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ThreeWestWinds

Santa Fe, New Mexico, UNITED STATES


Joined February 15th 2010

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Comment by ThreeWestWinds
on Can atheists be moral? (Richard Dawkins)

April 5th 2010 05:24
@ tiggyd

I agree that thinking like that does a great deal to discourage... problems, but I also see it doing a great deal to discourage action.

Too often, I hear people using the lack of absolute right and wrong to excuse laziness. Just because we only have "as right as currently possible" doesn't mean we have to accept all ideas as equally valid. The "right for now" needs defenders as much as any absolute - more so, in fact.

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Comment by ThreeWestWinds
on Can atheists be moral? (Richard Dawkins)

March 21st 2010 06:35
Samantha, I agree that we tend to have social morals instilled in us, but I think the real question is whether these hold up under deeper scrutiny. I don't really like the idea that all morality is merely handed down - then we have no standards by which to judge what's been handed down to us.

Now, what I've just said is somewhat in tension with the comment I made right above yours, where I acknowledge that there is no absolute basis for morality. But non-absolute is not quite the same thing as accepted without examination. All systems are not equally valid.

Your talk about basic morals sounds to me like a bit of intellectual slight of hand - I don't have to think about it, because my parents/society told me it was right, and I don't have to argue with your ideas, even if I disagree with them, because you have different parents/society.

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Comment by ThreeWestWinds
on Can atheists be moral? (Richard Dawkins)

March 21st 2010 01:29
"Taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states 'You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions,' in short, 'Thou shalt.'"

Quoting Nietzsche on morality always makes me feel better, and in this particular case seems extremely relevant. This is what I read the questioner as having asked - without an unconditional "Thou shalt," an absolute morality, how can atheists have any morality at all?

That's all just restating the opening post, where Nonymouse said much the same, and asked the same question. While it may be a thorny issue, I also thing the answer is quite clear, and many atheists just haven't accepted it yet. Without a belief in something absolute outside the world to force consensus, any system is always open for debate. There can be no absolute morality without god.

Dawkins' response embodies quite well for my why this isn't actually a problem, as the questioner assumed it would be. "How can you have any absolutes without a first absolute to draw from?" I can't, and I like it better that way.

"Objections, evasions, cheerful mistrust, and love of mockery are indications of health: everything absolute belongs with pathology."

All Nietzsche quotes from Beyond Good and Evil

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Comment by ThreeWestWinds
on Objective truth (Peter Frauenglass)

March 14th 2010 19:59


You're right to call me out on that - what I should have said is that it's been a long time since a famous philosopher believed in access objective truth. There is of course a wide variety of beliefs among the populace, and many philosophers (Kant) believed that there is a true world to which we have no access.

But how far apart is believing in something unapproachable and not believing in the existence of the thing? The end results seem to me quite similar - a total disregard for the inaccessible/non-existent idea.

I like that definition of objective - mind independent. True for every mind without regard to perspective, and perhaps even without a mind to think it.

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Comment by Peter Frauenglass
on Inability to bear children

February 23rd 2010 23:30
Well, Marx is more of a philosopher than an economist, and he actually has something interesting to say on the subject. He's not eastern, but, well, it's something.

"Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life." (German Ideology)

To summarize a bit of Marx's thinking, man is unique in that we produce not only offspring, but ourselves. Animals eat and mate - only we farm. That gives us a big leg up, in that we become less dependent on nature than animals. A famine will wipe out a population of squirrels, but we tend to just import more food from a different country. In an animal, the inability to reproduce itself sexually is the loss of almost its whole essence - what makes it alive. You're in a bit better position as a human. The ability to reproduce yourself sexually is only a small part of your self-activity (to use one of Marx's terms).

On a daily basis you reproduce yourself by working for your bread. You reproduce yourself by spreading your ideas, by social interactions. While Marx would say that being barren is to loose a part of human nature, it's only the animal part. The far more important aspects of your existence are still present - you can still work with your hands to shape the future, still pass on your ideas and, in short, still reproduce yourself in every way that is uniquely human rather than merely animal.

So yeah, little more than a philosophical way of saying to not focus on what's missing, and instead focus on what you still have.

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