Star Course Objective Morality Discussion Page

•  Nicholas Beale Sun 03 May, 1998 16:45

Clearly, if RedC is true, then it completely changes the way the world looks.  It means that we should love God, and our Neighbour as Ourselves.  We should make prayer and worship central to our loves.  All our moral choices are made in a different light, so there are as many specific examples as moral choices.  Let's take one: "euthanasia" (deliberately killing another person on the grounds that their life isn't worth living) is compeletely out under RedC. because, being made in God's Image and beloved of God, no-one's life is not worth living and because God says "thou shalt not kill".

• Diarmid Weir Sun, 03 May 1998 22:39

Shall we discuss morality, since we can at least both agree that this has relevance to action? I couldn't understand why Colin Howson let you get away with this 'torturing babies for fun is wrong' {TBFFIW} nonsense. This is a tautology: 'inflicting unnecessary pain on defenceless infants for no rational reason is wrong' is its real meaning and it is therefore meaningless. Anthony Flew in 'Thinking about thinking' quotes a passage in Hamlet where he says something like: 'There is no villain in Denmark but he be a knave'. Horatio or someone rightly tells him he's talking a load of cobblers! But what if we said 'Carrying out a medical procedure which involved some pain for the purpose of preventing more severe pain or death'? The actions involved and the level of pain could be exactly the same. Is this morally wrong?
 It is my understanding that many Christians at any rate do not believe in Objective Morality. They believe that their personal relationship with God and their 'love' (using the definition you gave earlier) for their Neighbour is quite enough to ensure that most choices of moral actions (which is what counts) are the best possible ones. It seems to me that Objective Morality has been and still is responsible for much suffering in the world.

• Fr Gregory Hallam 04 May 1998, 09:53

Situationist subjective ethics leads to abortion on demand.  I would have thought the boot was on the other foot when it comes to objective morality.
• Diarmid Weir 04 May 98

So..........................?
• Fr Gregory Hallam 04 May 1998, 23:45

Well, we know where we stand don't we Diarmid?
• Nicholas Beale 5 May 98, 11:01

So........ millions of innocent human lives have been lost in a way which, given RedC, is totally unacceptable.   Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of this issue, you cannot deny that it is a specific practical situation where it makes a difference.
PS - The last major state to try to base its morailty on scientific evolutionary principles exterminated 6+M  people who were 'unfit' to live.  Many doctors there said "So........?" and enthusiastically collaborated.
• Steven Carr Mon 4 May 1998 06:23 - A post re omniscience moved here.
• Nicholas Beale 5 May 98 12:20

I too was surpised by Colin's line.  But TBFFIW is not a tautology ("for fun" is not the same as "for no rational reason" and even if it were you need additional axioms) and certainly not meaningless (NB tautologies are not meaningless. 100-35=65 is a tautology, don't give a £1 to pay for The Times if you think its meaningless!).
   Those Christians who believe that "their personal relationship with God and their love for their Neighbour is quite enough to ensure that most choices of moral actions are the best possible ones" do believe in an Objective Morality viz that acting in accordance with Love God and Neighbour as Self always leads to the objectively right moral decisions.  As far as this goes, I think this is true, but I would also add that no individual can expect that their own subjective evaluation of this principle will necessarily be correct, which is why we need additional guidance from God, the Bible and the Church to explain what this principle means in practice.
 
• Steven Carr 18 May, 1998 17:10

There are certain things about 'objective morality' which have always puzzled me.
  1) Anybody observing human beings can see that different people have different moral values. I find some of them very objectionable. I think it was highly immoral for people to sacrifice human beings to ensure that the Sun rose the next day.  But to argue that there is an objective morality that everybody agrees upon is like arguing that there is an objective language that everybody speaks. It is simply, as a matter of plain fact, not true.
  2) Let us suppose that certain things are morally good in themselves. Then they are morally good in themselves. There is no need for any external source to declare that it is morally good. By definition, if something has to be declared to be morally good, then it is not morally good in itself, but morally good because something external has valued it as being morally good.
  3) Was the Bishop's suicide in Pakistan an objective moral good or an objective moral wrong?
• Nicholas Beale 18 May, 1998 20:15

1) We don't suggest that everyone agrees with a morality, merely that eg "torturing babies for fun is always wrong" is either True or False.  Not everyone agrees about whether the universe is open or closed, but this does not make it a subjective matter.
2) That assumes that we are omniscient!  It is surely clear that it is logically possible that something might be good in itself but that we might fail to realise it, unless we are told. Christians believe (and are told) that all morality flows from love (Love God & Love Neighbour as Yourself (LGLNY)) but we know perfectly well that in practice we are often unable and/or unwilling to think through what that means in practice.  If someone asks "why is love good?" or why should we LGLNY? then at one level we can reply: this is an axiom (after all there must be some definition of the terms "good" and "should") but if the reply is "sez who?" we can illuminate it by reference to the Loving Ultimate Creator, and to the pheonomenon of Jesus.  Whereas atheists.....?
3) I don't know, but I hope the former.  However if so, it was by a special revelation.
• Diarmid Weir Wed, 20 May 1998 17:48

A story I read in the paper today - I think there was a similar incident in the UK a few months ago - about a gunshot victim being left to die yards outside a hospital in the US, illustrates one of the problems with 'objective' morality.
  The difficulty is that you can lay down prohibitions which sound very reasonable until they actually prevent you doing the right thing because the fear of doing the proscribed 'wrong' thing is so great. This person was not helped because
a) the hospital staff had been told - probably for insurance reasons - that they could not render assistance to anyone outside the hospital;
b) the police were apparently not supposed to move injured people 'in case the bullet moved'!
{z - see below}  The logical mistake here is to fail to give the same moral weight to the consequences of not acting as to those of acting. The same applies to abortion. Those who wish to deny women the right to safe, legal abortion cannot absolve themselves from considering, for example, the death and serious injury that inevitably would result from illegal 'botched jobs'. (The law is only a tool after all, not a moral statement). They may say that this is outweighed by the 'evil' of abortion - but they must make it clear what the preferable consequences are of their chosen alternative. It is not enough to say that abortion is bad in itself, and ought to be avoided. No-one with any experience of the realities of abortion would disagree with this.
  And what about God's inaction over human suffering? He either has the power to prevent it or he doesn't. (To choose not to see it is no excuse.) If he does but chooses not to his guilt is very great. If he doesn't, then we are more powerful than him, because we do have that power - should we only choose to use it. {moved to here}
• Robert Chetty Thurs 21 May 98

 Could you share more thoughts on the above, particularly on the issues of:
1.  why God chooses not TO act in the face of so much suffering;
2.  how to recognise Him acting when He does;
3.  His general "action in the world" (as  Polkinghorne describes it)- the interaction of a supernatural Being with a concrete world in such things as answers to prayers, healing, etc.
• Diarmid Weir Fri, 22 May 1998 16:58

My comments were in response to some points made previously in the 'starcourse discussion', mainly by Nicholas Beale. If you look at the site http://www.starcourse.org/discussion you will find the relevant ones in the section on 'Objective Morality'.
{a}  Essentially the point I am trying to make is that even if one can make a case for human beings arising from deliberate action by some intelligent being or beings (let's call him/her God - although some believe 'aliens' to be responsible!), this doesn't tell us how we should act towards this being. We have to respond to him/her/them in the same way as we would respond to any other 'new intelligence' - someone coming unannounced to our door, a man landing from outer space in our back garden - for example. And what is crucially important is how this being acts toward us, and responds to our actions. Without this process we can't even begin to communicate.
{b}  As to why God should choose not to act on suffering (assuming his/her existence for the sake of argument) - the only possible explanation could be that the consequences of not interfering are greater than those of interfering. But this brings us back to the question as to why the world is like that. Either it's because God chose to create it that way - or there are indeed forces outwith God's control - in which case in some situations our knowledge or judgement might, in theory at any rate, be superior to his. {moved to here}
{c}  As to how to recognise 'him' acting in the world - I would say that you have to predict an event which could only occur if God existed. But what this event would be is problematic because it depends on a definition of God. Nicholas Beale uses the definition 'loving ultimate creator'. This means we actually have to prove three things
  1) We were deliberately created
  2) The creator was not itself created
  3) The creator loves us
1) Nicholas Beale (and Polkinghorne) think that the nature of the Universe 'proves' that we were created. Altough I agree that some of the 'evidence' sounds pretty impressive, it's a bit like trying to convince this week's lottery winner that they couldn't possibly have won because the odds against were 17 million to one. In the face of the big cheque the odds become irrelevant. In the face of the existence of man the retrospective odds of us occurring by chance are logically irrelevant.
  If someone claimed to be God, how would we decide if they were telling the truth?
2) Therefore has always existed - so time must be an illusion. If this were so why have we not always existed? And if we have always existed, then we can't have been created! QED?
3) Nicholas Beale defines love (quite reasonably, I believe) as 'constantly willing the ultimate good of the beloved'. This takes us back to our arguments about suffering.
{d} 'Action in the world'  - I think in the end it is certainly possible to accept that we may have been created, and that our creator quite likes these little human things. But this does not necessarily mean that he has the power or the information to always know better than us how we should act in our own best interest, or can communicate this satisfactorily - which is  the actual basis of theistic religions, as opposed to theories, and explains worship, prayer and objective morality etc.
{e}Clearly the benefits of worship etc do not have universal significance, unlike eating, drinking or sex - since many humans don't do it. This raises the possibility that they are genuinely important to some people - and the benefits - supernatural or psychological - are real to them - but that they are not at all important to others in any real sense. In this case a lot of time and effort has and is being wasted by theists on trying to convince the rest of us of something that is actually utterly irrelevant to us, and they would be better off trying to put Jesus' teachings into practice, by working to eliminate third world poverty etc!.
• Nicholas Beale Sat 23 May 11:10

{a}God = Loving Ultimate Creator - if humans were 'created' by Little Green Men Interfering then the LGMI would not be God.  How you 'should' act towards an LUC depends on what you mean by 'should'.  If should=Love God and Love Neighbour as Self then its obvious.  What do you mean by should?
{b} (see here).
{c} (1) If a randomly chosen person in 13M wins the lottery that's not evidence that its fixed.  If only one person entered, and there was no prize if he guessed the numbers wrong, then it would be v suspicious.  The point of the Anthropic Principle is not that we exist, as opposed to billions of other possible civilisations if the parameters had been a bit different, but that if they had been a bit different no civilisation could exist anywhere in the Universe.  And like any observation which has a low likelihood under H1 and a high one under H2, it tends (in the absence of other data) to confirm H2. Statistical, not mathematical proof.  But that's science for you.
(2) Why does God always existing make time an illusion?  Are you saying that it is logically necessary that time had a begining?  Kant was right in demolishing that.  (for "who created God" see here).
{d} Would you accept that there may be a Loving Ultimate Creator?  LGMI aren't, as you say, very interesting (although maybe that's what the Greek Gods were thought to be?)
{e}Probably more humans worship than have sex, and far more than practice medicine or physics.  Would you therefore say that medicine or physics "do not have universal significance"?  We've also previously shown that ELUC, if true, is far from irrelevant.
{z } The 'argument' that "abortion should be legal becasue if not some women may die from illegal abortions" would be an 'argument' for legalizing blackmail, burglary,  infanticide or murder.  If it were really true that illegal abortions cost as many lives as legal ones do now, then there would be an issue, (although I would still prefer to protect the innocent) but there is no evidence that this was ever the case. Over one million human lives have been lost through legal abortions in the UK alone, and there have probably been more deaths of women due to legal abortions than there were illegal ones (the big rise in female suicides is probably strongly linked to abortion, although the statistics are carefully supressed) .  So I agree that Christians need to be clear about the consequences of moral actions, but in abortion we are so.
 
 

Peter Singer

• Nicholas Beale 15 May 98 21:19

According to the BBC Peter Singer, the Australian 'philosopher' who invented "Animal Rights" now thinks that handicapped babies should be 'helped to die' by lethal injection.  A horrifying example of how, once society has lost its moral bearings, anything goes.  Comments?
• Steven Carr, Fri, 15 May 1998 21:42

Psalm 137
• Fr Gregory Hallam Fri, 15 May 98 22:40

Whoops!  There goes Steven, the biblical literalist again!  Another example of how atheism requires fundamentalism or distorted exegesis to survive.  There again, it could be irony.  No, no, I think he's just being clever ... too clever!
• Nicholas Beale Sat 16 May 15:00

Christians have always understood that the Bible must be read in the light of Christ, so in our eyes Psalm 137 says nothing about human babies. The principal interpretation (at least 1500 years old) is here.
 
• Wayne and Fiona Corker Mon, 18 May 1998 23:40:27 +1100

The ethics of Peter Singer are very frightening. He and his colleagues at Monash University produce hypotheticals that stretch human moral boundaries beyond our imagination. It should be of no surprise that he has soul mates all around the world.
  For reasons that are difficult to explain, Peter Singer and his colleagues work within a  regulated system that prevents that which is normal practice in the UK and parts of the USA. (eg Anonymous artificial insemination by donor, experiments upon embryonic tissue). They have been campaigning to change public opinion and State Law for the realisation of the technological options that are available today. Therefore, in their eyes
{a1}healthy piglets should have more value that an impaired human baby,
{a2} abortions are equal to extraction of wisom teeth.
{a3} Experiments on embryos are the same as experiments on any cell culture, and
{a4} clones are nothing more than twins seperated by a long time.
There is great emphasis upon the right of individuals to choose and calls for deregulation of ethical questions.
  Singer and his partners would argue that
{b1}it is those who obstruct them who have lost their moral bearings. He would also point out that
{b2} Western Society never operated upon Biblical Ethics.
{c} They would also argue that Christian ethics which dominated our Society until recent times have been proved wrong.
{c1} Anglicans were misguided in denying painkillers to the dying and to women in labour.
{c2}That Christian oposition to birth control including abortion was misguided and
{c3} those places, that control their fertitlity are better off medically, mentally and materially.
{c4}Opposition to assisted reproductive technology again has been confounded with the thousands of healthy and happy children given to subfertile people. The debate will range even further as {d} our own genration illustrates that the Christian family is nothing more than a religious fanstasy.
   Peter Singer and his bedfellowes ask {e} Christians to provide hard scientific evidence that any grounds to obstruct their activities are for the well being of humanity. Christians are called upon not to assert Christian morality and their ethics, but to demostrate how Christian morals and Christian ethics are for the well being of humanity.
{f1} How can unwanted children be beneficial?
{f2} How can denying people assisted reproduction be beneficial for human society?
{f3} How can the suppression of technology be beneficial for human beings?
{f4} Why should people's lives be determined by a confounded religious system?
   It would be wonderful if this discussion could provide some responces to the above critique of Christian ethical priniciples and their continued guiding of Western society.
•  Nicholas Beale 18 May 1998 20:00

Gosh - lots to deal with there!  Let's try the following (BTW I know these are not your views, but it's easier writing as if they were)
{a} The trouble with evil people who try to invent their own morality is that it can have no fundamental basis, becasue whatever principles they invent cannot have any logically objective basis.  4-legs good, 2-legs bad springs to mind.
{a1} What does it mean to say piglets are "more valuable" than babies?  Would you then slaughter 3 babies for 2 pigs?  What about if the pig is a bit lame?  Why not worms - how many milli-pigs are they worth?  What does "impaired" mean?  We are all imperfect.  Severely handicapped?  How severely?  "inferior/unwanted?" This 'scientific' ideology has been tried before, and leads to the Gas Chamber.
{a2} "equal to" how?  You might as well say that murder is equal to cutting down a tree.  Abortion is clearly the deliberate killing of an innocent human life,  and a society that condones this cannot expect to survive very long.  Extracting wisdom teeth is none of these things.  A society that aborted all its fetuses would die - unlike one that extracted all its wisdom teeth.
{a3} If so, please experiment on other cell cultures!  If you cant tell the difference between an embryo and a tooth you should not be doing biology!
{a4} The objection to cloning is not that it produces clones, since identical twins occur in nature.  It is that clones are deliberately produced, knowing the exact genetic makeup and the implications of its expression. This is too big a step towards making humans a commodity.
{b1} in the abesence of sound fundamental premises they cannot say this.
{b2} the fact that moral norms are not always lived up to in no way invalidates them.
{c1} nor does the fact that people have made mistakes in applying general principles.  Would they argue that every mathematical error invalidates maths?
{c2} they may disagree with the Christian position on abortion but it is entirely consistent with the Christian axiom "Love God & Neighbour as Self".  Far from having been proven wrong, it is quite clear that all the assertions used to 'justify' relaxed abortion laws were evil lies, and it is the most terrible blot on our society.
{c3} There are many ways to control fertility other than abortion.  Societies that practiced mass abortion are now facing extinction due to a greying population that is not self-replacing.
{c4} There are no long-term studies on the effect of assisted conception, and the success rates are very low.  It is only made 'necessary' by excessive promiscuity, birth control and abortion.  Of course we rejoice in the babies born, but the overall effect is tiny compared with the millions murdered by abortionists.
{d} this is such nonsense I can't even think what it might mean.  The vast majority of children do not have divorced parents.
{e} So he can spout garbage but we must give "scientific evidence" that God's morality is benficial.  Some philosopher, if he hasn't read Hume. You cant get ought from is without additional moral axioms.
{f1} The children can be wonderful human beings. (Beethoven would have been aborted today).  And even evil parents who don't want their children can be converted by the experience.
{f2}Becasue treating humans like commodities devalues the whole of society.
{f3} Nuclear terrorism is OK then?
{f4} Why indeed?  Any deep system of beliefs that conditions the basic way people look at moral and spiritual issues is a religious system.  If they follow an evil and misguided invented one they will inevitably end up in terrible mess. It's known in the trade as Idolatory.  If they truly seek the love of God, then His own Son promises that they will find, and base their lives on Truth, not invented falsehood.

Main Topics in Debate

• Anthropic Principle
• Comprehensible Universe
• Objective Morailty
• Jesus
• Suffering
• Other God & Science
• Other Star Course
• Other
• Biblical Manuscripts
• How can uncertainty be compatible with faith
• AJ Ayer's Verification Principle Refuted