(no subject)
May. 11th, 2002 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnpalmerThere are a couple of threads in alt.callahans that made me want to set some ideas down that have been percolating in my brain for a while. Some of them are written down in Word documents, but, frankly, given my success rate in getting writings published (or even "to a publisher for consideration") I think writing them out in a somewhat more public place might be a good idea.
Legend (presumably true legend) has it that Descartes came up with his famous "cogito, ergo sum" by trying to deal with what he could be certain that he knew. He couldn't be sure of anything except that *SOMETHING* was trying to figure out what was known/knowable.
I tried to do something similar with the concept of morality. What would a moral, wise person do, or be like? What could we know about morality if we had to assume we knew nothing?
Here's what I came up with.
The first axiom would be
1) Morality exists
That is, there are times when there is 'bad' actions, or 'good' actions, or both. There might not always be times when there is a good set of actions, or a bad set of actions, but there are at least sometimes when there are.
The next axiom is
2) There are methods by which one can attempt to determine right actions from wrong actions.
These are sort of boring, aren't they? "Yes, Pennsylvania, there *IS* morality" (Herm. Wrong state, I think), and "it's not unreasonable to think about morality."
Why would a moral person need these axioms? Well, if you're determined to do the right thing, you need to know that there *IS* a right thing to do, and you need to know that it's not hopeless to find it.
Keep in mind that there are no guarantees that either of these axioms are right... but if we don't accept them, where do we get? Do we gain something by not assuming that morality exists, or that we can reason about it? Not as far as I can see.
However, by those two axioms, we end up leaving a particular idea behind.
There is a belief by many that a being (usually called "God") dictates morality. For example, in the story of Abraham and Isaac, Abraham is ordered to sacrifice Isaac. It is said, by some, that if God ordered that, it was moral.
Now, let me step aside briefly. Mathematically, two ideas are 'equivalent' if they can be linked with an "if and only if" statement.
"Action A is good/bad" if and only if "God has commanded us (to/not to) do it" would be what I'm looking at.
"Action A is good if God has commanded us to do it" is a plausible statement. It might be that there is a being that knows morality perfectly, and thus, *IF* that person says that an action is (im)moral, it is.
But our first axiom was that morality exists... and we made that axiom *WITHOUT* considering God. So, using that axiom, morality must exist beyond any being who dictates it.
If that morality is "do only what a powerful being, like God" wants, it's something that we can't see as "morality". Oh, it can be *VERY* pragmatic to do what a powerful being wants... but self interest isn't generally seen as the root of morality.
If morality was dictated by a deity, it would violate our first axiom (that it exists, regardless of a deity) *OR* our second (that we can reason about it), unless that deity can be found through the use of reason. It used to be a position of the Catholic church that one could find God through the use of reason... whether that's still doctrine or not, I think it's generally accepted that one can't.
(As a side note, regarding reasoning about morality: some Christians claim that "reading the bible" *IS* the same as "reasoning about it". "It's just common sense; read God's word and know what's going on!". However, that is *NOT* reasoning about morality. If you accept my axioms (and nothing says you HAVE to), you might be able to find that the bible is right in every moral command that it gives, but you couldn't simply decide that it's correct)
Okay... I think that's all I have time for right now.
Please keep in mind that a person might quibble with my axioms, and decide that they don't like them. There's nothing wrong with that. But, I do hope no one will tell me that I'm "just plain wrong" unless they can point to a flaw with my reasoning *FROM* those axioms.
Disagreeing with my axioms is okay; but if you accept my axioms as "rightfully mine", and wish to argue, you'd need to argue from my axioms, or admit up front that you don't accept them.
This is probably a meaningless warning... I haven't seen any hot and heavy debates in Livejournal, yet. But, since this place can be newsgroupish, I figured it wouldn't hurt to put it in.
Legend (presumably true legend) has it that Descartes came up with his famous "cogito, ergo sum" by trying to deal with what he could be certain that he knew. He couldn't be sure of anything except that *SOMETHING* was trying to figure out what was known/knowable.
I tried to do something similar with the concept of morality. What would a moral, wise person do, or be like? What could we know about morality if we had to assume we knew nothing?
Here's what I came up with.
The first axiom would be
1) Morality exists
That is, there are times when there is 'bad' actions, or 'good' actions, or both. There might not always be times when there is a good set of actions, or a bad set of actions, but there are at least sometimes when there are.
The next axiom is
2) There are methods by which one can attempt to determine right actions from wrong actions.
These are sort of boring, aren't they? "Yes, Pennsylvania, there *IS* morality" (Herm. Wrong state, I think), and "it's not unreasonable to think about morality."
Why would a moral person need these axioms? Well, if you're determined to do the right thing, you need to know that there *IS* a right thing to do, and you need to know that it's not hopeless to find it.
Keep in mind that there are no guarantees that either of these axioms are right... but if we don't accept them, where do we get? Do we gain something by not assuming that morality exists, or that we can reason about it? Not as far as I can see.
However, by those two axioms, we end up leaving a particular idea behind.
There is a belief by many that a being (usually called "God") dictates morality. For example, in the story of Abraham and Isaac, Abraham is ordered to sacrifice Isaac. It is said, by some, that if God ordered that, it was moral.
Now, let me step aside briefly. Mathematically, two ideas are 'equivalent' if they can be linked with an "if and only if" statement.
"Action A is good/bad" if and only if "God has commanded us (to/not to) do it" would be what I'm looking at.
"Action A is good if God has commanded us to do it" is a plausible statement. It might be that there is a being that knows morality perfectly, and thus, *IF* that person says that an action is (im)moral, it is.
But our first axiom was that morality exists... and we made that axiom *WITHOUT* considering God. So, using that axiom, morality must exist beyond any being who dictates it.
If that morality is "do only what a powerful being, like God" wants, it's something that we can't see as "morality". Oh, it can be *VERY* pragmatic to do what a powerful being wants... but self interest isn't generally seen as the root of morality.
If morality was dictated by a deity, it would violate our first axiom (that it exists, regardless of a deity) *OR* our second (that we can reason about it), unless that deity can be found through the use of reason. It used to be a position of the Catholic church that one could find God through the use of reason... whether that's still doctrine or not, I think it's generally accepted that one can't.
(As a side note, regarding reasoning about morality: some Christians claim that "reading the bible" *IS* the same as "reasoning about it". "It's just common sense; read God's word and know what's going on!". However, that is *NOT* reasoning about morality. If you accept my axioms (and nothing says you HAVE to), you might be able to find that the bible is right in every moral command that it gives, but you couldn't simply decide that it's correct)
Okay... I think that's all I have time for right now.
Please keep in mind that a person might quibble with my axioms, and decide that they don't like them. There's nothing wrong with that. But, I do hope no one will tell me that I'm "just plain wrong" unless they can point to a flaw with my reasoning *FROM* those axioms.
Disagreeing with my axioms is okay; but if you accept my axioms as "rightfully mine", and wish to argue, you'd need to argue from my axioms, or admit up front that you don't accept them.
This is probably a meaningless warning... I haven't seen any hot and heavy debates in Livejournal, yet. But, since this place can be newsgroupish, I figured it wouldn't hurt to put it in.
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no subject
Date: 2002-05-12 06:51 am (UTC)God always seems to make an appearance in discussions about morality. " says this therefore this is the way one must behave.
The interesting question to me, who doesn't believe in a supreme being, is how should I behave without that guidance from above.
My own personal moral code has been developed over the years into something I can live with, and because I was raised in a primarily Christian culture, there are many areas of overlap with the Bible, but there are also differences.
For instance, while I consider adultery to be immoral I don't consider polyamory to be so. In my lexicon adultery involves lying and polyamory doesn't, and I consider lying to be a greater sin than consensual sex. (And can one have sin without a Higher Being???) Actually, I don't consider consensual sex to be a sin at all.
For me, and this is probably my teaching background coming to the fore, morality is about taking responsibility for your own actions, and in that process doing what you can to avoid harming others.Sometimes there is no way to avoid that as self-concern must always come first (I need to do A. If I do A, person B will be hurt. If I don't do A, I will be hurt. Therefore, I do A, and try to minimize the fallout as much as I can.)
The people in this world who I find immoral are those who try to fob off responsibility on others. It starts in the playground (Well, sure I hit him, but he was bothering me. Everyone does it so why shouldn't I? It's not my fault, she told me to do it.) and in some cases continues well into adulthood. (They fired me just because I was late a bunch of times. Why did they put the exam after a long weekend - I didn't have any time to study. I had to take the call on my cell phone while I was driving - it's not my fault the traffic got bad. These laws are stupid - they don't apply to me)
Where does this morality come from if not from God? Well, mine comes from me, from my desire to be what I consider a good person to be. Which leaves us with a problem, because clearly not everyone has the same definition of a good person.
Morality is easy when you can point to a book and say "We behave this way because this book tells us to." It gets very hard when you move away from the book.
I think there are no hard and fast rules about morality. I think every person must come up with their own code of conduct. That, of course, is the problem because there is _always_ an opposing viewpoint.
I'm not entirely sure this makes sense, but there it is for what it's worth.
Rhona
no subject
Date: 2002-05-12 07:46 am (UTC)But our first axiom was that morality exists... and we made that axiom *WITHOUT* considering God. So, using that axiom, morality must exist beyond any being who dictates it.
This does not seem to follow. It is akin to looking at a piece of fruit on my desk and saying, "This apple exists." Followed by, "Since I stated the existance of the apple without considering Time, this apple exists beyond Time."
The fact that you state the axiom without considering god merely means that the relationship between god and morality is unstated. Nothing more, nothing less.
Honestly, you cannot discuss the relationship between god and morality without first saying something about the nature of god. You must know what it means to be "beyond god" before you can make statements that include the phrase. There are some concepts of god for whom being "beyond god" is completely impossible, for any definition of the word "beyond".
no subject
Date: 2002-05-12 09:13 am (UTC)But our first axiom was that morality exists... and we made that axiom *WITHOUT* considering
God. So, using that axiom, morality must exist beyond any being who dictates it.
This does not seem to follow. It is akin to looking at a piece of fruit on my desk and saying, "This apple exists." Followed by, "Since I stated the existance of the apple without considering Time, this apple exists beyond Time."
This is not a flaw. A statement about an apple is a statement of observation. An axiom about morality is not an observation, but an axiom... a principle to be used when developing a consistent system.
To state that morality exists, as a first, fundamental axiom of morality, states that there is no morality "given" by a god or gods... it's already there.
If I were to say "We know that morality exists, and I know this without thinking about God, thus this morality exists beyond God (or "the gods", etc)", that would be the flaw you're referring to. Instead, I'm saying that the first axiom one might decide to use, when reasoning about morality without preconceptions, is that morality exists. That it exists, regardless of the existence of anything else, puts its existence beyond that anything else.
When reasoning about morality, without any preconceptions, one would not first posit the existence, or nonexistence, of a deity. Further, one would expect that, if morality exists at all, if there are ever right, or wrong, things to do, that would not stop being true if one were a deity.
Finally, and most importantly, *IF* there is a deity that can dictate morality, the whole of morality is still beyond that deity, because there's now an unshakable "meta-rule" that whatever this deity decrees to be (im)moral, is (im)moral. Even if that deity changed things such that this deity no longer could create morality by decree, that change would still only have been imposed through the will of that deity, and the ultimate morality would still be "what that deity wanted, at the point that the change was made, was what morality was".
There are people who insist that nothing can be "beyond" their conception of God. I believe that they fail to understand the difference between something having power over another thing, and something simply being beyond another thing.
no subject
Date: 2002-05-13 03:52 pm (UTC)I can propose axiom 1 AND consider God. Your inital statement was positive, but I can say "God has nothing to do with morality" or "God defines morality" equally well. Both fit with your less-positive explanation. And either denies the later "Without considering God" assumption - there needs to be at least an axiom about God as well, IMO, before you can bring him into the chain of logic.
Also, I think you need to be clear about what form of morality you're talking about: a general morality we can all agree on, or a personal morality that you recognise in others.
Axiom 2 is also weak: it even includes "attempt" in the initial statement, I don't have to look for weakness in the definition. There are methods by which I can attempt to determine whether I can fly unaided. It doesn't mean that they're good methods, or useful methods.
Keeping axiom 1 as it is: I'd change the explanation to "sometimes things are clearly right or wrong, and those decisions are defined by morality".
Axiom 2 would become "the morality of something can be tested against certain principles".
Axiom 3 would have to explain why God comes into it at all: maybe that "God dictates morality" theory you suggest some people are proposing. If so, you've either reduced God to a set of principles you already had for axiom 2, or decided that axiom 2 is whatever God decides it means. Whick kind of knocks axiom 3 (or 2) on the head immediately, so something's wrong.
Personally, I think I have morals, and therefore morality exists. That's it, same as Descartes: it ends there. (What else did he do that everybody else agrees on?) I don't think it's the same morality as everybody else, and I'm not sure there's a common denominator.
But good luck with the thinking, you've stimulated mine, and thanks for that.