No. Most of the guiding laws you're referring to (drugs/sex mainly) are not things which most people would consider a moral issue, i.e. there's nothing necessarily immoral about smoking marijuana. Also, people do override their natural moral instincts in (what they consider to be) extenuating circumstances, i.e. they need money so they steal. Also, some people do have malfunctioning brains (lack of empathy) so we need to be protected from these people.

I find it hard to understand what is moral and what is immoral. Like taking drugs etc

So who owes the monopoly on what's moral or immoral? or does it depend?

I suppose my question is how do I know what is moral and what is not? How does one define these things?

These are all questions that moral philosophery ponders. There's no answer that is "clearly" right, though people have a broad range of perspectives on the matter.

Aaron just has a hard-on for me, and I knew he'd nitpick the quote.

Nitpick... challenge a complete misrepresentation of the topic... whatever.

I'm sorry that every contribution I've made in this thread is considered by you to be:

"objectively wrong", "a misrepresentation", “rambling”, “false”, “unclear”, and "wrong".

It's lovely chatting to you.

Most things i do good and bad, like holding open a door for someone or not, have no laws.

But they do them in the hopes of getting into heaven/hope for reward - even if this process is subconcious (I was religious once too).....
How do you know this when even the Christians on this website can't seem to agree? We've had around 15 threads on this with various scriptures and pope's cited, and there has never been a consensus of any sort. I don't see how you can know this for certain.

If Einstein wasn't referring to God-guided/objective morality then I don't know what he could be talking about. Care to elaborate?

Let me guess. You're going to tell me that you know my subconscious thoughts so that you know that when I do good I'm doing it because I'm hoping it's going to get me into heaven even though I consciously acknowledge that my good actions are not what gets me into heaven?

I suggest you start a poll. Theologically, the Protestants will generally hold that it is by faith you are saved, and I think that most of the Catholics will state that faith is required for salvation, but that works are the outgrowth of that faith, so that if you aren't doing works then your faith is dead (which is still not the same as stating that your good works are what gets you into heaven).

First, I think providing the context of this quote might be useful. I would think that the sentences that come before and after this sentence would shed light on what he meant. (I'm doubtful that you will find the quote in context.)

But in the absence of that, I'm certainly open to the possibility that he was talking about his understanding of "God-guided/objective morality." I'm particularly confident that he wasn't talking about "objective morality" as the quote doesn't make any sense with that in mind. It's more likely that he was musing on religion in more general terms, and not particularly on the topic of "God-guided/objective morality."

Taking the quote at face value, the concept that it seems to most closely resemble is karma (as I stated before). God-guided morality has no necessary reward/punishment associated to it. It doesn't seem to speak to "objective morality" either. It's really a statement about people who act on the sole basis of some form of reciprocity.

Would you like to elaborate on why you think that he's talking about "God-guided/objective morality"?

I want to elaborate slightly on this. By "reciprocity" I mean something more like "expectant reciprocity." According to karma, if you do good things, then good things will happen to you (basically). There's a clear sense of cause and effect.

However, ethic of reciprocity (do unto others...) does not entail a cause and effect. It simply states that you should treat others how you want to be treated, and does not add any clause that sounds remotely like "because it will cause them to treat you well."

The quote seems quite clearly to be talking about expectant reciprocity.

Here's the full quote:

And an additional quote that may help to clear things up (or not):

Thanks. Although reading that seems very disjointed, as if this is coming from a quote page and not part of an actual interview or essay (which means that this isn't the context I was really thinking of -- though it does provide context of a sort by placing his statement in a series of other statements on the same issue).

Although he talks about a "personal God" at the start, by the end it sounds like he's talking about religion in general. I think the following is a complete text:

http://being.publicradio.org/program...dscience.shtml

I can't even find the first part of the quote in there. The second part is there, and quoted in its paragraph below:

By the way, the essay is rather short, and I suggest that you actually read it. I think the context suggests that he's not actually being critical in the way that those who are quoting him are interpreting his statements.

I think most of the philosophical criticisms of the book really miss the point. The health analogy is very apt; both health and morality have subjective fundamentals but you can still make objective judgements about both. As he says:

Notice that you can attack the philosophical underpinnings of anything. You can ask of science "WHY should we value evidence?" or of theism "WHY should we want to avoid Hell?".

Now, I'm not a philosopher by any means (as the above no doubt shows!) but the fact is that we already have practical, real-world objective morality in the form of laws and foreign policy etc. The question now needs to move on to what conversations we need to have as communities, countries and societies that move towards laws and politics that work for the common good.

I don't think Sam Harris' philosophy on these questions is perfect or a definitive answer by any means, but it's a good starting point for practical discussion and outlines methods by which science can join the conversation.

It is useful for you to point this out, because I think the assumption you are making here--that if something is subjective it is relative--is the crucial one that leads so many people to think that atheism=nihilism. But I'll get to that in a second.

I take it that your objection is that the category of “epistemological objectivity” is useless because it can apply to both relative and absolutist moral theories. Now, I’ll grant you that it can apply to both these types of moral theories (I implied as much in my original post). But that doesn’t mean it is useless. Rather, it means that, in my view, it is useful for a different purpose than distinguishing between relativism and absolutism.

Essentially, the value of the category of epistemological objectivity is that it shows us how a statement can be true without be based either in a mind-independent reality (such as e.g. claims in astronomy) or based solely on your own personal experience of reality (e.g. ice cream tastes good). The reason this is important is because as a naturalist, I am going to be skeptical that the truth of moral claims is based in a mind-independent reality. The physical world seems to be empty of value unless we put it there.

The next step is where I think the nihilists and counterfactual nihilists (theists that claim to only be moral because of god) go wrong. They say, see, value is subjective, what we do only matters insofar as it matters to us. But here’s the problem. The fact that something is mind-dependent (subjective in the literal sense) does not mean that we can think about it however we want.
Naturalists believe that the square root of 49 is 7, regardless of how differently constructed we might be. Similarly, (some) naturalists that believe in an objective morality believe that there are principles of cooperation based on reason, in a similar way to how math is based on reason, that constrain what kinds of actions we can take to achieve our goals as humans (notice that this would apply to psychopaths as well as more ordinary humans).

Some naturalists believe that for almost all humans the range of things we value (our goals) is also constrained—that emotional responses of empathy, altruism, selfishness, maternalism and paternalism, etc. are to certain degree innate to human nature. This also constrains our goals in life. We cannot just wish away our feelings and emotions—they are there, they are a part of us.
Thus, we would say that, at least on these assumptions about human nature and reasons, there are absolutist rules of morality that constrain human actions. And going back to where I started, the reason this is the case is because the subjective is not necessarily relativistic.

Certain versions of non-cognitivism and egoism end up not being epistemoglogically objective. So, expressivists (a variety of non-cognitivism) claim that moral claims are neither true nor false, but rather are expressions of our emotional attitudes towards certain kinds of actions or objects. Thus, on this theory moral claims wouldn't be epistemologically objective because they aren't stating something that is true or false.

This, again, misses the point. I am not claiming that divine command theory is not objective or absolutist--I very much think it is. What I am trying to say is that it is subjective, that like the theory I am describing, according to divine command theory, the truth or falsity of a moral claim is not mind-independent, but rather is dependent on the mind of god.

Hopefully I have made clear why I think the category is both helpful and meaningful.

Two points. First, I am not really trying to say that god could be different than he is, and thus divine command morality is relative. Rather, I am trying to draw a parallel between god-based subjective morality and human-based subjective morality. So, if you want to say that god's nature is necessary and so it is necessary that god make the moral commands that he makes, fine. But notice that this is very much what Kant does in his subjective-based (i.e. reason-based) morality. He thought that our moral claims, if they were true, were necessarily true--that they followed as if by a kind of logic from the mere willing to do a particular kind of action that we have to will to do it according to the laws of morality.

Second, your example just doesn't work. If divine command is true, then it is impossible for god to will to do evil. "Evil" would be defined as that which goes against god's will. Thus, it would be literally meaningless to imagine a counterfactual in which god was evil. However, it is not meaningless to imagine a counterfactual in which god commands us to lie and steal. In that counterfactual, god is still not evil and his commands are still by definition moral, thus making it moral to lie and steal and immoral to do the opposite.

Right, and here I'll just reject cultural relativism. The fact that a different culture has different moral views than those commonly accepted in my own doesn't mean that their views (or ours) are not wrong, even on the subjective basis I've described. After all, they could have false views about reality (such as that the sun is a god and desires human sacrifices) that lead them to perform immoral acts. Or perhaps they (or we) have not yet developed social institutions that lead to better outcomes (here are some admittedly controversial examples: replacing slavery and serfdom with capitalism or patriarchal with egalitarian marriage). And obviously, this goes both ways as well--just because my own culture assumes that something is okay doesn't mean that it is either.

I'm sure that some theologians say what you say here, but I don't think there is a strong consensus about your claim. You are essentially describing a compatibilist version of freedom; God is free because God acts according to his nature.

However, some theologians understand God to have libertarian free will. Thus, although God is perfect and cannot sin, this doesn't mean that God is not able to sin (see for example Jesus's temptations in the wilderness).

This is to misunderstand the nature of necessity. We would say that if God is a necessary being (and don't forget that I think none of this actually makes sense), then if God exists, then God has all the Godly attributes. However, if God were a different kind of necessary being, say God*, then God* would have all the God*ly attributes. If God* is just like God, except with a different morality, then voila.

Thank you. Glad to see that my post may not be a misrepresentation after all.

+1

-2

You can't say something like "philosophical criticisms of the book miss the point" and then concede you aren't a philosopher, and further claim that the ability to attack 'the philosophical underpinnings of anything' is somehow a reason to accept your view. So suppose I can attack the philosophical underpinnings of anything; does it follow then that morality is what I affirm on odd-numbered Tuesdays?

Philosophy is actually quite good for tasks like these; not to say what objective morality is (philosophy almost always sucks for making substantive claims like this), but to point out the myriad flaws in philosophically underdeveloped thinking.

I should have quoted better.

I didn't +1 for the - philosophy can attack anything, therefore its pointless - argument. I gave the +1 for his aligning view on the utility of epistemological objectivity - as I have been arguing for in this thread.

There's hardly a situation where I don't claim the possibility of being wrong.

But since it appears that you're quoting Einstein out context to try to make a point completely different from the one that one can reasonably conclude he's making based on the available evidence, it does not come as any sort of surprise that you would take a single sentence of mine completely out of context to try to make a point that bears little resemblance to the point I was actually making.

But as I said earlier... whatever.

We clearly disagree on the rest, so I thought I'd leave it alone for now.

All I wanted was an admittance by you, that my post was not a misrepresentation, but I'll settle for a compromise, with your acknowledgment of the possibility of you being wrong - this is about as much as I'm going to get out of you.

Original Position can accomplish more I think - on the epistemological objectivity front - which I hope doesn't appear to be so "objectively wrong" to you anymore: whatever that even means.

At a certain level, this seems to be a different concept of "true" than what I normally associate with that term. (This is not to say that I think you're wrong in your usage of the word.) This is similar to the error that VeeDDzz is making with his statements about what social scientists say. When they make observations, they are doing so in a descriptive sense. Their observations are true insofar as they accurately reflect the attitudes of the specific range of persons in question (where the range can be both time and culturally constrained). An observation that a social scientist makes is NOT true in some sort of global sense.

Going back to my example of inches, it would still be true that there are 12 inches in a foot even if the entire world went to metric. The only thing that would cause a "violation" of this fact is if people redefined the terms "inch" and "foot" to have a different relationship (in which case, we would really only have a violation in the sense of a conflation of terms, and this would easily be resolved by referring to the relationship of foot_1 and inch_1 as being different from the relationship of foot_2 and inch_2).

I appreciate that you spent the time to expand on this point. I can understand a bit better what point you're trying to make here. From my point of view, you're basically just saying that you want all the things that God provides, but you want to have humans take responsibility for it.

I had to look these up.

This makes sense now. Obviously, I don't agree with it, but coming to a point of agreement on this wasn't ever the point. I think that you're creating a sliding scale of truth, which to me feels very odd. I have a difficult time conceptualizing the word "true" as applied to math in a way that is meaningfully applied to human constructions in the absence of a larger construction which defines the parameters. (I view logic and mathematical truths as being somehow embedded into the universe, and it seems to me that you're trying to define truth as being somehow embedded into some sort of collective human perspective/experience.)

You've also said more, but I don't have anything in particular to say in response at the moment, so I'll simply leave it as it is and thank you for the time you took to expand on your thoughts.

He assume everyone wants to be healthy, and thats easy once you define what it means to be healthy (eat good, exercise, take medicine when needed etc)...Most people dont want to vomit.

But what about people who smoke, take drugs, who are obese, if these things were moral questions we would ban all cigarettes/tobacco, ban all fast food joints are at least put a restriction on the amount of times you can go to a fast food place, same for alcohol, force people to exercise, maybe even control their diet, maybe punish people for being obese etc..so where and how do you draw the line on freedom to act compared to what is moral and the right thing to do?

Most people want to be healthy, sure I can buy that, but most people dont act on it because they desire other things. How can the will to desire to do things outside of the social norm be wrong? Doing what is best is a fine idea but only if you value what is best. (best for who?)