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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 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.