Relatively Absolute
A new video on atheism where I talk about the theist’s concept of moral absolutism and why I think it is an incorrect and impractical view to have.
Hello, I’m Al. I’m an atheist, I believe that supernatural gods don’t exist.
I’ve seen and received some comments from theists asking about where atheists get their morality from. Some of these have been thinly-veiled accusations that atheists have no morality at all since, they argue, only God can create morality. Since atheists don’t believe in God, and don’t believe they’ll be punished in the afterlife for their wicked behavior in this life, then apparently there’s nothing to stop them from becoming violent, thieving sociopaths.
At first this disturbed me, because I thought that a belief in God was the only thing keeping these moral theists from becoming violent, thieving sociopaths.
But then I realized that of course they wouldn’t. Most people wouldn’t. But the reason they thought atheists would is because they’ve never had to think about life without God. I don’t mean all theists, in this video I’m talking about the many theists who specifically make this amoral-atheist argument.
I’m going to talk about this question, even though it’s a ridiculously silly one. Because the fact is you don’t need a reason to help people, or show concern or act ethically. But religion gets itself tied up with morality so often that theists are used to thinking that one can’t exist without the other.
Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t kill because God says so. And that sounds about right, so they don’t. And that about ends the discussion. They don’t have to consider a world without God because that isn’t the world they occupy. It’s like imagining a world without sunlight, it’s just seems so obvious. “God says so” makes it fairly straight-forward, because then it’s just a matter of self-control and following all these religious precepts that are laid out for you. And you can be sure of the validity of these morals because God is by definition the supreme moral authority. For the atheist, who draws upon his or her sense of empathy, fairness, philosophy, altruism, the greater good, these are seemingly on fairly shaky grounds, because the atheist is just a person. Just a person whose thought about it. And maybe they’ve thought wrongly. The theist sees this as moral relativism, whereas morality from God is absolute, dictated to man, and steady as a rock.
This idea that we have the one true, absolute morality is a very comforting one. Because real life is full of complicated, ambiguous situations where we don’t know if our actions, whatever our good intentions, will end up doing more harm than good. It’s the sort of thing that keeps one up at night: am I doing the right thing? Is doing my best going to be good enough? Or worse, what if I’m doing the wrong thing, and the better I do it, the worse I’m making the world? Religious dogma claims to solve this because even if we fail to live up to its principles, we can be sure that the principles themselves are true.
Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t kill, these are fairly obvious. It’s like don’t drive drunk or don’t stab a kitten. It’s a good idea in and of itself. Except when it isn’t. You can probably think of rare but plausible situations where these things wouldn’t be prohibited, or even encouraged. It’s okay to stab the kitten if in self-defense, for example. Use your imagination.
My point here is that these simple, obvious rules are too general to be absolute in all cases. “Thou shall not kill” is a very valuable rule, but we can’t and arguably shouldn’t live strictly by it in every possible circumstance. Which tells us this absolute moral standard isn’t going to be simple. And there isn’t really an obvious absolute standard to follow, is there?
I’m not talking about the minor differences between the amillenial AOG initial evidence pentecostal protestant Christian and the post-millenial AOG initial evidence pentecostal protestant Christian. I’m talking about the major differences. Is your holy book entirely literal, or are some parts metaphorical? Which parts? For that matter, which one is your holy book? Where do you stand on eating pork, or eating cows, or eating babies? Depending on which absolute morality you subscribe to it’s either okay, horrible, or barbacue. And if you think those are inconsequential, petty things, where do you stand on two gay men adopting a son, or a rape victim having an abortion? Those are very disputed issues, despite whichever one of our absolute moralities has to say on it.
That’s the great thing about absolute moral standards, there’s so many of them to choose from. And we do choose them. We choose which religion we convert to by personal choice of what feels right to us. Does that make it sound arbitrary, or relative to personal preference? It is. And no less than staying with the religion one happened to be born into.
Even within a single religion, the contradictions or various interpretations that are there allow that you to use religion to back up whatever preconceived moral attitude you have, and still have the weight of “absolute morality” on your side. There isn’t a whack-job group out there that didn’t toute some holy book verse or political ideology to justify their own ends.
So simply having religion-defined absolute morality doesn’t free us from having to justify our beliefs with sound reasoning. Saying, “my religion says so” isn’t good enough. I’m not saying there is no absolute, objective morality, but that making a claim to absolute morality, for example the way most religions do, is the height of unthinking arrogance. Because the theist’s choice of which religious belief to follow is as human-based as the atheist’s choice of which ethical morality to follow.
Countering that your beliefs are the one true religion is convenient, but not very convincing. Every religion makes that claim. To prove the morality of one set of religious beliefs over another, you will have to rely on argument and your critical reasoning, which are as suceptible to flaws as anyone elses.
But if you just claim that you are absolutely right on faith, you aren’t obligated to argue or defend your point. You don’t have to, you’re right, and the “why” doesn’t matter. And religions do make claims in this way. Religious moral values often have a, for lack of a better word, sacred status that philosophical moral values do not even pretend to have. Absolute morality is tool religions use to convert a moral opinion into a moral fact regardless of any reasoning.
That isn’t to say that religious values are automatically wrong. But my point is that there are no absolute absolutes, because your holy scripture, whichever one it is, does not free you from the responsibility of being critical about your own thinking and the possibility that your religion’s values are dead wrong. And you WILL have to decide, atheist or not, because falling back on a superficial acceptance of some moral ideology is no better than saying “I was only following orders”.
I do think there is an absolute morality where, given perfect information and consideration of every possible factor, you can reason what is truely the most just and fair decision to make in any given situation. But we’ll never have anything close to perfect information, so good luck figuring it out. Moral relativism in it’s extreme, stereotypical sense is a cop out. Saying something is either tolerable or intoleratable based on the what the local culture is or what the current century is is the just simple hypocracy. But the claim to moral absolutism, the kind made by the theist who places religion above critical reasoning, above even the possibility of dissent, is the exact same thing, except it is stated with more assertiviness.
But then again, I could be wrong.
Thanks for watching.
Excellent video as always Al. This is the same point I try to make when confronted with people who believe in absolute morality. This especially when 44% of the religious have changed denominations, and 16% claiming no affiation, meaning near half of those who claim affiliation have changed denominations. The -choice- made in a switch of religions is the same as the basis for athiest morality.
I’ve also got a variation. For argument’s sake, assume God had given absolute morality. The many ways humans have interpreted it, as evidenced by historical and contemporary religion, show quite starkly interpretation can be flawed, because this ‘absolute morality’ gives a huge range of those who think they are acting morally. So I ask the religious ‘why is yours the right one? On what can you base that if your interpretation could be wrong as so many others have been.’
Comment on May 6, 2008 @ 5:24 pm
Saying something is either tolerable or intolerable based on the what the local culture is or what the current century is just simple hypocrisy. (some typos corrected)
Of course, this is exactly the sort of reasoning employed when theists justify slavery, male-centric polygamy, women as possessions (including wife-beating), punishment of entire family lines for the sake of one member, etc. Jesus also employed this reasoning as an explanation for why Moses permitted the institution of divorce.
Comment on May 6, 2008 @ 9:54 pm
Honestly, “Morality” to me insinuates a sort of… Good v Evil situation. I disagree with that. I think it’s more of a Right and Wrong, in the humanistic sense.
Uhh, I believe that we, the “Non-believers” acknowledge that we alone are responsible for what we do in this life, and do not leave it to a divinity to punish us. We have developed beyond animalistic thought, and therefore, create our own, humanistic laws, and definition of what is right and wrong.
From my perspective, I say, “Who would you trust more? Someone who acknowledges responsibility for their own actions? Or leaves it to a divinity?”
Comment on May 7, 2008 @ 5:38 am
Hey Al,
Glad to see another one of these videos, it’s been a long time.
Great points, but I’m interested in how far you’re willing to take relativism. I agree that in its extremes, Moral Relativism leads to silly assertions, (see defenses of female genital mutilation), but I think the concept itself is pretty sound: morality changes based on on time, place and culture.
As an example, the statement “Resisting calls to antisemitism during the 1940s in Germany was ‘more moral’ than it would be today in North America” seems reasonable to me, based on the fact that it’s much easier to oppose antisemitism today than it was in 1940. (Not saying that it was ever ‘morally permissable’ to support the holocaust, only making the point that the demands of morality were more difficult to achieve in one time/place, so is it appropriate to judge them the same?)
Comment on May 7, 2008 @ 9:24 am
Nothing like “hindsight” and “observer bias” to muddy the waters of debates on moral relativity. xD
In reference to Derek’s comments. There seems to be a contradiction between the “more moral” and “Not saying that it was ever ‘morally permissible’ to support the holocaust” comments. If we believe that anti-Semitism and the Holocaust were wrong, then the Germans were wrong during WWII. Even if what they were doing were accepted behaviours locally (both time and place), to the whole of humanity what took place in Germany (i.e. the Holocaust) during WWII was immoral.
“(T)he demands of morality were more difficult to achieve in one time/place,”. Maybe its less about the demands of morality being difficult to achieve Maybe its that sometimes people make the wrong choice, and sometimes those choices have horrible consequences.
If you realize that you’ve done something that is morally wrong, then there is no point in trying to make excuses for it. Making excuses (like the “more moral at the time” argument) tries to recast what is immoral as moral, instead of admitting that what was done was immoral, a mistake, and realizing that the immoral act should not be repeated.
The problem is that we often don’t know what is immoral until after something immoral has happened and groups of people or whole societies can attempt to determine if the act in question is either moral or immoral.
By the way, another excellent six minutes of my life spent Al, thanks.
Comment on May 8, 2008 @ 4:05 am
I say this one thing to you:
you are GENIUS
you have put everything i want to say into videos.
thank you.
email me!! :D
Comment on May 10, 2008 @ 8:11 pm
It’s like trying to hold back a flood with a piece of plastic wrap.
Fun video again, if a bit loose on your reasoning and logic beyond your good word that two things are the, etc. (A particularly funny example being the ‘no religion is true because so many claim to be’ insinuation, after all if 10 people stole my identity and had amnesia and REALLY thought they were me would no one be justified in believing that there is a real me?)
That aside. I await the typical comments abusing religious people for being stupid, Then the typical self-righteous commentary on how only atheists think etc. (Amazingly enough religious people feel the same self-righteous way about the subject, but in the opposite direction.)
As always I intend to sit on the fence, wish people argued without resorting to informal fallacies, and cry.
Comment on May 12, 2008 @ 5:48 pm
Oh, also Derek, way to bring up Nazis in the 4th comment, that’s fast, even for an internet conversation about morality.
Moral relativists are cute, they think they are nihilists. Further, most young people are moral relativists. That is until you lock them up for their ‘freely speaking’, oppress them for religious reasons, reveal their deepest secrets to the world, etc. Suddenly EVERYONE is concerned with their inalienable rights. :)
Comment on May 12, 2008 @ 5:54 pm
Socrates Johnson
I think you misunderstand Al’s argument
Al did not say, or even insinuate “no religion is true because so many claim to be”, it’s how would you be able to discern the real deal from the rest? Absolute morality? Why yours not another. Personal connection to God, or faith? well then what about other people who claim to have that but believe in a different morality, are they lying or making an honest mistake? I’ve got to believe in most cases an honest mistake. But if they can be mistaken about absolute morality, a personal connection to God, or faith - why couldn’t you too. It’s not that you inherently are wrong, it’s that you too could be.
You “await typical comments abusing religious people for being stupid, Then the typical self-righteous commentary on how only atheists think etc. ” While I don’t deny there are people who will vilify theists, this is not what I believe - nor, I think, does Al. His whole point is we all think about morality, even those who assume it is absolute divine mandate.
Finally, you discuss moral relativism, and legitimately so as Derek brought it up explicitly - I hope you do not take Al’s argument or mine for moral relativism simply because we argue against someone assuming they know absolute morals. As Al says “I do think there is an absolute morality where, given perfect information and consideration of every possible factor, you can reason what is truely the most just and fair decision to make in any given situation. But we’ll never have anything close to perfect information, so good luck figuring it out.” We are not arguing that absolute morality does not exist, merely that even if it did, we would have nothing better to go on than our feelings about and reasoning of morality.
Comment on May 13, 2008 @ 10:01 pm
Excellent retort Owen.
Comment on May 14, 2008 @ 6:52 am
Al, I wish I could show some of my theist friends your videos, but trying to convert them is as futile as the reverse. It is always a battle of two “rights.”
I’ll continue to be your biggest fan. Love your videos!
Comment on May 15, 2008 @ 8:59 am
My apologies for Godwinning so quickly, it was just a quick and dirty example.
Jolly Sapper, I was trying to point out that sometimes it’s more difficult to make the moral choice. Any theory of morality has to account for these differences.
You are correct in asserting that making an immoral choice is still immoral, regardless of extraneous circumstances. But the difficulty in making the choice changes based on time and place (context). This is why we applaud members of the uderground railroad in the slave-era of the USA, but the fact that I abhor racism is much less noble.
Comment on May 15, 2008 @ 11:36 am
Owen, I do agree that taken out of context his argument here isn’t actually toward what I was pointing at. Rather I did respond rather carelessly to the larger claims he makes as not being supported by this claim. You’re right to point out my flub and I will try to attack points legitimately and only insofar as they were intended to be taken.
About the abuse comment I was once again meta-commenting on the nature of the path I imagine discussion would take immediately following my post. To be frank I am glad to have a responder that actually responded to my points, and am pleasantly surprised.
On the moral relativism point I don’t think Al is a moral relativist, most people are not (as was the point of my snarky quip.) Rather I should have addressed that the comments he makes relating not harming people and such as “good ideas” appeals to some sort of moral intuition. That seems to me to run headlong into a sort of dual-pronged problem regarding the source of said intuition.
What I have in mind here is first a question of how to separate what is “moral” from what is divine mandate. This is to say that if Al is purporting that some rules many theists follow are “good” and others are “bad” by what right is this judgment being made. If it’s a matter of what “feels good” and that’s it then it is sort of bootstrapping itself from relativism into a “legitimate” ethos and needless to say it would be a mite bit arbitrary.
The second problem is more directly the method of deduction of moral absolutes Given a “perfect information” system or some such under what rights would we judge actions as better than others. Aside from the simple problems similar to Buridan’s ass which might arise (where neither choice is better in ANY way, but not choosing is bad), there might be further concerns about appeals to naturalistic fallacies or to other problems.
stupid space limits
Comment on May 16, 2008 @ 7:50 pm
to sum all that up: Yes, absolute morality based on divine commands is screwy and a very easily attacked system (despite its many adherants.) But the question becomes this: if we are being “moral realists” (which means moral terms refer to “real” values and good/bad/right/wrong/whatever) Under what justification are we going to do so?
Though the positive moral stance might not be Al’s point, it’s certainly more aesthetically pleasing than just tearing down someone else’s argument.
(I know I don’t offer a replacement here, but hey, it’s not my web-site)
Comment on May 16, 2008 @ 7:54 pm
Socrates Johnson, I don’t know how Al would respond to your arguments, but I’ll lay out my repsonse.
I think the best metaphor I can give for how we should deal with relativism in ethics is the way science deals with skepticism. The skeptical problem with describing the real world is even our senses can be wrong, and there can be unforeseen, and hence uncontrolled elements, even in ‘controlled tests’. Thus rather than shooting for an absolute Truth, we admit anything we consider true could be wrong because of error or ignorance. But we don’t stop at skepticism, throwing our hands up in despair and giving up - we use induction, which in the end could always be wrong, to generate very useful, albeit not perfect, answers. Newtonian physics is an excellent example of this, it was in the end ‘wrong’ but it was a useful place to be at the time.
Science gets quite a bit of help from measurement, it makes it much easier to standardize, quantify and hence compare. The repeatability of controlled experiments also makes comparison much easier. Ethics is of course fuzzier, it’s much harder to get any meaningful measurements, standardize, quantify, repeat or compare. Thought experiments are a useful tool, but aren’t quite like real world repeatability, or hard measurements. But we don’t stop at skepticism (in this case relativism) throwing our hands up in despair and giving up - we can use induction with the tools we have access to (such as the empathy, fairness, philosophy, altruism, and the greater good that Al mentioned). We get useful, albeit not perfect, immediate answers.
Comment on May 17, 2008 @ 4:10 pm
With ethics we’re farther from a world where we can point and say ‘that’ is what I’m talking about thus we have to accept more confusion discussing ethical issues than scientific. Even when we say the same words, it may not mean the same thing, in a more significant way than the difference between our meanings of a gallon of water. While I think there is a moral ‘real world’, we can only talk about our experiences of that world, not the world itself. Science doesn’t even really talk about the real world (I reference Newtonian physics again), it rather describes a useful approximation. If not even science can make that claim, I think it’s rather silly to make that claim in ethics or philosophy. This is the same type of problem that underlies absolutism - even if there is a real thing there, we only have our possibly flawed interpretation, so proclaiming absolute values is self-deception.
Comment on May 17, 2008 @ 4:11 pm
Owen,
With regards to the scientific method and ethics. Science is based upon an empirical foundation, ethics not so much. You mention something like this with regards to the way we can justify science through result repetition and coherence. Ethics however has NO “result” to replicate, nor coherence standard unless we assume a standard prior to our actions.
What I have in mind here is that if you want to say that ethics is “working” you must mean that it is getting some desired reaction. Something like a Millian maximization of utility etc. However, that isn’t actually resting ethical claims on a sort of falsifiable method, but rather their effacacy in achieving a “ultimate standard.” seeing as how that standard is the thing at issue this at best railroading toward begging the entire matter.
You and Al mention things like empathy, altruism, etc. However, my entire point is that you are assuming those are good, then saying we can approximate them with science. However morality isn’t necessarily “readily apparent” to everyone, as evidenced by some people thing it’s OK to marry 12 year old girls etc. We DO have moral disagreement, even on fundamental matters such as the foundation of morality (happiness,rights, etc.)
As such I once again ask, why accept anything other than moral relativism (other than the fact that it is a joke?)
As a side note with regards to making claims about the real world in philosophy. Logic, yeah, it has to be true, and that’s a claim about the real world. Also the Frege-Russel program showed that math is true about the “real world” using philosophy… but who’s counting.
Another side note. Desmond from lost played Jesus in a movie… WTF?!?!
Comment on May 18, 2008 @ 10:41 am
a 3rd side note (though much more to my points above). The whole ethics has no empirical data thing is actually one of the MAJOR things about ethics. David Hume (yes like Desmond David Hume… oh those Lost writer guys and their philosophy references) argued very famously that empirical data CANNOT give value. there’s a big distinction between what is and what “ought to be”. I might have mentioned that above. In short, aside from silly virtue ethicists NO ONE takes seriously empirical ethical data, and you don’t want to be one of those. They are silly.
Comment on May 18, 2008 @ 10:46 am
Socrates Johnson, I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I was using the scientific method as a metaphor. I am not advocating ‘the science of ethics’.
All I was getting at is science says hey, there’s a world here, let’s try to figure out in as much detail as we can how it works. The fact that we can act in the same world makes this study quite precise.
Likewise I’m saying I do think there are ethics(or an ‘ethical world’* in my metaphor). It’s a lot harder to figure out with no shared world to point at and say ‘that’ is what i mean**. Because of this it is nowhere near as precise as science, and we need to take anything we get from it with a larger grain of salt.
We only have our personal experiences in the ‘ethical world’ and the words others use to describe their experiences. But this doesn’t free us from trying to figure out what’s happening. We can make progress with the tools at our disposal, and I think have made progress(for the most part). I think we are ethically required to strive for such progress.
I think with science as with ethics the job’s the same: there is something here, let’s try to figure out how it works. To do this we need to use induction rather than deduction, because anything we believe could be wrong, even more in the ethical world than the physical.
*By ethical world I mean such things as empathy, sympathy, fairness, altruism etc
** While there’s no world to point at, I think the ethical world we try to feel out as humans is largely the same(barring significant mental disorders etc), and it’s got its origins in human genes and the cultures which human genes created. We just experience some different parts of that ethical world, draw our own conclusions about what we experienced, and thus give rise to the differences of opinions we have about what is or isn’t ethical.
Comment on May 18, 2008 @ 1:05 pm
1. “progress” implies an absolute standard.
2. still wondering where you are justifying your claim that things like empathy etc are “ethical”
some quotes form your post above:
“I do think there are ethics(or an ‘ethical world’* in my metaphor)”
“I think with science as with ethics the job’s the same: there is something here, let’s try to figure out how it works.”
I am not sure what you are saying about “moral realism” anymore. Either moral terms are meaningful and refer to the world, or do not. It sounds like you are arguing both ways.
If there is a “human nature” as defined by culture or DNA or something that really doesn’t give ethics a foundation per se. Further if we can “draw our own conclusions” how is it not just moral relativism. Maybe i draw the conclusion that you don’t have a right to life because you aren’t related to me. By what rights can you argue, it’s my moral experience!
if we “only have our experiences in the ‘ethical world’ and the words of others” as you put it. However that still jumps the is/ought distinction at best, and at worst begs what the foundation of that moral world is.
Comment on May 18, 2008 @ 2:03 pm
sorry about the “both sides” comment above, i thought you were saying you didn’t in one and did in the other. so disregard that. However, the question as to what this moral world is and how you are accessing it stands.
Comment on May 18, 2008 @ 2:04 pm
So it seems to boil down to doing whatever we feel is right based on what we want the world to be like.. ?
Comment on May 21, 2008 @ 7:33 pm
Hi Al!
Haven’t been visiting your blog for sometime. Work has kept me busy.
The thing is, the video on RA is good except that when you ended that you might be wrong, I am left thinking you are a moral relativist. Are you?
I think moral relativism is wrong simply because when we apply the statement: “Truth is relative.” to the statement itself, it self-destruct.
Your statement makes sense only in the largest sense of things, that being, we are always at the tragic state of knowing anything at the deepest possible level.
Please clarify. By the way, how old are you? You look young. :-)
Comment on May 24, 2008 @ 8:20 pm
Sorry. Some typos. We are at the tragic state of NOT knowing something at the deepest possible level.
Comment on May 24, 2008 @ 8:21 pm