God and morality in a nutshell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew654htG7yg&lc=Ugy6FjPwwYLqcvNTfWN4AaABAg.ANqDmMA9W-sANqLGq_TAnd 

 

In the 2015 Germanwings flight tragedy, the co-pilot deliberately crashed the plane, killing himself and everyone on board. Such an act is bad regardless of anyone's opinion of it being bad (just as the moon is smaller than the sun regardless of anyone's opinion). This badness is easy to see, dissect, and understand, without appealing to God at any point.

 

First, I don't see how God is supposed to solve this puzzle. Let's label the bad / evil act mentioned above E. If I ask: What is the wrong-maker of E, how is God meant to answer this?

 

Maybe: For an act to be wrong is for God to command against it and for an act to be permissible is for God to permit it.

But 1) God hasn't commanded for or against all human acts. So how do we know which are right or wrong?

 

2) It's controversial exactly where God's commands are (the Bible? The Quran?), which ones count as commands for which people at which times (just the Israelites, or us too?), or whether they really came from God and not from humans inventing a God character. (Christians, after all, are committed to the belief that Allah is a fictional character. Or if Allah refers to Yahweh, then Christians are committed to the view that the event of Yahweh sending Muhammad as a prophet is a fictional event.)

So the "God commands it" answer to the wrong-maker question seems pretty useless. Even Christians are forced to use their own judgment when it comes to modern day moral dilemmas; God is of no help to them. The Methodist church recently had a schism over gay marriage.

And 3) Doesn't this open up the Euthyphro Dilemma? If the right-maker is purely God's command, then God could command E and that would make E right. But my intuitions say, like that of Christians, that a good God could never make such a command because the act is wrong prior to any command made for or against it. So it must be something else that acts as the wrong-maker.

 

You might play William Lane Craig's card and say that something is good when it is aligned with God's nature, and God's commands are aligned with God's nature. But this shifts the arbitrariness of God's commands to the arbitrariness of God's nature.

 

a) If God's nature happened to be pro-atrocity, then those atrocities would be good. God could transform into a swan like Zeus and rape a woman named Leda, and because God's nature happens to be pro-rape, this action is good. If God's nature happened to be pro-genocide, then God could command genocide and that command would align with God's nature.

b) If goodness is defined as that which is aligned with God's nature, then saying "God is good" is to say "God is aligned with God's nature", which is a silly thing to say. But Christians don't see themselves as saying something silly when they say "God is good."

c) We call things good all the time – good friends, good food, good movies – without invoking God. These things aren't good because they are aligned with God's nature – they are good because they are intrinsic, extrinsic, or saving goods.

Second, I say again that the badness of E is easy to see, no God required.

1) We can give a phenomenal definition to intrinsic goodness and badness. Intrinsic goods are characterized by their felt experience, same with intrinsic bads (evils).

2) Extrinsic goods are those that lead to intrinsic goods. Extrinsic evils lead to intrinsic evils.

3) Saving goods are those goods that prevent evils. Depriving evils are those evils that prevent goods.
 

4) We also use 'good' as a success term. A good chess move might not be a chess move that is intrinsically, extrinsically, or savingly good, but good because it leads to success with respect to the goal of winning the chess game. A "good" torture device is good for torture.

And so by this analysis we can easily see what the bad makers are of E. The intrinsic evils of the suffering of the victims and victims' families are bad in their essence. The depriving evils of the deaths of the victims are bad too, grounded in the self-evident concept of "better" as used in the sentence: A joy feels better than a pain.

Now the wrong-maker is trickier. A consequentialist approach could be like this: The act that produces the worst outcomes (most badness + least goodness) in a situation is the worst act, and the act that produces the best outcomes (the least badness / most goodness) in that same situation is the best act.

Assumption 1: There is no difference whatsoever between epistemic and value-based wrongness. Both amount to being incorrect or mistaken in some sense.

Assumption 2: Every morally relevant act is caused by a belief or set of beliefs, or something like a belief that could be translated into a proposition.

Idea: The wrong-maker of an act is the falsity of the false belief that grounds the act.

People often (always?) act thinking that their action is the best action they could take, the action that maximizes goodness over badness. If that belief is false, then the wrongness of that belief transmits to the action, making the action wrong too (strictly speaking, there are no wrong actions, only wrong beliefs and bad actions).

He who succeeds in believing what's right will act rightly too. There are no categorical imperatives, only hypothetical imperatives: If you want to believe what's true, and act accordingly, and if you succeed in always believing what's true and acting accordingly, then you will never do wrong. Your actions will always be grounded in true beliefs.

If you want to do what's right, then you should act according to what's true – and there we see the hypothetical imperative. "Should" always applies to goals – given the goal of doing what's right, you ought to believe what's true. If you want to maximize goodness, then you ought not commit acts that fail especially badly to maximize goodness (which we call evil acts).

Of course, we humans are ignorant and stupid, and so we constantly fail to believe what's true. So we constantly act according to false beliefs and do actions that are bad. (And our answers as to why we chose to do these bad actions are always filled with lies, falsehoods, contradictions, confusions, or irrelevancies).

Notable Quotes: Plato's Alcibiades – Justice vs Expediency

From a deontic point of view, justice involves the administering of just deserts – folks getting what they deserve. Justice is about fairness and equality. Good things ought to happen to people who do good, and bad things ought to happen to those who do wrong. Justice is a mysterious karmic demand that needs to be satisfied, like a god needing oblation.

From a consequentialist point of view, no one deserves anything in any sense other than a consequentialist sense. There are no mysterious karmic demands or gods needing to be appeased.

In the parable of the talents, a master gives his servants large amounts of money (The NIV version uses 'bags of gold'). The servants are judged based on the consequences of their uses of the money (they are judged too by their virtue, but consequence drives virtue: the virtuous person aims for good consequences). One of the servants misuses the money, and the master wishes he (the master) had given that money to the other servant who was a good steward of resources.

This is a consequentialist sense of deserving. A person deserves a good if that good maximizes flourishing in their hands and not in the hands of another.

We often feel that an injustice has occurred if someone works hard, is talented, and has a good heart, but never receives any reward. Conversely, someone who cheats their way to the top deserves none of the promotions they receive. I think we'll find that we feel this way for consequentialist reasons. It's intrinsically difficult to be motivated to work hard. The promise of reward enables the motivation. So if we observe people working hard and getting nothing out of it, then we will be demotivated from working hard, which will have poor consequences. If we observe people getting rewarded for cheating their way to the top, then that will motivate us to do the same, which will likewise, in the long run at least, lead to poor consequences.

So a consequentialist notion of justice can involve a consequentialist notion of just deserts. But there's another definition of justice I like: Justice has been achieved when there is a direct correlation between virtue and power. Justice has failed when there is a direct correlation between vice and power. This definition is compatible with the first, because when virtuous people have power, total flourishing is maximized, and when evil people have power, total flourishing is minimized.

Justice can be used to refer to a state of affairs, or to a process. Thus, justice is the process of establishing a direct correlation between virtue and power, or of breaking the connection between vice and power. We can replace 'virtue' with 'truth', 'vice' with 'falsehood', and 'power' with 'survival'; justice has been achieved when truth prevails and when falsehoods die, not because some magical debt has been settled, but because truth leads to flourishing and falsehoods lead to misery.

Anyway, the point of all that is to say that Plato saw this many years ago (though apparently the authorship of Alcibiades is disputed):

"But, Socrates, I think that the Athenians and the rest of the Hellenes do not often advise as to the more just or unjust; for they see no difficulty in them, and therefore they leave them, and consider which course of action will be most expedient; for there is a difference between justice and expediency. Many person have done great wrong and profited by their injustice; others have done rightly and come to no good."

-Alcibiades, Alcibiades I

From Plato Complete Works, Benjamin Jowett and George Burges translation

Alastair Norcross - There are no moral obligations

A view that I've had for a while now is that there are no moral obligations, only legal ones and other social obligations (by 'social obligation' I mean like you are obligated to follow your job duties or you will be fired). Obligations are social constructs. I don't believe in moral rights—there is no intrinsic 'right to life.' Rights are something a state grants a citizen. Rights can be taken away. If someone has a seizure, their right to drive is taken away until they have been seizure-free for 6 months. Your right to life is taken away when you try to kill someone. Etc. However, we can have discussions around what rights a state should grant its citizens. You could argue that it would be objectively better for a state to grant a right to produce alcohol compared to a state that bans alcohol, because banning alcohol leads to all sorts of problems (as America discovered in the Prohibition Era). In this sense there are objective rights.

The reason why I don't like moral rights is because I can't make sense of them. I don't believe anything can be magically right or wrong. If an action is right or wrong, there will always be an explanation for why this is the case. You could say I believe in a moral version of the principle of sufficient reason. In fact, I suspect that morality necessitates this—it is necessarily the case (i.e., the inverse is impossible) that for any moral fact, there is an explanation for that fact.

But if someone has a moral right, then violating that right is wrong. But how is it wrong? What's the explanation? Moral rights sound like these magical things that people have, but there is no explanation as to what they are or where they come from.

This is one reason (of many) why I like consequentialism. I don't have to worry about trying to make sense of moral obligations or about explaining why violating someone's right is a bad thing. (Certainly, violating someone's legal right is often a bad thing for consequential reasons.)

Importantly, I think we still have objective morality without moral obligations. Moral facts don’t need ‘em. You have something like obligation when it comes to epistemic normativity. You ought to reason well, you ought to think rightly, you ought to believe what's true, and so on. If we call those epistemic obligations, I think that's fine. We are still demanded by normativity to not make mistakes in our reasoning, and we can apply reasoning to moral contexts to produce moral reasoning. Just as reasoning can be objectively good or bad, reasoning applied to moral contexts (moral reasoning) can be objectively good or bad.

(There's a good question you can ask about the nature of normativity's demand, which is basically the question of why should we care about being rational, or why should we oppose irrationality. But I'll save that for another time.)

If we call epistemic obligations applied to moral contexts moral obligations, then I'm fine with that idea of moral obligation, but you aren't violating anyone's intrinsic rights in the case that you violate these moral obligations—you would just be violating your epistemic, normative obligation to think rightly, reason rightly, etc.

Anyway, I'm excited to have discovered a philosopher who is a hard consequentialist like me and feels the same way I do, at least roughly, about moral obligations: 

https://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/people/alastair-norcross

Ben's Law

If you let someone speak on his or her moral system long enough, always, without exception, it will eventually sound like consequentialism (even if they explicitly reject consequentialism).