalize? An arbitrary definition is useless. How do you define good and evil? Your appealing to concepts that have no basis under your own reasoning. Try using logic instead
@alena-qu9vj another question... do you think its logical to share when your needs are met? Or is it just a selfish rationalization for potentail future benefit? Id say they are exactly the same, and I'd claim not shareing is illogical under most circumstances.
It all depends on your moral philosophy whether you can get an "ought" from an "is". If moral realism is true, the "ought" statements are actually statements about the state of some aspect of reality, which means that an "ought" statement is an "is" statement about that aspect of reality, much like statements about the weight of a carbon rod or the elasticity of a spring. In that case you can get "ought" statements from "is" statements because "ought" statements _are_ "is" statements, just disguised by using different words.
@@juanausensi499 : My favorite objective morality system is consequentialist humanist realism. In other words, the objective consequences of an action define its morality. We ought to help people in need. We ought to not murder people. We ought not to fight wars. We ought to protect the innocent. We ought to do _anything_ where the objective consequences of our actions serves to make life better for humans and for other animals that have mental faculties near to human. So when we say "we ought to do X" we are actually making an "is" statement about the objective consequences of doing X.
@@Ansatz66 But there are consequences that aren't objective, for example, how we feel about things. If you ignore them, then your system can allow non-physical abuse. If you take them into account, you can end forbidding anything that offends somebody.
0:25 I get where Alex is coming from by saying it is smarmy... but more likely than not, the theist is not making a legitimate question. They are doing a leading question to back the atheist into a corner. No theist ever, that I have met, that have made that question has a legitimate interest on answering that question honestly. So if the atheist is being smarmy, so is the theist, the atheist in that instance is answering in kind. At least, the atheist by saying neither do you, is trying to have an actual conversation and honest debate. But every single theist I have had this conversation with, they NEVER make that question to have a honest conversation, rather it is done to shut down the conversation... So sorry no sorry for being smarmy, I will stop being smarmy when the theist wants to have a honest conversation.
Morality was there way before religion was. Every since there were groups of humans, we have had a sense of right or wrong - pain caused by others (whether physical or emotional) eventually led to social norms of what is right or wrong for that group. Those observations became one of the cornerstones of most religions. I would hope most atheists are actually agnostic.
"You cannot get ought from is" This statement is false in absolute sense. But it is useful approximation for MOST of discussions. It's a good assumption to have by default so when someone tries to cross this boundary we can quickly recognise a need for additional proof.
@@MsJavaWolf I feel like full answer requires to tackle your question from two different angles. One angle, would be: In practice you cannot because of two reasons: it's virtually impossible to formulate a logical statement for a vast enough set of entities, and it's also super hard to properly include time and space in such formula. But in theory you can model a vast enough simulation space, including time and space, so you can conclude how entities will interact with each other, you can conclude that somewhat synchronized more complex systems emerges from them, and you can observe, investigate and describe characteristics of such abstract systems (which are internally a complex and seemingly chaotic set of interactions of vast number of entities). Those more complex systems will then influence the entities and their individual outcomes. Another angle is: You cannot get ought from is for any arbitrary argument. But that's because every such argument is a description of a narrow subset of something (mostly reality) and therefore it cannot predict for what is beyond it's definition. Issue is theists use this and conflate limitation of a simple argument with limitation of the reality. Reality is always more complex and interconnected than an argument. That's why logical and mathematical paradoxes and contradictions never proven existence of supernatural. What such paradoxes did was exposing fact that there are still some characteristics of reality that didn't observe or described well enough. So while you cannot get ought from is when talking about somewhat simple logical statement, you can (and in fact, do) get it in physical reality.
Yes, what makes a God a God is that you ought to worship them so if a God exist, you ought to worship it. It is the statement from which, if it is true, that is necessarily produces an ought
There's no strict is/aught distinction. Every "is" smuggles in an aught (because "is" is under-determined -- it would be a cruel joke if the world doesn't work they way it aught to). Every "aught" smuggles in an "is" (because it presupposes things).
i really hate the "objective morals" argument from pseudo-rhetoriticians like WLC. the argument is essentially A: if the bible is objective and B: objectivity equates to a state of being universally true then C: you can't have objective morality without the bible. The issues with this are 1.) that objective doesn't mean universally true 2.) they subjectively decided the bible was objective and 3.) you can do that with any book or even any thought anyone has ever had.
Objective morality should be called 'Consensus of moral values', since there are a few moral questions that will be answered the same, no matter who we would ask about.
@@notloki3377 For example Unaliving someone without a reason, disproportionally huge punishment for miniscule crimes, forcing others to do (previously established) immoral things, etc. I think there are a few tribes around Papua-New Guinea where anthropologists couldn't make contact with, but there are a few articles where these kind of questions been asked from different cultures and these were among those, that considered immoral for everyone. Funny enough, questions about slavery, forced marriages was not so conclusive. :)
The real question is, "Can God be both an ought and an is?" God has revealed that He is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, so He cannot contradict Himself, so His commands are not arbitrary but are a necessary expression of His being.
This type of claim from theists has always confused me the most. Theists often have a version of a morality system, sure. Personally I don’t think a particularly good one, and certainly a problematic method when they attempt to forever fix it in place. No room for making changes as we learn new things is always dangerous. But they by no means own the concept of morality. It exists regardless of religions or gods. It’s just weird that they get so confused about none believers having a moral system. It would be like people with brown hair being confused that blonde hair people might also use a comb or brush.
Im not atheistic at all, I can't really relate to atheistic philosophy. But claiming that they can't be moral is completely unfounded. There are both logical evolutionary and religious theological reasons for morals, and both are ultimately overshadowed the common morality where most people agree on whether something is good or bad such as violence being seen as objective moral evil
From my dive into the psychological aspects of morality, the idea that atheists have no morals is a wild claim. Because i feel morality evolved as a social regulatory function and they can stem from basic things such as empathy and fair play, but as well they come also from grpup dynamics. The idea that morality is from a divine source often makes little sense to me because morality is a contentious issue in which we frequently disagree. We evolved morality to regulate relationship interactions. And many animals have proto moral behaviours
There are plenty of studies about morality. That's basically an evolutionary trait that came in every social living beings. "I will act the same way I'm expecting to be treated. If I get in trouble, someone who likes me, more likely will rush for my help." etc. you get the picture.
I get my aughts from my IFs. I aught to do moral things IF i want to be moral. I aught to eat food IF i want to stave off hunger. There are no aughts from an IS, but there are no aughts without IFs.
In other words, oughts come from objectives. If you want x, then you ought to do y. But now the question is: why i want x? Is x good? Me wanting x makes x good?
Im kind of torn by this. On one part I feel like morals definitely could come from a higher being but at the same time, there’s so many problems with saying it comes from x god. So I’d say morals come from evolution. And that killing feels bad because I can put myself in another persons shoes. It does seem wrong. But still morality seems like it’s subjective, and I can subjectively say morality is wrong along with a lot of other people.
I just have to say firstly, you can absolutely be an atheist and believe in free will. I am an atheist and I believe free will exists. There are logical and reasonable ways to interpret quantum mechanics in a way that allows for free will without doing anything out of the ordinary. I also believe we have no data that suggests free will doesn't exist, we only have data that suggests we are influenced by more than we often like to admit, and anyone that extrapolates that certain data concludes free will does not exist is making a conclusion that the data itself does not in fact conclude. With that said, you can absolutely get an "ought" from an "is" that is objective, given at the very least that we all agree on a presupposition that is itself, ironically, subjective, a conjecture. I will tell you how. The idea of solipsism states that there is nothing but the self, the internality, one's own mental activity, that can be known. It doesn't take very long to conclude that this is undoubtedly true. Everything is experienced through our own consciousness, and so no experiment on another person to verify their own individual consciousness can be removed from the bias of our own consciousness. That is, that what we are experiencing when we perform said experiment is anything but a projection of our own mental activity and does not actually exist. Yet, we have all collectively agreed, both consciously and unconsciously, to extend the fact that we have consciousness onto other beings that look and/or behave like we do. I eat, breathe, talk, sleep, and defecate. We have agreed to conclude that it stands to suggest that other beings that eat, breathe, talk (communicate), sleep, and defecate are likely to also have consciousness. We cannot prove that they do, but we have agreed collectively to make that conclusion. It is the basis of all human interaction, both personal and societal. It might be conjecture, but because we have all agreed to treat it like objective fact, then the following "ought" can be extrapolated from this aforementioned "is". From this point forward, we will treat others having consciousness as an absolute certainty. I as a being with consciousness experience suffering. Suffering is defined objectively and universally, as a negatively charged emotional or mental experience. It does not matter what form it takes. Sticking a pin needle in my finger hurts, and therefore causes suffering. Someone unable to feel pain may not suffer from that happening, but perhaps experiences suffering in the form of loneliness in the way their condition separates them from connecting with others. If I experience suffering, and suffering is defined objectively and universally as being a negatively charged experience - and all other living creatures have consciousness, it stands to reason they all experience suffering as it is negatively defined. If I examine myself and extrapolate from the "is" that is the fact that I suffer, and the fact that suffering is inherently negative, I can objectively state that I don't like to feel suffering. This is not subjective mind you. Suffering is inherently defined negatively, which means objectively, is is definitionally unpleasant. If it is suffering, you do not like it. If you liked it - it would not be called suffering. This is another "is", that anyone who experiences suffering can and will objectively say about themselves that they do not like to suffer, based on the innate negative nature of the experience of suffering. If I don't want to feel suffering, and I can extrapolate based on its innate negative nature, that others will not want to experience suffering, I can take the "is" that is "others experience suffering" and infer the "ought" that is "I ought to not inflict suffering on others." Obviously because no matter our actions they have the potential to cause suffering regardless of our intention, we can make an alteration and reframe the "ought" as "I ought to not purposely inflict suffering on others." Done. Ought from an is. Objective morality devoid of anything divine or supernatural being invoked in order to bestow such morality onto the moral landscape.
We have things that we must do in order to be able to get our time to do whatever we want. There is free will. However, If you want to get to somewhere you have to do work and move your legs. In that perspective nothing is a free will, but taking actions to achieve our goals. That's why philosophy is just a mental jerkout, proves nothing, only creates contradictions.
@@BadassRaiden Sorry, I'm still struggling with the grammar, English is my third language, but we could talk in German or in Hungarian if you wish! So I try to clarify what I was talking about. Free will is something, that you can do whenever you want right? You want to go to the beach, so you stand up and go to the beach. However, you can only do that if your legs are working. If your legs are not in a working condition, you have to ask another person to take you to the beach. (The example is just an oversimplified explanation of my point, bare with me) So you rely on the will of others in this case. Even if your legs are working it depends on the state of your body if you will be able to reach your will. You getting what I'm trying to say? We are always will depend on the "will" of our own body or on other people, thus there is no such a thing as free will.
Trying to get morals from a fictional story, a story that has wildly immoral acts and commands, seems rather weird. Morals come from the real world where we act to look after and care for each other
IS: God, who is identical to Goodness, subsists as the fundamental structure of reality. OUGHT: We ought align our actions with the nature of reality, which is inherently good.
I can lay out a chess board in a particular position and can say what the player ought to do based on how the board is, this is because we understand that what we're trying to achieve is to win the game. Morality is much the same, we can say what we ought to when we acknowledge the goal is to enhance the wellbeing of any conscious creature. If you don't agree that that's what morality means then I'd love to hear your definition, but either way we're not talking about the same thing.
The first issue is, the anaolgy between winning the chess game and enhancing the well-being of conscious creatures. How did you get to that point? The second issue is, someone says they dont care about winning the game they just want to move the pieces, hpw do you say that what they are doing is wrong?
Even if the definition you give is correct, the difficulty is in identifying the well-being of a living creature. Is my well-being enhanced by eating delicious meat for which another animal suffered? Whose well-being do we prioritise over others? Is longer life more well-being? Is being dead not preferable to being alive if I'm suffering?
@WaqasAli-ct7ly the chess analogy is to demonstrate that 'is + goal = ought'. If a person plays chess the way you described, we can objectively say they are playing wrong, because they have the wrong goal according to the rules of chess.
@DavidBrown-ts2us thats what im saying. Who decided that our goal in morality is to enhance the well being of creatures? You are starting off with a premise without any good reason as to why we should take that premise. Its the same mistake Sam Harris falls into in the moral landscape
@@WaqasAli-ct7lywell, if we prioritize the well being of other people, we increase the likelihood of that person surviving and then reproducing. In the end, whatever you believe, empathy is what our goal is based on and so we have the goal, we learn the rules of the world, and thus the optimal “play” can be discovered
I have repeatedly had to halt debates on the universal fine-tuning argument with atheists. Sophistry, repeated lies, distortion the reason. That, along with the fact that the prominent militant atheists, Dawkins, Krauss, Maher, Shermer, Fry, Coyne etc ALL side with Isr-el even now. Morality? I see little of it among atheists; Alex being a rare exception.
I don't agree with Alex's criticism when he says you can't get ought from is even with God; in this context God would the "is" that you are getting the "ought" from.
In many ways, athiest often hi jackobian, my heritage good and bad equations the same anylitical step by step sources they just use half the sources and are often inverted or drawing from more recent plagerizisms. Or they also draw from correlating with nature but as the orginal devine right wokism cog in the wheel it was some earlier revisionist history curriculum they mimic.
This is why Rationalism is a dead end. You can't get a Ought from an Is, when it's all just a mind game. Psalm 34:8 Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.
Hi MoeGar, Moral values are not a mind game academic logic issue. They are a practical political issue and a practical political solution to a practical political problem - how do we live socially, because it is necessary for humans to live socially since individual humans are useless at real self-sufficiency, particularly when young or elderly, and so we ought to abide by the rules of social living. As far back as archaeologists have looked, they have found humans living socially. Morality is the rules of social living, encompassed by the Do and Don’t versions of the Golden Rule which have been independently known to different societies across the globe. Moral values are political as they deal with power relationships. Getting an ought from an is requires a practical political process, not an academic logical one. David Hume was not talking about whether we ought to tidy up the garden. He was talking about how we ought to behave towards other people. Morality is not a solo gig. If you are living alone on a desert island you have no need for moral values though you still need other ethical values. As soon as another person arrives on the island and you have to live socially, then you need moral values, you need to abide by the rules of social living. Social living is necessary therefore we ought to follow the rules of social living. Moral obligation is grounded in the non-optional reason of the necessity of social living and we get an ought from an is by getting out of the academic mind game armchair and being practical and political. Alleged gods are not required. How does a theist ground moral obligation with a non-optional reason that can't be dismissed out of hand or denied?
If you’re considering the ‘ought’ as a universal ought (a moral principle of the universe), then I think there’s a difficulty there. How could one person’s mind, finite in time and space, with access to only an infinitesimal fraction of knowledge of that vast universe that it has been born into also be the source of a universal truth? A single person could decide: “it’s wrong to sit on chairs”, but that doesn’t make it an ‘ought’ does it? It’s just one finite mind’s idea, not universal.
Neither do I .Ought seems to suggest an emotionanl imperative. Guilt, obligation, compassion, justice, fair play, are all emotional pushes that guide (coerce?) us to behave in a moral/ ethical manner.
Everything anyone values is based on exclusive effects and rarity to create and preserve possibilities for the future. There is nothing that can happen in the universe incidentally that humanity can not potentially cause or stop DELIBERATELY. Humanity is more valuable than anything because it has the same effects as anything plus everything else. Knowledge is why humanity can produce these remarkable effects. There can be nothing more priceless in the universe than Humanity, persons, knowledge and all that sustains them. If it is irrational to destroy a valuable thing to create a less valuable thing, then it must be immoral to diminish a priceless thing to create a less than priceless effect. All moral actions can be understood this way and it's as objective as math. The only subjective input is the knowledge and will to act morally. We need no subjective commandments nor given rights from clergy, kings, nor gods to understand moral rights and wrongs. The more we understand about nature and each other, the more obvious it becomes. The more we bow our heads to pray for answers, the more big bullies guide us to believe absurdity and commit atrocity and fecklessly ignore tragedy. God is just a really bad guess that all children make and grown ups learn to ignore.
People who state that athietst cant have morality are silly. Free will can absoluetly exist in an athiest worldview. The ability to choose what pizza i want or who i want to date is not defined from god. You dony need a god to have free will. Morality can absoletly exist and does within an athiest worldview. Dont murder is nessary for cooperation. And it would stand to reason that if i want to live a safe society it would behoove me not to engage in that. Out of survival and a logical want to live in a productive envirnment.
morality is a strategy for social relationships. it's a strategic dynamic which emerges from fundamental rules, not a law of physics or religious physics. from a secular, mechanistic perspective, morality is a game theoretic strategy, emergently produced by a genetic collective, to maximize benefit for that collective. it has selected for emotional and social incentives towards behavior which benefits the group (i.e., "good" behavior; "good" is relative to a particular utility function). religious morality contains proxies for this premise, but largely centered around a cult of personality for gods, and to a varying lesser extent, religious leaders. there is extreme ambiguity about the mechanistic relationship between god and man, because in many important ways, religious dogmas categorize god as being undefinable or impossible to understand; so we can't know how the fulfillment of god's will relates mechanistically to the wellbeing of the collective-- we can only know the dogma that following god leads to heaven and turning away from god leads to hell, and also that there are general consequences for the community in the earthly realm based on these behaviors. or, one might be so emotionally invested in god, that the emotional urgency of maximizing god's expressed mode of benefit subsumes the emotional urgency that one has for one's self and one's community, such that they only care about what's good for god, and that's the only point of concern. since religion tends to be based on a stable set of dogmas, which are proxies for evolutionary moral systems, religion can assume a greater stability of moral classifications (categorical imperative)-- that x behavior is a sin, independent of context. eg, some say that abortion is evil because of the dogma of a soul's presence in a body, and destroying a body with a soul is murder. an approach to secular morality would be some brand of utilitarianism, of maximizing the benefit of a collective. different people in the same community can have different utility functions, because ultimately, adherence to a function depends on the self-interest of an individual. this even applies to social dynamics. the premise of "caring about other people" is that, through our evolutionary development, our self-interest is profoundly interwoven with the self-interest of others; because of survival logistics, and because of the emotional triggers based on social perception. i assume that one of the biggest difficulties in discourse about morality is that 1) it's complex, and 2) it's extremely non-romanticist. the social infrastructure of religion has had thousands of years to establish itself, which generates extreme social and cultural exposure to its principles; and it's much simpler to understand, which is logistically useful and less emotionally difficult. and one sense of romanticism is that it's an emphasis on a particular idea based on its aesthetic attributes, which has significant implications for thought, more generally. because religion is socially embedded and utilitarianism isn't, religion has had a lot of time to develop aesthetic appeal; and since utilitarianism contradicts many aesthetically appealing aspects of religion, it has a negative aesthetic appeal. people will tend to find utilitarianism disgusting, *even in cases where you can deduce that utilitarianism creates explicitly superior outcomes*. the difficulties of trying to understand a non-traditional or anti-traditional mode of thought are drastically compounded in social settings, for many reasons. there are various cultural and religious taboos for saying things which contradict pre-existing sensibilities, and which aren't compatible with a particular social setting. this is already a pretty long comment, so last thought will be abbreviated and simplified. extrapolate chesterton's fence into chesterton's sawtooth. imagine a linear sequences of theoretical solutions, with later ones being better than earlier ones. a solution initially may be terrible for many reasons, maybe because it's poorly understood, or because it requires extensive development. a given solution sucks when it's new, and rocks when it's old. in the sawtooth, each spike's tip represents an old solution; and the plummet into the point between two adjacent teeth represents the transition from an old strategy into a new strategy.
Why is this always so complicated and wordy. Or maybe I am just dumb. If objective "morality" comes from god - then why does every religion have different moralities, why do the members of said religion CONSTANTLY violate them and ...last but not least, apparently slavery and taking women against there will is okay..among other things that we punish today and apparently violate god's morality by doing so? Sure, I grew up in a family that went to church etc - but my morality was taught by avoiding what hurts people...and not "because god tells us". Today I am also avoiding harm to animals by not consuming this and I see that as a moral thing. The church certainly didn't tell me that
I don't know you so I think it'd be rude to call you dumb. However you may just not have the required experience to understand the "wordy" words they're saying. I understood all of it easily but I have been reading philosophy for years. To your first claim, theists don't see other religions as true so from their perspective their god has the authority on morality and other gods are false idols. So that's the problem with that view. You are looking at it from an unbias perspective which is great, but in order to understand why they think that you need to shift your point of view to theirs.
I would love to argue this with him as I think he doesn't even have the right argument. God is not an ought. You ought to do something. God is more of a yes you 100% should do this. The bible is filled with Thou Shalt do X. Even going back to Genesis. God said Thou shalt eat from all things except Y. The given argument I would lay out is that if all things God is just oughts it implies he doesn't care if you do them or not. This simply is not the case in any scripture. From an atheistic view though there is no reason to do anything you don't want to do. Why should you? There is no meaning to anything anyway. Atheist's have the why? problem they always have.
Dear Theist, If, at the highest and widest level of reality, there hasn’t ever been, and there can’t ever be, any gods or goddesses, what explains your morality?
@@thomassandoval8025 “because if there was no creator, there would be no existence.” - Existence requires a creator, correct? But that’s circular, isn’t it? You’ve simply suggested that existence creates existence, haven’t you? “If there is no God there is nothing, including objective morality.” - And this is question begging, isn’t it? You’ve simply asserted, without argument, “objective morality” only follows from a god, haven’t you? - What factors contributed to the existence of one god as opposed to the existence another god? And from this god’s perspective, how is this not subjective as opposed to objective? - Let’s imagine there is a god, how does it follow this god is moral (the standard for morality) and/or what it decrees is moral?
You can learn to abide by law. You cannot learn moral, not even from any god. It is innate, same as other talents. Trying to find a definition for this innate character attribute is just a mental masturbation. The important thing is how you excercise it, not how you define it.
@@fssstyuniaf Depends on the definition of "morality". Morality is authentic in my understanding- you cannot act "bad" even if it is not advantegous for you. What you describe is not authentic morality, it is just a learned behaviour and depends solely on what your society teaches you. Should they say you it is "moral" to kill somebody you would do it.
Everyone has morality, the Holy Spirit is God and speaks to you through your conscience. Religious people have a heightened awareness, believers in Yeshua especially. It is worth trading every single thing you think your desire driven life offers and more.
@@thejabberwocky2819 Feel your conscience? Lean in to it, ask for guidance. Like the problem of evil or the problem of suffering, this is another issue one solves within one self. God is proven through connection. The idea that someone has to prove God to you comes from Luciferianism, it's not logical at all. Anything you say to deny it is just a caterpillar telling a butterfly that wings don't exist, wasting your time lying to yourself to try and convince me will never work.
@@WriteTrax Appealing to one's conscience is the definition of moral subjectivism. It's not terribly surprising then that different peoples' consciences tell them wildly different things about their moral intuitions. You needn't look farther than the large number of different denominations within the same parent religion yet with significantly different moral beliefs. If the holy spirit is speaking to us through our conscience, it's not doing a very good job of it.
@@danielle_vandress Not even close. Once you connect with God you will know what I am saying, yes, most Christians also fail in life because they do not understand scripture and make it about ego and emotion. Your conscience is swayed by outside forces until you are connected, is what it is.
@@WriteTrax And yet the Christians who disagree with you are using the same methodologies and arriving at different beliefs. How do you know that its not your ego and emotion swaying you to false revelations? How do you know that it's not you who has misunderstood scripture? You're not omniscient. You can't claim absolute certainty in your knowledge anymore than anyone else. To make such a claim would be to ascribe Godhood to yourself.
Meh, seems like this will be all philosophical masturbation. I'm an atheist, but it drives me nuts that most of us seem to think morality is/must be subjective. I have no clue what subjective morality even means.
“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities -his eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood by what has been made,so that people are without excuse.” The word of God has stated you know He exists,but are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. There is a day of judgement ,and these words explain your answer, “ if only you had revealed yourself I would have believed “,will be met with the condemnation it deserves. BUT,there is “Good News”…
Apologists: we have the objective morality directly from god
Also apologists: completely unable to agree on what this objective morality is
Same with objective atheists, same Christian values too. How predictable.
@@bryanutility9609 what are "christian values" monkey?
We do agree on it, the commandments of God are clearly stated.
If an apologist claims you can't justify objective morality under atheism, the solution isn't to try to come up with a way.
Rather it's to demonstrate that you can't have objective justification under either perspective. If an apologist claims their morals are objective because they come from god, than their standard is dependent on their opinion that doing what god says is good.... There is no answer they can give that won't ultimately lead back to some subjective opinion they hold
An then that will lead to some kind of special pleading by the theist.
There is no objective justification under either perspective, but you're wasting your time trying to demonstrate that to a religious person. They will never believe that their morality is anything other than objective.
@@exiledfrommyself Their biggest issue is learning the difference between morality and laws. What their g0d is actually handing down to them are laws (rules/orders). Objectively, you are or aren't following a law. But, even a g0d would have created a law based on their own subjective bias. For example... It didn't have to create pigs, make them so tasty, and then make a law against eating them. It subjectively chose to.
@exiledfrommyself If the creator of the universe makes rules and commands, wouldn't they be "objective"?
Or you could just reject the claim.
Basic survival ethics in groups shouldn't be hard concept to understand. Animals and insects routinely exhibit the behavior. We just gave it a name.
You can't base moral rules on things that help you survive. That can lead you down a dangerous path.
Terrible foundation for morality. Doesn't explain it well enough at all. Also allows for genocide of other cultures and rape.
@@antoniopratt1893 The path of survival?
@@juanausensi499 Survival by any means right?
@@antoniopratt1893 You say "can't", but that's exactly what people do. Yes, it can lead to some declaring they're a superior race, who justifies gncdng and enslvng others, like in the OT.
I'm a Christian here, love this channel as it really gets my gears going. The point Joe raises about the ineffability of God is actually quite interesting and I too have never heard of that objection until he outlined it, but it does make sense. I believe in the omnipotent, omniscient (all the other omni's) God but at the same time we (as Christians then) do have to balance that knife's edge of knowing so much about him that it eventually leads to us knowing nothing at all.
Can’t God just be an asshole with a dark sense of humor? Why isn’t that ok? Maybe god plays tricks on people because it’s funny.
As an evolved ape, with further thousands of years colored by culture, is there any mystery why there’s a range of morals with a few that seem super useful for survival like no-murder? If we define ought as some kind of universal, yeah I could see why that’s difficult to do.
The ought doesn't need to be universal. It needs to be objective, to fill the is-ought gap. But, that's the problem Hume found with the gap. Everyone just fills it with subjectivity, so the ought isn't objective.
Evolution is about the weak dying. Nothing about that says killing is bad for survival.
If humans generally have peferences for particular moral positions (boo murder), it seems like there must be reasons for this. As it happens we don't need to guess about that, because we have evolutionary game theory that explains why we have these preferences in terms of functional benefits to us and our society. So there are objective reasons for these impulses. Is that moral realism?
I think one of the common misconceptions we have about physicalism in particular is that the physical is just about objects or states of affairs. 'Is' statements. There's more to it than that though, the physical also includes space and time, and therefore spacial relationships, physical causation and physical processes. Evolution is a physicalist account of a generative process, so generative processes are physical. Game theory shows that goal oriented behaviours also emerge from physical states and processes. Does that mean we do actually get ought from is?
So the only way I can have morality is if I train myself to believe characters from books exist beyond the bounds of time and space?
Also, you have to eat from an apple tree, because without that, you wouldn't know what is right or wrong since you have no idea about anything before that...
To say that divine command theory is not subjective because God is analogical is to say it is also not objective because God is analogical. It solves a problem, but makes it worthless.
This doesn't require an extended, complex and intellectualy masturbatory response.
It is simple:
Religion derives its moral framework from humanity, which, by definition, predates religious systems. As a human construct, religion is shaped by our ethical principles rather than the inverse. Thus, the derivation of morality flows inherently from human experience to religious doctrine. Discussion concluded. Next question.
The discussion was really interesting i dont get why you're insulting them for it.
"Religion derives its moral framework from humanity" is just begging the question. You're pulling yourself out of the hard parts of the discussion by the bootstraps. You can't take religious theology seriously while immediately supposing that god cannot exist.
@sixghill1925
Ah, the indignant response of one who believes themselves cornered. I find it endlessly amusing how the critic sidesteps the actual argument, choosing instead to clutch fervently to "religious theology" as if those two words, when strung together, suddenly endow superstition with intellectual heft.
"Religious theology," you say, which prompts the question: is there another kind?
If one takes the term seriously, then theology is merely the study of God-a bit of academic embroidery around the stories of those whose beliefs predate reason.
To address the notion of "begging the question," the only question truly begged here is why one should lend even a sliver of credibility to claims of divine moral monopoly. Morality did not emerge, fully formed, from a mountaintop lecture or a stone tablet as so many like to imagine. Morality grew from human experience, from cooperation, empathy, and the realization that societies function best when people behave decently toward one another.
Religion entered that stage much later, claiming authorship of virtues it barely understands and, in many cases, often contradicts.
You suggest that we cannot engage with theology without assuming God exists. How splendidly convenient for you, and how woefully self-defeating for any honest discourse. No other field demands we assume the truth of its claims before engaging with them. We need not assume unicorns gallop in the fields to study mythology, nor dragons soar above the clouds to appreciate folklore.
Theology, despite its self-important airs, deserves no special exemption from the scrutiny we apply elsewhere.
Religious defenders often wield these rhetorical diversions to escape the "hard parts" of the discussion, as you so ironically put it. Yet the hard part lies in facing reality without divine training wheels, deriving our principles from our shared human experiences rather than the dusty edicts of ancient texts. When one moves beyond fairy tales, morality becomes no less compelling-indeed, it becomes more vital. Only then can we speak of morality not as a cosmic decree but as a universal human endeavor, one that needs no deity to validate it.
@@MAurelius-h8s sorry, you're being really cringe and boring and im not interested in replying to you seriously. hopefully you get a bit more self awareness and intelligence.
im not even religious and dont like religion, but your pontificating adds nothing interesting.
@@sixghill1925 It is I that is bored - How disappointing, yet entirely predictable.
When reason falters, and engagement proves too taxing, hurling empty insults is often the refuge of the intellectually cornered.
I'm content to leave this discussion here, as it's clear meaningful discourse was never your aim. Farewell.
Moral values are not an academic logic issue. They are a practical political issue and a practical political solution to a practical political problem - how do we live socially, because it is necessary for humans to live socially since individual humans are useless at real self-sufficiency, particularly when young or elderly, and so we ought to abide by the rules of social living. As far back as archaeologists have looked, they have found humans living socially.
Morality is the rules of social living, encompassed by the Do and Don’t versions of the Golden Rule which have been independently known to different societies across the globe.
Getting an ought from an is requires a practical political process, not an academic logical one. David Hume was not talking about whether we ought to tidy up the garden. He was talking about how we ought to behave towards other people. Morality is not a solo gig. If you are living alone on a desert island you have no need for moral values though you still need other ethical values. As soon as another person arrives on the island and you have to live socially, then you need moral values, you need to abide by the rules of social living.
Social living is necessary therefore we ought to follow the rules of social living. Moral obligation is grounded in the non-optional reason of the necessity of social living.
What are termed universal moral values of Do and Don’t, are political as they deal with power relationships, be they physical, economic or psychological (though not every culture considers them universal, but we generally do in Western democracies). The most political thing you can do to another person is terminate their life without their permission.
Secular Humanists are firstly humans, with the same intelligence and brain power, the same ability to empathize and reason as humans have had for hundreds of thousands of years.
Christians and other theists are firstly humans, with the same intelligence and brain power, the same ability to empathize and reason as humans have had for hundreds of thousands of years.
The common denominator in the humanist values of Secular Humanists and Christians and Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucianists etc etc, is that we are all humans and humans are a social species and we live socially because social living is necessary for our survival and prosperity as individual humans are useless at real self-sufficiency, particularly when we are young or elderly, and so we ought to abide by the rules of social living.
What humans actually do is too often not what humans ought to do but we do live socially and that can only be best done in a state of mutual peace by abiding by the moral values that are the rules of social living. Alleged gods are not required.
Is murder wrong because the God's say it is wrong? Or is murder wrong because it is wrong?
Is speeding wrong because laws says it is or is speeding wrong?
@@japexican007we humans make the laws ideally to reflect our empathy. speeding is dangerous for the pedestrian and the driver, and we have decided that we should protect people from the consequences of speeding.
that is a different question to whether the morality of an action is based on what a god says (which is that god's subjective judgment), or is it inherently bad and god has no deciding power in morality.
Both statements are missing a preface to the second half of the statement which the "does God say..." and "does the law say..."
I only bring it up not say your point doesn't stand but the reason it hits the point harder by redressing why the x says y is wrong.
"Is y wrong because x says it or DOES X SAY y wrong because it is wrong?"
@@JGreyJens Thank you. I restated the Eurythro dilema.
@@zucc4764 "is an action right because it is commanded by the gods, or do the gods command it because it is right?"
Replace gods in that statement with the government and that is a valid question that hits at the point. Take criticizing the government for example
"is it wrong to criticize the government because it is commanded by the government, or does the government command it because it is wrong?"
You rightly pointed out in your comment that speeding is illegal because it is a danger to society and therefore wrong. So speeding isn't wrong just because the law says so.
But criticizing the government does seem to inherently be a danger to society and therefore isn't wrong outside of the government's mandate. So, it is wrong only because the government says so.
Did I explain myself clearly?
Man he looks like Ramsey Bolton from Game of Thrones in the thumbnail.
Oh god
Guys! God is logic! The code embodies all.
Also morality is inter-subjective not objective or subjective!
It cant exist to a solo actor!
To a religious person: *Harmless things become bad if god says he doesn't like it and what's worse is that harmful things become moral and even good if god tells you to do it*
I think the theist would respond that if God says something is bad it is definitionally not harmless, even if you don't understand how it is harmful. Likewise if God says something is good, then it is definitionally not harmful regardless of whether or not you understand how it is not harmful
@@sordidknifeparty Well I've heard apologists defend mass murder, slavery, & rape....
They generally agree that those actions do cause harm and that they're wrong, but suddenly become okay with it if they think god told people to do it
People will do any level of horror if they are told it's for the greater good.
And there is no greater good than your gods implicit will
@@dominicparker6124or a perfect utopia for humanity by those who don't believe.
@LilySage-mf7uf I can make an atheist argument for all those too.
Does that make atheism bad too, or just the atheists who use their beliefs to justify their bad actions?
Let's see if we can simplify this. The fundamental question theists can't answer is how an impossible and contradictory being (God) can even exist. And until theists can do so (and not with magic), then we have no reason to entertain any claim they make nor indulge in philosophical word games. And so, it's thus likely that morality is actually atheistic. (Even if you believe in God, it's likely that she is a human invention and not real.) Let's keep in mind that it is the theist who is making the extraordinary claim and has to provide extraordinary evidence, not the atheist. I think we let theists get away with not having to explain God because of our cultural indoctrination to the idea of God when we are children. It is perfectly acceptable for the atheist to answer "I don't know, but we're using the tools of science to try to find out." BTW, we have some interesting ideas involving evolved social behavior.
Ok, so “You ought to tidy the garden.” Yes, that implies there is a garden. The problem is still “Why ought you tidy that garden?” In a way it’s circular. You’re just starting at a different point. You’re still left with, “There is a garden, so you ought to tidy it.” Well, why? That ought still doesn’t come from the existence of the garden, and the existence of the garden isn’t caused by that ought. The ought still comes from within the one saying you ought to tidy it. Somebody else might prefer an untidy garden, and say “you ought not tidy the garden.”
I’m replying to myself here because my phone won’t let me edit my comment.
Those two aren’t the only possible oughts. Another person might prefer a burned garden, and say “you ought to burn the garden.” Another could say, “You ought to destroy the garden,” not having a preference as to how. Another could say, “ you ought to make the garden larger.”
My point is there are countless possible oughts for a given is.
@@tweetdriveryou ought get a phone that lets you edit comments 😎
@@Nutterbutter123Something about the RUclips app on iPhone. Maybe I’m just missing it, but there doesn’t seem to be an edit option anywhere. When I’m at home, I go to my computer to edit if needed, but I’m not at home.
The ought comes from what you would think is moral to do to someone you care for.
@@jacobdittmer5512Or what you think is moral to do t ppl the garden? The point is the light is 100% subjective.
Even in a theistic sense morality is only the subjective preferences of a deity, not because something is inherently wrong or right. Objective morality simply doesn't exist.
Show me a human tribe where unaliving an innocent person without any reason is not wrong...
@@dorkception2012 Judaism of OT? Unless you understand the unaliving of an innocent firstborn as a sacrifice for god for reasonalble.
PS -to be just - there were many tribes which sacrificed innocent children a persons to their gods.
@@alena-qu9vj That's my point, that every religion teach immoral things that is objectively wrong if you ask ANYONE. I have never heard of humans doing that without a reason (as I have stated in my first comment) because everyone thinks that is immoral! However they do it because some psychos found it more impactful to put it in the rules of gods.
@@dorkception2012 On the other hand, many an innocent child has been unalived in the name of (non religious) human rights, and as Madelein Allbright nicely put it in the case of Iraq children: "it has been worth it"... Your crusade again religion is almost fanatically religious and makes you blind to the same faults of the other side.
I don't think it matters if a god or gods exist. The point is that a religious person still has no authority to tell me that he/she knows what the god wants us to do.
Unless said God revealed what he wants us to do
@@japexican007 The evidence necessary to demonstrate that any god ever revealed anything to anyone has never been found. The evidence necessary to demonstrate that humans routinely claim that god shares their personal opinions is ubiquitous.
Even if God comeback to Earth and says something is good and you should do it, it doesn’t solve the Euthyphro dilemma (what makes something good). That’s one of the objections for DCT. Religion can be compatible with moral objectivism but that is just saying that they think there is a true and false value of the moral judgment. It says nothing that morality has to be based on empirical evidence.
@@japexican007 But you need to believe God revealed that. If not, i can tell everybody that God revealed to me that i should rob that bank.
@@j.d.4241 The dilemma of "what makes something good" isn't just a logical question that can be explained plainly through rationality and made into some universal definition. What makes something good can only truly be good when a person have lived and experienced good in his/her life - but also experienced how their actions have exhaulted 'good' on to others. This is why the commandments in the bible isn't just "objective" and "universal" written truths about "what's good". When you read the bible as something independent of you - then you read it in a rational "objective" manner - where it have no value of telling you what's good. But if you read it as something deeply internal and apart of you (you've experienced what's good in the bible in your own life) - then it have value for telling you what's good. This doesn't only apply to reading the bible, but to everything you read and experience. Alex would call this a form of emotivism. But "Good" isn't something purely rational or logical phenomenom. It has to be felt, experienced and acted upon with soul, body and mind IN the world we live in. But surely "good" existed in the world before you were born, and it surely existed after you're gone - So isn't "Good" something external - that are given through our experiences of the world? Who or what is giving/gave us the concept of Good?
IS->OUGHT
IF you WANT a “tidy” garden, THEN you OUGHT to “tidy” the garden!
If God can make the immoral moral simply by commanding it (see: Biblical genocide, rape, slavery, etc), then objective theist morality does not exist.
You must be talking about Islam when you refer to slavery and rape. Otherwise that's a very underdeveloped and not well thought out rebuttal of the Christian God
@@buddyguy7175 It's the same God, the God of Abraham.
@@EyeMixMusic It's moral because those actions are a punishment from God. It's like if your mother told you to spank your little sibling while they are gone if they act up. That doesn't then give the child the authority to spank their siblings for any reason just because they feel like it.
Besides, let's say for the sake of argument that the Bible is morally inconsistent. Can you give me an argument for why the Bible ought to be morally consistent without employing the is ought fallacy? Can you give me an argument for why we ought not do the things you claimed are immoral that God allowed? (Jenno -side, grape and forced labor)
If not, your objections are unfounded and can be laughed away.
@@buddyguy7175It seems you need to read the Bible some more and not just selected bits.
@znail4675 show me where rape and slavery is specifically endorsed... I'm very well read in the Bible. You sir, are the ignorant one on this topic
This conversation gets so close to my logical proof of God's non-existence:
1) Divinity is by definition (at least in part) necessarily inconceivable, or ineffable as Alex puts it.
Only the mundane has the potential to be completely conceivable.
2) Humans can only conceive within the constraints of their own human conception.
3) When humans attempt to conceive of God, they are only doing so insofar as they can conceive of the mundane.
Attempting to conceive of the humanly inconceivable aspects that make God divine is necessarily beyond their conception.
Therefore God is not divine to humans. When claiming divinity we are claiming something of which we cannot even conceive in order to claim it.
This contradiction prevents even the postulation of God/divinity. He doesn't exist to us.
does someone necessarily have to conceive of something in order to claim it? Can someone not claim "There exists a force that I cannot explain or imagine", which we would regard as God?
@nikolasnash7288 you are free to claim whatever you like e.g. triangles have 4 sides. All the ingredients of the claim can be perfectly conceivable in isolation, but what does the claim refer to? Surely that matters.
The answering of that question inherently requires conception, at least in potential. There are:
1) things you didn't conceive of before that you do now,
2) things that you may conceive of that you don't yet,
3) even the notion that "there are conceivable things that nobody will ever conceive of" has potential conceivability.
But to make a claim, where all the individual ingredients are perfectly conceivable, but which refers to something that must be at least in part inconceivable (the part that makes it "divine") - to you, what is that inconceivable element? The answer must necessarily be conceivably nothing, making the it the very definition of an empty claim.
So yes, it is possible to make empty claims. Any conceivable elements of an otherwise empty claim are fine, but the totality of those will always be normal mundane stuff. No divinity.
"You need God to know killing is bad"
"Okay, so I think it's bad that God commanded the slaughter of the Amalekites"
"Wait not like that"
Next atheist comment: “Why doesn’t God stop bad people from doing evil?”
“You mean like the Amalekites?”
@@dvillegaspro the Amalekite children and animals were doing evil ?
@@LilySage-mf7uf Of course, they were the first to attack Israel
@@dvillegaspro No, I mean like the Israelites who were practicing slavery. Weird how he skipped banning that bit but made sure we knew we'd be killed for gathering firewood on the holy day.
@@dvillegaspro killing children is evil
Getting an ought from an is: if normative "oughts" are limitted to what is actually possible, AND something is modally necessary in a specific situation, I think that modally necessary "ought" is necessary and "is" what "ought" to be done because that is the only possible course of action in that instance.
Religious morality is hilarious. When introducing a morale code, the first thing they do is lie about where it came from.
Atheists morality is hilarious, introduce a morale code then the first thing they do is lie about where it comes from
Faulty logic. Lying implies knowing that you aren't truthful. That's not a true religions person, that's just a liar.
@@Leonhart_93 I forgot that religious people never lie.
So do most human rights egalitarians.
If I say X is wrong because X causes harm to others, they would say it's just your *opinion* that causing harm is wrong
But they don't seem to realize that nothing changes by adding god to this
If they say X is wrong because god has declared it to be wrong, than it's just based on their *opinion* that it's wrong to do what god has said not to do....not to mention their *opinion* that god exists in the first place
Yup.
"Never believe that religious people are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The religious person have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Here's another way to get an "is" statement from an "ought to" statement:
1."ought" statements are statements about the moral disposition of actions. Amoral actions are not considered in "ought" statements, you may take an action which is amoral, it is permissible to take an amoral action, but you never "ought" to take an amoral action.
Therefore if it is true for any given subject that you ought to do something, it is the case that that subject is morally significant .
I think it's worth noting that statements in this form do not work in the other direction. For example, if I make the statement that a given subject is morally significant, it does not follow that I ought to take any particular actions either for, against, or neutral to the subject
You didn't solve the problem.
"Therefore, IF it is true for any given subject that you ought to do something"
You haven't given a justification for why we ought do anything. You've just said that IF it is true that we ought to do something than it is the case that the subject is morally significant. You haven't demonstrated that we ought or ought not do anything. You can't, because no fact about the natural world can tell you what we ought or ought not do.
what i've learned is that I've never written the word "ought". In fact, for some reason I thought it was "aught"
I see morality as an objective ermgent behaviour stemming from the evolutionary advantage that being a social animal gives us. We had a form of morality long before we had language to describe it.
Exactly!
I see this argument misunderstood all the time. It is not what God decides is good that determines good, it is God's nature that determines what is good. God does not arbitrarily decide what is wrong, something is wrong because it contradicts God's nature. Remember, for most Theists, God is a logically necessary being. Meaning there is no possible world where God could not exist, or could be any different. If God can not possibly be any different than he is, than morality can not possibly be any different than it is. Now you can of course disagree with his existence, but it is a logically sound grounding for morality.
Well put. It does seem to be trying to hand wave the argument away.
That said, it leaves Christian’s at least, with the problem of god’s nature being quite clearly contradictory and arbitrary in scripture that undermines an unchanging god in the first place. Other than scripture, how could they know what god’s nature is?
Without a god to present, anything we say about it is conjecture and arbitrary, so I think we are still justified in saying so even if we are skipping the middle bits of how we got there.
This still doesn't mean we should follow morality that stems from whatever god is being moral.
You comment is still an IS that an bought cannot be derived from
I've literally had theists ask me why they should care about empathy in an attempt to hold their objective morality. Weinberg was right.
One realization that I've had about people is we seem to have a tendency to oversimplify complicated things and overcomplicate simple things. Morality's quite simple in my mind.
Human beings are capable of suffering. Suffering is undesirable so we ought not to be responsible for it. When we can look at another and understand the simple fact that they are
really a variation of you, there will no longer be a need for commandments, rules or laws. We'll be able to intuitively navigate the landscape of morality.
I've always thought this too. Just from a few objective facts of physical reality (we feel pain and don't like it, we have empathy, we're a social creatures) you can pretty much generate all the major moral positions, because it's really just a word we use to describe how we feel about the actions and behaviours of people and how they impact other people. It's not much deeper than that and there doesn't need to be some grand universal "truth" grounding it for it to be the way things are.
So the pain that a person endures classifies the thing under good or bad? What if I steal? Am I causing any pain? What if I overexploit the resources of the earth? Am I causing any pain? What if I kill my baby when it’s 3 weeks old, is it ok because it doesn’t cause any pain? We choose to base our morality under something always, but it doesn’t mean necessarily that it exists objectively
@@monstermonquey9442 Correct. WLC has pointed that Sam Harris does this by equating goodness with physical wellness. I've seen Micheal Shermer do the same. It's very superficial reasoning. Obviously, so many moral questions don't involve suffering or have straightforward answers as SaffronHorizon thinks.
@@monstermonquey9442 I thought it was pretty obvious that I was just giving examples? You can extrapolate from there a whole host of other things that at their basic level were associated with our earliest survival mechanisms as a social species. Happy to clarify further
@@monstermonquey9442Not all pain is physical, it can also be emotional and mental. Obviously stealing will hurt the person youre stealing from financially, and if theyre poor enough youre denying them the chance to survive by taking away their ability to acquire sustenance. Again, overexploitation causes pain, because you are ruining the environment, causing pain to animals in that environment as well as your fellow man by depriving them of resources that you decided to greedily hog. It is a myth that babies dont experience pain, this was believed to be true back then but studies show that babies actually experience pain. Heck, even plants can experience something similar to pain. What is pain physically? Its a signal our body sends to our brain to tell us to get the hell out of that situation which causes you pain. Frankly, the idea that you dont consider the things you just gave as examples shows that you yourself need to evaluate yourself morally before debating others on morality.
When trying to derive an ought from an is, are we allowed to assume the truth value of the is statement? If so, I can think of exactly one ought you can get from an is.
1. It is the case that objective moral laws exist, where a moral law is a statement about what you ought to do.
2. Therefore you ought to follow objective moral laws.
Now this is completely definitional, it's pretty much just saying if it is true that there are things you ought to do, then you ought to do those things , and relies on assuming that objective laws exist. Without that assumption, I don't believe that you can ever make an is to an ought statement.
I can think of one more very serious problem with this. And that is that even if you could confirm the truth of premise one without question, and accept that the conclusion follows from the first premise, there would never be any way for a finite being to ever know what moral statements were objectively true and which ones weren't, which leaves us in precisely the same position we are on the front side, namely having to use our own subjective rationality to decide what is and isn't moral.
Apologists think they can win moral arguments if just keep uncharitably asking "why why why"
The same thing can easily be done to them: Why is going against god wrong ?
Any answer they give will merely be their subjective opinion
in other words, morality dependant on a subject (god) is subjective
Because God *is* morality. They're the same.
@@didimockets Why? Is it by definition?
@@LilySage-mf7uf Why is a circle round? Because it's part of its essence. Study Aristotle and Aquinas.
@@didimockets Your subjective opinion god exists & your subjective opinion that morality is part of his essence
People desire not to be harmed, so if your actions are causing harm than of course people who don't want to be harmed are going to take steps to prevent you from doing that....this occurs regardless of whether gods exist or not
What people desire doesn't matter if the actor considers their harmful actions morally justified.
Morality is an evolutionary tool, nothing more and nothing less
If only everybody was evolved enough to have morals :/
@@youtubestudiosucks978 so long as everyone follows the laws/regulations we're good?
@@okkomp since when do people follow the same regulations? Religious people break the law constantly and are activly trying to enforce their laws upon others.
Have you read the laws in their books?
I will never follow a paw that tells me i should unalive somebody for insulting my imaginary friend nor to enslave somebody for not sharing my views, which every religion has
Not all theists are created equal, yall. I think you would find my theism much more logical & possible then the blood cults of Abraham.
Blood cult?
Christianity @@keitumetsemodipa3012
@@keitumetsemodipa3012 yes, all followers of Abraham are a blood Cult of Sin Worshippers.... thanks to your dogmas. But, I still love you!!!
your eyes are blinded by the god of this world I pray the Father would open your eyes to the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ, my friend 1 Corinthians 15:1-4
Your theism, as in designed by you or…?
There is no good reason to deny the existence of objective morality, just as there is no good reason to deny that the external world objectively exists.
As a Classical Theist who is Catholic many of the comment sections including the Alex here misunderstand at least the position of Classical theists. God’s commands are not an arbitrary set of rules but rather a set of properties that correspond to being which is inextricably linked by goodness. Goodness is being and the nature in which Goodness flows from is the very fount of Goodness itself.
There you go: embrace the tautology. God = goodness is the same as saying god = god. True but unenlightening. Of course this formulation eliminates the possibility of god being omnipotent since doing evil is now impossible for god. What's that... god can do everything consistent with its nature so it's still omnipotent in that way? Slick move but just another tautology, i.e. god can do anything god can do. True but not just unenlightening, it is literally the same for everything that exists.
@@WDRhine I didn’t say Goodness = God, and also your formation of your “omnipotence” isn’t coherent since omnipotence doesn’t entail logical impossibility. CS Lewis says: “His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. you may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense, this is no limit to His power. meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words "God can". it remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities.” And St. Thomas who says: “Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.” And evil is a privation of being, if you studied any sort of classical theism or neo platonic thought you would know this. Also please cut out the passive aggressive oozing from your comment if you want people to take you seriously
@@hap1678 It is not intrinsically impossible to do evil so if god can't do it then god is not omnipotent, even within your highly-customized definition. What you call passive aggressive is just your cognitive dissonance at having your "Classical" theism exposed for the bilge water it is. Theism is the only area of study without a subject that can be demonstrated to even exist. Putting 'classical' in front of it, even with a capital letter, doesn't change that.
@@hap1678quoting two scholars doesn't make those "philosophers" correct. Besides, what is logically impossible about God being or performing evil? You didn't dispute or disprove the other commenter, you brought up several separate points, which, in this discussion, are irrelevant.
@@hap1678and ancient Greeks, who knew actual early Christians, believed those Christians explained omnipotence as all powerful, which, considering that's a Greek phrase, probably understood what it means better than you or I do, making boulders is logically possible, so is lifting boulders. So, if God can create a boulder he cannot lift, he cannot be all powerful, if he cannot create a boulder he cannot lift, he cannot be all powerful, in any definition of all powerful. Lifting stone is not logically impossible, neither is a boulder being formed from stone logically impossible. And choosing to be incapable of something, and then making himself capable of it, does not count.
This reminds me me why Samuel Beckett said that language is an inadequate vehicle for communication.
Definitions are a real problem because we all internalise them slightly differently based on factors such as cultural milieu and personal experience. For example, if I asked 100 people from as wide a range of cultures as possible if a given action was honourable, we would probably have high levels of agreement on some actions and low levels on others.
Is killing a woman honourable?
Is killing a woman honourable if she brought shame on her family?
Is it honourable to kill someone that you have never met before?
Is it honourable to kill that same person if they are part of an army invading your homeland?
You will get varying levels of agreement on the above questions.
It's ironic that the ones who say that rely on *Divine Command Theory* (the hallmark of terrorism)
Under their perspective, any action no matter how vile can be called moral simply by saying *"god told them to do it"*
They believe that vileness is in line with good because their god by definition is good.
6:10
No, it's not at all fair to say that most people have moral realist intuitions at all. Honestly that made me stop wanting to watch this video.
I really think you need to listen to what some anti-realist philosophers have to say on this topic. I would really strongly suggest looking into some of Lance Bush's criticisms regarding this claim.
It seems to me that one clear is you can get from an ought is as follows:
1. You objectively ought to do X.
2. Therefore it is the case that objective moral laws exist
This could perhaps be considered the trivial case
@@sordidknifeparty What's objective, about 1?
@@TheHuxleyAgnosticI'm not sure what you mean. The first premise is just a hypothetical "ought" statement Which we assume to be true for the sake of seeing if we can derive an "is" from it. So in other words the first statement says if we assume that it is true objectively that you ought to do anything, then it must be true that objective statements about morality exist, since the first premise is such a statement. This is no way demonstrates, nor does it attempt to demonstrate, that statements such as "you ought to do X" can be objectively true, rather it simply acts to demonstrate that there are certain "ought" statements which if assumed to be true yield deductively certain "is" statements as a consequence. Is that a little more clear?
@@sordidknifeparty Well, the is-ought problem is exactly the opposite ... to get an objective ought from an objective is, without filling the gap with subjectivity. So, you're assuming the very thing that's in question.
@@TheHuxleyAgnosticI addressed the "ought from an is" argument in a different comment. In this one I'm addressing a separate question that Alex posed as to whether it was possible to get an is from an ought.
@@sordidknifeparty But the entire point is to stick with pure objectivity. Simply asserting stuff, with no actual grounding in objectivity, can get you whatever answer you want, any which way. Assertion: pizza is objectively good ... therefore you objectively ought to eat pizza. It totally misses the point of the problem.
1. You ought to tidy the garden
2. The garden is tidy.
These are the two statements you should be considering in my opinion.
Yahweh is a desert War God of Hypocrisy, not THE ONE TRUE CREATOR.
Absolutely every single "true creator" claimed to exist by theistic groups are rejected by other theistic groups in the same fashion as you reject Yahweh. How would you even know you aren't as incorrect as you claim the Jewish people are?
I have concluded that the idea of morality being subjective or objective is a bad way of framing this issue, to the point of being a category error. If you reject the notion of God, then morality is better seen as a complex combination of culture and evolved social behavior, which can not tidily be stratified as either objective or subjective. And if you want to propose God as the giver of objective morality, then you must first show how what is an impossible and contradictory being can even exist, otherwise we have no reason to consider that claim (see my other comment).
"If you reject the notion of God, then morality is better seen as a complex combination of culture and evolved social behavior"
Is it though? I suppose we ought to define exact what we mean by "morality" here. If you mean "moral codes" then yes, I would agree. However, if you mean that something is good or bad, I think those concepts can exist independent of the human race. Also why do you define God as impossible and contradictory?
@@Ψυχήμίασμα It's not that I am defining God as impossible and contradictory, but that theists define God in impossible and contradictory terms and then dismiss those as "mysteries" or "things beyond human comprehension." Or at least some do. Do you disagree with this? What I am saying is that before God can be posited as an explanation for anything, theists must first provide an adequate description (model) of such a being.
I used to think morality had to be objective because subjective morality seemed untenable; but so then did objective morality when I thought about it. I now think that framing morality this way is overly simplistic and misleading, even a category error, because I think morality should be better explored as the complex interplay of factors such as evolved social behavior and culture. I suppose you could define some things as "good" outside of human subjects, but other things could still be subjectively "good", and I think that helps illustrate my point.
First I’m lit!
U might like a recent upload here chat gpt compares the logic of my theism to that of followers of Abraham.
God only exists as a supernatural mythic narrative.
Atheism exists as a cult to the deprave who do anything to not find God
/genuine initial reaction to thumbnail b like
Damn, you got that Ashton Kutcher interview?
Don't hold back big dawg, ask him the hard questions about why he in on the sex slave trade
Religious folks think that their morals are granted by God but then pick and choose which ones to obey. If you compromise on your "objective" morality, then surely it becomes subjective...
Atheists folks think their morals are granted by the collective aka laws but then pick and choose which laws they follow
They don't, but nice straw-man. Give an example next time.
Just because we pick and choose doesn't mean the law isn't still there. People bend and break the law all the time that doesn't suddenly mean the law is gone
@@ededwards7226 Which is why the important ones have made it into actual law and the others have been dismissed through revision. Truly timeless texts, they are..
In the US religious morals are determined as either a defense or offense of a version of a deity or God.
They can, but ultimately, they will restrain themselves to end up exactly like the one who dint have a moral code and enjoyed whatever. At the end, we are all doomed to the cosmic cool down. 😊
Debates like this should be headlined: only for Christians or atheists with the Christian background.
It is notorious how both sides ignore all the other concepts of God and/or transcendent in their repetitive circle ranting.
"Oughts" and "is" ? I follow the advice of the famous Yorkshireman who put it this way: "'ere all, see all, say nowt. And if thee ever does owt for nowt, do it for thisun."
There is no "ought". There only is a "how I would like it to be".
Consider: there is a state of "what is". What exists. Any state of "what ought to be" is either identical... or is is different from that.
If it is identical... there is no need for an "ought"... everything _is_ as it _ought to be._
If it is different... it does not exist, at least not in the same way as this "state of what is".
Morality is objective because its logical to be good.
Thats why logical actions including self defense are "good".
Is logic objective, depends on the definition
Morality is more of an emotional than logical thing. You have to "feel right" to be able to act good. No amount of logic can make a intelligent evil psychopath to be good.
@alena-qu9vj ah huh. So how do "good" people who don't experience emotion pre-hawk rationalize?
An arbitrary definition is useless.
How do you define good and evil? Your appealing to concepts that have no basis under your own reasoning. Try using logic instead
@alena-qu9vj another question... do you think its logical to share when your needs are met? Or is it just a selfish rationalization for potentail future benefit?
Id say they are exactly the same, and I'd claim not shareing is illogical under most circumstances.
@alena-qu9vj wait. And again by your own "logic"(reasoning) if it feels good to murder is it right? Bad reasoning
It all depends on your moral philosophy whether you can get an "ought" from an "is". If moral realism is true, the "ought" statements are actually statements about the state of some aspect of reality, which means that an "ought" statement is an "is" statement about that aspect of reality, much like statements about the weight of a carbon rod or the elasticity of a spring. In that case you can get "ought" statements from "is" statements because "ought" statements _are_ "is" statements, just disguised by using different words.
Let's see if that is true: produce the list of 'oughts' that come from some kind of objective morality system
@@juanausensi499 : My favorite objective morality system is consequentialist humanist realism. In other words, the objective consequences of an action define its morality. We ought to help people in need. We ought to not murder people. We ought not to fight wars. We ought to protect the innocent. We ought to do _anything_ where the objective consequences of our actions serves to make life better for humans and for other animals that have mental faculties near to human. So when we say "we ought to do X" we are actually making an "is" statement about the objective consequences of doing X.
@@Ansatz66 But there are consequences that aren't objective, for example, how we feel about things. If you ignore them, then your system can allow non-physical abuse. If you take them into account, you can end forbidding anything that offends somebody.
There is a drinking ban. you ought to not drink. Solved
so you derive your morality from what is legal or not?
i certainly hope you're joking
0:25 I get where Alex is coming from by saying it is smarmy... but more likely than not, the theist is not making a legitimate question. They are doing a leading question to back the atheist into a corner. No theist ever, that I have met, that have made that question has a legitimate interest on answering that question honestly. So if the atheist is being smarmy, so is the theist, the atheist in that instance is answering in kind. At least, the atheist by saying neither do you, is trying to have an actual conversation and honest debate. But every single theist I have had this conversation with, they NEVER make that question to have a honest conversation, rather it is done to shut down the conversation... So sorry no sorry for being smarmy, I will stop being smarmy when the theist wants to have a honest conversation.
Morality was there way before religion was. Every since there were groups of humans, we have had a sense of right or wrong - pain caused by others (whether physical or emotional) eventually led to social norms of what is right or wrong for that group. Those observations became one of the cornerstones of most religions. I would hope most atheists are actually agnostic.
but this is a dichotomy between good and bad, rather than the good and evil that religions propagate
@@anonymoose478 I would propagate that good and bad became good and evil once people put the religion du jour stamp on it.
Link the main video in these clips
"You cannot get ought from is"
This statement is false in absolute sense. But it is useful approximation for MOST of discussions. It's a good assumption to have by default so when someone tries to cross this boundary we can quickly recognise a need for additional proof.
How do you get an ought from an is in something like predicate logic?
@@MsJavaWolf I feel like full answer requires to tackle your question from two different angles.
One angle, would be:
In practice you cannot because of two reasons: it's virtually impossible to formulate a logical statement for a vast enough set of entities, and it's also super hard to properly include time and space in such formula.
But in theory you can model a vast enough simulation space, including time and space, so you can conclude how entities will interact with each other, you can conclude that somewhat synchronized more complex systems emerges from them, and you can observe, investigate and describe characteristics of such abstract systems (which are internally a complex and seemingly chaotic set of interactions of vast number of entities). Those more complex systems will then influence the entities and their individual outcomes.
Another angle is:
You cannot get ought from is for any arbitrary argument. But that's because every such argument is a description of a narrow subset of something (mostly reality) and therefore it cannot predict for what is beyond it's definition. Issue is theists use this and conflate limitation of a simple argument with limitation of the reality. Reality is always more complex and interconnected than an argument. That's why logical and mathematical paradoxes and contradictions never proven existence of supernatural. What such paradoxes did was exposing fact that there are still some characteristics of reality that didn't observe or described well enough.
So while you cannot get ought from is when talking about somewhat simple logical statement, you can (and in fact, do) get it in physical reality.
Yes, what makes a God a God is that you ought to worship them so if a God exist, you ought to worship it. It is the statement from which, if it is true, that is necessarily produces an ought
"What makes a god a god is that you ought to worship them."
Why do you say this?
There's no strict is/aught distinction. Every "is" smuggles in an aught (because "is" is under-determined -- it would be a cruel joke if the world doesn't work they way it aught to). Every "aught" smuggles in an "is" (because it presupposes things).
Where's the full interview?
i really hate the "objective morals" argument from pseudo-rhetoriticians like WLC. the argument is essentially A: if the bible is objective and B: objectivity equates to a state of being universally true then C: you can't have objective morality without the bible. The issues with this are
1.) that objective doesn't mean universally true
2.) they subjectively decided the bible was objective
and 3.) you can do that with any book or even any thought anyone has ever had.
Objective morality should be called 'Consensus of moral values', since there are a few moral questions that will be answered the same, no matter who we would ask about.
@dorkception2012 what moral questions are those
@@notloki3377 For example Unaliving someone without a reason, disproportionally huge punishment for miniscule crimes, forcing others to do (previously established) immoral things, etc.
I think there are a few tribes around Papua-New Guinea where anthropologists couldn't make contact with, but there are a few articles where these kind of questions been asked from different cultures and these were among those, that considered immoral for everyone. Funny enough, questions about slavery, forced marriages was not so conclusive. :)
@dorkception2012 fair. there's certainly a universal language of pragmatics.
The real question is, "Can God be both an ought and an is?" God has revealed that He is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, so He cannot contradict Himself, so His commands are not arbitrary but are a necessary expression of His being.
This type of claim from theists has always confused me the most. Theists often have a version of a morality system, sure. Personally I don’t think a particularly good one, and certainly a problematic method when they attempt to forever fix it in place. No room for making changes as we learn new things is always dangerous. But they by no means own the concept of morality. It exists regardless of religions or gods. It’s just weird that they get so confused about none believers having a moral system. It would be like people with brown hair being confused that blonde hair people might also use a comb or brush.
Im not atheistic at all, I can't really relate to atheistic philosophy. But claiming that they can't be moral is completely unfounded. There are both logical evolutionary and religious theological reasons for morals, and both are ultimately overshadowed the common morality where most people agree on whether something is good or bad such as violence being seen as objective moral evil
From my dive into the psychological aspects of morality, the idea that atheists have no morals is a wild claim.
Because i feel morality evolved as a social regulatory function and they can stem from basic things such as empathy and fair play, but as well they come also from grpup dynamics.
The idea that morality is from a divine source often makes little sense to me because morality is a contentious issue in which we frequently disagree.
We evolved morality to regulate relationship interactions. And many animals have proto moral behaviours
There are plenty of studies about morality. That's basically an evolutionary trait that came in every social living beings. "I will act the same way I'm expecting to be treated. If I get in trouble, someone who likes me, more likely will rush for my help." etc. you get the picture.
That has been perfectly true untill the modern philospohers with their absurd theories were forced on the innocent humanity.
I get my aughts from my IFs. I aught to do moral things IF i want to be moral. I aught to eat food IF i want to stave off hunger. There are no aughts from an IS, but there are no aughts without IFs.
In other words, oughts come from objectives. If you want x, then you ought to do y. But now the question is: why i want x? Is x good? Me wanting x makes x good?
@@juanausensi499 Exactly.
Im kind of torn by this. On one part I feel like morals definitely could come from a higher being but at the same time, there’s so many problems with saying it comes from x god. So I’d say morals come from evolution. And that killing feels bad because I can put myself in another persons shoes. It does seem wrong. But still morality seems like it’s subjective, and I can subjectively say morality is wrong along with a lot of other people.
I just have to say firstly, you can absolutely be an atheist and believe in free will. I am an atheist and I believe free will exists. There are logical and reasonable ways to interpret quantum mechanics in a way that allows for free will without doing anything out of the ordinary. I also believe we have no data that suggests free will doesn't exist, we only have data that suggests we are influenced by more than we often like to admit, and anyone that extrapolates that certain data concludes free will does not exist is making a conclusion that the data itself does not in fact conclude.
With that said, you can absolutely get an "ought" from an "is" that is objective, given at the very least that we all agree on a presupposition that is itself, ironically, subjective, a conjecture. I will tell you how.
The idea of solipsism states that there is nothing but the self, the internality, one's own mental activity, that can be known. It doesn't take very long to conclude that this is undoubtedly true. Everything is experienced through our own consciousness, and so no experiment on another person to verify their own individual consciousness can be removed from the bias of our own consciousness. That is, that what we are experiencing when we perform said experiment is anything but a projection of our own mental activity and does not actually exist. Yet, we have all collectively agreed, both consciously and unconsciously, to extend the fact that we have consciousness onto other beings that look and/or behave like we do. I eat, breathe, talk, sleep, and defecate. We have agreed to conclude that it stands to suggest that other beings that eat, breathe, talk (communicate), sleep, and defecate are likely to also have consciousness. We cannot prove that they do, but we have agreed collectively to make that conclusion. It is the basis of all human interaction, both personal and societal. It might be conjecture, but because we have all agreed to treat it like objective fact, then the following "ought" can be extrapolated from this aforementioned "is".
From this point forward, we will treat others having consciousness as an absolute certainty. I as a being with consciousness experience suffering. Suffering is defined objectively and universally, as a negatively charged emotional or mental experience. It does not matter what form it takes. Sticking a pin needle in my finger hurts, and therefore causes suffering. Someone unable to feel pain may not suffer from that happening, but perhaps experiences suffering in the form of loneliness in the way their condition separates them from connecting with others. If I experience suffering, and suffering is defined objectively and universally as being a negatively charged experience - and all other living creatures have consciousness, it stands to reason they all experience suffering as it is negatively defined.
If I examine myself and extrapolate from the "is" that is the fact that I suffer, and the fact that suffering is inherently negative, I can objectively state that I don't like to feel suffering. This is not subjective mind you. Suffering is inherently defined negatively, which means objectively, is is definitionally unpleasant. If it is suffering, you do not like it. If you liked it - it would not be called suffering. This is another "is", that anyone who experiences suffering can and will objectively say about themselves that they do not like to suffer, based on the innate negative nature of the experience of suffering. If I don't want to feel suffering, and I can extrapolate based on its innate negative nature, that others will not want to experience suffering, I can take the "is" that is "others experience suffering" and infer the "ought" that is "I ought to not inflict suffering on others." Obviously because no matter our actions they have the potential to cause suffering regardless of our intention, we can make an alteration and reframe the "ought" as "I ought to not purposely inflict suffering on others."
Done. Ought from an is. Objective morality devoid of anything divine or supernatural being invoked in order to bestow such morality onto the moral landscape.
We have things that we must do in order to be able to get our time to do whatever we want. There is free will. However, If you want to get to somewhere you have to do work and move your legs. In that perspective nothing is a free will, but taking actions to achieve our goals. That's why philosophy is just a mental jerkout, proves nothing, only creates contradictions.
@@dorkception2012 literally all of what you said is nonsense word salad.
@@BadassRaiden Sorry, I'm still struggling with the grammar, English is my third language, but we could talk in German or in Hungarian if you wish! So I try to clarify what I was talking about. Free will is something, that you can do whenever you want right? You want to go to the beach, so you stand up and go to the beach. However, you can only do that if your legs are working. If your legs are not in a working condition, you have to ask another person to take you to the beach. (The example is just an oversimplified explanation of my point, bare with me) So you rely on the will of others in this case. Even if your legs are working it depends on the state of your body if you will be able to reach your will. You getting what I'm trying to say? We are always will depend on the "will" of our own body or on other people, thus there is no such a thing as free will.
Trying to get morals from a fictional story, a story that has wildly immoral acts and commands, seems rather weird. Morals come from the real world where we act to look after and care for each other
fantastic
IS: God, who is identical to Goodness, subsists as the fundamental structure of reality.
OUGHT: We ought align our actions with the nature of reality, which is inherently good.
Get back to me when they’ve solved the Euthyphro.
Euthyphro’s dilemma has been solved decades ago
@@fidelcashflo8129 I think you’ve been misinformed.
@@brianholly3555 nah C.S. Lewis solved it way back and countless apologists today debunk atheists who still use it
@@fidelcashflo8129 C. S. Lewis never refuted anything. You need to study some real philosophy.
@@brianholly3555 great argument
David enoch, taking morality seriously
I can lay out a chess board in a particular position and can say what the player ought to do based on how the board is, this is because we understand that what we're trying to achieve is to win the game.
Morality is much the same, we can say what we ought to when we acknowledge the goal is to enhance the wellbeing of any conscious creature. If you don't agree that that's what morality means then I'd love to hear your definition, but either way we're not talking about the same thing.
The first issue is, the anaolgy between winning the chess game and enhancing the well-being of conscious creatures. How did you get to that point?
The second issue is, someone says they dont care about winning the game they just want to move the pieces, hpw do you say that what they are doing is wrong?
Even if the definition you give is correct, the difficulty is in identifying the well-being of a living creature. Is my well-being enhanced by eating delicious meat for which another animal suffered? Whose well-being do we prioritise over others? Is longer life more well-being? Is being dead not preferable to being alive if I'm suffering?
@WaqasAli-ct7ly the chess analogy is to demonstrate that 'is + goal = ought'.
If a person plays chess the way you described, we can objectively say they are playing wrong, because they have the wrong goal according to the rules of chess.
@DavidBrown-ts2us thats what im saying. Who decided that our goal in morality is to enhance the well being of creatures? You are starting off with a premise without any good reason as to why we should take that premise. Its the same mistake Sam Harris falls into in the moral landscape
@@WaqasAli-ct7lywell, if we prioritize the well being of other people, we increase the likelihood of that person surviving and then reproducing.
In the end, whatever you believe, empathy is what our goal is based on and so we have the goal, we learn the rules of the world, and thus the optimal “play” can be discovered
I have repeatedly had to halt debates on the universal fine-tuning argument with atheists. Sophistry, repeated lies, distortion the reason. That, along with the fact that the prominent militant atheists, Dawkins, Krauss, Maher, Shermer, Fry, Coyne etc ALL side with Isr-el even now. Morality? I see little of it among atheists; Alex being a rare exception.
For as many athiests that are pro-israel, there are just as many that aren't lol. Definitely not a universally shared belief
@ I was referring to prominent new atheists, the ones who share a public platform with Dawkins.
@@briansmith3791 yeah fair they suck. using a base of being anti-religion to play into western islamaphobia
I don't agree with Alex's criticism when he says you can't get ought from is even with God; in this context God would the "is" that you are getting the "ought" from.
In many ways, athiest often hi jackobian, my heritage good and bad equations the same anylitical step by step sources they just use half the sources and are often inverted or drawing from more recent plagerizisms.
Or they also draw from correlating with nature but as the orginal devine right wokism cog in the wheel it was some earlier revisionist history curriculum they mimic.
This is why Rationalism is a dead end.
You can't get a Ought from an Is, when it's all just a mind game.
Psalm 34:8
Taste and see that the Lord is good;
blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.
Hi MoeGar, Moral values are not a mind game academic logic issue. They are a practical political issue and a practical political solution to a practical political problem - how do we live socially, because it is necessary for humans to live socially since individual humans are useless at real self-sufficiency, particularly when young or elderly, and so we ought to abide by the rules of social living. As far back as archaeologists have looked, they have found humans living socially.
Morality is the rules of social living, encompassed by the Do and Don’t versions of the Golden Rule which have been independently known to different societies across the globe. Moral values are political as they deal with power relationships.
Getting an ought from an is requires a practical political process, not an academic logical one. David Hume was not talking about whether we ought to tidy up the garden. He was talking about how we ought to behave towards other people. Morality is not a solo gig. If you are living alone on a desert island you have no need for moral values though you still need other ethical values. As soon as another person arrives on the island and you have to live socially, then you need moral values, you need to abide by the rules of social living.
Social living is necessary therefore we ought to follow the rules of social living. Moral obligation is grounded in the non-optional reason of the necessity of social living and we get an ought from an is by getting out of the academic mind game armchair and being practical and political. Alleged gods are not required.
How does a theist ground moral obligation with a non-optional reason that can't be dismissed out of hand or denied?
Morality is culture-based, same with religion.
Although there are objective parts of morality. For example unaliving another person without reason is objectively considered wrong.
Morality in higher pack mammals and primates is survival based. It stems from altruistic behavior, which makes the survival of the pack possible.
Magic is ought.
I don’t understand why oughts can’t come from our minds
If you’re considering the ‘ought’ as a universal ought (a moral principle of the universe), then I think there’s a difficulty there. How could one person’s mind, finite in time and space, with access to only an infinitesimal fraction of knowledge of that vast universe that it has been born into also be the source of a universal truth?
A single person could decide: “it’s wrong to sit on chairs”, but that doesn’t make it an ‘ought’ does it? It’s just one finite mind’s idea, not universal.
Neither do I .Ought seems to suggest an emotionanl imperative. Guilt, obligation, compassion, justice, fair play, are all emotional pushes that guide (coerce?) us to behave in a moral/ ethical manner.
Everything anyone values is based on exclusive effects and rarity to create and preserve possibilities for the future.
There is nothing that can happen in the universe incidentally that humanity can not potentially cause or stop DELIBERATELY. Humanity is more valuable than anything because it has the same effects as anything plus everything else. Knowledge is why humanity can produce these remarkable effects.
There can be nothing more priceless in the universe than Humanity, persons, knowledge and all that sustains them.
If it is irrational to destroy a valuable thing to create a less valuable thing, then it must be immoral to diminish a priceless thing to create a less than priceless effect.
All moral actions can be understood this way and it's as objective as math. The only subjective input is the knowledge and will to act morally. We need no subjective commandments nor given rights from clergy, kings, nor gods to understand moral rights and wrongs. The more we understand about nature and each other, the more obvious it becomes. The more we bow our heads to pray for answers, the more big bullies guide us to believe absurdity and commit atrocity and fecklessly ignore tragedy.
God is just a really bad guess that all children make and grown ups learn to ignore.
People who state that athietst cant have morality are silly. Free will can absoluetly exist in an athiest worldview. The ability to choose what pizza i want or who i want to date is not defined from god. You dony need a god to have free will.
Morality can absoletly exist and does within an athiest worldview. Dont murder is nessary for cooperation. And it would stand to reason that if i want to live a safe society it would behoove me not to engage in that. Out of survival and a logical want to live in a productive envirnment.
morality is a strategy for social relationships. it's a strategic dynamic which emerges from fundamental rules, not a law of physics or religious physics.
from a secular, mechanistic perspective, morality is a game theoretic strategy, emergently produced by a genetic collective, to maximize benefit for that collective. it has selected for emotional and social incentives towards behavior which benefits the group (i.e., "good" behavior; "good" is relative to a particular utility function). religious morality contains proxies for this premise, but largely centered around a cult of personality for gods, and to a varying lesser extent, religious leaders. there is extreme ambiguity about the mechanistic relationship between god and man, because in many important ways, religious dogmas categorize god as being undefinable or impossible to understand; so we can't know how the fulfillment of god's will relates mechanistically to the wellbeing of the collective-- we can only know the dogma that following god leads to heaven and turning away from god leads to hell, and also that there are general consequences for the community in the earthly realm based on these behaviors. or, one might be so emotionally invested in god, that the emotional urgency of maximizing god's expressed mode of benefit subsumes the emotional urgency that one has for one's self and one's community, such that they only care about what's good for god, and that's the only point of concern.
since religion tends to be based on a stable set of dogmas, which are proxies for evolutionary moral systems, religion can assume a greater stability of moral classifications (categorical imperative)-- that x behavior is a sin, independent of context. eg, some say that abortion is evil because of the dogma of a soul's presence in a body, and destroying a body with a soul is murder.
an approach to secular morality would be some brand of utilitarianism, of maximizing the benefit of a collective. different people in the same community can have different utility functions, because ultimately, adherence to a function depends on the self-interest of an individual. this even applies to social dynamics. the premise of "caring about other people" is that, through our evolutionary development, our self-interest is profoundly interwoven with the self-interest of others; because of survival logistics, and because of the emotional triggers based on social perception.
i assume that one of the biggest difficulties in discourse about morality is that 1) it's complex, and 2) it's extremely non-romanticist. the social infrastructure of religion has had thousands of years to establish itself, which generates extreme social and cultural exposure to its principles; and it's much simpler to understand, which is logistically useful and less emotionally difficult. and one sense of romanticism is that it's an emphasis on a particular idea based on its aesthetic attributes, which has significant implications for thought, more generally. because religion is socially embedded and utilitarianism isn't, religion has had a lot of time to develop aesthetic appeal; and since utilitarianism contradicts many aesthetically appealing aspects of religion, it has a negative aesthetic appeal. people will tend to find utilitarianism disgusting, *even in cases where you can deduce that utilitarianism creates explicitly superior outcomes*.
the difficulties of trying to understand a non-traditional or anti-traditional mode of thought are drastically compounded in social settings, for many reasons. there are various cultural and religious taboos for saying things which contradict pre-existing sensibilities, and which aren't compatible with a particular social setting.
this is already a pretty long comment, so last thought will be abbreviated and simplified. extrapolate chesterton's fence into chesterton's sawtooth. imagine a linear sequences of theoretical solutions, with later ones being better than earlier ones. a solution initially may be terrible for many reasons, maybe because it's poorly understood, or because it requires extensive development. a given solution sucks when it's new, and rocks when it's old. in the sawtooth, each spike's tip represents an old solution; and the plummet into the point between two adjacent teeth represents the transition from an old strategy into a new strategy.
Why is this always so complicated and wordy. Or maybe I am just dumb. If objective "morality" comes from god - then why does every religion have different moralities, why do the members of said religion CONSTANTLY violate them and ...last but not least, apparently slavery and taking women against there will is okay..among other things that we punish today and apparently violate god's morality by doing so?
Sure, I grew up in a family that went to church etc - but my morality was taught by avoiding what hurts people...and not "because god tells us". Today I am also avoiding harm to animals by not consuming this and I see that as a moral thing. The church certainly didn't tell me that
I don't know you so I think it'd be rude to call you dumb. However you may just not have the required experience to understand the "wordy" words they're saying. I understood all of it easily but I have been reading philosophy for years. To your first claim, theists don't see other religions as true so from their perspective their god has the authority on morality and other gods are false idols. So that's the problem with that view. You are looking at it from an unbias perspective which is great, but in order to understand why they think that you need to shift your point of view to theirs.
*Implicature
I would love to argue this with him as I think he doesn't even have the right argument. God is not an ought. You ought to do something. God is more of a yes you 100% should do this. The bible is filled with Thou Shalt do X. Even going back to Genesis. God said Thou shalt eat from all things except Y.
The given argument I would lay out is that if all things God is just oughts it implies he doesn't care if you do them or not. This simply is not the case in any scripture.
From an atheistic view though there is no reason to do anything you don't want to do. Why should you? There is no meaning to anything anyway. Atheist's have the why? problem they always have.
Dear Theist,
If, at the highest and widest level of reality, there hasn’t ever been, and there can’t ever be, any gods or goddesses, what explains your morality?
Non- sensical question. Might as well ask why isn't a circle a square.
@@thomassandoval8025 How is my question nonsensical in the way a question about a square circle is nonsensical?
@yinYangMountain because if there was no creator, there would be no existence. If there is no God there is nothing, including objective morality.
@@thomassandoval8025 “because if there was no creator, there would be no existence.”
- Existence requires a creator, correct? But that’s circular, isn’t it? You’ve simply suggested that existence creates existence, haven’t you?
“If there is no God there is nothing, including objective morality.”
- And this is question begging, isn’t it? You’ve simply asserted, without argument, “objective morality” only follows from a god, haven’t you?
- What factors contributed to the existence of one god as opposed to the existence another god? And from this god’s perspective, how is this not subjective as opposed to objective?
- Let’s imagine there is a god, how does it follow this god is moral (the standard for morality) and/or what it decrees is moral?
God is a fictional character.
Atheism is a fictional religion
Remove that stach it doesn't suits you keep beard + stach
You can learn to abide by law. You cannot learn moral, not even from any god. It is innate, same as other talents. Trying to find a definition for this innate character attribute is just a mental masturbation. The important thing is how you excercise it, not how you define it.
@@fssstyuniaf Depends on the definition of "morality". Morality is authentic in my understanding- you cannot act "bad" even if it is not advantegous for you. What you describe is not authentic morality, it is just a learned behaviour and depends solely on what your society teaches you. Should they say you it is "moral" to kill somebody you would do it.
Everyone has morality, the Holy Spirit is God and speaks to you through your conscience. Religious people have a heightened awareness, believers in Yeshua especially.
It is worth trading every single thing you think your desire driven life offers and more.
@@WriteTrax prove it
@@thejabberwocky2819 Feel your conscience? Lean in to it, ask for guidance. Like the problem of evil or the problem of suffering, this is another issue one solves within one self. God is proven through connection.
The idea that someone has to prove God to you comes from Luciferianism, it's not logical at all.
Anything you say to deny it is just a caterpillar telling a butterfly that wings don't exist, wasting your time lying to yourself to try and convince me will never work.
@@WriteTrax Appealing to one's conscience is the definition of moral subjectivism. It's not terribly surprising then that different peoples' consciences tell them wildly different things about their moral intuitions. You needn't look farther than the large number of different denominations within the same parent religion yet with significantly different moral beliefs. If the holy spirit is speaking to us through our conscience, it's not doing a very good job of it.
@@danielle_vandress Not even close.
Once you connect with God you will know what I am saying, yes, most Christians also fail in life because they do not understand scripture and make it about ego and emotion.
Your conscience is swayed by outside forces until you are connected, is what it is.
@@WriteTrax And yet the Christians who disagree with you are using the same methodologies and arriving at different beliefs.
How do you know that its not your ego and emotion swaying you to false revelations? How do you know that it's not you who has misunderstood scripture?
You're not omniscient. You can't claim absolute certainty in your knowledge anymore than anyone else. To make such a claim would be to ascribe Godhood to yourself.
Meh, seems like this will be all philosophical masturbation. I'm an atheist, but it drives me nuts that most of us seem to think morality is/must be subjective. I have no clue what subjective morality even means.
I've stolen an apple, the shop ovner think it would be a good punishment to cut off my hands. Would you agree with him?
I for one have no clue what objective morality means. As if ANY subject could preceive and interpret ANYTHING in other way that subjectively.
@@alena-qu9vj Objective morality would be based on facts. See how hard that was?
@@EllieBanks333 See how silly it was. Who would interpret the facts and who would decide they are "objective"? You?
“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities -his eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood by what has been made,so that people are without excuse.”
The word of God has stated you know He exists,but are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.
There is a day of judgement ,and these words explain your answer, “ if only you had revealed yourself I would have believed “,will be met with the condemnation it deserves.
BUT,there is “Good News”…
what?
If you're going to assert everyone knows God exists then why try to convince people he does
@@S.D.323 it is not me who asserts everyone knows God exists,it is declared in the word of God ( Holy Bible).
@@chrismachin2166 right so what is more likely that all 1 billion atheists are lying or that this one book is incorrect about something
@@chrismachin2166 how do you know it is the word of god?