We need evidence that atheists don't have the same sort of "remorse healing" mechanism as Christians sans God.
 

How did you get this from any of my words?
 

I think you're right.

So, instead of a God being the judge, it could be "other people," or "culture," or "the law." It doesn't matter as long as it has a significant effect on the behavior of the two players.  

Edit: Actually, hahaha, the biggest variable would be our moral intuition, wouldn't it? Jeez, look how much stuff the OP left out.  

Hey - we're all coming round to the game I suggested.

Great! I'll set up the board. Ok - can anyone suggest a scruple we can start with before any moral standards apply?

Wait a moment ...

Yeah, it's pretty typical behavior of people who prioritize the fantasy of an afterlife instead of the reality of the one life they actually have.

That's easy enough. Humans can forgive other humans but some form of restitution is usualy required.

God's forgiveness doesn't require such. I've heard stories of God impressing people to do so but nothing that rendered the forgiveness invalid if it wasn't done.

Also, you've never heard of the grieving process (depending on the severity of the infraction)?

Harm to others is intrinsically unpleasant because the conventional definition of "harm" is bound up with that which is morally evil.  Therefore, your statement is essentially a tautology.  You would still have the daunting task of justifying to me what you believe falls under the category of "harm."  

If by "harm," you merely refer to the administration of physical or mental pain (or the physical processes associated with such) on another being, you still have not posited any sort of functional model for building a sound values system, since pain could be construed as a good thing in certain situations, such as those situations where it is necessary to make a certain medical diagnosis.

Justification, in this instance, has nothing to do with referencing any sort of document.  If you were to adopt any sort of fair minded view of the theist position, you would realize that the principles are in the document because they are justified, not vice versa.  But I had not even referenced any sort of document in my post, so you are creating a straw man.

Justification is not something that is measurable in degrees.  A statement is either true or it is false.  In order for it to be true, you must prove that it is true.  If you have not proven it to be true, then you have not justified your position.  For you to say, "I think it's debatable which method of arriving at justification is superior: determining the level of social unpleasantness, or consulting the manual" suggests that both of our mutually exclusive principles are justified but that because your "means" of justification is superior to mine that the truth value of your statement is more justified than mine, which is unintelligible.

What I've said was that "Do no harm" was as functionally useless as "do not be immoral." I've even explicitly stated that atheists can be good.  The issue, which you've yet to resolve, is the degree to which an atheist can offer an objective rational basis for why they are being good.  At best, atheists have a set of principles which can be true under certain arbitrary preconditions, which means that the values system itself is arbitrary.  Or even worse, morality gets reduced from the highest good to a means to an end, which itself is based on the potentially misguided "needs" of finite beings.  

The notion that theft and murder are universally recognized as being harmful is conjectural and unmeasurable for any finite being.  At best, it is a probabilistic assumption which you'll have to accept on faith.  To say anything but would be a statement of omniscience.  But beyond that, simply because something is conventionally agreed upon does not prove that the agreed upon principle is true or false.  So yes, if you are going to argue on those grounds, then your basis is arbitrary for two reasons: (1) The truth or falsity is not proven, and (2) even if it was true that everyone in the world agreed that theft and murder were bad, there would still be the potential for some people to start disagreeing.

You are merely arguing against the structure of my sentence and you have not addressed the premise itself, which I will take responsibility for.  I was not trying to say that physical objects obey some group of prescriptive laws in the same way that, say, a human being obeys a law against speeding.  Such adherence to prescriptive laws is, in fact, not necessitated by the prescriptive laws themselves.  Natural science actually operates under the opposite assumption, namely, that the universe will behave in a certain way that is rational and quantifiable, though the information may not be fully decoded by us.  But at the heart of the assumption is the idea of necessitation.  Given certain preconditions, what happens is what must happen.  If the preconditions were exactly the same, then the same event would reoccur.  In that respect, natural science presumes a certain consistency in the behavior of physical things.  Any denials of this will compromise the integrity of natural science, whose fundamental purpose is to understand the intelligence inherent in the universe so that we can operate with more control over our daily lives. Even if it was true that such preconditions, especially at the micro level, are unlikely to reoccur, that does not change the general principle of necessitation.  Therefore, the physicalist does commit himself to determinism and cannot account for objective morality under his worldview.

Biiingo. We have a winner. Welcome to the real world.

The social contract is what decides it, by being part of a group you agree to abide by certain rules of that group along with everyone else.

Just because you think your rules are better, doesn't make them better.

In the real world, there is a presupposed framework of right and wrong that underlies humanity, based on the metaphysical principle that human life has a value and sanctity not found anywhere else in the animal kingdom.  This is why we do not release the Manson girls from prison or why we sent our soldiers into Germany during the Holocaust.  Under your worldview, we may as well have let the Holocaust go on because the morality of the Nazis was just as valid as ours.

Agreed.  My rules are better... because they are better.  Not because of what I think.

I would probably be like most atheists and act a certain way while being, at the same time, in capable of giving a rational account for why my actions are morally right.  Atheists are capable of acting moral.  They just cannot account for morality in a rational way.

I'm not sure how you concluded that from what I said. Atheists have beliefs (not believing is a belief). These beliefs constitute a viewpoint.
 

You were talking about a godless moral system.  Why would anyone want a judge that produced negative moral choices?
 

Ethical behavior is actual human behavior. If you agree that people do behave with rational self interest then what they "should" do is not relevant. Adding a conscience to the players is equivalent to adding randomness to their choice of strategies (note: even if you argue the individual conscience is not random it is still random across players). Even with a mixed strategy such as this we can expect cheating as long as the average payoff for cheating is greater. If we argue the mixed strategy (produced by the conscience) is biased toward not cheating we will still result in cheating if the payoff is great enough as this will increase the expected gain for cheating.

The net is that adding a real life conscience just dampens cheating. Our base behavior still tends toward rational self interest especially with high gains and low chance of getting caught. Our drive toward self interest allows us to rationalize.
 

I did not make any determination about the moral in the game. The inferior refers to the system not the moral. The system or framework is inferior in the sense that it results in more cheating.

It does not matter.  All that matters is that the players believe the judge to be omniscient and fair.

The thread is intended to draw a distinction between two moral constructs, true. The distinction I'm drawing is that one is superior in that it will result in less cheating. I am not arguing that one results in no cheating and the other results in total cheating. Where on that scale an individual falls is a very complicated issue, but the basic abstract analysis I've made has merit and weight because our rational self interest driven behaviors are undeniable and very relevant even in complicated social and personal scenarios.

 

How 'bout this one?

However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you.  You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land.  You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance.  You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way.  (Leviticus 25:44-46)

Did you pull that metaphysical principle out of your ass?

Clay, Im pretty sure you still haven't addressed this.

You've not taken into account that people have interests other than reducing cheating and presented authoritarianism as the solution to cheating. It may be superior in the sense that it results in less cheating but it's not the most elegant solution. It's the most heavy-handed solution displaying the least amount of consideration for human dignity. What you've presented here is explicitly totalitarian.

That's an interesting little side-step. Maybe I misunderstood your original idea. When you say an atheistic morality is "inferior", I have to ask myself "inferior to what?" The only thing that comes to mind is the variety of book-based theological moralities, and those have none of the functional models or instructions for situations of medical diagnosis. How is a value system "sound"? Theft, as well, can be a good thing, if you're removing drugs from the hands of an addict.

You may be attacking a difficulty with rule-based morality, rather than exercising moral judgement. An atheist is in the position of using moral judgement at all times, based on cultural influences. I don't see that as any different functionally than any theist, seeing as for the theist, the extra cultural influence would be a church community, and an interpretation of the will of the favoured deity (usually through a divinely-inspired text).

First, I'm not creating a straw man. I just can't think of any theology that doesn't involve a set of documents that describe a god or gods for followers of same. Maybe you happen to follow a religion that has no document associated with it, and that's your argument, but I strongly doubt it. You'll have to explain to me how you get the principles being justified, and then ending up in a document, because that would mean that the atheist is in no inferior position to the theist in forming a morality. After all, if the principles exist outside of the texts usually used as explication of theistic morality, then we all have access to an intrinsic moral sense, regardless of your particular theology (or lack thereof).

You bring a pretty heavy bias to this statement, of which you should be made aware: that objective morality is the best possible morality. That has not been demonstrated. Many atheists, like me, are moral relativists. That's not to say morals are strictly relative, seeing as harm to others -- insofar as you've noted that's vague -- has a detrimental social effect. So maybe "semi-relative" is more accurate. It's the reality of the world, though, that different cultures have different values and different morals. I don't know how you would argue with that; it's simply what one sees traveling around the world. It's difficult to see even that an objective morality could exist.

I have no problem conceding that my idea that theft and murder were universal principles were guesses. They were. I just couldn't think of a culture that was okay with theft and murder. Also, where we seem to be having difficulty is with the idea of an absolute "right" and "wrong", such that when police confiscate drugs that are illegal in their country, they aren't stealing from someone, they're within their rights to remove someone's property from them. Personally, I see no evidence for an absolute "right" and "wrong" in nature. While they may exist as Platonic Forms, you'd have to demonstrate any reason to consider them practical for behaving morally. (That is, for moral reasoning.)

That's a misrepresentation of modern scientific thought. Full stop. That understanding of physics is what you get in a classical mechanics course, maybe first and second year, but that's 17th century. Please give that notion up. 

Natural science presumes a certain consistency in certain modes of discussion, like classical mechanics. Naturally, that kind of math is good enough for engineers, but for a discussion of this kind, it's not appropriate. The "general principal of necessitation", in the way you've presented it, is not reproducible at all (not just "unlikely to reoccur" ). That is, you can't make the same event happen twice exactly the same. You can posit a probability that it will happen in a certain way (thus the more current probability-based model) but exact reproduction is demonstrably impossible. Thus, strict determinism does not play out at any level.

If you're using the term "necessitation" in its more modern sense, relating to universals, you have a long uphill climb to show that your line of reasoning competes favourably with empiricism.

I also don't know where you got the idea that science's "fundamental purpose is to understand the intelligence inherent in the universe". That's very much off-base for someone using jargon like "necessitation". If you're going to be precise in one area and not the other, it confuses the discussion. Science isn't searching for an intelligence.

Since both the existence of a God and the 'goodness' of such an supposed entity are inherently unverifiable, a rule system based on such ideas is the truly arbitrary one. Any rules associated with such a system actually derive ultimately from the same mix of societal processes and evolved constraints on behavior necessitated by living in a group as social species that naturally emerge over time. We see similar but simpler, non-intellectualized versions in most if not all social species.

The scenarios in the OP are valid but not actually relevant to morality, rather to the fairly obvious but unremarkable 'insight' that imposing disincentives for a particular set of behaviors will tend to reduce the frequency of those behaviors, but only to the extent that 'rational self-interest' is actually applied to decisions whether or not to indulge in the behavior.

Such a system would be more effective if is some punishment is applied immediately whenever an infraction ('cheating') is detected, rather than delayed until some indefinite time in the future as in the 'heaven and hell' scenario of Christianity, or the Karma idea of Buddhism.

It would probably be even more effective if direct physical pain was inflicted, especially against the more compulsive/impulsive sorts of behavior which involve little or no rational decision-making.

So the 'game', taken to its 'logical' conclusion, makes an argument for an Authoritarian regime with 100% surveillance and 'Gitmo' style torture, especially if the justification if purely that one system leads to less 'bad' behavior. 

EDIT: So the scenario says nothing really relevant to the title of the thread. Dogma based ideologies, aimed at some ultimate 'ideal' religious or economic or racial 'order' are typically more likely to lead to abuses of those who don't agree or can't fit in to the plans, whether 'infidels', 'commies', or 'racially inferior'.

At this point, I think we're all arguing even past that. I mean, you're obviously right (and welcome to the boards!) but even beyond that, it has yet to be demonstrated that an objective morality produces a superior result (or even exists, outside of the sense of Platonic Forms).

I've never actually stated that atheist morality is inferior.  That is the original poster's wording. Such a statement would have to presuppose some general consensus among atheists about what is right and wrong and there really is none.  Buddhists and Raelians are both atheists and yet I would assume that their ideas of right and wrong are probably very different.  Likewise, I would assume that your morality is a little different than Stalin's.  

Your interpretation of the theist worldview is demonstrably false.  The means of revelation has nothing to do with the justification of principles.  I may have discovered that it is a bad thing to spit at someone when my father told me that it was bad.  Yet if you were to ask me why it is wrong to spit at someone, I would not simply say, "Because my father said so."  That is an appeal to authority and a logical fallacy.  Once again, you are consistently hung up on the genesis of moral knowledge that you conveniently dodge the actual question:  Why is what you believe to be moral true?  I continually hammer the point home that atheists can be moral.  That does not mean that they can provide a rational account for it.

Under the theist worldview, moral principles are concepts which are inherent in the nature of a divine intellect, which is itself inexorable and has a necessary existence.  Moral principles have an ontological dependence on a mind.  Therefore, in order for any moral principle to be absolute, the mind that thinks it must also be absolute.  Morals are thereby justified through their nature as necessary principles.  They are ends in themselves, which is to say that morality constitutes the highest good, whereas under the secular atheist worldview, morality is typically seen as the means to societal affluence and stability.  Thus, right and wrong ends up being defined by the arbitrary needs of society at some random point in time.  This is pretty implicit in your view, since you are comparing "objective morality" to "subjective morality" as if our values are competing for some reward, whereas my position would be that morality is a reward in itself.

There are different flavors of moral relativism.  They usually look like this:

(1) Different societies and cultures have different moral principles.

(2) Therefore, the different moral principles held by different societies and cultures are all true.

OR

(1) Different societies and cultures have different moral principles.

(2) Therefore, there are no moral principles that are universally true.

(3) Therefore, one ought not to judge the morality of other societies.

Both arguments are non-sequiturs.

Regarding science, you are making this more difficult than it has to be.   The bottom line is, if everything is physical, then every event is a physical event.  Therefore, what happened could not have been otherwise given the circumstances.  You can equivocate on "determinism" all you'd like, it is still determinism.  Everything else you've mentioned is just a red herring.

Am i getting an answer?

Oh my God! I could just tear this whole thing apart so easily. It almost feels wrong.

P1 is a naked assertion. People help each other all the time. Most people, when raised in the right environment, also don't murder, steal, etc. Self-interest isn't necessarily bad either, as long as you don't trespass on the rights of others.

For P2, the judge doesn't have to be God. It could be culture, the law, etc. Also, if there isn't an actual judge, but, rather, a judge that you invented, then this judge will almost always be in your interest; after all, you made it. So, if these judges don't actually exist, then people are still acting in their self-interest, except this time, they can enact dogma and claim divine support for their personal beliefs. Finally, refraining from doing bad things due to fear of punishment is not moral because then it would be in the person's interest to not do bad things. A truly ethical person would be one that didn't do bad things simply because he/she observed that it was the wrong thing to do.

P3. Both atheists and theists have all kinds of judges. Family. Society. Government. Moral conscience. There is one judge that the theist has, which the atheist doesn't have, a supernatural all-powerful entity that is impossible to understand, by definition.

C1. P3 was false, so C1 is unsupported.

P4. Naked assertion. Also, I think liberty is more important than control. Moral systems based on fear remind me of Kohlberg's first stage of moral development.

C2. C1 was unsupported. P4 was also unsupported.

Oh, really? What about these?

Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen forever. Leviticus 25:44-46

"Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the Lord in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the Lord's people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. Numbers 31:15-18

This is irrelevant. The question is whether God condones slavery. If slavery is mentioned at all, it should be God trying to end it, instead of:

"Then the Lord said to Moses..." Exodus 20:22

"If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as menservants do." Exodus 21:7

"If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and slave dies as a result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property." Exodus 21:20-21