Every time you change the structure of the situation, you change the morality of the behaviors. That is why moral questions can be very difficult. Also, there is no absolutely right answer accessible to us, which also makes it tough.

The significance of the denial of faith is important. Is it a simple empty statement to satisfy a lunatic? Or is it public acceptance of a violent, misogynistic, politically repressive religious faction, for example? You started with the latter, then morphed to the former trying to make a point, but in the process you changed the question enough so that the two are probably no longer analogous in the way you intended.

Sorry but I don't think those two are different enough to change your actions. To make it different you would need that faction demanding you join their army or something like that. And I'd bet most rabbis and even the Pope would agree with me

I don't see why this doesn't go both ways. For example, suppose someone is mugged, but while she is being examined at the hospital they discover some kind of early stage cancer that might have otherwise gone undetected until too late.

Did the mugger do something morally wrong? Well, his action probably increased total utility, so that would seem to indicate not. However, we can still definitely hold him morally blameworthy as the positive benefit of the mugging is not to be expected.

This is substantially different than what you have offered previously. In this post you are entirely buying into the idea that there is a line where beyond it we stop "respecting" or "excusing" or whatever people's actions even if they are acting in accordance with their belief. What I have suggested is that somewhere between "not giving up your beliefs to save yourself" and "killing others for your beliefs" is a not unreasonable spot to place the line. I don't really like either of the words respect or excuse but its true I don't bring the same level of condemnation for someone who refuses medical treatment on religious grounds as someone who kills people on religious grounds. This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to establish moral differences about and as long as you are buying into the framing of establishing moral lines, it seems like a reasonable place to put a moral line. And indeed, I reject that it is a "small step" to cross this line.

What you kept saying was that we were accepting a much more universal claim like "I excuse/respect any action if it is done in accordance with beliefs". Ergo, if you excused the one you would have to excuse the other. I don't think there is a single person in this thread that has accepted such a position.

I never changed my stance. Perhaps I should be more precise with my words when I know Phds are reading them.

Were you equally appalled when I said I also respect those who try and save their children? Most people wouldn't if it meant risking their own life, that is just a myth perpetuated in popular media.

What you did was extrapolate my statement from "respect those who do not convert, nothing against those who do not" to "t_d admires those who sacrifice their family", which is just a cheap rhetorical appeal to emotion without any value whatsoever in regard to what I said. Sorry, but it is just poor form.

It doesn't really deserve a response, but you are a poster people bother reading so clarification is sadly necessary.

Sure you did. Here is you previously:

Nothing about moral lines, just about accepting a general axiom of excusing anything from people with different axioms. THat nobody advocated that didn't stop you. Now you are talking about moral lines that segregate the moral landscape (lol) into different sections, not just the single section above. And you can't seem to see that it is quite reasonable to place a moral line right between the two things you claims are a "small step" apart.

Yes I did. But I wasn't claiming that you actually felt this way. I was claiming that you weren't being careful to make sure that a comment didn't tend to imply something you didn't mean it to.

So a person in WWII who refused to join the Nazi party despite a threat to have his family sent to a concentration camp is morally indistinguishable from an SS officer participating in the Final Solution, as long as the SS officer felt that his cause was holy and sanctioned by God?

No. But I don't want to argue anymore.

Ya when your argument is thoroughly destroyed best to bow out and start a new thread about it tomorrow

Its not destroyed. RLK continues to misunderstand my position.

I thought you didn't want to argue any more? That lasted about as long as your "i'm done".

To be fair to RLK, I'm not sure you understand your own position. As I just quoted for you:
That is exactly the kind of "excuse everyone for everything as long as they do it based on their axioms" that RLK is using in his example.

Of course, you then changed from this completely and started talking about moral lines without realizing that a reasonable spot for such a moral line was precisely where you said there wasn't one. It is all very discombobulated.

The confusion arises because I was espousing two different stances

1. Be careful when you say you admire someone for sticking to their principles without admitting that there is a point where you wouldn't anymore

2. If someone's principles include dying to avoid pretending to convert you have reached that point.

I still believe both things but I admit that the second is harder to prove.

Looks a lot more like you DO want to keep arguing. It is a bit odd, when I accused you of changing your stance you said you never changed your stance (between versions of one and two). Notice the singular. Now you are claiming two different stances. Which is fine, but it is worth noting your positions have been so confused that not even you can distinguish that there were two stances when I explicitly showed how you were switching between them. Even you still keep speaking of a single stance.

1) is basically a giant strawman. Nobody in any of your three threads has suggested anything close to admiring people who murder in the name of religion. I suppose tame deuces didn't explicitly type it out for you, but it is so obvious it shouldn't be remotely necessary.

For 2, I suppose if you insist in this elementary worldview where you admire something up to one point and then switch to condemning it you might want to have that line be somewhere not so far away. But in a more sophisticated view where we allow different levels of strength to our reactions, it remains certainly the case that there is a meaningful difference between allowing harm to come to you and causing harm to others.

I think that if I may state your point best (since you struggle to consistently articulate it yourself) you are effectively saying that after some threshold you no longer have the ability to "see" meaningful moral differences. As in everything is a "small step" from each other after we have flipped from admiring to condemning someone for their convictions. With just a little bit of grey allowed, the picture becomes much more sophisticated allowing for moral distinctions between these types of actions to be made. My original disagreement with you was that these two actions were rather dissimilar so one didn't follow from the other...but your retort is effectively that since they are both beyond your line they are almost by definition both to be rejected and thus similar on these grounds.

Even taking the simplistic black and white view, there is many reasons to consider personal sacrifice for your convictions a laudable trait to admire in humans. Surely much good has occured when people take risk or suffering upon themselves for the betterment of their ideals. We sometimes praise such people as martyrs. But killing others crosses almost everyone's line. So no, even under your rather limiting framing I don't think you can substantiate 2 effectively.

I understand the need for consequentialist theories to account for the consequences of an act but I'm struggling a little with the idea that we are blaming someone for an act that wasn't wrong. Yet in your example it seems clear that the mugger is blameworthy and the act hasn't reduced utility.

If in the example the victim suffers depression as a result of the mugging and commits suicide then does the status of the act change again. What if the victim commits suicide at the point that the undetected cancer would have been expected kill them, are we left with an act that is neither right or wrong?

I think that foreseeability and intentionality are important considerations when evaluating acts and it may be this distinction between blameworthiness and wrongness is a failure of the utilitarian to address adequately the character of the actor. I recall zumby suggesting that Virtue Ethics could act as a corollary to utilitarian and deontological ethics in this regard.

Maybe the answer is in some form of rule utilitarianism whereby the heuristics are codified into rules that are most likely to increase utility and rightness and wrongness are considered in relation to the rule. I'm going to have to think about this and get passed my objections and lack of understanding.

If I think of a right and wrong action in terms of acts that ought to be done and acts that ought not to be done I don't know I want to claim that the mugger ought to have mugged the victim even when we know that the action resulted in the early detection of cancer. Yet this seems my failing if consider a counter example whereby a person who saves the life of someone who goes on to murder a third party it seems somehow more intuitive to claim he ought not to have saved this life. I don't agree with the claim but it seems more aligned with my intuitions.

And I accepted that god is rewarding this demonstration of faith and commitment, then I extended the idea of reward for demonstrations of faith and commitment to killing people as a demonstration of faith and commitment and that's when you decided that there was a disconnect, that it wasn't arbitrary to say that killing people for god isn't rewarded when dying for god is rewarded. That clearly they are different.

Then I asked how you know which demonstrations of faith and commitment are rewarded and which aren't and you said that you didn't know.

So as things stand, I still think that you're arbitrarily deciding what is and isn't rewarded by god.

Clearly what I was saying that that I can't interpret it any other way than the way that I have, because there is no other way to interpret it IMO. Your conclusion is this:

Choosing death over renouncing god is a demonstration of faith and commitment that will be rewarded by god.

It doesn't matter that you were trying to show why god isn't petty, you've still established a pretty clear principle of divine reward for certain demonstrations of faith and commitment. I'm now exploring the implications of that.

Actually no, you did the equivalent of extrapolating "I like cake" to "I like fish", because it wasn't clarified that cake did not include fishcake. Also, your underlying premise seems to be that we can't respect what we do not agree with. From my viewpoint that is the same type of sentiment that drives groups like IS.

On a different note: Would you be unable to respect a woman who resists rape and risks death instead?

First error: I did not say that God is rewarding this demonstration.


Second error: I did not say that it isn't rewarded. I do not believe that it is as an element of faith, but I do not know that it isn't.

This is correct. I did say that they are different. Presumably you accept that, but if you do not then this we could discuss.

That is also correct. I do not know.


If you are asking, then I will say that I think it is far more likely that God would reward the personal sacrifice for your faith as opposed to the mass murder for your faith. You perceive that as arbitrary? OK, fine. If you cannot see a difference between those two actions, I truly doubt that I could change your mind.

Unworthy of response.


No. My conclusion is that this does not seem unreasonable to me.


Yes it does. If you display an argument that you claim rationally shows God to be petty, I am entitled to demonstrate its fallacy under the assumption that God exists and makes such a demand. Doing that does not imply that I am stating either that God exists or that He makes such a demand. That is how arguments like this work. That is what we are doing here.

Nonsense. I have not done the former. I have no idea what you are doing.

I understand frustration when people misunderstand your point, so I have no problem with letting this go without trying to claim victory. I truly do not understand your positioning of options 2 and 3 as close but maybe that can not be resolved.

I have thought about it some and I just do not see the flaw in the WWII analogy.

Then this is where my misunderstanding lies.

Then I think it's irrelevant that the believer is refusing to renounce god, he just benefits from dying whatever the cause, the context could be anything and he's not being rewarded for a demonstration of faith and commitment. Your statement made it look as if he was being directly rewarded for the specific demonstration of faith and commitment that is refusing to denounce god, not that dying is a reward in and of itself.

I can't see how you're addressing my comments that I think that a god that would require you to die rather than renounce him is petty, or (separately made claim) that what is actually happening has nothing to do with what god does or doesn't want but is actually a human construction to ensure loyalty to a particular belief system.

I am thinking my point would be clearer if I used the kidnapped Nigerian girls as an example. Convert (or pretend to knowing that there is a good chance you will eventually escape or be rescued) or be sold into sex slavery. In this example the idea that death is not necessarily terrible doesn't come into play.

In the above case I contend that tame deuces should not be saying that he admires those who are sticking to what they think their god would want (something a bit different by the way than sticking to "principles") but rather saying that he pities these girls who have parents who brainwashed them into thinking that they should be making this decision.

Only if the risk was high and she had children depending on her to take care of them.

Changing the specific example to ever more extreme things doesn't help you.

I don't think these emotions are mutually exclusive. It's pretty easy to pity them, although I think if you want to say that religious people with strong convictions are "brainwashed" you are going to be in for a whole other argument. But at the same time, there is certainly something to be admired in the human spirit, for lack of a better word, that holds on to its values and convictions even in the face of personal adversity. Indeed, in many other examples we may even glorify or martyr those that die for their convictions.

If you want to force a black and white world where one either 100% respects them or 100% condemns them, where only one emotion is allowed, and you go around taking a particular value (like admiring conviction in the face of adversity) and creating examples that try and stretch it to a breaking point then sure perhaps this isn't the dominant emotion. But under any more nuanced view its quite fine to maintain these things in tandem. You don't even have to think such attributes of the human spirit are universally good things, you can just take it as part of the human condition where you might say you "understand" or can "empathize" with people that take great suffering or even those that cause great suffering due to adherence to their convictions.

This whole business of trying apply some sort of pseudo logic where you force these black and white axioms on people and try to claim people are contradicting themselves with their application of axioms and the like is mainly just something you are forcing down on people. Take tame_deuces initial "respect" comments, I don't think that this is supposed to be read as some sort of universal axiom on a class of behaviours he respects.