Posted on 04/25/2014 8:30:14 AM PDT by fishtank
If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.Joel Marks, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the U. of New Haven, who for 10 years authored the “Moral Moments” column in Philosophy Now, made the following statements in a 2010 article entitled, “An Amoral Manifesto.”To natural selection killing your siblings and offspring is all the same as loving them. Selection only favors what works to enhance survival and reproduction, and it does not matter if it is nice and moral, or harsh and brutal.
- Darwin, Descent of Man
“This philosopher has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality…I experienced my shocking epiphany that religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.
Marks then quite boldly and candidly addresses the implications of his newfound beliefs:
“Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as say a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality…yet we human beings can still discover plenty of completely naturally explainable resources for motivating certain preferences. Thus enough of us are sufficiently averse to the molestation of children and would likely continue to be…( An Amoral Manifesto Part I )Clarence Darrow (from the Scopes "monkey trial") was an early champion of the idea that criminals should not be held responsible for their crimes. His outspoken denial of personal responsibility came to the forefront when he chose to defend Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb for their cold-blooded murder of a young boy in Chicago in the 1920s. Darrow's debunking of criminal responsibility was based squarely on his worldview of deterministic materialism and claimed that pleasure was the ultimate basis for morality: "I believe that progress is purely a question of the pleasurable units that we get out of life. The pleasure-pain theory is the only correct theory of morality, and the only way of judging life."
Dr. David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at The University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill” has been quoted as stating:
Killing is fundamentally in our nature because over the eons of human evolution murder was so surprisingly beneficial in the intense game of reproductive competition,. Our minds have developed adaptations to kill, which is contrary to previous theories that murder is something outside of human nature—a pathology imposed from the distorting influences of culture, media images, poverty or child abuse.Is vs. Ought – Pleasure vs. Pain – No Right or Wrong only ‘preferences’… Keep that in mind while reading this:…People might mistakenly assume that the theory of adaptations for murder implies approval or acceptance of killing. It doesn’t. I would suggest instead that those who create myths of a peaceful human past, who blame killing on the contemporary ills of modern culture, and who cling to single-variable theories that have long outlived their scientific warrant tread on dangerous moral ground. The problem of murder cannot be solved by wishing away those aspects of human nature that we desire not to exist.
As an evolutionary psychologist, I’ve become accustomed to critics who confuse what is with what ought to be.
1. If morality is subjective (by individual or group), as atheists/materialists claim, then what any individual/group ought to do is necessarily relative to that individual/group purpose. IOW, if my purpose is to make a frozen margarita, I ought put ice in the blender. If my purpose is to make fresh peanut butter, I ought not put ice in the blender. The ought-ness of any task can only be discerned by mapping it to the purpose for which the act is committed. Under moral subjectivism, acts in themselves are just brute facts with no objective moral value; they must be mapped to the subjective purpose to determine subjective moral value (oughtness).
2. The question “Is it moral to gratuitously torture children?” implies that whomever does such an act finds it personally gratifying in some way, and we are asking a third party if the act is moral or immoral. The only possible, logically consistent answer a subjective moralist (atheist/materialist) can give is that yes, it is moral, because the moral challenge is tautologically valid in the subjective morality model. If my purpose is to gratify myself, and torturing children gratifies me, there is a 1 to 1 mapping of act to purpose- I ought do so. It is moral by definition for anyone who is gratified by the act to do so for their own gratification.
3. If the moral subjectivist says that the act is immoral “to them”, they are committing a logical error. The acts of others can only be morally evaluated according to that particular person’s subjective purpose, not according to the subjective purposes of anyone else. That is the nature of subjective commodities and relationships. Whether or not it is something a third party “ought” do for their purposes is entirely irrelevant and is treating the third party’s purposes as if they are objectively valid and binding evaluations on the acts of others.
4. Would an atheist/materialist intervene if someone else was gratuitously torturing children? If they had the power to snap their fingers and eliminate this kind of activity from the world, would they do so? I suspect the answer to both would be: yes. Note how self-described moral subjectivists would treat their own personal preferences as if they were objectively valid and binding on others.
5. Only a sociopath can truly act as if morality is subjective. “Moral subjectivism” is a intellectual smokescreen. It is a self-deception or an oughtright lie. Its proponents cannot even act or respond to questions as if moral subjectivism is true. They betray themselves as closet moral objectivists in denial, hiding from the implications of a morality they must live and act as if objective.
In contrast, under the materialistic picture of reality…, you get this:
"Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law, of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him .... The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society . their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation."
-Thomas Jefferson
I don't see how quoting the opinions of three men I disagree with debunks my argument.
I think Marks, Buss, and Clarence Darrow are incorrect in their assumptions. You're pulling sort of a reverse appeal to authority, in the same way that I could quote Barack Obama's view of Christianity and claim that all Christians must agree with him.
The Constitution assumes:
Free will, hence the capacity for self-governance.
Moral responsibility hence accountability under the law.
Intrinsic dignity of the human being, hence inalienable human rights.
Unchanging moral principles and a stable human nature, making possible a stable system of Constitutional law.
All of these are possible without theism, as is Jefferson's quote. Jefferson's use of the word Creator infer absolutely nothing more than a Pantheisic worldview. Theism is not a prerequisite to any of those principles.
Points 1-5 about Moral Objectivism seem like the same worthless gobbledygook spouted by William Lane Craig. In fact, I'll bet he wrote it. The entire set of points are altogether meaningless. And I've never claimed to be a moral subjectivist, and I'm not a closeted moral objectivist. I claim it openly and have given reasons for it.
They don’t believe in a creation event?
Why - based on what?
They provided no evidence for their assumptions (especially Buss). Something claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
The time has come to take seriously the fact that we humans are modified monkeys, not the favored Creation of a Benevolent God on the Sixth Day. In particular, we must recognize our biological past in trying to understand our interactions with others. We must think again especially about our so-called “ethical principles.” The question is not whether biology—specifically, our evolution—is connected with ethics, but how. As evolutionists, we see that no [ethical] justification of the traditional kind is possible.Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will…. In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance.
Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place.
- Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson, The Evolution of Ethics
This book [The Murderer Next Door], the result of Buss' research into a never-used file of more than 400,000 murders and a close collaboration with psychiatrists at the Michigan Center for Forensic Psychiatry, led him to a new view: that murder is the product of evolutionary forces and that the homicidal act, in evolutionary terms, conveys advantages to the killer.
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