Most important truth

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The other part of this - it has yet to be shown that anything other than sheer physics governs the world at a moral level. Power is amoral, it even tends to drift to the opposite pole because a large part of power is being willing to do what someone else isn't, it's part of how ruthless people, ruthless corporations, etc. tend to always outcompete ethical ones or ethical people. The really bad news about that - if this is the way power always behaves and power always wins then it means that the technologies we're creating will almost assuredly guarantee either our extinction as a species or at a minimum a hard reset where most people die and we're back within a few generations to something approximating neolithic living.

I'd like to address this at length, and would appreciate when people read my post here they take the entire thing in context.

All logic stems from axioms. In human systems, mathematics is often considered the purest form of logic. Yet there are parts of math, that cannot be proven. They can not be logically concluded. They are stated as basic truth, from which all other conclusions are derived.

An atheistic morality system does not need to conclude that anything is wrong, it just needs to state that some things are wrong. My personal morality axioms would go something along the lines of:

1. Life is good, Death is bad
2. Happiness and joy are good, pain and suffering are bad
3. Freedom is good, constraint is bad
4. Truth is good, untruth is bad

I can't conclude these statements to be correct, I just believe them. For the morality to flow I need one more thing a statement on good and bad.

Principle of Good and Bad: Goodness should be maximized, Badness should be minimized.

Now, these principles can come into conflict. For example the concept of prison for murderers. I've stated constraint is bad, and that life is good. I can justify prison for murderers on two different groups of logical thought. First I can justify constraint on murderers as punishment for their badness of causing death. Second I can constraint on murderers as a meands of preventing their badness of death. Both of these are judgment calls. I presume that the bad of constraining murderers is outweighed by the good of upholding the morality system. I judge that the decision to imprison murderers will maximize goodness and minimize badness even though it requires an act of badness.

Most of morality is judgement calls. Different people can come to different conclusions operating from the same principles. An extreme pacifist would argue war is never justified. Most people would agree that defending yourself from harm is justified and thus defensive wars are valid. A few can justify offensive wars based on various arguments or differing first principles. I find it very easy to condemn, Hitler, Stalin, Mao et. al. as they provide a lot of badness on my morality scale and very little counterbalancing goodness. I can comfortably describe all 3 of them as evil.

Now as I've alluded to throughout this discussion of my atheistic morality, different people have different moralities. Not everyone has the same first principles as me. I doubt anyone would come to all the same finite morality judgments as me once you consider the vast array of human behavior. This all leads into the last hard truth of morality.

Might makes Right

This does not mean the actions of the mighty are intrinsically good. It instead means the mighty have the ability to decide what is right, because whereas the mighty can affect their morality on the weak, the weak are powerless to affect their morality on the mighty. At the Nuremberg trials the might of the allied forces was able to enforce the morality of the allies on the Nazis. Had the Nazis prevailed in the war, their twisted morality would have continued.

This brings us back to religious versus atheistic systems. In religious systems the mighty is a supernatural being or god. In Christianity the "correct" morality is the morality of God. Most atheists I know take a humanist view. The mighty is human society as a whole. The "correct" morality is that of human society as a whole. The biggest difference I can see between the two is that human society is sometimes persuadable to change its conclusions, whereas God is not.

Those do actually run into some trouble:

1) It's tough to say death is necessarily good beyond terminal illness, states where the pain is excruciating, one could say it's only good in that case based on extenuating circumstances - fair. There's also that which we really don't know - ie. does death serve more of a purpose, aside from preventing exponential population and collapse or massive amounts of cancer from telomeres that can run for ever.

2) and 3) seem tightly related, and what I mean is that suffering tends to come from constraint, it can also come from too little constraint where there's no optimal path to chose and no way to make what seem to be meaningful decisions. There's also the kind of constraint that gives someone remarkable skills, such as being a concern pianist. Constraint and discipline are tightly correlated as well as discipline to excellence.

4) Truth is generally good, unless life has someone in such a vice grip that actually telling them the truth - like handing them Straw Dogs by John Gray or some work of Russian existentialism, would either cause their deterioration and collapse or possibly their overdose or suicide. We get put in truly grueling conditions, quite often. To use what I think to be a useful analogy here - think of your hedonic balance as a profit/loss number for a company where if it's in the black life is better than it is bad and if it's in the red life is worse than it is good. Sometimes there's enough expense that one can't truthfully bring in enough revenue, and that's where fantasy, escapism, and even white lies tend to come in. Ideally one should have the goal of doing whatever they can to solve the excess expenditure problem in order to be back in the right with truth but - it's not always a choice. Given that scenario - our first and ultimate allegiance is to survival, not truth.

The point of my hastily constructed codification of a moral system is show that for logical conclusions on morality you need fundamental values to start from.

As presented I fundamentally value life, happiness, freedom, and truth. These values come into conflict all the time and indeed even one value can come into conflict with itself. I think if you think about it every one of your problematic scenarios is a product of tension between competing values and not valuing their opposites.

To take your example of painful terminal illness. Justifying assisted suicide isn't valuing death over life. Its a calculation that removing months of pain is worth the cost of removing months of life. Granted assisted suicide is controversial and many people would argue that calculation is flawed.

Well, here's hoping we don't sidetrack the thread but I think freedom was the clearest case where it's possible to have too little freedom and it's also possible to have too much for orientation to be possible. I don't think many things are unabated goods without context and restraints of some type.

The problem is that even if Christians believe in the "objective morality" of God, they don't all agree on what that is. Declaring your own version of morality to be the one, true objective version does not make it so.

Here's an example of a "moral argument" for God from the Christian propaganda film "God's Not Dead." The Christian student hero claims that his atheist professor is being hypocritical and "acting like a Christian" by telling the students they can't cheat on their test. Here's the thing, though. There are secular reasons that cheating could be considered immoral -- i.e., it's not fair to the students who actually did the work -- but even putting morality aside, there's a practical, secular reason why cheating isn't allowed. The point of the test is to see if the students learned the material. If cheating were allowed, there'd be no point in giving the test. Furthermore, the student asks why should he avoid cheating on the test, which will "benefit" him, without a God to judge him for it. However, he could potentially "benefit" from actually learning the material in the class and if he did so, cheating would be pointless. No objective moral judge is required to explain this.



In my view, the most horrifying actions are often taken by those who believe their morality to be unquestionable, such as dictators and religious extremists.

Christianity had nothing to do with the notion of lying or cheating being wrong.
That was from the Asereth Ha Devarim or the Ten Commandments.

Christianity was the notion that your sins were so great only the blood of Jesus could atone them.But had nothing to do with morality or ethics,that was Jewish and only Jewish.

So he should have told the professor he was acting "like a Jewish person?" I would have loved to see the Christian target audience's reaction to that .

From my perspective, I don't think any one religion or culture can hold a copyright on a basic concept like "don't lie and cheat," especially when there are also secular reasons to avoid doing those things. Even if their religious text really was first to introduce the idea, which I think is up for debate.

Yea