Is there an absolute morality?

[Kylie]

This is because what is around us, requests our respect. Degrees of inference are something we should each be doing all the time, on every matter.

This sounds like a whole bunch of new age mumbo jumbo.

 

[Kylie]

In every field eventually yes - and probably not quite all the same fragments for a very long time. Likewise, morality is recovered in fragments. Because methods vary, and because it is personal, doing so is all the more more emotionally fraught and subject to circumstance.

This is why I keep using the word approximation. Approximations are immensely realistic and of huge practical value. As people keep on pooling inferences, not only are rough parameters seen, but more detail and structure. Knowledge is tested tentatively and provisional findings lead to even more inferring.

If I decipher this correctly, I disagree. If we lost all moral viewpoints, we would not recover it and form the exact same moral viewpoints that we currently have. Very much unlike science.

 

[LightLoveHope]

If I decipher this correctly, I disagree. If we lost all moral viewpoints, we would not recover it and form the exact same moral viewpoints that we currently have. Very much unlike science.

On a historical note, the Nazi young people who grew up feeling racism was fine, have often gone through their whole lives believing the same reality.

Pornography and rape culture seem to have gone hand in hand. Guys who devalue women find it very difficult to change that view, which is bad news for our society and care and love for 50% of the population and terrible relationship politics for many families in the future.

There used to be the concept of corrupting people, which should be avoided. I remember reading of a Swedish woman who said because pornography had changed sexual views between partners, it was hard to imagine returning to an innocent style society. Personally I am not so pessimistic, and think love actually in Christ conquers all and can transform how we listen to one another and care appropriately. In the culture Paul preached, open orgies and indulgence with temple prostitutes was a problem, and he instructed the church to have no hint of sexual immorality.

So I have hope that morality can be re-established into a saints heart through the Holy Spirit.
God bless you

 

[Amittai]

... If we lost all moral viewpoints, we would not recover it and form the exact same moral viewpoints that we currently have ...

We would indeed not recover the same pieces in any field.

 

[Amittai]

... young people ... have often gone through their whole lives believing the same reality.

Pornography and rape culture seem to have gone hand in hand. Guys who devalue women find it very difficult to change that view, which is bad news for our society and care and love for 50% of the population and terrible relationship politics for many families in the future.

There used to be the concept of corrupting people, which should be avoided ...

I was 14 when new official teachers invaded my school and said (not in biology lesson) that we "should" consider "having" sex outside marriage. This was not our light hearted unauthoritative playground tittle tattle. This was official authority.

That was the time of Jimmy Savile in the studio (supported by top churchmen and top politicians).

I met a traumatised BBC (studio) cameraman.

Now look how afraid girls and some boys are or voracious at "prospects".

Fortunately there is now protest from agnostic young people at Highgate School and Fredonia State University.

 

[Amittai]

This sounds like a whole bunch of new age mumbo jumbo.

Pooled degrees of inference are how science as well as everything else was built up, both when science was new age mumbo jumbo (New Atlantis), and when science wasn't new age mumbo jumbo (Hiroshima).
Absolutes are ideals. The sum total of partial insights is partial, only bigger. That's why I keep introducing the word approximation.
HTH

 

[Kylie]

On a historical note, the Nazi young people who grew up feeling racism was fine, have often gone through their whole lives believing the same reality.

Pornography and rape culture seem to have gone hand in hand. Guys who devalue women find it very difficult to change that view, which is bad news for our society and care and love for 50% of the population and terrible relationship politics for many families in the future.

There used to be the concept of corrupting people, which should be avoided. I remember reading of a Swedish woman who said because pornography had changed sexual views between partners, it was hard to imagine returning to an innocent style society. Personally I am not so pessimistic, and think love actually in Christ conquers all and can transform how we listen to one another and care appropriately. In the culture Paul preached, open orgies and indulgence with temple prostitutes was a problem, and he instructed the church to have no hint of sexual immorality.

So I have hope that morality can be re-established into a saints heart through the Holy Spirit.
God bless you

Yeah, I'm an atheist. And I've been very clear the whole time that my position is that morality is subjective. If we lost all moral viewpoints, we could no more reconstruct them than we could could recreate every single episode of Star Trek if all knowledge of them was forgotten.

 

[Kylie]

We would indeed not recover the same pieces in any field.

I'm sure we'd discover the same things that we know in mathematics and science. We'd rediscover plate tectonics, we'd rediscover the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. We'd just call it something else. But the knowledge would be the same.

 

[Kylie]

Pooled degrees of inference are how science as well as everything else was built up, both when science was new age mumbo jumbo (New Atlantis), and when science wasn't new age mumbo jumbo (Hiroshima).
Absolutes are ideals. The sum total of partial insights is partial, only bigger. That's why I keep introducing the word approximation.
HTH

Honestly, you are starting to sound like Deepak Chopra, and that's not a good thing.

 

[LightLoveHope]

Yeah, I'm an atheist. And I've been very clear the whole time that my position is that morality is subjective. If we lost all moral viewpoints, we could no more reconstruct them than we could could recreate every single episode of Star Trek if all knowledge of them was forgotten.

This is where I think I have shifted my perspective on subjective belief. If you take biology at a simple level, the difference between wild dogs in Africa and wolves in northern europe, wolves will adopt members outside their group and accept them in a social hierarchy while wild dogs only accept family members and no other unrelated dog.

I would suggest that morality to a large extent is biologically set in us. We are very dependent as babies on our parents, locked into this identity and loyalty, even when we do not know them, they play a significant emotional role in our psyche.

I debated with an atheist who felt they had abandoned social morality except they still felt guilty which they blamed on social conditioning. I would rather observe the reason why humans across the world build very similar social structures and outlooks is because it is programmed into our DNA.

You can see this when antisocial behaviour is linked to a lack of empathy which can be shown in brain scans where the empathetic areas in the brain of the individual do not light up.

So I would suggest there is a subtle nuance, morality is subjective except it is hard wired into us. I would suggest this is what God is declaring when he says we were made in His image. We are wired to care and be social, to empathise and see and feel as others do. It is ironic that belief in God has been declared as why we have morality, ie lose belief lose morality, except clearly most of society have no clear idea of God or the theological and philosophical outworking of this, yet they behave in a really moral way one to another. God bless you

 

[Noxot]

So helping the poor is not?

helping the poor is an outward appearance that can be done in divine love or in a spirit of status seeking, social climbing, a sick impulse to keep people down so that you can feel good about helping them up, a spirit of slavish obligation to some code, or whatever else is the actual inward meaning of why the act occurred.

 

[Bradskii]

helping the poor is an outward appearance that can be done in divine love or in a spirit of status seeking, social climbing, a sick impulse to keep people down so that you can feel good about helping them up, a spirit of slavish obligation to some code, or whatever else is the actual inward meaning of why the act occurred.

With you it would always be divine love I guess. Me? Just gratifying some sick impulse...

 

[Noxot]

With you it would always be divine love I guess. Me? Just gratifying some sick impulse...

I don't believe you have to be conscious about divine love. what is in a persons heart is what is in their heart.

 

[Bradskii]

I don't believe you have to be conscious about divine love. what is in a persons heart is what is in their heart.

You mean doing something because you think it's the right thing to do.

 

[Noxot]

You mean doing something because you think it's the right thing to do.

nope I mean goodness that loves to do good

 

[Kylie]

I would suggest that morality to a large extent is biologically set in us. We are very dependent as babies on our parents, locked into this identity and loyalty, even when we do not know them, they play a significant emotional role in our psyche.

I would be much more convinced of this if there weren't such wildly differing moral viewpoints throughout different societies.

You can see this when antisocial behaviour is linked to a lack of empathy which can be shown in brain scans where the empathetic areas in the brain of the individual do not light up.

I have argued for a long time that morality is based on empathy.

So I would suggest there is a subtle nuance, morality is subjective except it is hard wired into us. I would suggest this is what God is declaring when he says we were made in His image. We are wired to care and be social, to empathise and see and feel as others do. It is ironic that belief in God has been declared as why we have morality, ie lose belief lose morality, except clearly most of society have no clear idea of God or the theological and philosophical outworking of this, yet they behave in a really moral way one to another. God bless you

This sounds rather contradictory. It sounds like you are saying that we all have the same morality hard wired into us (not even sure what evidence you have to support that claim), but that morality is still subjective.

 

[Bradskii]

nope I mean goodness that loves to do good

That makes very little sense. Very deepity. I assume that you mean we do that which we believe to be good.

 

[Chriliman]

It does not seem like we are saying the same thing. It seems like what you are saying is confusing the existence of an opinion with what the opinion is.

Can you quote, word for word, what I said that shows why you think I’m confused? Because I’ve corrected you on this multiple times.

Essentially, Im saying if a moral position proves to be true/good/right then it’s objectively true/good/right. I’m not talking about opinions, I’m only talking about positions that can be proven true/good/right. Do you think such moral positions can exist?

I’ll take us back to an earlier example: If I know you love Star Trek and would love to have the series on dvd, how would it not be objectively good of me to purchase that for you as a gift? Again, knowing your feelings about Star Trek exist in objective reality(Note that I’m not saying your feelings about Star Trek are objectively correct, I’m just saying they exist, objectively).

 

[Bradskii]

Can you quote, word for word, what I said that shows why you think I’m confused? Because I’ve corrected you on this multiple times.

Essentially, Im saying if a moral position proves to be true/good/right then it’s objectively true/good/right. I’m not talking about opinions, I’m only talking about positions that can be proven true/good/right. Do you think such moral positions can exist?

I’ll take us back to an earlier example: If I know you love Star Trek and would love to have the series on dvd, how would it not be objectively good of me to purchase that for you as a gift? Again, knowing your feelings about Star Trek exist in objective reality(Note that I’m not saying your feelings about Star Trek are objectively correct, I’m just saying they exist, objectively).

That's not a moral problem. All you've done is state an objective fact. 'I have given something to Kylie which she enjoys'. A moral problem would be 'should you give something to Kylie because she likes it?'

And that is question that cannot be answered without some further facts. Is it a means to persuade her to do something? Does she deserve it? Will it spoil her? Will she feel obliged to you? The answer to the question will be relative to the facts pertaining to the act. Even if your claim is simply 'I wanted her to be pleased' it may not discount any consequences.

And even if there are no consequences worth considering, it is a moral or immoral act relative to your intentions.

 

[Chriliman]

That's not a moral problem. All you've done is state an objective fact. 'I have given something to Kylie which she enjoys'. A moral problem would be 'should you give something to Kylie because she likes it?'

Actually, in the example I'm considering if it would be good to give her something I know she would enjoy(good behavior), so it is a moral "problem" as you say. And since my intentions are based on the objective fact that she likes it, then it would be objectively good of me to give it to her as a gift, therefore I should give it to her as a gift.

And that is question that cannot be answered without some further facts.

No, I answered it above.

Is it a means to persuade her to do something? Does she deserve it? Will it spoil her? Will she feel obliged to you? The answer to the question will be relative to the facts pertaining to the act. Even if your claim is simply 'I wanted her to be pleased' it may not discount any consequences.

This all seems beside the point to me.

And even if there are no consequences worth considering, it is a moral or immoral act relative to your intentions.

Yes, and my intentions become objective once I do them.