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Morals Without God?
Posted on: October 20, 2010 - 11:16pm
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Morals Without God?
Here's an interesting article canvasing the theistic vs naturalistic moral debate. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/morals-without-god/
“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”
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Covers a lot of good points, especially about manifestations of empathic and altruistic behavior in primates, but I don't quite agree with his vision of the place of religion in society. His closing words appear to me a little simplistic and lacking in insight.
I agree with his comments to the extent that I agree that we actually need some framework to encompass and support our moral ideas and imperatives, but I think that to assert than any such framework will eventually come to have the same attributes, such as prophets and followers, as "any old religion", is a bit shallow. Although it makes a snappy close to his article.
I would expand the idea - such frameworks will be likely far more varied than that even within one national society, especially in the more open societies, those at least a few steps away from the North Korean model.
No doubt some variations will degenerate into religious forms, to appeal to that fraction of society who tend to think in 'religious' modes. So no, not "any such framework", but some subset of those frameworks, plural.
But I agree with what that comment implies in a general sense, that everything we know now, reinforced by these observations in other species, points to the conclusion that religion comes from moral drives, rather than vice versa. Of course, origin stories also are involved, but less so now that we have much better alternative explanations.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
"One study found that pleasure centers in the human brain light up when we give to charity. This is of course no reason to call such behavior “selfish” as it would make the word totally meaningless. A selfish individual has no trouble walking away from another in need."
It does make make the word meaningless in the traditional sense.
To be selfish just means one does not derive pleasure from helping others, one does feel discomfort upon seeing the misery of others.
What religion has done demonize being a pleasure seeking hedonist. So everyone is terrified to admit they are one because of all the social scorn. But it's like being gay, we need to get more and more people to come out the closet and admit who they really are.
So the only way for society to have less suffering and more pleasure is to admit we're all hedonists without free will to be anything else. Then one should adopt the ethics and goals of the transhumanist movement.
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
I thought the "any old religion" was a little snarky too... I'd be curious to see what sort of quasi-religions would rise should theistic religions die. There's already personality cults, arguably even in some religions. Numerous apolegetic groups are leery of guys like Jakes and Olsteen, and even more so of people like Oprah....
But as far as morals go, I'm not sure what they'd say. It seems Oprah and Olsteen more or less regurgitate the popular culture ethics of the day.
“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”
There's a lot of debate among moral philosophers over what is meant be selfishness. Some see distinguished between selfishness and self-interest, the latter being as being morally acceptable. I however am not sure if there is a consensus or even an emerging consensus in these conversation what is meant by either of these ideas. For that reason, I think it is a good thing for writers to define what they mean by selfishness.
“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”
That is what I was thinking. The difference between those two words is going to be rather arbitrary...I'm not even sure how you could separate them without making a blanket statement relying on your own moral system, whatever that is.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
The new book by Sam Harris, which he discussed at length on Sunday at Cal Tech should be right up your alley.
How can not believing in something that is backed up with no empirical evidence be less scientific than believing in something that not only has no empirical evidence but actually goes against the laws of the universe and in many cases actually contradicts itself? - Ricky Gervais
Morals without God? That's like food without ecoli. What good is food if it isn't rancid?
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