Interesting game.

It seems there's a rule 4, though:

4) Arbitrary morals exist that may or may not be right. Both parties believe the judge prefers these choices, whether the choice is right or not.

And if the payoff for "cheating" is not greater than that for following the agreed moral rational players wouldn't favour "cheating" regardless.

So, what is your reason for setting the payoff so high? How does that choice relate to atheism and morality?

It's inferior in OrdinaryClay's eyes because he can't see a moral system working without a fear motive guiding it.

Methinks he's jealous.

You said:

Just because the judge can punish cheating and they know about every instance of cheating that doesn't mean that they will punish ever instance of cheating, so it's still within the player's self-interest to cheat. It's actually in their interest to cheat much more because most of the cheating doesn't result in any benefit so a greater amount of cheating is require to get the same amount of payoff that the players received from cheating before the omniscient judge started deducting points gained from cheating.

Depending on how often you could get the payoff from cheating and how much higher the payoff from cheating is it may be advantageous to do nothing but cheat. As long as you could determine that cheating ultimately resulted in greater gain. So, no your omniscient judge causes more cheating.

 

This is a good observation. Cheating by definition involves greater payoff, or at least the perception of greater payoff. Can you think of any perfect cheating that does not provide a payoff greater then not cheating.
 

Umm... did you have a premise, then to add in place of the first three question marks?  Can you elaborate on what it is you believe necessarily follows from no belief in god?

As a secondary question, what is a meme such that something can be elevated to its level?

What exactly is your point? That theism favors a strawman version of morality?

The point of my quote you include here is that the poster's argument actually bolsters mine.

A strawman is a side argument used for misdirection purposes when arguing against a primary argument. My argument is the primary argument so no I'm not building strawman.

To answer what I think you are asking here and in the previous post, I'm reducing a moral choice to a bare abstraction for analysis. This has value and is ligitmate. I'm not saying more complex moral structures don't exist. These more complex systems can be, and are, debated. The results of this debate still has validity and implications, though.
 

I think you hit the nail on the head here. It is important that the players believe the judges exists. It is important that people believe God exists for us to have the moral order we have today. This does not necessitate anything about God be true. But I think it could be strongly argued that we have the morality we have today because people believe a God exists, not the other way around. Now, the atheists want us to "graduate" into beliefs that are more logical and defendable.

 

 

Let us insert your premise:

• A person has no belief in god.
• That person exhibits behaviour endemic to that lack of belief.
• Therefore ...? (The person is atheist?  Lovely tautology.)

First, what behaviour must an atheist exhibit except for a lack of belief?  Perhaps a lack of that behaviour which a religious person may or may not exhibit?  The point is, there is nothing that can be logically derived from atheism except itself.

What if the difference in the amount of cheating was negligible in terms of effort. You know what I mean? What if cheating one time required the same effort as cheating a thousand times. Everyone who wanted to cheat would still cheat as much as they wanted whether a judge was deducting points or not.

My emphasis added in bold text.

So there isn't any ultimate advantage to be gained by cheating and both players know this.  Doesn't that mean that there really isn't any such thing as a moral choice in your scenario, seeing as there's no temptation to misbehave?  You're basically offering the players vanilla ice cream or arsenic; picking arsenic doesn't make you a bad person, it makes you a crazy person.  I guess this works if you have a very Calvinistic understanding of morality, and that's all well and good, but I don't live in 16th century Geneva--I have to make choices for myself everyday, and there are real temptations to do the wrong thing.

Furthermore, they get to agree to these rules?  You have know that's bullshit.  In any theistic scenario, you exist at God's (or the gods') pleasure, not because you willed yourself into being.  You accept the existing moral rubric because it's the only game in town, not because accepting it makes you moral.

I'm aware of what atheists want. I'm also aware of what logical and defendable are. I'm also a Christian.

good - wating for you to start logically defending...

Well obviously if a player cannot gain from cheating then there's no point in cheating. I think that pretty much goes without saying. But a situation where there is no enforcement of the rules doesn't necessarily always lead to more cheating than a situation where there is some enforcement of the rules. It depends. And you probably shouldn't use the word irregardless unless you're doing it as a joke.

That is one way to look at it. I don't look at it that way. A free gift should be a free gift. But we see analogies on earth. If my boss is gracious enough to give someone else a raise they don't deserve, I would be upset. It happens all the time. This goes to the parable of the worker who only worked an hour and got the whole days pay. Is it really any business of mine, who agreed to work for the whole day for a certain wage."

And, technically although unquestioning obedience is useful at times, I don't think God requires that, especially since its not possible. Its impossible to not break at least one the 10 commandments daily. I think there are tons of grace God gives us to repent. Thousands of times over our lifetime. Its not totally unfair.

I think God still loves the people who choose hell and makes it the "best" place possible, whatever than means.

That's the "God will forgive me so I can do what I want" Christianity that I know so well. 

1. Commit sin

2. Get forgiveness and be safe until you want to sin again

3. goto 1

Lather, rinse, repeat. Why bother? It reads more like paranoia than freedom.

In a vacuum, perhaps.

 

You don't actually address the argument there, just assert it's false.
 

Straw man, I made no such claim.
 

It's based on experience working with criminals, and on studies done by others. What I posit is that a belief in a supernatural judge who is all forgiving means they feel remorse, feel forgiven, and repeat the behavior.

 

If you have any reason to suggest this correlation is meaningless, I'd love to hear it.

Making a moral choice is not necessarily doing the right thing. I do hate it when people talk through their arses and hope to be taken seriously.

 

Killing someone is a moral choice. Stealing is a moral choice. As long as there is a moral standard applied to the choice then the choice cannot avoid being a moral one.

 

Rule Number One: If attempting through English to set up a hypothesis designed to generate debate it is better to learn fucking English first.

 

But I digress ...

 

So here's an improved version of the game (let's call it Immorality, and let's base it on something a bit more real than OrdinaryClay's impossibly naive stupidity):

 

1. Each player agrees that there is a moral choice to be made and that they can choose one of two strategies - make a choice deemed morally good (do the right thing) or one which is morally bad (do the wrong thing, such as cheat). - Oh look, a standard of morality has been established already!

 

2. Both players agree that the immediate payoff is greater for being morally bad and choosing that strategy, though both players instinctively know that morally bad is considered morally bad for a reason, and that a strategy which might appear out of self-interest to be logical is probably anything but, if they have the time, information and intelligence to work it out. (At this point one adopts the safe attitude and decides it's better to be good while the other takes a chance on being bad)

 

3. Both players are then told that there is a third party - an omniscient judge who will reduce the payoff for doing the morally bad thing to zero.

 

4. Both players must believe that the judge exists, which immediately begs the question. How has the definition of morality changed one iota since his introduction? After all, both players had already sussed out what was morally good and bad.

 

In this game the player who would have behaved morally bad might change his mind to avoid a nil payoff, but if he has half a brain would at least demand to know by what authority this judge was appointed and that the judge should at least have the courtesy of explaining in person what the fuck gave him the right to get involved. The player who would have behaved morally good would be quite justified in wondering much the same thing, and what right had the judge in any case to threaten him into behaving in a way he had already decided to adopt anyway?

 

So, thanks to the introduction of the so-called "judge" we now have a situation where two players, who already had an understanding of morality, now have an understanding of morality and either a) a reasonable objection to unwarranted interference from a supposedly omniscient third party or b) two players with a reasonable demand that the judge reveal himself and explain what gave him the right to intervene or - failing such an action on the judge's part - c) a reasonable certainty that they've been fooled.

 

In short, the game doesn't need a judge - least of all one which is a delusion at best.

If the judge is omniscient and fair, surely that means that both players believe the disapproved strategy actually has zero payoff, so that makes it a different game. It turns any decision to cheat into a simple case of breaking the rules of the game. 

Such a system is not a 'moral' one , it is a legalistic one, where an authority sets the rules, and the punishments for breaking them.

It debases the concept of 'good' to just a matter of obedience to an arbitrary set of rules.

A choice to do 'the right thing' only makes sense as a personal 'moral' decision if it is made without coercion or threat.

Commandment style rules are not morality, they are simply laws. They also cannot be written to cover all possible situations, especially where there are conflicting interests.

Rules such as the 'Golden Rule' are more in accord with morality, providing guidelines for decision making in the real world where the situations and the ultimate effects of our decisions are often far from clear-cut.

We typically do not have enough knowledge or experience to rationally assess what actions really are in our ultimate self-interest, even if were able to overcome emotional issues sufficiently to reason our way thru a situation. Even if we knew all the factors, the ultimate effects are not necessarily predictable in the complexity of the real world.

The question being addressed by the OP seems to be: Does belief in an omniscient judge make people more likely to follow the rules associated with that judge? Possibly. Depends on things like the nature of the rules, and how easy it is to apply them to the real world situations people encounter, especially if strong emotions are involved. Such complications make any conclusions from such a simplistic scenario as in the OP somewhat academic.

Observations of actual behavior in different societies support the idea that there is no clear benefit to society from widespread belief in an omniscient enforcer.

 

 

A player that cheats by gaining knowledge not known to the other players receives the "winning" payoff with less cost to the cheating player. This is a net gain greater then the player who did not cheat. So the payoff is greater by cheating. The less tangible payoff such as self satisfaction can be gained by a cheating player in the form of self admiration for being a good cheater and peer admiration for beating the game(assuming silent cheating).
 

Two person non-zero sum games have been understood for awhile now. The simple game I propose is particularly easy to understand. I don't understand why you would argue that reasoning based on such is indefensible.

 

What is radical love?

If you agree that some enforcement of the rules leads to some cheating then it follows that no enforcement would lead to more cheating. If a person is willing to take a risk for the gain of cheating (which shows they want the gain) then they would want the certain gain to be had when no enforcement is had.

 

Well, actually, the 'monster red letters' are a reaction to Christian beliefs, I believe.  You haven't addressed the argument though.  What I'm trying to exemplify is that nothing is logically entailed of being atheist other than being atheist.

For example:

• A person lacks a belief in god.
• (something must go here)
• therefore, atheists are immoral.

Get it yet?  In order to come to some conclusion you need two premises.  That's some pretty basic logic.  Without two premises you cannot have a conclusion.  That atheists may act in a certain way because of being atheists is simply entailed by atheism.  Pointing out in a vague and extremely generalized way that my behaviour toward Christians stems from my non-belief is nothing more than pointing out that since I hold to x, x should have some effect on my behaviour toward y.  Problematic there is that it is vague and extremely generalized.  There is no specific way, entailed from my atheism, in which I should behave toward any given Christian.  If atheism is only a lack of belief in god(s), then there is nothing that can be derived from it, except tautologically.

Guys, I think we've veered off the path of game theory significantly enough for this to be a completely convoluted argument. At first, the problem was a rigged game, that was poorly explained. Now, we're talking about cheating as if it's not playing by the rules. Different things. In game theory, you have choices. If one of them is "to cheat", that's just a different choice with a different payoff.

Are there no economists or mathematicians on here to back me up? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.