While I would rather we talked about the other part of what I previously said, the one that relates to the murder, this is quite interesting too.
I was not saying that god is necessary for morality. I understood what you said previously this way: since there is no God or higher power, religious morality, and by extiention my supposedly religiously motivated statement(actually, I am not particularly religious) is unsubstantiated, to which I replied with an argument, that if this is the case, and if you apply the same criteria to every worldview, then no moral views are substantiated.
And I would like to address your counterargument. I did find it convincing when I was a “militant atheist” but now I recognise its inadequacy. It is arguing with a position that does not exist, it is based on a misunderstanding of an argument that theists often make. I will now expand on that:
When theists say that without God there is no morality, they mean that there is no objective morality. The argument is based on showing that the accounts of morality possible under atheism are contrary to our moral intuitions. Theists generally recognise that people can be moral if they are not religious, all of us have a sense of morality, since we are the “children of God”.
If there is no morality independent from subjective beliefs about morality, then, in practice, when someone says “this is immoral”, they are simply expressing their preferences. So if I say murder is wrong, this simply means I do not want it to occur, and I am urging everyone to not murder, so there is, in practice, no difference between subjective preference and morality, since morality is subjective.
So if we lived in a world where noone believed rape is wrong(animals do rape each other quite often), there is no sense at all in which the statement “rape is immoral” would be correct.
Since most people do not understand morality to be subjective in this way, this argument can be convincing.
Edit: another similar argument, is that atheists, while they can be moral, have no justification for their morality. It is also often misunderstood, and your counterargument is wrongfully applied, but I will not get into that.
No offense, but I don’t understand how this differs from my summary beyond just that you apparently enjoy pontificating. Like I don’t understand what part of what you said was supposed to be revelatory to me, I specifically told you that morality is not sacred; this isn’t news and I’m not ignoring or unaware of some secondary truth here. Yes, morality is influenced by society and thus yes it is subject to societal whims… Okay? But it’s also informed by generations of evolutionary response and the motivation is almost entirely overwhelmingly pragmatic. Your “bUt WhAt iF rApE sUdDeNlY oKaY” scenario is meaningless because there is no social benefit to that scenario. Morals are still founded a sort of pragmatic empathy; sure sometimes, maybe even often, we get this wrong, but we don’t need a guiding hand to teach us the basics of working together for the greater good. The question isn’t “will this send me to hell,” it’s “is this to the benefit of humanity?”
While I would rather we talked about the other part of what I previously said, the one that relates to the murder, this is quite interesting too.
I was not saying that god is necessary for morality. I understood what you said previously this way: since there is no God or higher power, religious morality, and by extiention my supposedly religiously motivated statement(actually, I am not particularly religious) is unsubstantiated, to which I replied with an argument, that if this is the case, and if you apply the same criteria to every worldview, then no moral views are substantiated.
And I would like to address your counterargument. I did find it convincing when I was a “militant atheist” but now I recognise its inadequacy. It is arguing with a position that does not exist, it is based on a misunderstanding of an argument that theists often make. I will now expand on that:
When theists say that without God there is no morality, they mean that there is no objective morality. The argument is based on showing that the accounts of morality possible under atheism are contrary to our moral intuitions. Theists generally recognise that people can be moral if they are not religious, all of us have a sense of morality, since we are the “children of God”.
If there is no morality independent from subjective beliefs about morality, then, in practice, when someone says “this is immoral”, they are simply expressing their preferences. So if I say murder is wrong, this simply means I do not want it to occur, and I am urging everyone to not murder, so there is, in practice, no difference between subjective preference and morality, since morality is subjective.
So if we lived in a world where noone believed rape is wrong(animals do rape each other quite often), there is no sense at all in which the statement “rape is immoral” would be correct.
Since most people do not understand morality to be subjective in this way, this argument can be convincing.
Edit: another similar argument, is that atheists, while they can be moral, have no justification for their morality. It is also often misunderstood, and your counterargument is wrongfully applied, but I will not get into that.
No offense, but I don’t understand how this differs from my summary beyond just that you apparently enjoy pontificating. Like I don’t understand what part of what you said was supposed to be revelatory to me, I specifically told you that morality is not sacred; this isn’t news and I’m not ignoring or unaware of some secondary truth here. Yes, morality is influenced by society and thus yes it is subject to societal whims… Okay? But it’s also informed by generations of evolutionary response and the motivation is almost entirely overwhelmingly pragmatic. Your “bUt WhAt iF rApE sUdDeNlY oKaY” scenario is meaningless because there is no social benefit to that scenario. Morals are still founded a sort of pragmatic empathy; sure sometimes, maybe even often, we get this wrong, but we don’t need a guiding hand to teach us the basics of working together for the greater good. The question isn’t “will this send me to hell,” it’s “is this to the benefit of humanity?”
But is there a difference between preferences and moral imperatives?
Does it matter in any way beyond semantics?
Yes, of course it does.
How? Why?
Because the argument is based on what morality is. And this is a question about what it is.
And you think if it is preference it cannot be morality? My friend, morality is societal preference, at least in part.
Such an account of morality is indeed insufficient for some people. But this is the argument: you have to accept moral subjectivism if you reject God.