Morality is the desire to force other people to act in ways beneficial to the individual or group preaching a behavior standard. This done by means of fear, guilt and deception.

Any attempt to define morality another way is an example of the imposition of morality.

Points for trying to shut down any counter-argument

As I have done before, EXC, I see you have a strong point but I would add clarification to it.

What you are speaking of is probably not morality and I will show you why.

I would establish morality as a basis thus, for an example:

First lets take the most obvious road with- killing- and assume that it is universally true that killing is good.

so (A). Killing is good (universal statement)

(B) Good, by definition, is desirable.

(C) Killing entails death.

(D) (A)&(C) Death is Good

(E) (C)&(D) Death is desirable.

(F) since (A) is universal (E) is universal and death is desirable to me. {FALSE}
 

By contradiction I have proved that killing is not good. This is not by any means a watertight proof that killing is wrong, or should not be done. We can slip out of this logic either via removing the universality condition from (A) and thus negating (F) as a non sequitur or via declaring (F) true.  But it is watertight in terms of morality. Universally, if your life is valuable to you, killing is immoral - ie Not Good. The referent for good is your own opinion on the value of your own life, and because it's a universal statement and you are in the universe, what goes for you, goes universally - Killing is immoral QED.

Now, because this only establishes under universal conditions that are equal to your conditions that killing is not good, some people might consider this argument to be weak, or insufficient.  But Morality is not defined by its strength or sufficiency, so this is morality, regardless of what you expect or may have hoped morality could be. Nothing more needs to be established to ascertain morality here; the argument includes a referential standard of good and it applies universally. To obtain any more than this is to establish law, not morality. What you are referring to I think, is the establishment of law by adding extraneous matters to the logical basis of morality. Thus it's probably law you disagree with, rather than morality. And we use the same argument to establish why you find law to have immoral consequences:

(I) Law is Good

(II) Law is therefore desirable.

(III) Law entails the restriction of one's will by outside agency.

(IV) (III)&(I) Restriction of one's will by outside agency is Good.

(V) (IV)&(II) Restriction of one's will by outside agency is desirable.

(VI) (I)&(V) Restriction of one's will by outside agency is desirable to me. {True/False}

Conclusion - to whatever extent VI is true for you, that your agency restricted by another is desirable, law is good and therefore moral to you.

Compare this with:

(a) Morality is Universally Good

(b) as in previous versions of the argument.

(c) Morality entails Good.

(d) c&a

(e) d&b

(f) a&f Good is desirable {definition of Good} ; ..... to me

Conclusion- morality is tautological, and entails no referent other than one's own self. Morality cannot be immoral.

But killing can be immoral, and stealing can be immoral and all this can come from universal logic, built on this tautology it does not have to come from God. There are two ends holding up the tautology of morality - Universality and Desire - and they are both empirical.

Of course we've all seen this argument before, it's the Jesus commandment - do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  When expressed logically the jesus commandment looks to me like simple straightforward truth, I don't see any supernatural or causeless influence in it, myself, and I don't know where the apologetics who claims morality comes from God get that from.  To me, that idea just stands as undeniable evidence of the purely deliberate post hoc rationalisation which is the absolute nature of apologetics.

This all ties in quite well with the stuff I'm reading about at the moment regarding morality that has a basis in evolutionary natural/sexual selection, would you agree?  If so, have you ever come across any serious unknowns or flaws in it?  It seems pretty solid to me so far.  The most interesting contention I've come across was the question as to why we don't feel the same protective/emotional bonds to every sperm that doesn't make it to the egg, or that gets thrown away in the trash in the middle of a tissue, or every egg that is 'wasted' when a woman has her period.  I think this might have been brough up by Alister McGrath in "The Dawkins Delusion" but I can't remember for sure where I read it.  To me, without looking up an expert response to this, I would think there are a couple of reasons, the first being we can't easily detect these cells with the naked eye and secondly they don't represent the same investment in resources that an actual baby that has been born does.

I agree, I think I would say it's a "reason" not an "excuse"

I'm not sure I follow this bit.  It looks like you are saying we define a certain act as good or bad based on the positive or negative social rewards or penalties we impose on the act.  However, that would seem to be indicating that the good and bad acts are good or bad only arbitrarily if we don't already know they are good or bad before we have a system that imposes those rewards or penalties.  I don't think this was what you were trying to communicate, was it?  The basis for an act being considered good or bad must surely come before the socially imposed consequences.  This is where I think evolution comes to the party, and which I think agrees with your first paragraph that I quoted.  We have a general feeling about morality which is similar, but not entirely identical to most people all around the world.  Most civilisations come up with many of the same laws, like "don't kill your own" and things like that have pretty obvious evolutionary roots.  The differences in morality I think come from being in environments that we didn't evolve in, i.e. modern cities and living in modern cultures with high population densities, etc.  It is these factors and the divisions in morality that I think are some of the major reasons for major conflicts between different populations of people.

I see religion as one of these major obstacles, seemingly lapidary boundaries between people, to a global culture that would allow us to see everybody as "one of our own" and would cut down on out-group hostility. 

 

Love the circular reasoning, it's good because it's good   "Because God said so" is such an unfulfilling non-event answer.  I think when a theist next gives me that I'll have to respond with "But why do you think God said that?" I guess the answer will either be "God works in mysterious ways" or the reason for it being good will have to rely on something back in the material universe.

 

 

Agreed

Well, it's tongue in cheek. The whole concept of morality is kind of bullshit. Humans always act in ways that they believe will maximize our pleasure and survival, just like any other animal. But, we are social animals so we seek cooperation and affirmation of others. In a healthy functioning societies and individuals, you would have a natural balance between individualism and socialization. "Do unto others" would be the rule.

 But just as in dogs, some members seek to be top dog. Other members seek to get something for nothing. To me religion and politics are tools for the top dog and something for nothing crowd to get what they want. They dupe the naive with the notion of morality causing God to be pleased, giving one heaven instead of hell. Politician do the same thing just with promises they can't fulfill in this world. But you see the pastors and politicians pushing a morality are usually the worst at following this standard.

So the Theist concept of morality is be good to please God and get him to help you out and get heaven not hell. But this is just a self seeking goal, just as bad as any criminal. They'll rob a bank to get a big payoff(heaven), or not rob a band to avoid jail(Hell). So this is BS. Religion tells people to not be selfish so they can get a selfish reward later.

Many Atheists will say be good for goodness sake. Man can be moral just because it's the right thing to do. This is BS too. People need a carrot or a stick to behave in certain way.

So called immoral behaviors are really a problem of socialization. Criminals have psychopathic disorders. They lack empathy for others because they derive no pleasure or affirmation from being empathetic. They often derive pleasure from the misery of others. They may have a paranoia such that they believe they must commit a criminal act to survive. So is this a moral failing of criminals? They are acting with the same motivations(pleasure and survival) as anyone else. No, it's a problem of socialization. Never being taught and never being made to learn how to thrive in society without resorting to behaviors destructive to others.

So in summary, the concepts of moral and immoral behavoirs are BS. They should be replaced with terms like proper socialization and dysfunctional socialization. This is the way to look at human behaviors scientifically and rationally. Morality like religion is an archaic concept belonging to a pre-scientific era.

Perhaps here's a good way of putting it:
Morality might force you to over-come immediate desires, i.e. immediate passing self interest, but actually serves your interest in the long run as it is more in your interest to be a positive part of your community rather than to satisfy passing impulses.
So morality would be selfless as in going against the desires at the forefront of your mind in favour of looking after community as a whole, but that actually serves your interest in the long run.

Do you agree with Hamby now?

If I may be so bold, something I'd like to add here:

Take note of the amount of abstraction and complexity required for a person to solve even this one relatively simple moral problem for themselves. We have to account for not only the immediate possible consequences of the action (What if I lose the brawl, and am killed myself? What if the bar patrons start co-operating to eliminate me as a group before I can whittle down their numbers? What if someone escalates to a better weapon than my beer bottle? Etc...) but also weigh the stakes based on the social dynamic we're embedded in (What will this do to my bank account? What will this do to my marriage? What will this do to my physical sex appeal? What will this do to the new clothes I just invested in? What will this do to the economy? Etc...). Humans are the only species on Earth with the capacity for such abstraction of cause and effect - which is why we're holding the moral compass, and other animals are not. A cat who kills someone isn't 'bad', and not simply because God says animals are exempt: the cat had no capacity for abstracting how it's actions might impact the world. It simply acted based on notions of immediate, instinctual, cause and effect. Inanimate objects, like bullets or falling debris, are similarly exempt, based on their lack of mental capacity.

I just wanted to mention this before a theist decides to jump in and demonstrate how 'clever' they are by claiming that this doesn't differentiate human morals from other animal morals.

What do you mean 'just'?
Personally, I think that some guilt and fear is necessary.
I mean, if you were to hurt someone then you should feel guilty right?
But you're right that the fundies go over-board with it and put guilt and fear where it just shouldn't be.

I actually disagree with this.
Morality is like everything else - we never had a perfect understanding that was polluted, it's more that over the ages people have come up with different ideas on how to make sense of it all. Although I agree that many of the current religious views of morality have too much superstitious baggage attached.

 

As a value judgment, yes - people kill one another far too often.

However, if you look at it from a more objective viewpoint:

In my city in 2003 there were 9 homicides. The population at the time was 152,000. Given the number of possible interactions among that many people over the course of one year, 9 homicides and murders constitutes "rare". So, under fairly typical conditions Hamby is correct, it just doesn't happen with much frequency.

In fact, expanding to include anything the FBI would consider "violent crime" for 2003, there was only an 0.59% chance of being a victim of violence over the span of that year.

 

Just to reinforce this point, 9 homicides with a population of 152,000 is approximately 6 homicides per 100,000 people. Before anyone decides that this low crime rate is anomalous or somehow due to the relatively small size of the city, New York City's murder rate for 2006 was 7.3 per 100,000 people (and in 2007, 6.05 per 100,000 people), and total violent crime rate .64%, not appreciably higher, despite a population of almost 8.2 million.

494 murders in all of 2007, among over 8,000,000 people works out to less than 0.00000016875 ( (494/365) / 8,000,000) murders per person, per day. I'd call that reasonably 'rare' in situations where the normal social contract is in operation.

Yes.  This is just a philosophical explanation of the sociobiological reality.

Unknowns, yes.  Flaws, no. 

The unknowns are kind of difficult for me to explain because they get into straight up neurology, which is not my strong suit by any means.  Basically, I haven't seen any behavioral or psychological flaws in this explanation, but there are gaps in the understanding of how we got from point A to point B, and how/why our brain processes certain moral ideas.

I find this to be an interesting contention only insofar as it's a hidden attempt to get to "Abortion is Wrong!  GOD SAYS SO!!!!"

Yes.  Each individual is a kind of superorganism.  We are a conglomerate of trillions of individual cells, each performing their own function.  In the same way, a society is a superorganism, with each individual person performing its own function.  The analogy only extends so far, but we have thoroughly documented superorganism behaviors that transcend individual behaviors.  Of course, war is the easiest example.  Males become expendable by the thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, for the larger goal of conquering this territory or eliminating this threat or capturing access to this resource.  While we mourn individual losses, and we make a very big deal about looking very sad on the News Reports, war is still a human universal.  Clearly, the larger goal is more important than the individual losses.

In a similar way, the larger goal of getting one sperm into an egg makes the expenditure of a few million cells (remember, we have trillions!) insignificant.  A woman has a few hundred thousand eggs (if memory serves) but can only get pregnant six or seven times in an average lifetime.  Those eggs are already sentenced to death.   The only question is which six or seven will live.

Consider also that a male who inseminates a female with exactly one sperm has a chance of approximately 0% to be a father.  The huge numbers are necessary not only to ensure insemination, but also to present a good enough army in case there are competing sperm already moving towards the egg.

Nah.  You've got it ass-backwards.  Moral instincts developed before society.  They must have, or we wouldn't have society.  The language of morality - right, wrong, etc -- is simply the language that explains the behaviors we already do.  In the same way that logic is not something that people made up, but rather a codification of the way we think, morality is not a human invention.  It's a language game (Props, Strafio!) we use to describe the way we already behave.

Yes, and the socially imposed consequences are based on the way we already behave.  It gets trickier the more abstract the moral prescription becomes, which is why everybody agrees that murder (as opposed to justified killing) is wrong, but we can have bloody wars over things like whether the killing of a slave ever constitutes murder.  Oh, the irony.

Precisely.

It truly pains me to say this, but there will never (in this species) be a global tribe.  One of our strongest instincts is to form the strongest societies as insulators between "us" and "them."

 

I don't think we have evolved with a sense that things like murder and stealing is wrong. We've evolved with a sense of fairness. This sense of things being a contract a trade. So, I don't have an impulse to murder someone unless they break the social contract not to threaten or harm someone. Then my impulse is to murder and harm others. It's a sense that they are being unfair and are breaking a social contract, so I am not bound by any moral code because they broke the contract.

So I don't have a moral sense that a particular action is right or wrong. The action must be judged in the context of whether all the parties are being fair in their fulfilment of their social duty. I only have a sense that people should be fair in reciprocating each other with equal treatment.

The reason society hold together is that we have contracts, people ususlly follow the contracts and people that break contracts are punished. Nothing to do with people having a moral code they follow because of guilt and fear.

 

*Strightens tie. Gets smug asshole smile*

Why, thank-you.

Just for giggles, though, let's explore this a tad further. Instead of dealing with our abstraction of the world, let's deal with an absolute ruling: 'Thou Shalt Not Kill'.

A theist is likely to argue that this commandment is easily the equivalent to an atheistic moral deduction, like in the previous example (actually, most are likely to argue that it is completely superior, as a law laid down by our almighty creator). Afterall, anyone in a bar following the commandment is also not going to bludgeon anyone to death with a beer bottle.

This is misleading. 'Thou Shalt Not Kill', unlike a reasonable moral conclusion, comes before the problem is even examined. I'm going to use a mathematical analogy here:

When solving a math problem, you must always look at your variables before you can accurately solve it. It is accurate to assert that 2 + 2 = 4. It is not accurate to assert that 4 = 2 + 2. Yes, 4 may equal 2 + 2, but 4 may also equal 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, 3 + 1, 8 - 4, 6 - 2, etc. In otherwords, 2 + 2 is not the only equation you can use to reach the conclusion of 4.

If it's 'Thou Shalt Not Kill', and that's the end of the discussion, we have some very serious problems. What about people who have killed others by accident? What about people who have killed others in self-defense? What about people who have killed others by virtue of a consenting contract ('We're enemies at war', 'We're sword dueling to the death', 'I'm undergoing a suffersome demise and wish to be euthanized', etc)? The absolute moral law does not make any logical exceptions here - God said 'Thou Shalt Not Kill', that's that, and killing another human being is wrong no matter what.

In otherwords, fuck the moral problem. For all intents and purposes, it may as well not even be there, and certainly there is no point in exploring it. 4 can only be represented by adding 2 and 2 together. If you do it any other way, you're wrong.

This is merely the tip of the iceberg, as well as a layman's take on a very complex matter, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt. I encourage you to take a very sincere look at that list of commandments you hold dear, however, and consider how much explanation you've been given as to why these rules are absolutes.

This is so vague.  What do you mean by 'universally desirable' and 'desirable' and 'absolute' and 'pertains universally'?

What do you say to the proposition that a lone human cannot act morally or immorally?  (By lone, I mean there is no chance that any action of his will have any effect on another human.)

Who is 'everyone'?

Do you understand what I was saying about superorganisms and counterintuitive behaviors?

I'm afraid you might be falling into the same trap that Susac did about prostitution. 

I hope you're smart enough not to make the argument that one must be in a certain position to make objective evaluations of it.

I'm pretty sure you're making the same mistake.  "What everyone wants" is not equal to morality.

I'm not going to address the rest of this, because I'm having flashbacks to your opinions of true spiritual seekers, and it's making me twitch.