[ExI] Morality (was: atheists declare religions as scams)

John Clark jonkc at bellsouth.net
Fri Jan 7 16:11:22 UTC 2011


On Jan 7, 2011, at 7:39 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote:

> While the epistemic basis for religions is clearly bad, I doubt there is much science itself can say about the correctness of morality.

Yes, but there isn't much religion can say about morality either, except that it's bad because God says it's bad; and if that is the basis of morality then it makes the statement "God is good" circular and vacuous. 

> it is pretty easy to show how many moral systems are self-contradictory

I'd say that no moral system is entirely free from self contradiction. You probably already know about the moral thought experiments devised by Judith Jarvis Thomson:

1) A  trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track saving the lives of the five. Unfortunately there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch and kill one man or do nothing and just watch five people die ?

2) As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you - your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track killing him to save five people. Should you push the fat man over the edge or do nothing?

Almost everybody feels in their gut that the second scenario is much more questionable morally than the first, I do too, and yet really it's the same thing and the outcome is identical. The feeling that the second scenario is more evil than the first seems to hold true across all cultures; they even made slight variations of it involving canoes and crocodiles for south american indians in Amazonia and they felt that #2 was more evil too. So there most be some code of behavior built into our DNA and it really shouldn't be a surprise that it's not 100% consistent; Evolution would have gained little survival value perfecting it to that extent, it works good enough at producing group cohesion as it is. 

On Jan 6, 2011, at 6:33 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> 
> There is no contradiction in accepting a religion but rejecting its
> ancient beliefs as literal truth. Some theologians take the Bible
> about as seriously as classical scholars take the Iliad and the
> Odyssey; that is, they take it very seriously but they don't actually
> believe that any of the supernatural stuff happened.

True, but it seems to me that the minimum requirement for calling oneself religious is a belief in God, and if there is anybody who calls himself religious who doesn't think that God is benevolent I have yet to meet him. And that I maintain is inconsistent with Evolution, which can produce grand and beautiful things but only after eons of monstrous cruelty. 

  John K Clark 





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