A Basin of Nice, Thin Gruel
I want to talk just a little more about this question of morality and motivation. The more I think about it the more of a wall it seems. A dead stop, an aporia, a permanent undecideable. A six of one half dozen of the other. Norm Geras put it very well:
I have read that in the Nazi camps, those who did best at maintaining their moral bearings, at not going to pieces in face of the horrors they daily had to experience, were people of very firm and definite convictions: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jewish rabbis, hardened communist militants. On the other hand, intellectuals, liberal and professional people, sometimes suffered a precipitous moral collapse…To have had to get used to conditions of life and death in places where there was no why would have been hard enough for anybody; but it may have been especially testing and cruel for those educated in the norms of a sceptical rationality. Would we want to say, though, that the religious or quasi-religious forms of certainty which have helped to save some people in such conditions are, on that account, to be given an unqualified pass as ethical motivators, when we know what else, what horrors, such certainties can themselves lead to?
That’s just it, you see. It’s precisely the qualities that enable people to maintain their moral bearings in an unspeakable situation, that also enable people to eliminate doubt, ambiguity, complexity, uncertainty, caution. That can be a good thing, even a splendid thing – but it can also be a bloody nightmare. Maybe overall, thin gruel is really a safer dish than stronger meats. Maybe all those lions with blood dripping from their jaws, all those dedicated impassioned righteous soldiers (one thinks of Opus Dei, and shudders slightly), are simply too dangerous, for all their courage and self-sacrifice. Especially since the things they believe in, the things that motivate them, are not testable or investigatable, not questionable or revisable. If they get it all wrong there is no one to tell them so; no one they’ll listen to anyway. Thin gruel is not an exciting dish, that’s for sure, but it doesn’t scald your insides, either.
A genetic predisposition toward certain kinds of madness may not be entirely the debility it seems in relatively stable times, when it’s vital to make sense and react sensibly.
When everything’s awful and hopeless and terminal and doomed, and the gloom rises toward your shaking knees at the same time it clouds your burning eyes, partially, or at times completely disconnecting from reality seems like a possibly effective survival mechanism, does it not?
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Your point points toward a truth I can’t seem to articulate clearly, that judging these matters now, when prosperity’s all most of us in the room have known, is not the same as judging them when we’ve been crouched in some half-wrecked shelter for five months, scuttling out at twilight to find something edible or partially so.
And praying, yes praying, that those bear-like things don’t come back, and that the cannibal tribe went back across the river for good.
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Is that rhetoric?
I know one swallow doesn’t make a summer, but isn’t Primo Levi a fine example of the nourishing qualities of ‘thin gruel’?
I was wondering if anyone would mention Levi in connection with Norm’s quote..
OB:
You give an account of how morals that stem from divine decree have a certainty, none of the ambiguity, that secular morals may. You are keen that religion acts as a motivation to be moral that is absent for the atheist.
To the extent that the motivation for acting morally comes from something like respect for God, or from a view to eternal consequences – I emphatically claim that takes away the moral nature of the act.
As to certainty being a virtue, in cases where the evidence is ambiguous, or when values clash, only when – as in the Holocaust – uncertainty is so excessively debasing or demoralising will I agree. Surely the ideal is to believe what is true or right, not merely to believe strongly.
marco
Yes, Norm’s quote on his site linked to Levi.
Marco, it’s not that I’m keen. I’m not keen. On the contrary. I just think (though as I’ve said it’s only a thought: it seems plausible to me, but I don’t know and don’t have evidence, studies and statistics and such) it’s probably true, that’s all. Or at least may be true. I think it may be true that one of the few advantages religion has is its power to motivate.
And I separated the eternal consequences aspect from the feelings about the deity aspect, because I agree that the first is less moral rather than more; but the second I think is more complicated. If the feeling is fear, that’s one thing, but if it’s love or loyalty – I think that’s another. But, again, even if that is a moral feeling, it can also be a horrendously dangerous one. So of course I agree with your last point – that’s what I’ve been saying.
Considering all the terrible hardships which people have gone through in the past 5000 years, one might say that religion is (at the very least) one of those “useful fictions” which — no matter the truth — are extremely functional in getting people through the day. And maybe that’s why religion survives and seems to flourish.
“Considering all the terrible hardships which people have gone through in the past 5000 years, one might say that religion is (at the very least) one of those “useful fictions”
One might say anything they choose to. Whether they are correct in what they say is a whole other matter ;-).
Useful to who? Usually to currupt institutions (governments and churches usually), to turn people into cringing sychophants too insipid to protest about their lot. Religion adds to hardship by convincing the sheeple to put up with their lot in life no matter how cruddy it is. Religion is not only NOT useful, it is not even useless. It is a negative force in humanity. It can make it easier to convince people to either put up with terrible things, and/or also do terrible things. As for it flourishing; thankfully I do not beleive this to be so. The world is getting ever more secular, as there are fewer and fewer gaps in human knowledge for a god to hide in. The human race is growing up, and hopefully religion will go the way of beleif in Santa (a no less plausible figure than god(s)).
Driving to work this morning I realized that may be it is good that there is religion. Without it some people would have no source for their morality. May be it also good that they don’t see the (in)validity of it. God knows what some whackos would have done if they knew there is no “hell” and “heaven”. So I think religion is not a completely useless thing.
Every “moral” code, system, pattern, thought, whatever, is goal-oriented. It’s just that the goals can be so deferred in time they seem ambiguous, or better represented by a gleam of light from over the horizon.
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Still, here as elsewhere, religion gets defined solely as it’s present constructed. There were and are people running around in the landscape, living close to it, whose morals are clearly defined, and perceived as proceeding from the spirit-world, which is what divine means in this context isn’t it?
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Moral codes are about survival. Of the genes, of the tribe, of the self; the truth in that context can be debilitating; the only moral argument I have with the lion as he eyes my neck is that I don’t want to be eaten. Dressing that up as “God likes me better” or “humans do more complex things with their time” or even “I got three hungry children, and a very sickly wife” doesn’t change the basic nature of the eat-or-be-eaten paradigm
As far as I can tell every single moral system ever devised is about that and that alone.
Which is why religion is here with us still. It increases the likelihood of survival for its adherents. That’s the first argument. The truth component, and its measurement, are a far second. That’s why logic is so ineffectual as an agent for change in this.
“It increases the likelihood of survival for its adherents.”
Oh really? Always, in all times and places, in all circumstances? I can think of glaring exceptions to that without breaking a sweat.
I agree with some of what Norm Geras says. But one problem I think I have with the whole “gruel” metaphor is that it seems to assume there can be such a thing as gruel that is “thick” or “thin” for everyone. Or, worded alternately, that there are strong or weak motivators that are always strong or weak for everyone involved.
Granted, secular versions of morality may be weak motivators for some people, maybe even most of them. But who’s to say that it can’t provide a very firm set of convictions for others? Primo Levi, already mentioned in this thread, is an example of someone who held very strong convictions in a secular context. Then we have Bertrand Russell, who spent his very long life passionately campaigning for various progressive social causes. Or Albert Einstein.
The issue we shouldn’t forget is that we’re motivated by many complex, interacting factors, and religious belief is only one of these factors. Others include social class, family background, genetic dispositions, level of education, and myriad contingencies of personal development. The degree to which religion outperforms these other factors is subject to a great degree of variability. Of course, it’s easier for some people to let religion carry the whole load, or to pretend it is.
So maybe a more apt metaphor would be “boullion” instead of “gruel.” Or we could use “gruel” for the complete mixture of motivators, and designate religion as a type of “boullion” mixed into the gruel among other ingredients. The ratio of ingredients varies, and the gruel winds up being thicker or thinner for some people in ways that aren’t predictable only from the amount of religion thrown in the mix.
A further caveat seems in order, though. It seems that the gruel’s thickeness depends on how much “certainty” winds up in the mix. Certainty is something that congeals in the mixture from the interaction of the other ingredients. The reason religion seems to take up so much of the gruel so much of the time is precisely because it often deals in claims of moral certainty. Sure, non-religious factors such as personality type or secular ideologies (Marxism, esp.) can provide some feelings of certainty, too, but probably not as frequently.
Bertrand Russell : “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
Phil
Yup. All good points.
And that suggests a further point that I don’t think I had thought of. It might be a chronological matter rather than a religion or secularism matter. A which came first matter, a chicken or egg matter. That is, it may be that the kind of people who are religious are also the kind of people who are motivated by religion, and the kind of people who aren’t are the kind of people who aren’t.
I know, that sounds like an idiotic tautology. But I was thinking the motivation was in the religion, and it now occurs to me that the motivation may be in the temperament or character or personality rather than in the religion. If so, it seems a bit pointless to argue for religion on that basis, because people with the ‘wrong’ kind of temperament aren’t going to find it motivating anyway.
I prefer to think of such things as atheism or theism as purely cognitive, but I have to recognize that that’s probably not true; that things like temperament play a large role.
The use of fire. Guns. Cement.
“It increases the likelihood of survival for its adherents[users].”
“Oh really? Always, in all times and places, in all circumstances?”
That stunning rebuttal to the contrary, it’s simply true.
People use these things because they work.
The debate is whether they work all the way.
Or – and this is more germane I think – if they work for everybody. Since religion obviously doesn’t work for everybody, it seemed apt to point out that rather than proceeding from logical process most religion was relatively impervious to logic, that it gets defended from, rather than by, logical thought.
Vehemently.
Because it is seen as necessary for survival.
By its adherents.
Because it is.
For them.
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Usually, in my experience, when people who were normally perspicacious have gotten all snippy and wilfully obtuse it’s meant there’s something bothering them.
Another agenda as it were.
So be it.
No, msg. Sorry. That won’t wash. You’ve been pretty snippy and willfully obtuse yourself some of the time. If I’m abrupt it’s not because I have ‘another agenda,’ it’s because I’m somewhat weary of your unsupported assertions. That’s the ‘something bothering’ me. You just keep announcing everything, without a shred of argument. So just stay on topic and leave the motive-searching out of it, please.
“I know, that sounds like an idiotic tautology”
Nah – it’s certainly far from idiotic, and probably not tautological either. It bears a surprising resemblance to the truth, I think. And it’s probably open to empirical evaluation. In fact, I think there is already a signifigant amount of data to suggest that personality is the key factor determining the kind of religious beliefs one accepts, or if one accepts them.
Frank Sulloway’s book “Born to Rebel” has a lot to say about the factors influencing personality development, and the way these factors determine the kind of beliefs one accepts later in life. He did considerable data analysis to show that family dynamics, especially family size and birth order, effect whether someone develops an orthodox or heterodox personality – whether they are relatively conservative intellectually and dogmatic or open to new ideas. I have my doubts about some of his analysis, but much of what he says is convincing.
“If so, it seems a bit pointless to argue for religion on that basis, because people with the ‘wrong’ kind of temperament aren’t going to find it motivating anyway.”
Yes. Because different people have different levels and types of motivation, resulting from different mixtures of factors. And one of the big ones, as you suggest, is personality. So when people talk about the value of religion as a motivator, they can only talk about its value as a motivator for the people who will be motivated by it. In the end, the tautology seems to be on the side of the people who make this claim.
Phil
Ophelia-
The topic as I may have misconstrued it:
and
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There’s a moment when the decision to attack, or cope, or come to terms in some way with, anything predatious – lion, bacteria, Nazi, street thug, collapsing bookcase – requires an assertion.
What that assertion consists of is pretty situational in its overall form but its essence is always,
“I am, and I’m going to be”.
There is no rational basis for that assertion. It’s biological.
We can intellectualize ourselves right out the other side of it. There’s no moral valence to it.
There is no qualitative material that distinguishes the lion from the man, except the man’s assertion that there is. That the lion, were he capable of speech would have his own assertion isn’t a popular idea. When it was closer to the ground it was easier to make that assertion, there was less thought involved. Once we hit a particular level of awareness and logical ability the doubt was too threatening. Religion steps in right there.
That is what’s at the heart of those indecisive eggheads in the camps. The search for value-weight. Where’s the moral trump card? They don’t like me. How does that make them less, and me more? Where’s the moral argument against polio? Nazi extermination programs were no darker than disease, without religion to make the contrast between good and evil.
Religion, or a social cause, or the family, or whatever external validation, can provide a kind of armor for the doubt that most of us are capable of.
“I am, because God wants me to be.” versus “I am, because, well, I am, I think.”
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msg said:
“There’s a moment when the decision to attack, or cope, or come to terms in some way with, anything predatious – lion, bacteria, Nazi, street thug, collapsing bookcase – requires an assertion.
What that assertion consists of is pretty situational in its overall form but its essence is always,
‘I am, and I’m going to be’.
There is no rational basis for that assertion. It’s biological.”
I disagree. There are rational basis for many decisions. For example, the reason I stepped out of the way is because the book case was collapsing over my head. I see that as a rational decision. (i.e. based on reason).
msg said:
“There is no qualitative material that distinguishes the lion from the man, except the man’s assertion that there is.”
I disagree. The lion and the man are qualitatively different irrespective of what the man asserts. That is an objective truth.
I didn’t understand the rest of your post. So I couldn’t reply to it.
WhenI read a statement like “Nazi extermination programs were no darker than disease” then I know someone is scrabbling around for a scrap of self-justification. Least ways, they’d better be, or it’s the most disgusting thing I’ve read for ages.
’nuff said.
My aunt was crippled for life at the age of thirteen, disfigured and permanently disabled, by polio.
If you would like to claim some kind of moral high ground that makes something that can do that somehow less worthy of resistance and repudiation than Nazi racism, I’m waiting to see it.
This same weirdness exists around death by automobile. The Washington Sniper killed fewer people in three weeks than died in that same period, in that same area, on the highway – just as randomly, just as bloodily, if not more – and with many more non-fatal casualities attendant.
Somehow the sniper’s evil and horrifying, and the car’s all right, if regrettably “unsafe”.
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The Nazis were evil if anything ever was; but so was and is polio.
You seem to think ranking disease with Nazism softens its evil.
My assertion was exactly the opposite. Once it gets that dark, it is that dark, and there is no further darkness.
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And as far as your blustery “nuff said”, well… Toby Keith, how’s that?
You be Toby Keith and I’ll be Natalie Maines.
Clearly not ’nuff said.
I had assumed that you would surely realise, once you thought about it again, that that to equate the specific intention of a political group to wipe out a whole race with the essentially random impact of an insentient phenomenon is comparing the darkness of the soul with the darkness of the night – they are not the same kind of thing at all.
But I was clearly wrong.
Chris W.-
Being as how the overall tenor of these N&C dealies is religion and its deleterious influence on all our lives and fortunes, I feel called to point out to you as clearly as I possibly can that the Judeo-Christian morality your argument is infused with proceeds from a fundamental regard of intent as chief determinant in the resolution of moral questions.
Your inability to see that intent is the only difference between pandemic disease and racially-motivated genocide is a very common failing.
My purpose is less intellectual than pragmatic, I’m afraid. We’re looking at the very distinct possibility of imminent human extinction, caused by people for whom there is a profound and fundamental difference netween causing that distinction by accident, and doing it on purpose.
Religion is what makes the difference there, for most people.
Destruction. Causing that destruction.
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I’ve said this before here, I think it’s problematic because its unorthodox for either side.
Nature doesn’t care about why things happen.
You can hide intentionally from a predator, and learn to disguise your lunch-like qualities, or you can do it by accident.
This is blasphemy.
This is one of the primary reasons most religions are anti-nature.
The problem is, most scientific rationalists seem to be anti-nature as well.
But just so there’s no confusion behind the rhetoric.
I’m not saying it’s OK what happened in Auschwitz, I’m saying there’s no difference in the long run if we accidentally blow ourselves to kingdom come, or if some desperate lunatic blows us all there in a suicide-bombing.
You’re the one who thinks making deaths by genocide and deaths by disease categorically similar is sacrilegious, not me.
I vote with nature, what happens happens; why it does is meaningless, except to lawyers and religious zealots, and their congregations.
1. If you knew me you wouldn’t even mention Judeo-Christian morality
2. It isn’t an inability. It is precisely intent that is the difference between the two. That was the point I was trying to make so I’m glad I did – even if you thought it was accidental.
Chris-
You can repudiate it until you’re blue in the face, but your huffy defense of the sanctity of the Holocaust against the moral-content-lessness of disease regardless of actual effect on the victims either way comes directly out of a Judeo-Christian moral context. The simplistic rebuttal that you yourself are not Judaic or Christian in your moral beliefs and stances, as your friends can testify I’m sure, is completely meaningless.
Your moral character is not an act of will – shaping it can be, but what you work with you were given, by the culture that raised you. Which is, and has been for centuries, Judeo-Christian.
“but your huffy defense of the sanctity of the Holocaust against the moral-content-lessness of disease regardless of actual effect on the victims either way comes directly out of a Judeo-Christian moral context.”
But the effect on victims IS irrelevant in considering whether something is evil. To say that a knife wielding thug who stabs someone is evil, whilst also maintaining that the knife itself is not evil is NOT Judeo Christian bias. It follows from how we define the word evil. Natural phenemenon are not good or evil, in a similar manner to the fact that Wednesday is neither green or red or any other colour (nor is it evil for that matter – Mondays now they ARE evil). Not all adjectives are relevant to all nouns. Evil and misfortune are not one and the same thing.
Chris/Chris/and Chris-
At great personal risk I attempt, one last time, to restate what I thought had been so simply expressed at least three times already.
To a human being, within the context of a family or other social group, including the species itself, a distinction between intent and accident is important.
To an organism, in the context of the world, intent and/or accident are completely irrelevant.
Results matter, nothing else even registers.
We are human beings, and, at the same time, we are organisms. Therein begins this confusion.
We’ve anthro-formed the planet, and thus have an easier time pretending our values are biological truths. But they aren’t.
A plague that killed us all would be in a category by itself. As would, or will, a nuclear war that killed us all.
Making a distinction between someone intentionally, or accidentally, causing that plague or that war is a purely human response; and for the most part it’s a by-product of a belief in an afterlife, or a non-local divinity. The perpetrator will see justice done, even if we’re not here anymore. That nonsense comes right out of the book. And infests even the more rational and atheistic thought.
Nature does not care if you have antibodies in your system. Nature doesn’t care if you live or die. This is why so many people hate the natural world.
Nature likes planets filled with rocks and freezing wind as much as jungles and forests full of bird song.
We make the distinctions; and because we have become, for this little while, the rulers of this particular world, we’re blind to the illusion we’ve cast on ourselves.
Evil and misortune are not the same things to you and your particular deities, but they are to the world you live in.
Nature still bats last, even if you think you’re playing basketball.
msg,
There isn’t any personal risk.
Repetition doesn’t make an assertion any truer than it was when it started out. Your assertions are not particularly ‘simply expressed,’ and they are also not argued, they’re only asserted and decorated.
“Making a distinction between someone intentionally, or accidentally, causing that plague or that war is a purely human response; and for the most part it’s a by-product of a belief in an afterlife, or a non-local divinity. The perpetrator will see justice done, even if we’re not here anymore. That nonsense comes right out of the book. And infests even the more rational and atheistic thought.”
That’s just pure assertion, and it’s not the smallest bit convincing, at least not to me. If you want to argue, then argue, don’t just keep announcing, and then getting personal when people don’t find your announcements convincing.
The risk is here, with me, the energy and time and consequent frustration. Ironic delivery. Sorry that wasn’t clear. These points aren’t as abstract to me as they maybe are to others. My contention is we’re so close to annihilation at the moment it may be more apt to call it imminent.
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The argument vs. assertion thing though, maybe because I don’t have any academic training in these modes…
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The family exists as a biological unit. That’s not an assertion.
That unit exists within a larger social unit, tribe, group, congregation, village, state, etc.
Not an assertion.
Those larger social units operate in a biological landscape that has no social framework around it.
Except to someone whose view of life is theistic.
Assertion, right? But does that need to be argued? It seems pretty obvious to me.
The theist view infantilizes the entire human experience, in the sense that motivation is held to be more key than effect.
Assertion, but in the context still obvious.
Part of that infantilized experience is the projection of the family context, with its artificial and semi-virtual reduction of the biological interface, onto the larger, a-social landscape.
For instance the child who accidently sets the house on fire is not treated the same as a child who intentionally burns the house down; and in the larger social context, the law distinguishes crimes by motive as well as effect, criminal negligence, manslaughter, murder in various degrees, etc.
But nature, the natural world, the biological landscape whose frame surrounds all that moral distinguishing, rewards and punishes purely on the basis of situational performance.
Assertion, and a little decoration, but there’s argument in there too, right?
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I could be wrong but I think all that’s in the posts I made above as well. Maybe not quite as simply drawn, but there.
“Those larger social units operate in a biological landscape that has no social framework around it.
Except to someone whose view of life is theistic.
Assertion, right? But does that need to be argued? It seems pretty obvious to me.
The theist view infantilizes the entire human experience, in the sense that motivation is held to be more key than effect.
Assertion, but in the context still obvious.”
Well, I don’t think any of these points are “obvious,” or correct for that matter. Not even close. It’s not just theists who believe in a larger social framework, for starters – the emphasis on society seems relatively important to Marxists. Anyone who’s ever paid any attention to human affairs has noticed the social aspect of human life, however different their conclusions about it may have been.
Nor is it intrinsically theistic to regard motivation as more important than effect. It is intrinsically MORAL to give more consideration to motivations, and of course, morality is not the same thing as theism. So on balance, I’d have to say that none of your assertions hold up, however obvious they may seem to you.
Phil
“The family exists as a biological unit. That’s not an assertion.”
Maybe and maybe not, but until you define your terms more clearly, it is an almost content-free statement.
I do not know in the least that the term “biological unit” means family. That may mean an atom to some, a nucleotide base to others, a genome to others still, an organism to the majority. In fact on that thought I would say that to call the family (nuclear or extended?) a biological unit is anything but axiomatic. (And axioms are the only thing one is truly justified in asserting). For most people a biological unit would be an organism.
“The argument vs. assertion thing though, maybe because I don’t have any academic training in these modes…”
That’s an elitist way of accusing other people of elitism ;-). No seriously, it doesn’t require academic training to know the difference between assertion and argument as well you must know.
There’s a haphazard distinction here between the various mechanisms of rhetoric and debate that seems really arbitrary to me, but I wondered if it’s just because I’m unfamiliar with the rules, as I said. This is all new for me, I’m not being facetious. I’d never participated in any form of written debate until about a year ago, online.
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“…That unit exists within a larger social unit, tribe, group, congregation, village, state, etc….” -me
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“…It’s not just theists who believe in a larger social framework, for starters – the emphasis on society seems relatively important to Marxists….” -Phil
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Family exists within society, society exists within a biological landscape, that theists see as God’s living room.
Not society doesn’t exist, or whatever it was you saw there. My point, as simply as I can state it, is that society exists within a non-societal framework, where biological success and failure, and not morality are all that matter.
That seems awful clear to me.
Maybe it’s the heat.
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“…The family exists as a biological unit….” -me
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“…I do not know in the least that the term “biological unit” means family….” -ChrisM
I’m sure someone somewhere can look at that and say where in the textbook it’s illustrated, it seems more specific than just the standard Straw Man argument.
You reverse the terms of my statement and then rebut the statement you created, which I never made.
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The real argument –
“But nature, the natural world, the biological landscape whose frame surrounds all that moral distinguishing, rewards and punishes purely on the basis of situational performance.”
-never gets addressed.
I’d be interested if it were.
I am reversing nothing. I am asking what the phrase “biological unit” means. I notice you didn’t address the point. So come on, what IS a “biological unit”?
If you have something in mind with the phrase, please share. If you cannot explain what you mean by “biological unit”, then perhaps its worth dropping the phrase. It means nothing to me, nothing to many, and if you fail to define it, probably nothing to you.
“There’s a haphazard distinction here between the various mechanisms of rhetoric and debate that seems really arbitrary to me”
Well there’s your problem. There is a big difference between assertion and argument. This is not a feature unique to written debate, or online debate. The distinction is not haphazard either. I guess until you grasp the difference between asseting and arguing, you are likely to find youself in disagreement with many people who do enage in critical thought.
As for debate and rhetoric; leave rhetoric to ad men, politicians and other people who are more interested in their point of view prevailing than in finding the truth. Rhetoric will be quickly spotted and shot down in flames eleswhere (like here).
Phil-
That’s much more comfortable for me, thank you.
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The original thread as I understood it was an exploration of the rates of survival in the death camps of Nazi Germany, and by extension in extreme adversity generally, that seemed to be tipped in favor of strong believers, religious or social/political.
Ophelia’s comment – “bloody nightmare” – that I took to mean that the downside of that survival advantage was the clenched grip of dogma and the suffering of unbelievers generally under the superior force of the believers, is what I’m generally working with, or trying to.
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We have these moral systems, say Christianity and/or Marxism. They both wish to extend their belief organization out onto the larger society, until that society is identical with their organization. As opposed to democratic pluralism.
So far they’re identical in most everything but dogma.
But eventually all these codes of moral choice will run into something, an individual or a group, that says essentially, “so what?”.
So what if it hurts you or someone else, it doesn’t hurt me. It benefits me.
Slavery works for the slaveholder. There’s a lot of profit in selling black-market drugs to addicts. So what if people are harmed by what I do?
Political/social theorists have only force as a reply to that.
“We’ll stop you and hurt you in return if you do that.”
That seems more biological than moral to me.
But theists, and this is the core of my argument, place another force, outside the biological arena and superior to it, in addition to a display of force identical to the political/social theorists. This is tactically beneficial, because when it’s effective it requires much less enforcement. Fear of God is an internal policeman.
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Ok. In this venue, we’re mostly all coming from a Judeo-Christian social background, however much our individual upbringings differed from the cultural norm.
One point I tried to make was that we’ve internalized a lot of the givens of that social background without conscious work.
Which means some of the outrage and a lot of the emotional response to various morally-charged situations is theistic in origin, even when the individual reacting is atheistic.
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“…that our moral sense results from being a conscious being who lives among other conscious beings…”
Aside from the complete lack, in that statement, of recognition of any kind of purpose in that “living among other…beings” other than living itself – that in fact we practice moral living in order to survive, in order to reproduce; and all our organizations, from the family home to the nation-state, proceed from that core of biological necessity – it’s absolutely true. And not just psychologically, but biologically.
We are a co-operative and gregarious species in order to survive, not so much as individuals but as a species. And that means of course, generation; which means children. Morality provides social cohesion which releases energy and resources that would otherwise be bound up in individual survival strategies. So that we, meaning us now and children yet to be, can further improve our chances for survival. Et cetera.
That moral sense isn’t “trumped by the workings of nature red in tooth and claw”, it is nature red in tooth and claw.
Look around you, man. We’ve killed everything that ever threatened us. Because we have a vastly superior force, not as individuals but as co-operative groups.
Pretending that morality is some enlightened refinement of the pack instinct in canids or “lower” primates is simply more human arrogance. It is a refinement, but it’s no more enlightened than a Tek-9 machine pistol is more enlightened than a cross-bow. Enlightenment in this context would require humility.
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Again Ophelia’s comment about “bloody nightmare”. The downside of that superiority is we are now in charge of our own evolutionary processes. The tools of change that gave us that power are now in our hands.
But instead of an equivalent wisdom to match that power, we display the blind bluster of a drunk. We’re stumbling around in a roomful of scared children, lords of all we survey and clueless, and viciously reactive.
A morality that has at its foundation the blessing of a deity that we created in our own image will no longer serve us as well as it has until now.
Just like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Orthodox Jew, just like the Pentecostal and the Trotskyite. All those belief systems will carry the believer through tribulation, better than scepticism ever will, but each of them will fail at some unique point.
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We need to believe in the truths of life. I don’t know how else to say that. The words we have, “nature” “the environment” have been bastardized and gutted of meaning.
It’s life, living, that should be at the heart of our moral codes, but isn’t.
Morality does matter in the animal kingdom, it is precisely that morality that we have violated, and hidden from, that we pretend doesn’t exist, that we lie to our children about, and whose consequences we ignore until they become overwhelming.
As they now have.