I get tired of typing out the same question to a certain brand of theist every time I debate them, so I thought I’d start a thread about it so I can just direct them here in future.
I’ll start with a premise. There is such a thing as good and bad behaviour. There are moral acts and immoral acts; these things are, in my opinion, highly subjective, but they do exist.
Some theists will argue that this proves God exists – because morals have to have a source. Of course, this is flawed immediately because it discounts the possibility of evolved social behaviour, however we’ll continue to the question, which should be familiar to most atheists:
Are right and moral acts and deeds right and moral because God says that they’re right and moral, or does God say that right and moral deeds are right and moral because they are inherently right and moral?
Now to the point of the question:
Option one (right and moral acts and deeds are right and moral because God says that they’re right and moral) logically leads to the conclusion that God could say that anything is right and moral, including (for example) genocide, child rape, slavery, cruel and unusual punishment… Would anybody ever agree that these things are right and moral? I don’t think so – and yet they’re right there in the Bible – some of them as instructions from God himself. I guess that rules out option one! It also causes massive problems with option two: God’s proclamations (if you believe the Bible) are often not right and moral – in fact they’re often very wrong and very immoral. There’s more: If something is inherently right and moral, then surely we don’t need God to point it out to us – surely we’d have figured it out for ourselves anyway?
Now look at option three: Human societal norms are evolved and God has nothing to do with it. Doesn’t that rather neatly solve the problems with options one and two?
“Option one (right and moral acts and deeds are right and moral because God says that they’re right and moral) logically leads to the conclusion that God could say that anything is right and moral, including (for example) genocide, child rape, slavery, cruel and unusual punishment… Would anybody ever agree that these things are right and moral?” With some of the extremist within the religious communities, I would say some would see these as morally right but wouldn’t come out and say it. Look at some of the more extreme groups which have pushes underage marriage within the USA and the Middle East. I would say most who feel these are at times morally right do so based on religious beliefs.
“genocide, child rape, slavery, cruel and unusual punishment…
Would anybody ever agree that these things are right and moral? I don’t think so – and yet they’re right there in the Bible – some of them as instructions from God himself.”
The scary part is that fundamentalists do believe this. If the Bible says God said it, then it must be true. Ever heard a typical sermon about the the disobedience of Saul? I’ve observed several via Televangelists. They don’t project modern morality upon the story, wherein one would consider genocide immoral. No the problem with the disobedience of Saul, which apparently the believer should emulate, is that he did not follow the Lords command to the letter. The outrage is not that Saul killed every man, woman and child among the Amalekites (except one), along with most of their livestock. The problem, according to these preachers, is that the genocide was not complete, as the Lord had commanded. Saul had let the best of the livestock live and left the king alive. The latter oversight was immediately remedied by the venerable prophet Samuel who called the Amalekite king before him and hacked him to pieces with Saul’s sword. Obviously such preachers still believe obedience to the genocidal commands of the “Lord of Hosts” (god of war) is moral.
Fundamentalists, like most followers of the bible, pick and choose which parts god really meant. They freely violate the dietary laws which were very central to the cultural identity of the Jews and were followed by Jesus. They do not celebrate the passover even though this was at the heart of the last supper, instead substituting a tiny sliver of cracker and a sip of wine for the full passover ritual. They support capital punishment even though the bible has Jesus say that they should turn the other cheek. They openly judge others despite the admonition to “judge not lest ye be judged likewise”. I have to say that the bible is the best tool for defeating christian’s argument.
There is a fourth option (and I suspect there is a fifth and a sixth and a seventh option and so on…): That human societal norms actually are evolved, and still evolving at that, and God simply wants us to do our judging taking this fact into account. There is enough variety of intellectual interpretation in the history of theology to support it. It has nothing to do with the existence of God —not necessarily.
So, does that mean morality is whatever evolution defines it as? In that case, God doesn’t have a say in morals.
Of course she does; but like in any other intellectual topic concerning humans, in Morality too, there are no hard-and-fast solutions, recipes, formulas etc.. The premise of religious morality is simple: do not do unto others… you know, “The Golden Rule”. The rest, from dietary laws to marital regulations, to the question of slavery… are just commentary which changes shape and form according to the zeitgeist. I’m certainly aware that the modern orthodox view of religion has a far more rigid understanding of their own tradition, but it’s not my problem. In short, morality is about humans, and humans change. God being eternal and/or static does not even enter into it.
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is very flawed. It implies that all actions have the same effect across all people, and can be used to justify brutal judicial punishments or no prisons at all.
I am single at the moment, and if a random member of the opposite sex approached me and begun giving me a handjob, I would enjoy it(assuming she had reasonably clean hand).
I can think of some women who would not enjoy this, and some men as well.
I disagree. Like I said, religious tradition have nefer offered hard-and-fast solutions for questions of morality and that even includes the golden rule. It’s only a very basic axiom that leaves space for interpretation —as all good rules do. It is actually a desperate attempt for a common ground: having failed at finding it outside, it turns inwards and seeks the main principle of morality inside the individual. In this respect, yes, it is very a-theistic in the modern sense —as all good theology is.
Your take on it is a variation of Kant’s critic, which basically seeks a rigid, never-changing sets of rules. Sorry, but there aren’t any and we just have to live with the fact. (Surprise! Surprise! Morality is not Math!)
Interpretation is foolish, I’m sorry. You’re taking ancient knowledge from someone or something, and, instead of realizing that they were either wrong, inconclusive, or just didn’t have an opinion on the issue, you try to think about what they would say, when you should be using logic and human principles. Interpretation often results in coming to the decision YOU want, not what is actually right.
Why can’t morality be unchanging? “Don’t kill people” would never work as a moral principle, but that’s why we have things like moral relativism. There are no good moral rules, only principles.
There ARE moral absolutes. There is a right stance to every issue. We can’t know the right stance to every issue, but we can try to develop principles and exceptions(such as moral relativism) to come closer to these absolutes.
There is no need to be defeatist. Just because we can’t make morality an absolute science, it doesn’t mean we should rely on ancient rules that were founded out of terror for unruly citizens, or for simple gain. The goldren rule is simple because it was designed to convince the angry neanderthals of the day to calm down a little. It is extremely old, and does not fit modern situations or our advanced mental capacity compared to our ancient ancestors.
You will find that moral situations are nowhere near as hard if you drop outdated crap like the golden rule, and start using modern sources of morality. I know very well where you’re coming from, because I spent many sleepless nights trying to interpret biblical morality to fit modern situations. Its stressful because it doesn’t work.
Aren’t holy books supposed to be perfect guidance for all eternity? Saying that you need to change them, that sounds like blasphemy.
And interpretations are different for different people. Some people look at holy books and think, ‘A peaceful way to lead life.’
Others think, ‘Let’s kill all infidels.’
Who gets to choose which interpretations are right?
religious tradition have never offered hard-and-fast solutions for questions of morality.
I’ll have to disagree with you on that statement. The abrahamic religions have always claimed to have an absolute answers about morality based on their magic book of choice (or more accurately on what they decided said magic book say at the moment while insisting it’s a perfect and unchanging word of invisible sky daddy). Most of us can look at the way the buybull groups women with livestock rather then humans and the casual way that slaughtering whole towns is portrayed and see it as a window into the social norms of the bronze age middle east but there are some people out there who actually want to turn that into the law of the land.
I didn’t mean to post it so early…I hit enter and it posted the comment.
Still, continuing:
If I am a judge, and I am judging a man who raped a woman, should I use the golden rule? If I was the man, I would not want to go to jail for life, so should I release him? If I was the woman, I would want him to go to jail. Much more needs to be considered in this situation then just what I would want people to do for me.
So, lets summarize.
-The golden rule assumes that all people react to the same situations in the exact same way, which is extremely flawed
-The golden rule operates on utilitarianism, which, while its a start, we have more evolved philosophy now, such as moral relativism. The golden rule is from lesser evolved humans, certainly not from an omnipotent, omniscient being.
-The golden rule requires extreme interpretation, and can be used to justify good or evil in nearly any situation. Rather than logic, a follower of the golden rule subconsciously justifies what action they want to do based on how they interpret the golden rule(which, like you said, is typical of religious folk).
Morality is not hard. Making sweeping policies based on common morals, such as marital regulations, that’s a little harder.
If someone is reasonably empathetic, altruistic and kind, then they are rightfully(except by the religious) considered a good person. Of course, logic needs to go into the equation, in the form of moral relativism. Slavery? It depends on how much of a benefit is produced, coupled with how many slaves there are, and what kind of living conditions they have. Under this policy, southern slavery was not justified. Lots of slaves, horrible living conditions, and all it did was result in super-abundant wealth, they were happier than they were with less money, but not so much as to warrant slavery.
This isn’t hard. People try to make it sound hard to justify religion, like humans don’t have access to these things, so we need to call upon a (false) higher power to make the decision for us.
There are always hard and fast rules. Slavery is wrong. End of story. There are no compromises on this.
Saying that there aren’t any hard and fast rules is saying that God(like evolution) is making this stuff up as he goes along. In that case, morality has no inherent worth.
Oh God, I’m sorry, but this is so narrow-minded (of you two) —which is normal I guess, since you seem to have met with only the most superficial views of religious history and you are reacting to that, but Evangelical Christianity is hardly the only religious tradition in the world. I don’t live in US, I’m not even Christian and surely I’m not going to waste my time trying to simplify thousands of years of religious thought in a blog comment. Try to read something apart from second class religious critics like Dawkins before belittling a vastly complex and eclectic history of thougt.
All I’m saying is, most of what you wrote is irrelevant, in the sense that they could just as easily be argued, without hesitation, by a religious man too. “Who gets to choose which interpretations are right?”? Well, you do! That’s the whole point. Religion is not a set of rules inscribed on a stone or something —and it is a fairly recent (modern) development that we started to see it as such. Just like morality, it evolves, and it is more of an attitude rather than a judicial system designed to regulate every single aspect of human life.
Enough.
‘ “Who gets to choose which interpretations are right?”? Well, you do! ‘
This is a point I’ve already tried to make. Some interpretations of religion involve killing everybody who isn’t part of that religion. Should we respect this interpretation.
This has nothing to do with Dawkins; I have not read any of his books. I saw one documentary he did on faith schools in the UK, and I saw him in a talk, but my views have nothing to do with his. I notice that people often try to make accusations that a person listens to a particular popular person, and tries to discredit them(Somewhat of a reverse appeal to authority).
Again, interpretation of anything should never be the base of morality or a decision. This shows up quite often in the U.S, people debate endlessly about what our founders meant by saying certain things in the constitution, rather than using logic, with the constitution as a reference point to determine which policies to have and which not to.
The kind of religion you are describing is merely a roleplaying game. No religion that I know of claims to just be a general attitude to have. Buddhism doesn’t claim nearly as much as the others, but it still wants a big piece of your life. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they want it ALL. One has to ignore incredibly large portions of ANY holy book or teachings to follow a religion with the idea that its just an attitude. While Buddha doesn’t present his teachings as set in stone, most other religions do.
You’re basically taking a religion, then taking whatever parts away that you don’t like and leaving a human-patched concept of God in the mix, when you should be dumping it all and moving on with your life.
No one is closed minded. Your beliefs of God are much more attractive than my beliefs about him(which are non-existant). Unlike a fundamentalist, your beliefs require little commitment other than benevolence, which is something I already have. I have held beliefs similar to yours, and I eventually broke from them. You are the one that has a closed mind.
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“Religion is not a set of rules inscribed on a stone or something ”
The ten commandments were supposedly a set of rules inscribed on a stone. Just sayin’.
“…belittling a vastly complex and eclectic history of thougt.”
Ah yes – the old “but there are complex theological arguments” position. Either state them or shut up. I’m sick of hearing this in opposition to atheists. Not once have I seen it followed up with the alleged complex theology that actually supports the position being taken.
“…surely I’m not going to waste my time trying to simplify thousands of years of religious thought in a blog comment.”
Case and point.
“Religion is not a set of rules inscribed on a stone or something…”
Just so you know, saying that religion is not something that most modern religious people say it is, is not a particularly strong argument.
Slavery in degrees is obviously not wrong, or at least not to the degree that the modern American consumer is as outraged as they should be. They want cheap goods, cheap goods come from sweatshops in China. I don’t see a fundamental difference between employing slaves and exploiting cheap labor in other countries. Economically, they appear to be willing to do the work (as opposed to not having jobs at all), but I also don’t see much difference between being exploited by their employers and African chiefs selling people to go work in America. This goes for the conditions of the migrant workers as well. It is simply a matter of economics that certain labor is more cheaply done by people who will do it for a lot less and are not protected by our government about their conditions, otherwise Americans would have those jobs. I also think it is …. inconsistent to take issue with illegal immigrants taking jobs Americans won’t do (for the low pay and poor conditions) simply for the fact that the work needs to be done on site while sending loads of work to be processed and manufactured in other countries for similar low wages and poor conditions. It is a similar constraint on the business owners to cut costs by hiring outside of the legal American pool of available workers, exploitation very similar to owning slaves.
That’s not even going into some legal American working conditions – just about everyone I know has some experience with conditions and pay below what we think is fair, but take those jobs just to get by, to eat and have shelter. If those conditions and pay were unacceptable to an American but within the law, what are they spending their wages on, their low but acceptable wages, to buy things made by workers even worse off just so we can afford things. If produced by American workers, we could not normally afford on a low but acceptably legal wage the many things we need and want, but we would not want to trade places with the people who make them. To most people, hiring children is slavery; they should be in school. To only some people, animals on a farm are enslaved until slaughter just so people can eat – that is a line drawn only by some people; but we used to hire children, and we still exploit them by buying goods made in other countries where it’s not illegal to send them to work, but categorize animals differently, to the point where it’s offensive to some people to care about the welfare of animals, to bring it to their attention. We are not there yet, we still don’t have a handle on caring about all the people.
So I can’t necessarily say slavery is morally wrong, or we would all be outraged by our consumerism, we would look our material goods in disgust. We feel morally ok between a rock and a hard place (sort of). We work hard for our money, so we deserve goods and luxury items at the expense of workers we try not to think about, whose conditions and pay we would not agree to ourselves. We’re not personally whipping them! We’re not in charge of the laws over there! So it’s ok. Switch that to a migrant worker, who is in our land, taking jobs we can’t afford to take ourselves – they wouldn’t have jobs if the employers did not hire them in the first place, and who cannot afford to compete in the market without them and the poor pay and conditions vs. legal conditions for legal American citizens.
We are in the business of looking away from that, ignoring something (in my mind) very similar to slavery.
Kodie, I agree with your point that todays capitalism has created a class of people that could be described as ‘wage slaves’, where their options are to live in abject poverty, or live slightly better but have to work in dangerous, tedious or extremely difficult work. There is a sliding scale, where intimidation by the company, community, and sometimes even by the local government, can make it difficult for people to leave place they are working. We need to be careful using the term slavery. The line is crossed from abusive capitalism into real slavery when humans are bought and sold, and held under pain of death if they try to flee. It’s important to keep those distinctions.
Abusive capitalism may seem morally reprehensible, but there is a strong argument that those nations would be worse off without those industries. Remember that prior to industrialization, life spans were much shorter, disease was far more widespread, and child mortality was probably as high as one in five.
Most of the people in these really shitty jobs have chosen to be there. It’s better than the life they might have had without the NiCad battery factory, or the copper mine in Chile. These jobs are the price they pay to bring their communities into the modern world. Our ancestors paid that price, and we reap the benefits. This is a price people around the world are willing to pay to help their kids get a step up. (China is a perfect example, they are now exporting factory jobs to other countries)
Now, im not making these arguments as an excuse for abuse. I think we, as the wealthiest people on Earth, have a responsibility to make sure that we spend our money with a consciousness of it’s effect in the world. We need to stop abuses of people, and we need to make sure the factories are safe, pollution free, and that they give back to the communities where they are built.
That’s pretty much why I stated it as degrees of slavery. I am not above acting with justifications to purchase items I don’t really need at the cost of someone else’s true freedom, and I think such an ideal is presently impossible. What in our global history would have been accomplished without the enslavement of others? Can we all say we would rather live in that world now? We would rather do away with slavery now as it is unnecessary and inhumane, and yet as you state, it is necessary for some societies to employ some form of it in order to progress economically.
I am speaking as an American, lifelong middle-class-ish, who has taken jobs in dumps because I had to but would rather not have had to, I have had working conditions I think were beneath the average, or considered unacceptable to most of my peers, and yet within the legality, and most probably better than is still legal. While I don’t necessarily consider it slavery, it gives me an inkling that to have much worse conditions is intolerably close, and I have on one hand a lot of pity for anyone with the lack of choices and laws which would permit them to work at least as well as I have, and on the other hand, a typical American attitude that it’s ok as long as I’m not directly whipping anyone, I mean, I’m caught in that trap of needing things to be affordable, and not thinking too hard where those things come from and the conditions of the people who made them available to me cheaply. In this perspective, I also need things I don’t need, and don’t think too hard about people doing without, either.
I guess what I’m saying is we did away with slavery in the US, and so on one side is slavery was ok and suddenly it’s unjust and immoral, and a shameful period of our history, and always immoral and wrong. I don’t mean to toss around the word “slavery” casually but we tend to prefer to be blind to the conditions others work in. The illegal migrant workers are not to blame for enslaving themselves to poor conditions and low pay – the demand for the goods brought to us by their employers at a lower price than their competitors is, or else legal American citizens would have taken those jobs, and this is still something we tend to be able to live with, or blame the wrong people. If conditions weren’t an improvement for them, they wouldn’t be attracted to it either, so their bargain is to be exploited. Again, my perspective is from a generally spoiled American with some experience in intolerable (by some American standards) working conditions, considering how low those standards actually go and remain legal, and once again, considering how much lower those standards all but disappear just to move merchandise and keep our economy afloat. The process is still one most people would prefer to ignore, and generally do, all the while saying things like ‘slavery is obviously immoral and wrong’ because it seems like we’ve superficially gotten over the necessity of demeaning people at the cheapest prices possible, while at the same times, undervalued as legally as possible in many areas of American labor to the point that we cannot do but to take advantage of it anyway. It’s a matter of degrees – we are willing to and prefer to live this way, justify it if confronted with facts, and consider ourselves moral and righteous.
I generally compare this outsource of manufacturing as Thing 1: it is out of our legal boundaries so we don’t have a say in their culture and laws, so it’s ok to take advantage if that’s how they like to be (but we wouldn’t), and illegal immigrant jobs as Thing 2: jobs we would outsource if we could, but which need to be done on site, inside the US. I don’t know why we suppose the process is different or the justification of not hiring Americans legally is different. An employer cannot hire Americans to work as cheaply as Chinese to manufacture their goods; and employer cannot hire Americans to work as cheaply as Mexicans to perform the work they hire them to do. Or else they would have even less. Americans are too expensive because we have higher work standards by law. Lower than that is intolerable. It is not just a backwards country trying to make economic progress in a global economy – are we helping them or exploiting them? We are part of it, we are advanced by it, or we wouldn’t do it.
The devil is always in the details.
We can start by agreeing that slavery is wrong, and end up finding that we don’t exactly agree on what slavery is. Eventually it all comes down to semantics, and the fact that our brains seem to be very good at dealing with categories that we cannot precisely define.
In effect we have regressed from debating the definition of ethical to the definition of slavery. And I guess next we could move to the definition of coercion. At the one extreme we have physical force used a person leaving (which is definitely slavery), and at the other end we have more subtle social and psychological cohesion which makes you feel guilty about leaving or makes you not want to leave …
If you want to strain the point every one of us could be seen as a slave simply by being part of a society that prevents us form being self sufficient.
In the end we get down to the difference between theory and practice. In theory there are simple rules that govern everything. In practice this never works. Enforcing the letter of the law leads to just as many absurd situations as too much judicial discretion does.
That was my point about using caution with the word ‘slavery’. It shouldn’t be diluted by including people who can walk away from a job. It might mean they are faced with crushing poverty, or need to relocate to survive. It’s a word that should only be applied to people who are bought and sold as property, and held against their will.
Not only are our social systems evolving but so is “god”, not because he has any physical reality but rather because as we change, what we need from a “god” changes as well. Primitive people, hunter/gatherer groups, saw many gods in the forces of nature, both good and bad. As we became tribal nomadic people we needed different things and thus Judaism evolved. When we began living in villages and towns with members of other groups around us we needed yet another god and thus we have Jesus. Arab peoples saw their civilization evolve and so Allah was invented. I usually tell people that god’s are used as a tool to explain those things that the technology of the day cannot. The answers are simplistic and magic based which leads to conflicts when they butt up against new discoveries. Their first answer is to suppress and villify but over time they find a way to accept it into their belief system. It happened with Gallileo and the heliocentric solar system theory. Over time this was accepted and eventually they will find a way to wrap their beliefs around evolution and the big bang or new religions will become accepted or new religions will spring up that do. Of course many will choose a non-theistic belief system and join us..
But the only reason you can see that God’s commands are often not right and moral is because of the innate moral sense God has placed within you! :-7
Nice irony emoticon. Can I borrow it?:-7
I have to be honest. I had to look it up. I have Note Tab Pro (a text editor, in case you’re not familiar with it) and there’s a tab with standard smileys.
Thx. This is the only one I’ve seen that I would actually use. I hate the smileys.
I’m not crazy about them either. You should be able to express yourself such that attitudes like irony are obvious. On the other hand, we all know how easily some people misconstrue even the obvious, especially when it comes to writing. And, I’ll admit, I don’t always convey my thoughts as well as I could.
It seems very clear to me that our morality is defined by the society we live in. What was immoral in 1940 is not immoral today.
Creating meaning from nothing is classic denialism. Telling yourself lies over and over again doesn’t make them true. And asking unanswerable questions that reaffirm the lies you believe doesn’t make them true either.
The modern religions that supposedly define our morality ave been around roughly 3000 years. Just 300 years ago slavery, domestic abuse, and public executions were common and accepted by the public; likely under the umbrella of religious rights/morality.
Supposedly, if religion defined our morality, it would have remained constant for those 3000 years, but it clearly has not.
Deacon Duncan discusses this point (and others) in his analysis of C.S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity. Here’s a link to the chapter 4 section (from which you can easily find the rest): http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/2010/09/19/xfiles-weekend-toxic-faith/#more-1470
On the rare occasions I get asked “how can you be good without God?” I usually answer “with all the things that God’s got up to over the years, how can you be good with him?”.
The Hitchens brothers have recently debated over a similar question, can civilization survive without god? Anyone want to guess which side was Christopher Hitchens on?
No mention of Sam Harris’ new book? (there is now… heehee)
I hope to see him on his book tour. My fav reason he has a new book is there should be new debates and fox news appearances. I can’t get enough of it!
If morals come from god, does that mean that chimps are close to god? because if you look at many ape societies its obvious that they have evolved their own moral rules. Chimps who steal food, or do not share food, with the group are alienated and in the long run suffer the consequences. Clearly social pressure keeps chimps in line. it has nothing to do with a chimp god.
Acts are right or wrong, moral or immoral, based upon their consequences in the real world. I discount entirely metaphysical consequences. I include effects on future generations, and on non-human life forms in my evaluation. As a mammal, I can encounter many situations where what is good for the survival of my offspring is not what is good for me immediately, or for the society I currently live in.
I really disagree that moral acts are real, and exist by themselves out of the context of the society that they exist in.
There isn’t a single moral act that we consider reprehensible, that another society considered perfectly acceptable.
Murder? That one is so easy. There are plenty of societies that held murder as an honorable practice. The Aztecs and their blood sacrifices, all of the cultures that believe in honor killings, and my favorite example, the Spartans. You wouldn’t be considered a man until you murdered someone.
Pedophilia? The obvious example is the Muslims, who consider Mohammad’s marriage to Aisha a perfectly moral act. The Greeks were well known for using young male slaves for sex. Im sure there are countless other examples.
Theft? There are cultures who lack the idea of private property, that alone precludes the idea of theft. Even today were seeing a greying of this basic concept of ‘don’t take other peoples shit’ in the Peer 2 Peer file sharing. Theft is very rarely a black and white, right or wrong concept.
I would challenge anyone to describe an act that we consider reprehensible, that hasn’t been considered perfectly moral by another human society.
“Even today were seeing a greying of this basic concept of ‘don’t take other peoples shit’ in the Peer 2 Peer file sharing.”
Sorry. File sharing is not theft. It IS (can be) copyright infringement, but it is entirely different from theft.
For theft to occur, someone must take something from someone else. If Person A steals a car from person B, person A now has no car, while person B has one. In file sharing, when you download a song, you get an exact replica of the original song and no one loses anything (apart from the POTENTIAL sale of that song, but that is debatable).
***
But I agree that morals are often not a universal, binary, black and white concept. My opinion is that they are an unwritten contract created by societies as they grow larger and larger to try to keep the society running smoothly. People get together and say: “look, we can’t get anything done if we keep doing x,y and z. Let’s all agree no to do that, ok?”. These unwritten rules eventually become so entrenched in peoples minds that they are eventually coded into laws.
Since each village, city, or group evolved under several different constraints, these rules obviously only make sense to them, in their own context. As several of these smaller groups start gathering together, incompatibilities between these rule are inevitable. But societies have been able (more or less) to find a common ground, and settle these differences of opinion in a peaceful manner (even if that means reexamining their own moral codes). This is probably the reason why, for example, it is (almost) universally accepted that killing and theft people is bad.
This “evolution” of morals kind of “proves” that god has no hand in this. Humans (and some animals apparently) are perfectly capable of deciding what is right and what is wrong and to adapt those concepts to the ever shifting environment they live in.
This is a perfect example of how morality evolves and changes. Copyright law was created to protect peoples intellectual property. It’s not the physical media that the idea is printed on that has value (whether its paper, a CD, or your hard drive), but the content.
Laws are just codified morals. Our current law says that intellectual property cannot be transfered without the consent of the owner of the property. Thus file sharing is illegal, and by definition amoral.
Since morals are subjective, and flexible, we are seeing a shift in that morality. People like you don’t see any problem with file sharing. People like the RIAA have a big problem with it. As our society moves forward, we will resolve this issue, and a new morality will come out of it. We are just living through a period where we are testing the morality of Intellectual Property.
This is a perfect example of how morality evolves and changes. Copyright law was created to protect peoples intellectual property. It’s not the physical media that the idea is printed on that has value (whether its paper, a CD, or your hard drive), but the content.
There is another way to look at this example that yields a different conclusion.
The notion that the content and not the medium is the store of value is actually really only true for new media; prior to the invention of digital duplication, the costs of production for any given unit of content were not trivial. In fact, the divorce of content from media has exposed several latent ambiguities in the law up to that point regarding particularly how content licenses operate; time shifting (particularly of broadcast media), media shifting (CD to MP3, for example), the extent of fair use and private sharing, all tolerable ambiguities in a regime where each of these activities had an intrinsic cost, became less tolerable to the license issuer when that cost disappeared. Concomitantly, these changes in cost made engaging in these activities more worthwhile for the use-license holder, since the opportunity cost for engaging in them all but disappeared.
So perhaps what we are experiencing is not a change in moral values, but a change in circumstance under which the moral rules apply.
The cost of production is far from trivial for much of the pirated material. The cost of producing movies can run into the hundreds of millions, video games take huge teams of programmers and artists, even something as simple as a book can sometimes represent an entire year of a mans life. I wouldn’t count any of those costs as trivial.
I think you meant the cost of distribution wasn’t trivial. It was expensive to print, distribute, and market movies, games, books, and music. Today it is virtually free. What I find interesting is that the cost of the medium has been just been shifted, not eliminated. Once we get this digital content, we need a device to use it. So where people used to own large expensive libraries of content, they now own multiple expensive devices on which to use that content (computers, ipads, mp3 players, phones, kindles, netbooks, etc). The distribution costs have just been shifted onto the consumer.
Music is a special case, and I like to think of it as separate from other digital piracy issues. Most people tend to think of music as free because of radio, tv, youtube, and many other places that artists allow their content to be distributed with no direct charge. That part of our culture has led people to think that the music should be free on the internet too. Musicians can then charge for live performances and merchandise to monetize their endeavors.
Those who produce movies, books and games have a huge cost that can only be recouped by directly selling that product. Every pirated copy is a loss of revenue for them.
As far as morality, the things that we place value on, and how we value them, is as much a part of morality as how we treat each other. I think it’s very interesting that people with spend thousands on the hardware I mentioned above, but they wont spend $3.00 to watch a movie.
Im not making a moral judgment, since I’m a moral relativist. I just notice a big difference between the value the younger generation places on intellectual property than my generation did. For better or worse, file sharing and the loss of control over intellectual property is here to stay. The sooner we adapt to it, the better.
Good catch, I meant the cost of reproduction, not the cost of production.
I would point out, though, on the matter of production cost, that cost of production does not translate in any way to value of product; a bad movie that cost a hundred million to make is still bad, and likely to be valued poorly in the market (never mind lacking in aesthetic or intellectual value imputed by consumers and critics).
Those who produce movies, books and games have a huge cost that can only be recouped by directly selling that product. Every pirated copy is a loss of revenue for them.
This point in particular is extremely problematic. Not only does this not seem to be true for many media types in practice, but it seems that there are good theoretical economic reasons why it tends not to be so. Probably the only media type where it is unambiguously true is commercial computer games, and even there there are complications (since value added by users via support communities, modding, and the like does not necessarily correlate to purchase).
There was a pretty broad-range discussion over on the forums a couple of months ago on issues of piracy, theft, and morality. May be worth a gander.
Cool, thanks. Ill dig through that post. I’ve been talking and learning quite a bit about intellectual property rights. It’s an exciting time to be alive. Humanity is changing faster than it ever has before.
It’s an exciting time to be alive. Humanity is changing faster than it ever has before.
I’ll second that.
I have to agree with the claim that morality is an evolved concept. Furthermore, lot’s of credence is warranted to the socially evolved claim as well, as obviously different cultures would otherwise have nearly identical moral principles. The melding of these two thoughts seems the most reasonable outcome: We simply evolved moral axioms for which different societies have chosen to apply them differently. Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist, wrote an article on this how we can evolve morality and yet have different moral views at the same time. The article does a fantastic job explicating the general ideas behind the concept:
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/The%20Moral%20Instinct%20-%20New%20York%20Times.htm
(Thanks to, I think, Nox who originally shared this in one of the forums.)
Another solution, option four, is that the written reports (in the bible) of Yahweh’s unsavoury proclamations are incorrect, and Yahweh did not actually order genocide, slavery, etc.
Which immediately raises the question, why would an omni-omni deity stand for being blamed for stuff it did not do, in its own propaganda piece no less?
For the same reason that it allows all other falsehoods to remain. What is that reason? I don’t know.
The most parsimonious explanation is that the deity in question does not exist. All the other explanations, while possible in principle, tend to fail this test by being (by necessity) rather convoluted.
Yes, I agree that that is the most parsimonious explanation. I was noting that there are other options that the three in the OP.
Fair enough.
The late Arthur C. Clarke wrote:
“The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the
hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable — even
necessary — that may have been in enforcing good behavior on
primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive.
Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sancti-
monious nitwits are calling for a rerturn to morals based on
superstition.” (from Clarke’s article “Credo” which appeared
in Clifton Faidman, ed., Living Philosophies)
I may be splitting hairs but I would have preferred “revealed
relgion” instead of simply religion (by “revealed religion” I
mean “a religion founded primarily on the revelations of a
capital G God to humanity; generally, though not exclusively,
through the vehicle of a prophet, and said revelations having
occured in historic, as opposed to mythic, times or arenas). For
more than any of the other myriad systems of organized
supernaturalism, it is the “revealed religions” that seem to
have really grabbed the moral bull by the balls and, by
temperament and inclination, have consistently sought to wrest
the moral imperium away from those previously and
traditionally responsible in whatever new mileu they develop
or insinuate themselves.
In the West, for the most part, it was for centuries the
purview of philosophy and philosophers to explore and inform
what was the moral good for a particular cuture (though,
obviously, this wasn’t their only purview). Moral absolutes
were rarely espoused, and even then were generally
distrusted and almost invariablly discarded or declawed at
some future point. The purview of supernaturalism, on the
other hand, was mostly the processes of bargaining with and
propitiating the gods and hoping for a wee little peek into the
future.
From a pragmatic point of view, philosophers, for the
most part, have traditionally been multiple disciplinarians and,
by their general nature, avid observers of the human condition.
The boundaries of their inquiries were limited only by their own
reason and imagination, yet new doors could always be opened by
new discoveries in other disciplines. And while often
supernaturalists in their own right, it was not to the gods that
they sought how to harmonize and maintain a just (moral) society.
But those supernatural systems that are hog tied by their own
holy writ are compelled to stick to their official stories as long
as is humanly possible, or at least as long as their flocks (their
bread and butter) can abide it. The humiliation for Evangelicals
and such, post-Skopes, was too much to bear, resulting in a virtual
hibernation for some decades. Yet they have come back pretty
strong under the impetus of newly perceived affronts to God and the
idea that this bogey called Secular Humanism was encroaching into
their very personal space. And now, of course, they’re attempting to
redefine science with their various creationist models, and doing a
pretty good job of mucking up educational standards, school board by
school board. And I get the sense that they really don’t care about
the dumbing of American students since the whole idea is to be
taken seriously again (as a viable supernatural system) and save
more souls for Jesus before the always imminent Apocalypse which,
by their thinking, renders moot a student’s biology scores…. just not
a high priority. For most Evangelicals the highest moral good next to
gaining converts is to protect the holy writ from the appearance of
internal contradiction and outside insinuations of lost relevance.
When we get right down to it, however, there really is no public
debate in America informed by philosophic tradition. Not that I’m
aware of. It seems to me that most Americans, including most
ex-Xians, agnostics and atheists, are, like it or not, shaped in their
moral standards more so by Xian values — especially the Jesus
wisdom and moral teachings — than any other sources. If you were
born and raised in America you are shaped by our cultural umvelt.
But on the bright side, if you see it as such, remember the recent
Pew Research survey that suggests, to me at any rate, that ex-Xians,
agnostics and atheists are almost always more cuturally and
philosophically well rounded than those supernaturally oriented.
Thomas Urashi
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