Hacker News Reader

Comment by theothermkn | Hacker News Reader

I’m going to chime in to this very rote and dreary conversation only long enough to point out that, even in the unlikely event that “objective morality” is anything more coherent than “nuance makes me uncomfortable,” the existence or absence of “God” does not impinge on its existence. This is one of the more damning things about that whole “conversation”; the psychological need for a moral order is so great that the justification used for it is an utterly unquestioned, utterly absurd non sequitur.

I’ve just said the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard on the topic, and I’m still bored with it.

View on HN

> I’ve just said the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard on the topic, and I’m still bored with it.

Thanks, I chuckled. It's true that the conversation contains a big amount of things that are obvious and trivial as soon as somebody understands them.

Maybe you could make it more interesting if you start to question your own existence, but it's definitely possible that you don't have the problems that most people have with this topic. In this case you found a shortcut to enlightenment. Congratulations! (this is no sarcasm. I like how you interact with those ideas and still believe they're boring af).

> question your own existence

Non sum, ergo non cogito?

If creation is intended, not accidental, then there is a final end for each and every thing in creation. If there is a final end for creatures then for those who are given free will are given it for the express purpose of choosing their final end ("choosing" as opposed to "determining" - you could also read "accepting" as an ... acceptable alternative).

If the Intender did not exist there would be no objective morality because final ends would be merely illusions. All morality would therefore be subjective to the (local) intenders and would involve a "will to power".

I bring up God's existence for this end, without such a being, we are left with a material universe. There is no measure within the universe for right or wrong. People need to accept that since all of your ethics and laws are fundamentally build on it.

For example, why is rape wrong? Easily answered with God: because he said so. With out God, well, you don't have an answer. You can say, "Because it impinges on the rights of the victim." To which one will reply, "Why should I care about the victim?" This will cycle until one person is honest enough to admit, "Because if you rape, the force of the masses will descend on you to the point of pains or death." Might makes right (so too for God).

With man, the uneasiness is that we are fickle. We will only defend those we wish to. We know that fundamentally we can't trust each other. We know that we are each out for our own. We can lie and say, "She loves me. Or they wouldn't do that." These are all lies. The Germans were fairly good people until they weren't. The Russians and Chinese too. The government was a kind father until it exterminated millions with the, at least, tacit consent of millions more.

That, dear friend, is your world. That is why you don't need to read Plato first. Plato is predicated on a world view of constants and moral weight: the Forms. Nietzsche shows those don't exist. The only thing remaining is the stark reality that reality and all its trappings don't matter for all is simply matter. It is neither good nor bad. The only rule is that made of the strongest material to crush the wills of others to submission. Whoever bears that scepter has the right to make moral.

I'm about as far from someone who understands this topic as it gets, but here's my explanation for why rape is bad that doesn't invoke god:

It's not an evolutionarily stable strategy. [1]

By that I mean, if we had a society where rape was normal, and sex was largely a nonconsensual thing, meaning there would be more violence, women would develop adaptations to prevent being raped, and more energy would be spent on the prevention of unwanted procreation, and the the gene pool would be less fit for survival than one without the rape gene.

But merely having a society full of non-rapists isn't enough either: the first serial rapist to come along would invade the gene pool by raping others and spreading the gene that encodes this "rape others" behavior, and within so many generations the gene pool would be full of rapists.

To have an ESS, our behavior would have to be encoded with a "don't rape others, but also don't tolerate others who do rape" strategy, which would increase a society's fitness for survival, and be more resilient against an invading strategy.

Calling rape "immoral" is a good shorthand because "morals" are basically a formal way of defining the whole "don't do this, and don't tolerate others who do" concept in a way that humans can understand. But at the end of the day morals are just an abstraction that we've had to create in order to be more successful as a social species. Religion may have helped as well... to me these things are extended phenotypes for our genes that have been selected for over eons to keep our gene pool at a stable equilibrium.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy...

Rape is a regular thing for ducks to the point where males and females have evolved weird reproductive organs in some sort of evolutionary arms race. Bed bugs practice what is known as 'traumatic insemination', where the male literally stabs a female with his penis, and sperm travels to the eggs through the blood of the female. Females can die of infection because of the open wound left after sex. Clearly rape isn't such a big evolutionary disadvantage that no species exist with this trait. Likewise, lions show us that killing or scaring away someones partner and killing their infant children can be perfectly 'evolutionary stable'. It seems to me that your reasoning starts with the conclusion, and then works backwards to some argument that sounds plausible. It's a strange world out there, and I would be very wary to base morality on evolution.

> clearly rape isn't such a big evolutionary disadvantage that no species exist with this trait.

If different species (with different evolutionary strategies) also have different moralities, would this not be a strong hint towards morality being based on evolution?

> spreading the gene that encodes this "rape others" behavior... within so many generations the gene pool would be full of rapists.

Not neccesarily. In a small society, a serial rapist would be hunted and killed quickly or forced to run away. In both cases, his children would struggle to survive without the food and protection provided by a father. Many of they would starve and not survive to reach the adulthood.

That's the point I meant by saying it's not a stable strategy to just not rape, you have to have a "punish those who do rape" trait encoded as well. Or more generally, moral standards.

> For example, why is rape wrong? Easily answered with God: because he said so.

That's something I never understood about God as an argument for objective morality. What makes God's values objective? If God says x is immoral, isn't that just his personal opinion?

The fact that he is all-powerful and can punish you for not agreeing with him simply makes him a cosmic dictator - you'll be following his rules not because they are objective moral truths, but because you want to avoid punishment.

I don't see how it would be impossible to disagree with the creator's morality, in the same manner as you can disagree with your parents' despite them "creating" you, or with the laws of your country despite them having the power to punish you for not following them.

> all-powerful

You're forgetting that the Abrahamic conception of God also includes infinite knowledge, infinite wisdom, and infinite benevolence in addition to omnipotence. If one ignores the logical problems that entails, then it's not hard to see how the will of such a being is, by definition, morally correct.

God's ideas of right and wrong flow out of his character. If humans are created in God's image, then humans' (unfallen) character is similar to God's. Then God's views of right and wrong are what fit unfallen, uncorrupted humans.

Then you have the Fall. After that, humans are bent, distorted. The situation now is like having a bent ruler. You place it beside an unbent ruler, and the bent ruler often says "I'm straight; it's the other ruler that's bent". That is, humans use their fallen morality to judge God's morality, rather than using God's morality to judge their own.

God's values aren't objective. For them to be objective, there has to be something besides God to judge them by - something more authoritative than God. But God's values are valid for humans made in his image.

> For example, why is rape wrong? Easily answered with God: because he said so.

This is exactly the non sequitur that I pointed out. Not even a God’s say-so could change “objective” morality, if it existed. He can change the sea to red, but he can’t change what “red” is in any meaningful way.

Also, the quote has the other suspicious feature of this trope: it assumes that that which is objective is knowable, even tautologically obvious and workable in every case. It’s the “simple matter of programming” of the amateur philosophical world.

My point here is not about the relatively boring questions of God’s existence or of the nature of morality. My point is that those conversations are psychological, not philosophical. They’re the sublimated terror at the unbearable lightness of being, to borrow a titular phrase, which is so raw and unprocessed that it manifests in a hysterical inability to see the absurdity of appealing to objectivity as a proxy for control over existential circumstance. This is how God died. Not by mere disbelief, but by the realization that not even He could animate either values or morals.

God is the objective morality because he will interact with creation. If he didn’t, you’re right.

Objective morality by definition needs no god to justify it; in fact, even god could not alter the qualities of an "objective morality" and if he could then it wouldn't be "objective" and would be robbed of all meaning. For example, if a god defined objective morality such that it was moral to burn children alive as a form of penitence, then we're no longer talking about "morality" as it is understood and are instead discussing the semantics regarding the capabilities of god. If god said that burning kids was moral, we'd have to create a new word for describing the quality that appears as inherent disgust at the idea of inflicting torment.

Here's a dumb question: if God does not exist then why have the majority of moral systems happened upon such large areas of overlap regarding right and wrong? Absent a God there still needs to be an answer to this. It would be likely found in game theory, which is math, which may be onjective.

Or just the fact that we're all humans and humans tend to have a lot of similarities in their psychological makeup. Any purely logical framework (such as game theory), that doesn't take into account the non-rational aspects of human psychology is going to be ultimately limited in its explanatory power. The reality of human psychology is just as real and objective as human physiology, and the associated variability due to both nature and nurture.

That just bumps the question back to evolutionary dynamics, largely a subfield of game theory. Why are we "wired" to produce these cooperative "nice" social systems?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com