As someone who has spent a lot of time with religious conservatives, I’ve heard the sort of argument given by Robertson many times before. And they use it as an actual argument used against nihilism, which they tend to think follows directly from atheism. So Scott is completely right to address it as such.
I think Robertson conflates the two because he (and others like him) can’t really imagine a coherent non-arbitrary atheist moral realist theory. Can anyone here give a good example of one that couldn’t include what the murderer he depicts seems to believe?
What does “non-arbitrary” mean, and why is it a virtue? More, why does Robertson’s religion have this property, when plainly no moral claims can logically follow from the existence of some deity unless we start by assuming a connection?
What I meant is that you could easily just define your ethics to include by definition “murder is bad” and it’d satisfy all of the other criteria (assuming you could coherently define murder). But if I imagine myself telling Robertson (or somone similar) that, they’d ask how I came up with that rule and why someone else couldn’t just come up with the opposite rule “murder is good” and so it was just an arbitrary choice on my part.
When Lovecraft invented the blind idiot god Azathoth (as the human narrator calls it), he was likely just taking the Old Catholic/Aristotelian view of God and imagining what that might look like given the universe we live in. Azathoth maintains existence by sitting at its center surrounded by vast demonic dancers. There’s a mediator, here called Nyarlathotep rather than Jesus or the Pope, who claims to somehow be doing Azathoth’s will when he told humans to murder each other.
I mention this because we would not consider N’s commands morally binding, even in that scenario. We consider hypothetical deities moral or immoral based on whether or not they agree with “arbitrary” rules like not hurting people unnecessarily, not the other way around. Nothing else in the ‘philosophical’ account of God actually has moral significance. Nor can it provide a foundation for the claims that it sneakily assumes.
So one big reason why I look down on Robertson’s argument is that the charge he makes against atheists doesn’t distinguish theism from atheism.
We consider hypothetical deities moral or immoral based on whether or not they agree with “arbitrary” rules like not hurting people unnecessarily, not the other way around.
Some religious traditions disagree. There are, in fact, people who believe God is by definition good and therefore any known commandment of God is good if we trust its divine status, because our own moral sense is fallible but God is not.
How about moral realist consequentialism? Or a moral realist deontology with defeasible rules like a prohibition on murdering? These can certainly be coherent. I’m not sure what you require them to be non-arbitrary, but one case for consequentialism’s being non-arbitrary would be that it is based on a direct acquaintance with or perception of the badness of pain and goodness of happiness. (I find this case plausible.) For a paper on this, see http://philpapers.org/archive/SINTEA-3.pdf
Why does Robertson, or anyone else, insist on moral realism? And what exactly does he mean by it?
There seem to be different usages of “moral realism”, which is confusing. The main two are:
Morals are an objective property of the universe, or possibly of mathematics (e.g. game theoretic cooperation), which can be deduced and agreed on, even separately from purely human concerns and attributes. So we can speak of objective morals. And if one believes that humans are typical of (evolved) intelligences, and that evolution removes behavior that is self-destructive or unstable, it’s likely that common human morals are somewhat correlated with these universal morals.
Humans are very homogenous compared to all possible intelligent agents. Human moral beliefs, intuitions and actions are more alike than they are different. This shared core is objective or “real” in the sense that it is independent of any particular human or even any particular human culture. So we can speak of objective human!morals.
Well, Robertson insists on moral realism because he is a believing Christian and Christianity is rather insistent about it—specifically in the sense of your first usage case.
I haven’t seen anyone call the second case “moral realism” outside of the LW context.
Well, Robertson insists on moral realism because he is a believing Christian and Christianity is rather insistent about it
When stated like that, it’s clearly circular. Is he saying that his moral beliefs are better because they’re more like his moral beliefs than other, dissimilar beliefs?
No, when a moral realist says his beliefs are better, he means they are better because they are true.
Under moral realism morality is like physics—that’s just how the universe is constructed and the criterion for truth is matching the territory (reality for physics and God’s will for Christianity).
In this system, do morals have a separate status from other divine commandments and laws? What is the definition of the category “morals”, if the only way to discover them is to study divine revelation, and not by introspection?
do morals have a separate status from other divine commandments and laws?
In the same way the laws of physics have a separate status from divine commandments like “Though shall not stick a fork into an active electric outlet”.
What is the definition of the category “morals”
What God likes or doesn’t like. Alternatively, what gets you closer to heaven or to hell.
That sounds to me like there isn’t a difference between morals and other commandments. If sticking a fork into a socket is a divine commandment, then following it is liked by God (God likes people to follow commandments), and it brings you closer to Heaven (God lets people into Heaven if they follow commandments).
If the fork-and-socket commandment didn’t bring you closer to heaven or hell, then it wouldn’t be a commandment, because breaking it wouldn’t be a sin.
Morals are the underlying unreachable (for mortals) perfection. Commandments are heuristics for getting closer.
If morality is like physics, commandments are like engineering
And don’t think contemporary engineering with calculators, simulations, etc. Think medieval engineering, like building cathedrals—you don’t necessarily understand why things work this way, but you know that the three people before you who tried to do it another way had their walls collapse.
Well the fact that it appears to be impossible to get two LessWrongers to agree on whether a given moral theory is coherent and non-arbitrary is not encouraging in that regard.
As written, this implies that every LWer holds a different moral theory, which seems obviously false. A better phrasing might be, “There does not appear to be a majority position on morality on LW.”
Also, talking about only LWers seems a bit narrow. I would have gone for “moral philosophers in general”, actually.
But a significant number of atheists are nihilists and relativist, and the reasons seem to be the same...they can’t imagine naturalized objective ethics. And the common problem is stopping at personal incredulity rather than researching what anyone else has come up with. Show me the kind of atheists who is a moral nihilist, and I’ll show you the kind of atheist who disdains philosophy.
As someone who has spent a lot of time with religious conservatives, I’ve heard the sort of argument given by Robertson many times before. And they use it as an actual argument used against nihilism, which they tend to think follows directly from atheism. So Scott is completely right to address it as such.
I think Robertson conflates the two because he (and others like him) can’t really imagine a coherent non-arbitrary atheist moral realist theory. Can anyone here give a good example of one that couldn’t include what the murderer he depicts seems to believe?
What does “non-arbitrary” mean, and why is it a virtue? More, why does Robertson’s religion have this property, when plainly no moral claims can logically follow from the existence of some deity unless we start by assuming a connection?
What I meant is that you could easily just define your ethics to include by definition “murder is bad” and it’d satisfy all of the other criteria (assuming you could coherently define murder). But if I imagine myself telling Robertson (or somone similar) that, they’d ask how I came up with that rule and why someone else couldn’t just come up with the opposite rule “murder is good” and so it was just an arbitrary choice on my part.
When Lovecraft invented the blind idiot god Azathoth (as the human narrator calls it), he was likely just taking the Old Catholic/Aristotelian view of God and imagining what that might look like given the universe we live in. Azathoth maintains existence by sitting at its center surrounded by vast demonic dancers. There’s a mediator, here called Nyarlathotep rather than Jesus or the Pope, who claims to somehow be doing Azathoth’s will when he told humans to murder each other.
I mention this because we would not consider N’s commands morally binding, even in that scenario. We consider hypothetical deities moral or immoral based on whether or not they agree with “arbitrary” rules like not hurting people unnecessarily, not the other way around. Nothing else in the ‘philosophical’ account of God actually has moral significance. Nor can it provide a foundation for the claims that it sneakily assumes.
So one big reason why I look down on Robertson’s argument is that the charge he makes against atheists doesn’t distinguish theism from atheism.
Some religious traditions disagree. There are, in fact, people who believe God is by definition good and therefore any known commandment of God is good if we trust its divine status, because our own moral sense is fallible but God is not.
How about moral realist consequentialism? Or a moral realist deontology with defeasible rules like a prohibition on murdering? These can certainly be coherent. I’m not sure what you require them to be non-arbitrary, but one case for consequentialism’s being non-arbitrary would be that it is based on a direct acquaintance with or perception of the badness of pain and goodness of happiness. (I find this case plausible.) For a paper on this, see http://philpapers.org/archive/SINTEA-3.pdf
Or rule consequentialism, or constructivism, or contractarianism....
Why does Robertson, or anyone else, insist on moral realism? And what exactly does he mean by it?
There seem to be different usages of “moral realism”, which is confusing. The main two are:
Morals are an objective property of the universe, or possibly of mathematics (e.g. game theoretic cooperation), which can be deduced and agreed on, even separately from purely human concerns and attributes. So we can speak of objective morals. And if one believes that humans are typical of (evolved) intelligences, and that evolution removes behavior that is self-destructive or unstable, it’s likely that common human morals are somewhat correlated with these universal morals.
Humans are very homogenous compared to all possible intelligent agents. Human moral beliefs, intuitions and actions are more alike than they are different. This shared core is objective or “real” in the sense that it is independent of any particular human or even any particular human culture. So we can speak of objective human!morals.
Well, Robertson insists on moral realism because he is a believing Christian and Christianity is rather insistent about it—specifically in the sense of your first usage case.
I haven’t seen anyone call the second case “moral realism” outside of the LW context.
When stated like that, it’s clearly circular. Is he saying that his moral beliefs are better because they’re more like his moral beliefs than other, dissimilar beliefs?
No, when a moral realist says his beliefs are better, he means they are better because they are true.
Under moral realism morality is like physics—that’s just how the universe is constructed and the criterion for truth is matching the territory (reality for physics and God’s will for Christianity).
In this system, do morals have a separate status from other divine commandments and laws? What is the definition of the category “morals”, if the only way to discover them is to study divine revelation, and not by introspection?
In the same way the laws of physics have a separate status from divine commandments like “Though shall not stick a fork into an active electric outlet”.
What God likes or doesn’t like. Alternatively, what gets you closer to heaven or to hell.
Moral realism doesn’t care about introspection.
That sounds to me like there isn’t a difference between morals and other commandments. If sticking a fork into a socket is a divine commandment, then following it is liked by God (God likes people to follow commandments), and it brings you closer to Heaven (God lets people into Heaven if they follow commandments).
If the fork-and-socket commandment didn’t bring you closer to heaven or hell, then it wouldn’t be a commandment, because breaking it wouldn’t be a sin.
Morals are the underlying unreachable (for mortals) perfection. Commandments are heuristics for getting closer.
If morality is like physics, commandments are like engineering
And don’t think contemporary engineering with calculators, simulations, etc. Think medieval engineering, like building cathedrals—you don’t necessarily understand why things work this way, but you know that the three people before you who tried to do it another way had their walls collapse.
That does make sense. Thank you for the explanation.
Well the fact that it appears to be impossible to get two LessWrongers to agree on whether a given moral theory is coherent and non-arbitrary is not encouraging in that regard.
As written, this implies that every LWer holds a different moral theory, which seems obviously false. A better phrasing might be, “There does not appear to be a majority position on morality on LW.”
Also, talking about only LWers seems a bit narrow. I would have gone for “moral philosophers in general”, actually.
Because lesswrongians have philosophical superpowers, so if they can’t do it, noone can?
But lesswrongian are rather lacking philosophical ordinarypowers, from where I’m standing.
But a significant number of atheists are nihilists and relativist, and the reasons seem to be the same...they can’t imagine naturalized objective ethics. And the common problem is stopping at personal incredulity rather than researching what anyone else has come up with. Show me the kind of atheists who is a moral nihilist, and I’ll show you the kind of atheist who disdains philosophy.
What, like J L Mackie? For someone who disdains philosophy, he sure wrote a lot of it.
Source? (Also, what do you mean by “significant number”? Over 10%? Over 20%?)
Conversations with atheists.