Secular basis for morality?

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There are reasons for cultures to require its members to behave in specific ways. Different cultures have different requirements for its members to conform to and even if two different societies have approximately the same demands put upon them they can have different solutions for the maintenance of their society. These demands form the morality of each society and they may have some requirements in common but they may have some radically different from each other. If the requirements do not protect society's member from each other and from the environment in which the society exists the society will cease to exist.

The "is" is found in units, not in anything so abstract as ideals. Ideals refer back to oughts. Is's can only be found in desires and actions. Natural selection does not have anything to do with morality as morality is not a means to natural selection as noted by many of our moral behaviors. Even though they are connected and it is conceivable that morality was born of selection, they are still distinct. Sociopaths are only moral if we accept a social moral plane as a valid plane of analysis, even then I would reduce the moral plane to the cultural one.

Only the first part matters. Society has no inherent value, only subjective value.

Ok. But if these are gut instincts then what is their value? What makes them different from a gut instinct for chocolate? If morality is the same being as chocolate then why does society try to make it so distinct from chocolate? And why do atheists still play into the game of liking a chocolate a similar flavor as those with religion? There is nothing wrong with liking dark chocolate, white chocolate, or chocolate with coconut, but even those who claim to be free thinkers and analytical minds do not recognize that they speak of chocolate when they speak of societal objectives, goals, actions, etc? In other words, I can accept your statement but few people really try to intellectually accept what I see it as meaning.

They don't have to protect society's members for each other or the environment, they just have to maintain the stability and order of a society. Societies can live a long time with some groups oppressed and with some people who have the right to murder others. Really though, I am fine with people who think like you do, but too many people fail to recognize all of the elements of these thoughts and still moralize and function on a moral plane in intellectual arguments. They still ignore thoughts based upon their preconceived biases and fail to think through their opponent's frameworks. Like I said earlier, in absence of the universal oughtness, all of these things fall down to ethical egoism. Beings do what they want and that is their highest purpose and this removes thousands of criticisms that people can make of anything, any objective, any cruelty or kindness. Not only that, but even if society has these goals and morality is created by that, the duty of individuals to fulfill this morality does not exist so action still falls down to the individual actor.

There are limits on the oppression of the strong to the weak as the majority of the members of any society are weak and the sustenance of the strong depends upon the productive capability of the bulk of society. When the oppressive measures of the strong destroy the capability of the weaker member to sustain themselves the society will fail and both the strong and the weak will be destroyed. When both the strong and the weak benefit in a society both will do well.

I think you are missing my point here. I think an abstract moral code could be arrived at through a game theory like simulation of society. This is what I label the “is” part of morality. It has nothing to do with the behavior of a specific individual. In this sense there is an ideal “is”. In the end I think that the motives for following a moral system are ultimately driven by instinct. Even animals abide by certain behavioral codes without the need for external “oughts”.

I say the “ought” only exists in our head while the “is”, i.e. moral behavior, is what is actually real. You seem to say the exact opposite, yet I don’t quite understand your rationale. My rationale is the parsimony principle, i.e. Ockhams razor. An abstract “ought” morality that exists outside of our mind seems redundant when we're already biologically programmed to behave morally.


True. But it matters to humans because we have a subjective desire to live in a functional society. You dismiss subjective value, yet I say subjective value is the only kind of value that exists.

I think we are speaking past each other. I don't consider game theory and morality to be the same issue. I consider the "is" in this case to be optimum behavior for maximizing survival, which I see as different from morality as I consider morality to be "oughtness". There is not an ideal "is" though, there is an "is" that optimizes survivability, but the language threw me off.

The reason I say this ends up being definitions, Occam's razor has nothing to do with definitions. I can already apply Occam's razor to mine and I remove "ought" as nonexistent. An abstract "ought" morality is not redundant because the abstract "ought" is what I speak of when I say morality. The biological "ought" you speak of is merely what I would consider a want or desire, and it has nothing to do with any higher abstraction as morality would seem to indicate. Basically, to me, the biological "ought" belongs to the realm of social science, which is not a matter I really care to discuss and it is not the matter that this thread came to discuss as the thread was originally about the abstract "ought" relating to religion.

I dismiss subjective value because when I am looking at morality I am looking for higher objective order. I love subjective value in other topics, but this is the wrong topic. If I am assuming or looking for objective morality then I will look for objective value and compare everything to both and ignore anything that isn't either because it is unhelpful. Subjective value to me really has many distinctions but really is more of an economics question than a philosophy one.

AG:

If you are going to be picky about the definition then I won’t call the “is” morality. I’ll call it "maximized survival behavior".
Is the fact that this maximized survival behavior “is-ness” that we talk of largely corresponds to our notions of moral “oughtness” purely coincidental? Your opinion is that it just happens to be that way? That’s what I have trouble accepting, and my reason is related to Occam’s razor.

I see Occam’s razor (i.e. the parsimony principle, economy of premises) as the underlying principle behind scientific reasoning, and I tend to think about things scientifically. Occam’s razor isn’t failproof, it only gives the most likely explanation given our limited empirical knowledge, and our empirical knowledge is always limited. However, if we reject such principles we’re left completely adrift with no solid ground to argue anything. Without appealing to something like Occam’s razor it’s rather pointless to discuss any metaphysical claims. We might as well just admit that we are making contradictory assertions with nothing to base them on. We can’t even use logic because there are no premises to agree on.

If you want to divorce philosophy from science then we should just admit that everything is just assertions. There isn’t really anything to argue if we have no common premises to base things on. We have to agree on foundational premises before we can argue about anything rationally. Otherwise it’s like disagreeing over which flavor of ice cream tastes the best.

Last edited by marshall on 27 Dec 2007, 6:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I never said anything about coincident. Really, the distinction your making is one I don't really care much about because my concern was never with what we thought about morality but rather whether a transcendent one existed. I never said that I thought our notions of moral "oughtness" were morality, in fact, I think I would argue against that. Occam's razor has NOTHING to do with that dispute. This is a dispute on definitions and Occam's razor does not tell people how to define terms but rather what exists given the terms we have defined. Morality from my definition is a transcendent "oughtness" that may or may not have any bearing to how we act and may or may not even exist. The behavior we speak of is "oughtness" in our own minds perhaps but does not necessarily have anything to do with the transcendent "oughtness"


Marshall, I haven't rejected Occam's razor so much as I have defined the terms differently. Occam's razor does not say anything about how we define terms or what we look for based upon our questioning. Occam's razor merely tells us what premises should inform our search and what answers we should expect. Marshall, I think by this point we sort of agree but we define the terms very differently. You say that we should claim morality is based upon human behavior, but I say that whenever morality is invoked it is not invoked with an eye for humanity but rather higher principles and our arguments flow logically from our definitions. You can't get past the idea that Occam's razor forces you to put morality on human beings, I prefer to state that Occam's razor removes the idea of morality from our discussion. In terms of what we describe the same thing happens, we both agree that Occam's razor gets rid of transcendent "oughtness" but we are now merely disagreeing on the terms as I think that your term is not honest to what I consider to be the meaning of morality and you somehow got the notion that by claiming morality is transcendent I also say that human behavior is tied to a transcendent morality and claim that transcendent things must exist.

Everything is just assertions, however, I think we agree in terms of logic but not how we shape this logic.

Here, I claim that any search for morality is done with regards to X. X is a transcendent oughtness. I claim that human behavior, even moral behavior, belongs to Y. Y is human desire, which includes the moralistic pushings as well. We have no evidence for X but we want to build our Y around X and invoke X in many instances. In fact, I would imagine that very few people really recognize that their moral behavior is based upon Y so much as they think it is based upon X. X has no evidence for it though and may not exist and according to Occam's razor it doesn't. This ends up being a problem given how much we try to build our Y around the supposed X, even unconsciously.

Awesomely, you seem to be concieving morality as a kind of transcendant, Platonic-like set of ideals and oughts that exists outside societies ands the minds that make up such societies, which I think is nonsense. What we ought to do is only meaningful in terms of the needs, wants, and desires of individuals, and are bound by the biological/psychological constaints (the "is" factor) of human behavior.

Ok, I never said that morality existed. What we "ought" to do has absolutely nothing to do with the needs, wants, and desires of individuals though unless there is a transcendent "ought" to make it so, you merely posit this because you cannot handle a world without the transcendent "ought", which is why you still cling to objective morality(as noted in the philosophical profile test you posted). To do what you did is to invent an "ought" and thereby posit the objective standard that you just rejected. You really aren't escaping the dilemma. As I quoted in another thread:
Choice then implies "ought" no matter what choice it is. You may say that objective morality is nonsense, but you have not escaped from it which is the problem I stated with my last post. Even though objective morality does not exist, we always act as if it does. We really can't escape "oughtness".

This thread has given me a lot to think about.

I am not an atheist or an agnostic. I do feel that God exists, yet I feel that organized religion is too rigid, and limits self-expressionism and creativity.

Tim

Okay. Maybe I don't quite understand your position in its entirety. I'm not sure you completely understand mine either. My position is that transcendent morality doesn’t exist, at the very least not in the way people think it does.

One thing I should have clarified. It isn’t the existence of transcendent morality itself that goes against Occam’s razor. It’s the specific nature of the values that people commonly posit as transcendent morals that's problematic to me. If transcendent morality does exist we should not automatically assume that it will value human society. It could be that transcendent morality tells us we ought to eliminate the human race so that other species may thrive better. When I see humans posit a transcendent morality with values that happen to promote human society above all other species I feel their claims violate Occam’s razor. It seems much more likely that their moral beliefs are biologically determined to promote the passing on of their genetic makeup, not revelations of a transcendent morality.



I agree with everything here. I’ll admit that there is some cognitive dissonance in rejecting X. I will still instinctively behave as if there was an X even though I don’t believe in it on an intellectual level.

I never said we should automatically assume that. There is no proof either way that morality is or is not anthropocentric. Morality itself violates occam's razor though, whether or not it does value human society.


Ok, cool.

I wasn’t trying to counter anything you said. I was just clarifying my own position. I’m not quite sure what your position is though.

I feel that an argument against the existence of any transcendent morality using Occam’s razor is weaker than an argument against specific attributes of this morality. That’s why I argued against the existence of anthropocentric morality rather than against morality as a whole.

I guess you’re right that morality itself violates Occam’s razor, but I don’t feel Occam’s razor is that useful as a binary determiner of truth. When Occam’s razor is applied it tells us how likely a claim is to be true. The more ad hoc attributes that get assigned to a transcendent entity the more unlikely it becomes with respect to Occam’s razor. I feel the mere existence of a transcendent morality is a bit more likely than the existence of transcendent morality with anthropocentric properties.

The trouble I have with transcendent entities in general is this. When people attribute more things to the entity it increasingly butts up against Occam’s razor, yet when people attribute less things it increasingly becomes irrelevant. This is the problem I have with theism as well.

Again, I’m not really arguing against you, but merely clarifying my position.

Occam's razor doesn't seem applicable to the problem of morality to me at all. Since morality is a construct, how can one have a simpler explanation for it? There's nothing to explain, only something to build.