I think this video by BionicDance represents my position well enough.
Morality, as I see it, is subjective because it is we, human beings, who decide what is right or wrong in society.
I said it before on the STOMP forums and I'll say it again:
If you think subjective morality is insufficient and that scares you, blame reality. If you'd like to fantasize about gods and divine justice, you're welcomed to hold your irrational views but wishing doesn't make it so.
4 comments :
I would disagree with this. The main reason for me rejecting religion is that it implies moral relativism.
There are a number of books written a few thousand years ago, each with their group of followers believing is their absolute truth and correctness of their moral prescriptions.
Ultimately these convictions are born out of faith in an untenable concept that will surely not sustain the prolonged attack of science.
The reason I advocate and promote atheism is because it does away with such arbitrary notions of morality.
Once we got rid of these superstitions that have no relation to reality then we can pursue a reasonable discovery of the moral principles that are implied by the natural laws.
Okay. I do agree that there are right and wrong answers for every moral situation.
However, what is the ultimate goal of morality? Is it not subjective to humanity?
It is my tentative position that morality is ultimately subjective as its goal is to allow humans to cooperate and survive while maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering. It is from this subjective position that we can work objectively from to our moral actions.
Perhaps you could shed more light on what you meant. It would be nice to learn and perhaps alter my position.
I suspect that our differences might just be semantic but let me explain my position:
Natural physical laws led to the creation of stars, planets and finally to life. Then through natural selection and random mutations they gave rise to intelligence and social beings that corporate to further the survival of their genes.
Specific moral laws are complex and it dependent on context and consequence but Morality in social organisms is simply the set of rules that facilitate greater coorporation and trust between individuals and groups. I've related some of Dawkins' examples in a post prepared earlier.
So the laws that apply to humans are just a specification of laws that apply to all living things. And if we keep following the bread crumbs of reductionism, these laws are finally just manifestations of the physical laws.
So just like we discover physical laws through the scientific method, we can also discover the moral principles through reason and empiricism.
Of course we can say that the Universe and life has no value. But organisms that prefer death over life don't survive to propagate their genes. So by natural selection we are all endowed with a value for life and the will to survive.
So if going against this value causes pain and unhappiness to the individual and society, isn't it reasonable to then say value for life, and the moral implications that follow it are intrinsically more desirable than the alternative?
Agreed. I guess it was a semantic issue then.
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