{"id":1386,"date":"2011-12-30T16:49:18","date_gmt":"2011-12-30T21:49:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=1386"},"modified":"2012-11-30T11:27:27","modified_gmt":"2012-11-30T16:27:27","slug":"human-approximations-of-morality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2011\/12\/human-approximations-of-morality.html","title":{"rendered":"Human Approximations of Morality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Adam Lee, author of Daylight Atheism, has just gotten into an argument with Peter Hitchens over Divine Command Theory. \u00a0Peter Hitchens contends:<\/p>\n

\u201cFor a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a nonhuman source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Adam responded in two posts, the first titled \u201cThere Is No Non-Human Moral Authority<\/a>\u201d and a second responding to comments Hitchens made in-thread<\/a>. I think<\/em> I disagree with both the guys in this argument, but I\u2019m a little worried that my dispute with Adam might be definitional, so let me try to lay out my position as clearly as possible (and with as many math analogies as I can). \u00a0Here\u2019s Adam\u2019s position:<\/p>\n

The fatal flaw in this position is that, contrary to your confident presumption, there is no non-human moral authority<\/em>. Every religious book is written, edited, and printed by humans. All moral opinions, interpretations, and proclamations are human opinions. If there were a huge, glowing set of tablets with commandments engraved on them that descended from the sky accompanied by angels blowing trumpets, and the choice was between following those or making up moral laws on our own, we\u2019d be having a very different debate; but there is no such thing. All moral laws are humanly produced. The question is which set of human-created laws we should follow and why.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I agree with Adam that there isn\u2019t a non-human agent we can consult on moral issues (no oracle or book of cheat codes), but I disagree strongly that all moral law flows from human opinion. \u00a0Human writings are attempts to describe and summarize moral obligation, just as mathematical theorems describe\u00a0relationships between transcendent objects\u00a0and biology gives good-enough approximations of how things work at the scale of cells, allowing us to ignore atoms and quantum whatsits. \u00a0All of these are human-constructed maps of territories that already exist and are more complex and detailed than we are up to dealing with on a day to day basis.<\/p>\n

(It might be a good idea to pop over to Less Wrong for a moment and check out\u00a0Yudkowsky\u2019s essay on confusing the map for the territory:\u00a0\u201cFallacies of Compression<\/a>\u201c).<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A Divine Agent isn\u2019t required to conceive of moral law as non-contingent on human descriptions. \u00a0Accepting this fact shouldn\u2019t be a problem for any atheist who happily accepts that the Pythagorean theorem was true before Pythagoras and would be true even if humans hadn\u2019t ever come down from the trees. \u00a0Just as mathematicians can refine and revise their descriptions of the properties of mathematical object, philosophers can revise their description of moral law.<\/p>\n

The upshot is that the question we\u2019re trying to answer is not<\/em> \u201cWhich set of human-created laws we should follow and why?\u201d but \u201cWhich set of human-created approximations to Moral Law<\/em> is most accurate, and how do we check?\u201d \u00a0There\u2019s a bonus question, too, which is \u201cHow fine-grained an approximation of Moral Law do I need to be able to choose actions correctly?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I stuck by Kantianism for a long while, and although my read of it had some serious, dangerous flaws<\/a>, \u201cTreat other people as ends-in-themselves\u201d is a pretty good big picture encapsulation of your moral obligations. \u00a0And a lot of the time, you don\u2019t need to do any intellectual heavy lifting to see your duty clear. \u00a0When you\u2019re not sure which people count as people<\/a> or you\u2019re not sure whether a certain act means treating someone as a mere means, then it\u2019s time to drill down and find or invent a more zoomed-in ethics. \u00a0But all of this is still an attempt to better describe something that already exists independent of human portraits of it.\u00a0 And you can play around with High Energy Theoretical Ethics<\/a> if you want to fill in some of the \u201cHere Be Dragons\u201d regions, but that level of detail won\u2019t be necessary for most folks.<\/p>\n

But whether your moral map is highly detailed or a set of broad principals, whether you\u2019re mostly on the money or dangerously misguided, and whether you think of it as universally binding or wholly subjective, it\u2019s still a human-made map of a human-independent territory.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adam Lee, author of Daylight Atheism, has just gotten into an argument with Peter Hitchens over Divine Command Theory. \u00a0Peter Hitchens contends: \u201cFor a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a nonhuman source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself.\u201d Adam […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,68],"tags":[149,147],"class_list":["post-1386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-epistemologyphilosophy","tag-map-and-territory","tag-whence-moral-law"],"yoast_head":"\nHuman Approximations of Morality<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Adam Lee, author of Daylight Atheism, has just gotten into an argument with Peter Hitchens over Divine Command Theory. \u00a0Peter Hitchens contends: "For a\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2011\/12\/human-approximations-of-morality.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Human Approximations of Morality\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Adam Lee, author of Daylight Atheism, has just gotten into an argument with Peter Hitchens over Divine Command Theory. \u00a0Peter Hitchens contends: "For a\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2011\/12\/human-approximations-of-morality.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Unequally Yoked\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-12-30T21:49:18+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2012-11-30T16:27:27+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.painting-canvas.co.uk\/images\/gallery\/Painting%20Reproduction\/Vermeer\/prepver023.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Leah Libresco\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Leah Libresco\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2011\/12\/human-approximations-of-morality.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2011\/12\/human-approximations-of-morality.html\",\"name\":\"Human Approximations of Morality\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2011-12-30T21:49:18+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2012-11-30T16:27:27+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/#\/schema\/person\/17ee17592b35b40040d5f5f7ea5ab464\"},\"description\":\"Adam Lee, author of Daylight Atheism, has just gotten into an argument with Peter Hitchens over Divine Command Theory. \u00a0Peter Hitchens contends: \\\"For a\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2011\/12\/human-approximations-of-morality.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2011\/12\/human-approximations-of-morality.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2011\/12\/human-approximations-of-morality.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Human Approximations of Morality\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/\",\"name\":\"Unequally Yoked\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/#\/schema\/person\/17ee17592b35b40040d5f5f7ea5ab464\",\"name\":\"Leah Libresco\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/20e1e6a3a94c4e7928687804a41d888d?s=96&d=mm&r=r\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/20e1e6a3a94c4e7928687804a41d888d?s=96&d=mm&r=r\",\"caption\":\"Leah Libresco\"},\"description\":\"Leah is the author of Arriving at Amen and Building the Benedict Option. 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