Stop and think for a moment. Stop and think about what life would be like without the computer. Then remove the internet. Then remove the television, and all the television shows. Then remove the music playing devices, and all of the music. Then remove all the books. Then remove your bed, and your refrigerator, and your stove, and your couch, and your chairs, tables, and everything else contained in your house. Then remove your house, and your neighbourhood, and your shopping malls, and your local shops, and your playing fields, and your sports, and your sports teams. Remove all the electricity, and the phones. Keep on removing everything until you have even removed language, and the ability to even read this argument. Keep going until you have gotten to humans living in tribes, and have to hunt, and forage, and huddle in caves with fires for warmth. Fires lit not by lighters, matches, and the like, but with the most simplest means. Imagine yourself living like this.
There are few who would, and fewer who could, argue that an existence like that, in a ‘state of nature’, would be better than the existence we live in now. If a person were to try then we would owe it to ourselves to have that person put forward their argument in a convincing manner using only what would be available to them if they existed in this ‘state of nature’. They should be robbed of their ability to use language. For if it were to be better in a ‘state of nature’ than not, it should be achievable to put forward an argument in a ‘state of nature’. For we are able to put forward an argument in a ‘state of society’. If one cannot argue from a ‘state of nature’, then we should accept that the ‘state of society’ has achieved something. It has made things better. It has enabled us to do something we otherwise could not have done. It has enabled us to decrease our suffering. To go back to a ‘state of nature’ would increase our suffering.
Now think about even the most basic of societies. Two previously conflicting tribes, who have now merged into a tiny little village made of the crudest of huts. Huts just capable enough to protect them from the elements, to store things in, and to have a fire inside for cooking and warmth. For ease of argument we’ll consider this new merging of tribes a population of sixty or so. We could call this extravagant for two newly merged tribes, but we could call it a few generations in if that is the case. Now think about the things that would be included in this minimal ‘state of society’. The shelters, an easy means of lighting fires, the knowledge of storing food, the knowledge of cooking food, the knowledge of building the means of these things, the means of building these things, the social structures. All the physical and non-physical things involved. Now imagine what it would take simply to get from the ‘state of nature’, to this minimal ‘state of society’.
At the very least it would take agreement. For the two previously conflicting tribes to merge, it would at the very least take for them to agree to stop the conflict. In order for this to happen there needs to be communication. Which involves agreement, for what is communication if not agreement that certain things mean certain other things. It would take agreement at the very least that instead of harming each other, and fighting over resources, and land, co-operation was better. Co-operation allows us to have all the things we had in a ‘state of nature’, but more, and more easily. It allows them to increase their happiness, and reduce their suffering.
This simple act of communication, agreement, and co-operation, allows them greater protection from others that may want to steal their resources, attack them, or otherwise cause any kind of conflict. It allows them greater protection from any wild animals that may attack them. By virtue of agreement to stop conflicting with each other alone it has offered them protection from each other. This simple act of communication, agreement, and co-operation, has also now enabled them to exchange skills with each other. If one member agrees to help another member do something they cannot, then that member will help them do something they cannot. By being good to each other, both members have then increased their own happiness, as well as the others happiness. They have also reduced each others suffering. They have made things ‘better’. This simple act of co-operation, agreement, and communication, also enables them to teach each other new skills. It enables learning. Which in turn enables us to pass on our knowledge to the next generations, as well as others who may be able to offer advice on how to improve on our knowledge. For it cannot be argued that we all have the same amount, and level, and ability, when it comes to knowledge. We each hold ideas, and skills, that those next to us may not hold. In essence, in order to fully utilise those skills, we need to share them, and to work together, to communicate, and agree.
It is this sharing of skills and knowledge that would get this small, newly merged tribe, to shelter, and the storage of food, and minimal agriculture, and fishing, and to the point where these humans have overcome nature and adapted it to their own end. To a point where these humans have left the ‘state of nature’, and entered into a ‘state of society’; however minimal that ‘state of society’ is.
Here is where we can say, and see, that God is not a necessary reason for us to be ‘good’. For at no point in the argument has mention been made of the beliefs of these two newly merged tribes. One could argue here of course that God was the necessary component to merging these two tribes together, and this is a valid point to raise. However, the same could be achieved by two tribes believing in different gods, so long as those two tribes agreed to communicate, and co-operate, and to live in peace with each other, and to help each other out, and to share skills and resources. So God need not be a necessary part of why we should be ‘good’, it need only be a contributing factor. The necessary component is the agreement of the sharing of skills, knowledge and resources, and of peace, communication, and co-operation. The necessary component can be summed up as ‘the well being of ourselves and others’.
It may seem strange to some that our own well being and happiness is intertwined with not only others, but that of our community, and our society, and our country, and the world. For we as atheists are often confronted with questions like ‘if there’s no God then why not rob and steal and rape and kill?’ To which we can think a few things. We can think that the person has been taught to think like this, and hasn’t really thought of their position too well and too critically. Or we can think that that the person does not care about their own well being and should be helped. Or we can think that the person is not someone who should be among society. Whatever we think, it is still something that needs to be addressed in order to confront common criticisms, as confronting common criticsms is the only way to change the believers minds, and for them to be able to understand why we do not need God to be good.
For criticisms like that we need only think of how many social interactions we make each day, and how many people we rely on, in order to have what we have today. Think not only of those close to us that we rely on, but think at a community level, a society wide level, a country wide, and even a worldwide level, in order to have the things we have.
Think back to the mention of the sharing of skills, and how we need to co-operate in order to have these sharing of skills. If everybody was to rape and rob and steal and kill at will, then the people that are relied on at the wider level may not exist to support the infrastructure. Think of what may happen in the society we have today if suddenly all those who run the nuclear power plants were killed. Or all the nurses, or all the doctors, or all the police. Now think of what it would be like if all those close to you were killed. Or raped. Or robbed. Now think of what it would be like if all of these things happened to you.
If everybody agreed that these things were acceptable, then we would soon be returned to a state of nature. We would lose everything we have gained today. In fact, the further we go ahead, the more we stand to lose if we all agree to just do whatever we want, and disregard each other’s well being. You lose by causing another to lose, you gain by helping another to gain. There will always be those who decide to go against this of course, and these people should in some way be removed from society, and have the benefits of society stripped away from them to a certain extent.
Religious people have a point when they say that applying logic to ethics needs some sort of normative foundation (like a holy book). The problem with utilitarianism is that it does not really have a way to explain why happiness for other people is good in itself - it is in the end an unexplained normative postulate that you have to intuitively agree with. Looking at the world today most of the things you mention exists in a system that exploits more than half of the worlds population - and slave societies make up most of the historic societies we know - and they still worked quite well.
Hi @katharsisdrill! Really sorry for not responding sooner, had a lot on with Uni work over the last week or so and didn't really get much time for anything else. I totally agree that there has to be some sort of objective foundation to ethics. It's become popular amongst atheists to argue that ethics are subjective by nature, but I don't agree with that stance. The arguments for subjective morality/moral relativism are pretty sloppy, and essentially make the idea meaningless. Essentially they are arguing from the wrong viewpoint in my experience. They argue that morality is subjective because different people see different things as moral, but that 2 people disagree on what is moral does not necessarily make morality subjective or relative. It ignores that one of those people could simply be wrong about an action being a moral action. In some ways I think that the argument that all morality is subjective is simply a knee jerk reaction to the claim by theists that morality is objective in nature.
I'm not particularly convinced that it needs a god in order to make it objective. It certainly brings out that intuition when argued in the manner that people like William Lane Craig or John Cottingham argue it. However, Divine Command Theory has plenty of its own faults, and essentially has the same kind of problem with accepting things intuitively that you mention with utilitarianism. It has to be accepted that it's the right God being postulated, that the right religion is being postulated, that the people speaking for God are actually speaking for God, and much more. On top of that there are the faults with DCT like is an action good because God commands it or does God command it because it's good. If God commands something because it's good then there is a standard of good that exists independent of God. One could argue that we need God to tell us what good is because God is all-knowing, but good still exists independently of God, and would exist as a concept even if God didn't exist. It's a pretty fascinating concept, and ethics is one of those subjects I'm most interested in when it comes to philosophy!
No problem, I would think that anything UNI should precede discussing ethics with an old nihilist like me.
To me religious people are simply people with a imaginative take on existence. What I don't like is puritans of any kind; religious or not. If you believe that the earth should be pure for one or the other reason, you will often start cleaning it... which more often than not is cleaning it in blood. I will in general call myself an agnostic, and as peaceful and as tolerant as I can find it in me to be.
I agree that there is much to be said against the monotheistic religions based on Judaism. But mostly out of common sense. I think that our common knowledge of the size of the universe, the fact that humans only lived in a fraction of the time Earth existed and all the other things we assume these days makes it very hard to believe in a single personal yet almighty God...
On the other hand - if you want to stick with utilitarianism you often end up with a load of other problems.
Utilitarianism might for example be used as an excuse to kill babies (without pain of course) whose life we expect to be unhappy (handicapped for example) a thing that revolts against many peoples idea about what is good. ( I remember reading one of those highly entertaining, but also conservative and slightly Christian horror novels by Dean R. Koontz, which he wrote after being confronted with the ideas of the boringly convinced and rather puritan Peter Singer.) I think utilitarianism always gets caught up in a mess as soon as it proclaims to be ethics. It works much better when presented as practical common sense solutions. There is also the thing about happiness mentioned above. As Nietzsche puts it in one of his cocky maxims in Götzen-Dämmerung:
Yes, that is relativism. Lets leave that immediately!
To me the existence of a universal good is not at all obvious. My personal feeling on the subject is that I reproduce what I have learned from others, and also that I have a tendency to mix up aesthetics and ethics. I find it very hard to find a foundation that is outside of human conventions.
I will mention two philosophers that has interested me when it comes to ethics (or rather meta-ethics).
On the negative nihilistic note: J. L. Mackie, who's work on meta-ethics is fascinating. I am only interested in his ideas as an attempt to refute any idea of the existence of good. Argument from Queerness is enticing... and a damn fine catchphrase.
On the positive note: Moore's moral intuition. Vague! but hey, good might just be out there in all the complexities, right.
The problem is I do enjoy discussions like this, so that's why I force myself into a leave of absence for a little while when assignment time comes up! Though that being said, these were my last assignments, so it's not too bad. All that's left now is revision for an exam on the 7th of June, so there may be the odd day or two of disappearing, but no week long sabbaticals!
I think for some religious people it is an imaginative way of looking at existence, but humans are complicated creatures so it's hard to make that generalisation for all of them. For some it's simply conformity, for some it's simply ego, for some it's what they're taught, and so on. But I find the same for many atheists since it's become a commercially viable stance. Atheism has become something that people identify with, rather than are simply identified by. Though few would ever admit that of course! Totally agree with you about puritanical thought in any form. It usually turns out tyrannical, and like you say, is often enforced using spilled blood.
I consider myself atheist, rather than agnostic. But I can understand the agnostic position and think it's an honest one. Like you, I try to be as peaceful and tolerant as possible. I'm not so much a utilitarian as I am a combination of various view points, though part of my ethical overview involves preference-satisfaction utilitarianism, which I feel is a slightly more refined and usable version of utilitarianism. I think ethics is far more complicated than simply 'this view' or 'that view'. Plus, I don't like associating with simply 'a label'. Identifying as a 'label' rather than with assimilating certain viewpoints can lead to some pretty bad ideological like thinking, and can cause people to become dogmatic without even realising it. And I try to avoid dogmatic thought as much as possible, like puritanical thought, it usually leads down a dark and dangerous path.
I kind of enjoy Singer's work to be honest, though often find myself disagreeing with many of his stances. But that's always been one of the beauties of philosophy, you can accept that some thought is good and some thought is bad. It all boils down to how compelling the arguments are, and idol worship of personalities is usually frowned upon, and quite rightly so!
I think you raise an excellent point about the monotheistic god, but I find that to be the case for pretty much all definition of gods. I'm left pretty unconvinced by most definitions, though have to admit that I do find certain forms of pantheism to be interesting. Not entirely convincing, but interesting none the less. I suppose you could call it one of the more imaginative ones that you mentioned!
The criticism of utilitarianism that you raise is a good one, and one I've often heard. Don't get me wrong, I actually think there are times when it may be acceptable to allow a child to die, but the ones you raise aren't amongst them. Have you also heard the 'punishment of a criminal' criticism? If utilitarianism is to be accepted, then it also follows that punishing an innocent person to appease a blood thirsty crowd also becomes acceptable. That it is unjust takes a back seat to appeasing the crowd, because the net worth of pleasure that would come from the appeasement of the crowd. This is one of the reasons why I think one ethical system can never cover the complexities of ethics, and can only lead to dogmatic thought.
Mackie and Moore are both excellent philosophers! Though admittedly I haven't read quite as much of them as I'd have liked to. Though now that I have much more free time I plan on catching up on a lot of stuff!
A friend of mine has joined Steemit recently, and it's someone else I really enjoy discussing philosophy with. He writes for another blog I also contribute to, and was my first choice as co-contributor for a podcast I recently started. I think you'd enjoy discussion with him as well if you feel like checking him out. He goes by @blauweranger on Steemit if you do feel like having a look!
I would say that I am mostly an agnostic because I do not find theological discussions that interesting. As an atheist you jump right into the sea of scholastic fun, which I also did when I was younger. Now I am mostly interested in analytic philosophy (reading Wittgenstein over and over understanding nothing). I think that if you try to isolate what is special religious from conformism, social submission, power struggles from available power platforms etc. (things you find in connection with all institutionalised world views), you will find something rather harmless, and strange. The human mind running free in the endless questions we are (obviously) bound to ask. I have seen in my two daughters that they both needed a God at kindergarten age, which I accepted. Not without discussing it with them though. Later at about school time they both started to doubt, the eldest, a stone hard rationalist, went the way of her father, agnostic to honour the principle of scepticism, but (as I have understood) for all other reasons practically an atheist. The younger is a relativist of the Protagoras Class, not sure what she actually think about the subject, but I suspect she is a spontaneous animist like her mother :)
Whenever I find people who really believes I find it interesting that they often has some psychological childishness connected to the faith and I think that I can find something similar in my own creative process. Another interesting thing is that such people are mistrusted even by people of the same faith. I think that most people to all times has had very little need for religion and gladly has outsourced it to professionals, making it possible for them to shop around in available rituals whenever the ontological questions come too close.
Discussions about religion is most often with professionals or semi-professionals and I only do that if I really have to :)
I took a look at @blauweranger and added him - I also took the liberty to link to this discussion in my latest post - The morgenseiten of Katharsisdrill 14 - Discussions
Thanks for the link to the discussion, and for the very kind words you said! I have to admit, I'm really enjoying the discussion myself. These days on the internet it seems to be rare for a conversation to go so calmly, and to be simply a couple of people exchanging thoughts and ideas. It all too often descends into yelling and aggression. I'm far more interested in discussion than I am debate. Am very glad you took the time to stop and have a discussion, especially after reading in your post that you don't really do it very often! So thank you for actually stopping and chatting, it's been really stimulating and hopefully we'll have many more.
I don't really blame you for not getting involved in theological discussions. My interest mostly lies in the philosophy of religion side of it all, but theology and philosophy of religion are intertwined enough where there is crossover. I do enjoy a good discussion about the possibility of God with someone who can do more than proselytise or aggressively promote their own opinions. In many ways I think it would be interesting if a god did exist, less interesting if it was the monotheistic God, but still interesting. It would mean that there was 'more' to the universe. It's why I generally seek out discussion about the topic, it's a means of challenging my own thinking and looking at things through a different lens. I find too much 'echo chamber' thought going on in the modern atheist community to be honest, which is a shame.
Analytic philosophy is very interesting! I can understand having to read Wittgenstein a lot, I've had to do the same. Sometimes it's better to read the material about his material, as it helps break into Wittgenstein's thoughts a little more. His work on language is second to none though. I think his 'beetle in a box' analogy is incredibly apt when it comes to describing the idea of God, and is just generally very useful for understanding where communication breakdowns can occur. A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic had a similar effect on me. I don't agree with all he says about metaphysical truths, but there is a lot of good material in there.
Yeah, the underlying beliefs in a higher power can be quite harmless. There are some elements in various religions that I think are harmful, but religious is a bit of a double edged sword in many cases. People tend to transfer their own beliefs about what God is, or what religion should be, onto the religion or their idea of God. For those that are good people, the apologetics soften the harsher elements of their religion. Like you mention, politcs, conformity, social submission all play a part, along with the transferrance of personal and social biases onto the religon, cause problems. There is huge psychological element to religion, that isn't as easily generalised as many atheists these days seem to think.
Good point about it being a way to ask questions and search for answers, and quite old questions as well. It's one of the reasons why religion will more than likely be with us for a very long time, at least in one form or another. It might possibly be replaced with a form of spirituality, idealism, pantheism or deism, but the desire for a higher being isn't something that's likely to disappear in a hurry. And that's an excellent point about it being outsourced, that's given me some food for thought, thank you!