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

[John Clark]

On Jan 7, 2011, at 1:29 PM, Sondre Bjellås wrote:

> I don't see the problem with this moral example, and of course is #2 the worse one. In the first one, you are not inflicting death upon the single individual.

Yes you are, you're killing one man to save 5.

> In the second example, you are initiating physical force towards another human being,

And in the first example I am also initiating physical force by moving that switch, resulting in the death of a human being.

> The moral thing to do would allow the 5 people to die, while myself and the fatty survives.

If the end result of morality is that more people suffer and die then morality would have no point and there would be little reason to be moral.

> Moral values have to hold true to all contexts and not contradict each other

People like to say things like that, and it might be nice if it were so, but it has never been found to be even close to the truth. In reality moral values NEVER hold true in all contexts and ALWAYS contradict each other.

> Example: Is it morally right to use physical force towards other human beings if that will save some other human beings?

Well I can only speak for myself but I'd be willing to step on a innocent person's big toe if that saved another person's life.

> The moral truth of "you shall not initiate physical force" tells us that NO, we should not morally accept the killing of another human being. Not for two people, not for 5 people, not for thousand people and not even for a million people.

Arithmetic is one of the very few things that we know to be true and consistent, the idea that it's OK to use this true and consistent thing on trivial matters, like making change, but we must never use it on important matters, like morality, makes absolutely no sense to me. I think one person dying is bad, two people dying is worse and three is even worse.

  John K Clark


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