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MORALITY: And It's Longevity

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GodsGrace

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As I'm sure we are all aware,
there no longer seems to be a condition of absolute morals.
Subjectivity is what we have today - it's being taught in schools, philosophy, etc.
Our children seem to be growing without too much guidance these days.

Where do morals come from anyway?

Sam Harris, a world-known atheist, is a philosopher and a neuroscientist (whatever that is).
It's a scientist of the brain, but I'm not sure what their objective is.

Most probably it's materialism, with no hint of spirituality, thus he's an atheist.

He claims we don't need God to have morals.
He says that we humans could be good and be morally based even without God.

Could we be moral all on our own?
And who is to decide what is moral and what is not?
And how long would it last?
 
As I'm sure we are all aware,
there no longer seems to be a condition of absolute morals.
Subjectivity is what we have today - it's being taught in schools, philosophy, etc.
Our children seem to be growing without too much guidance these days.

Where do morals come from anyway?

Sam Harris, a world-known atheist, is a philosopher and a neuroscientist (whatever that is).
It's a scientist of the brain, but I'm not sure what their objective is.

Most probably it's materialism, with no hint of spirituality, thus he's an atheist.

He claims we don't need God to have morals.
He says that we humans could be good and be morally based even without God.

Could we be moral all on our own?
And who is to decide what is moral and what is not?
And how long would it last?
He with the most and biggest gun makes the morals...in a man's world.
Hitler was morally right, in a society crafted by Hitler.
Putin will seem morally right in a society crafted by Putin.
 
He with the most and biggest gun makes the morals...in a man's world.
Hitler was morally right, in a society crafted by Hitler.
Putin will seem morally right in a society crafted by Putin.
Agreed.
Harris says we have to learn to be moral even without God since it's this morality which will allow humankind to continue.

IOW, if we're not kind to each other, we will eventually die out just from fighting and war and famine, etc.

Harris is enjoying morality right now because we've been living in a society with God.
What if God disappears as some would like?
Will good morals continue?
 
Agreed.
Harris says we have to learn to be moral even without God since it's this morality which will allow humankind to continue.

IOW, if we're not kind to each other, we will eventually die out just from fighting and war and famine, etc.

Harris is enjoying morality right now because we've been living in a society with God.
What if God disappears as some would like?
Will good morals continue?
It isn't the "disappearance" of God that scares me.
It is the "erasure" of God that will be the undoing of the world.
 
I have a book called After Virue by the philosopher Alasdair McIntyre. I read it many years ago and started to write a summary of his main arguments, but never finished. But here is some of what I did write up.
My apologies for its length.

Western civilisation owes a huge debt to the philosophy of ancient Greece (Socrates, Plato & Aristotle) and to (Catholic) Christianity. This is true of the whole field of Morality. Today, according to Alasdair MacIntyre in “After Virtue”, the language of morality in our society is in a grave state of disorder. What we possess are fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance is derived. We possess indeed an imitation of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.

To understand this we need first to look at the concepts of morality laid down by Aristotle and how his scheme is modified by Christian concepts.
The moral scheme that Aristotle expounded had three elements:
1. man-as-he-happens-to-be (human nature in its untutored state).
2. man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his-telos (end).
3. the precepts of rational ethics for transforming state1 to state 2

Ethics therefore, in this view, presupposes some account of potentiality and act, some account of the essence of man as a rational element and above all some account of the human telos.

The precepts which enjoin the various virtues and prohibits the vices, which are their counterparts, instruct us how to move from the potentiality to act, how to realise our true nature and to reach our true end.

In a Christian context man-as-he-happens-to-be is fallen man and incorporates the concept of original sin. The precepts now have to be understood not only as teleological injunctions, but also as expressions of divinely ordained law and the concept of sin is added to the Aristotelian concept of error. The true end of man is more than the end of man in a Greek city state and can no longer be completely achieved in this world, but only in another. However the three stage scheme is still central.

After the Protestant reformation that swept northern Europe there was, by the eighteenth century, a secularisation and intellectualisation of society that became know as the Enlightenment. In this two important things happened; firstly the rejection of Aristotelian science, and along with it his system of ethics; secondly a rejection of religious thought. Reason became the “god” of the Enlightenment. Reason however is calculative; it can assess the truth of facts but nothing more. About ends it must be silent; it can have nothing to say about the ends of man. The Enlightenment therefore rejected the notion of a telos for man and in doing so left a moral scheme composing of only the first two elements of the three stage scheme. Their relationship then becomes unclear. The Enlightenment therefore had to provide another method for justifying a set of moral precepts. This, argues MacIntyre, it totally failed to do. Many schemes were tried by Kant (using pure reason), Kierkergaard (ethical choice), Mill (Utilitarianism), Moore & Stevenson (Emotivism), Neitzsche (subjective will) and many others.

Thus, MacIntyre argues, the removal of the concept of a telos – leaves the moral precepts hanging in the air. The eighteenth century (and later) moral philosophers engaged in an inevitably unsuccessful project - vis to find a rational basis for their moral beliefs in a particular understanding of human nature while inheriting a set of moral injunctions on the one hand and a conception of human nature on the other hand which had been expressly designed to be discrepant with each other.

In classical theism moral judgements are (were) both hypothetical and categorical in form.
Hypothetical in so far as they express a judgement as to what conduct would be teleologically appropriate for a human being. Categorical in so far as they reported the contents of the universal law commanded by God. So deprive them (moral judgements) of the hypothetical (teleological) character and of the categorical (divine law) character and what are they? Moral judgements lose any clear status and the sentences which express them lose any debatable meaning.

New contexts were needed in which to set a moral framework. As indicated above such attempts were made. One approach was to devise a new teleology which led to utilitarianism. Thus Bentham, Mill etc. suggested the attraction to pleasure and aversion to pain provided the telos. The second approach included all those attempts to follow Kant in grounding the rules in practical reason – Kant’s categorical imperative.

Another approach, that of Emotivism, is the doctrine that all evaluative judgements, and more specifically all moral judgements, are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, in so far as they are moral or evaluative in character. So C. L. Stevenson says that “This is good” means roughly the same as “I approve of this; do so as well”.

If we tell someone to “Do so-and-so” I may ask why? I can make a reply of the kind:
a) ‘because I wish it’. Here I have given the person addressed no reason to do what I command unless he/she independently possesses some reason for doing so e.g. I am your commanding officer, or you love me. In this case I have given you a reason.
b) ‘because it is your duty’, or ‘because it will give pleasure to the greatest number of people – I give a reason that appeals to some impersonal criteria.

MacIntyre argues that my basis for a given position is arbitrary. Therefore any expression to enjoin you to take my position is an expression of my will. But I cannot admit this so I try to appeal to the type b) argument.
{ Neitzsche and the will to power?}

To treat someone as an end is to offer them what I take to be good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, but leave them to evaluate those reasons. It is an appeal to impersonal criteria of the validity of which each rational agent must be his or her own judge.

By contrast, to treat someone else as a means is to seek to make him or her an instrument of my purposes by adducing whatever influences or considerations will in fact be effective on this or that occasion. If emotivism is true, this distinction is illusory. For evaluative utterance can in the end have no point or use but the expression of my own feelings or attitudes to others. I cannot genuinely appeal to impersonal criteria, for there are no impersonal criteria.
 
It isn't the "disappearance" of God that scares me.
It is the "erasure" of God that will be the undoing of the world.
What's the difference?
God is being removed from our society.
America was built on Christian ethics...
Now look.
Crosses removed,
Nativity scenes removed,
The 10 commandments removed from walls,
Religion not a part of Christmas, plays, etc.
Etc.
.
 
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