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Showing posts with label Morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morality. Show all posts
Michael Nugent with the eighteenth in a series of pieces on whether gods exist.  
 
How can we judge morality without gods? This is the eighteenth of a series of short posts about whether gods exist and why the question is an important one.

I have already argued that morality has evolved in the brains of social animals, including humans, because both cooperation and competition help us to survive.
 
Photo: star cluster NGC 3603 from NASA & ESA/Hubble

I’ve made a distinction between good and bad, which relate to outcomes, and right and wrong, which relate to intentions.

An outcome is objectively bad for a sentient being if it harms that sentient being by causing it to needlessly suffer. An action is objectively wrong if the agent of the action unjustly harms a sentient being.

But given the influence of subjectivity, and the amount of factors interacting with each other, how can we know what is good and bad or right and wrong?

I subscribe to a variation of John Rawls’ social contract theory of morality. Essentially, that is:

How would a perfectly rational set of people design principles of justice for a society, if we don’t know in advance what position we would hold in that society?

That is, we don’t know if we will be rich or poor, male or female, healthy or sick. This veil of ignorance forces us to be impartial, and to develop universally just principles.

My personal addition to the theory is that we also should not know what species we would be. I believe one of the greatest injustices in our world is how we treat nonhuman animals.

Every year we kill over 50 billion farmed animals, and up to a trillion fish. These sentient beings suffer unjustly for our convenience, and our slaughter of them is an ongoing moral atrocity.

This variation on John Rawls’ social contract theory won’t tell us exactly what is right and wrong in any given circumstance. But it does provide a way by which we can, in principle, examine what is most likely to be right and wrong.

Michael Nugent is Chair of Atheist Ireland

Do Gods Exist? ➤ 18 Morality Without Gods?

Michael Nugent with the seventeenth in a series of pieces on whether gods exist.  

How did morality evolve? This is the seventeenth of a series of short posts about whether gods exist and why the question is an important one.

Here is one plausible model of how morality evolved naturally.

Morality has evolved in the brains of social animals, including humans, because both cooperation and competition help us to survive.

Photo: Cepheus B cloud from Chandra X-ray and Spitzer Telescope

For example, when parents look after their children, their children are more likely to grow up. When a tribe cooperates in gathering food, the tribe is more likely to survive.

So genes for caring for children, and genes for cooperating, tend to be passed on from generation to generation, and become more common.

We see three phases of evolving morality among social animals. The first phase is empathy and compassion. The second phase is cooperation and reciprocity. The third phase is understanding fairness and justice

Many nonhuman animals exhibit these types of morality. In one experiment, rats would refuse food if they saw another rat being electrocuted. Which says a lot about human morality, setting up an experiment like that.

In another experiment, monkeys were given food if they put a token into a slot. Some monkeys couldn’t figure it out. Another monkey would take that monkey’s token, put it in the slot, and let the first monkey have the food.

But aside from that, humans and some other animals have a greater capacity for more nuanced morality, because we have a greater capacity for reason. We can know that something is wrong, because we can understand that it causes unjustified harm.

So our sentience and consciousness and our ability to reason therefore give us a special role in sharing our lives on this tiny planet while we are alive, in that we know that our behaviour has consequences for other living beings.

But that does not extend to us having a special place in the overall universe. Nor does it suggest that a god created the universe in order that we might live. 
 
Michael Nugent is Chair of Atheist Ireland

Do Gods Exist? ➤ 17 How Did Morality Evolve?

Michael Nugent with the sixteenth in a series of pieces on whether gods exist.  

What is morality? This is the sixteenth of a series of short posts about whether gods exist and why the question is an important one.

What do I mean by morality? I make a distinction between good and bad, which relate to outcomes, and right and wrong, which relate to intentions.

An outcome is objectively bad for a sentient being if it harms that sentient being by causing it to needlessly suffer. An action is objectively wrong if the agent of the action unjustly harms a sentient being. 

Photo: star cluster NGC 3201 from NASA & ESA/Hubble

In any given situation, because so many factors are interacting, it can be easy or hard to know what is good and bad or right and wrong.

However, if there was an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful god that is the source of morality and cares about human beings on planet Earth, then at a minimum, we would expect it to be able to give us all the same moral message.

If that happened, we would expect to see that different sets of people at different times and different places in the world would have the same sense of morality. But this not what we see.

On the other hand, if there are no gods, then we would expect to see that different sets of people at different times and different places in the world would be evolving different ideas and codes of morality. And this is indeed what we do see.

In parallel to applying reason to the evidence of reality, in order to try to understand what is objectively true about reality, we can also apply reason to the evidence of our behaviour, in order to try to understand what is objectively true about morality.

It is simply false to suggest that we need the idea of a god to assist us in doing this. There are many approaches to moral philosophy that do not invoke gods.
 
Michael Nugent is Chair of Atheist Ireland

Do Gods Exist? 16 ➤ What Is Morality?

From the Belfast Telegraph: The purposeless disbeliever idea, lacking anything to ascribe ultimate meaning to the universe, does not bear scrutiny, researchers said.



The idea that non-believers in God lack morality has been disputed by new research, experts said.

A common supposition – that of the purposeless disbeliever, lacking anything to ascribe ultimate meaning to the universe – does not bear scrutiny, a university study said.

Most endorse objective moral values and human dignity at similar rates to the general populations in their countries, the report presented at the Vatican said.

One of the authors, University of Kent sociologist Dr Lois Lee, said:

These findings show once and for all that the public image of the atheist is a simplification at best, and a gross caricature at worst.
Instead of relying on assumptions about what it means to be an atheist, we can now work with a real understanding of the many different world views that the atheist population includes.
The implications for public and social policy are substantial — and this study also stands to impact on more everyday interactions in religiously diverse societies.

Non-Believers Do Not Lack Morality, Research Suggests

Atheist Republic team member, Utsav poses a questions to those who believe in a moral god. 

Is God Moral?

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