Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 17, 2018 2:25 pm
We have done nothing so far to show whether or not there are transcendent truths or moral truths
Exactly. If you couldn't "find" any in 300 years, or 6000 years (civilization with writing) or 15,000 (agricultural and fishing settlement) or 50,000 years (nomadic tribal units) it's unlikely to happen this week. But, you never know.
I agree with you completely that Materialist or Physicalist cosmology would rule them out
Where did I say that?
So the question remains to be answered there.
Which question? That one:
Actually, it's the main question: "Is morality objective or not?"
Actually it was as written above here "What could make morality objective?"
Call objective morality "X".
I don't think that's a good idea. The X to which I referred was the example
you used on Page 1:
"Different people believe X, Y, and Z." All of these are truly question-begging, as none answers the question fo whether or not X is true.
...If the advocate of X appeals to the authority of X, and X is the right authority to which to appeal, then X is correct.
where X was one belief-system among many. If we now substituted X to stand for the universal objective morality, we might be guilty of surreptitiously slipping one contender into the winner's circle. That would be wrong in at least a dozen different competing moralities.
It actually doesn't matter how many people share a belief. The truth value of that belief depends on other things.
Force of arms, indoctrination, tradition, peer pressure... You have made this point.
I think we all know it's not geocentric.
If only!! Most of us still believe it's anthropocentric.
"Do we know the real configuration of the universe?" is not the same as "Does the universe have an actual configuration?"
No, but we can only know, about either one, as much as the evidence tells us. If there is or isn't, and we can't find out, it is of no consequence to us.
If we can't know whether there is such a thing and you claim to own such a thing, we may be excused for assuming that you're disingenuous.
The OP is not asking "Who believes that morality is objective?" But "What shows or makes it objective, if anything?"
Right. And?
Every archaeological dig on any ancient civilization has turned up evidence of religious and ritual practices,
Civilization. 6000 years, max. Actually, practices that are probably ritualistic and possibly religious, have turned up as early as 30,000 years ago.
and they're ordinarily polytheistic or animistic in configuration, though in at least one case, the Hebrews, monotheism's not unknown.
There is a world of difference (in which we may insert ancestor-worship, mysticism and dream-mythology) between animism and polytheism that spans some 20,000 years and girds the globe. The Hebrews' religion is only about 3000 years old. How it came to be monotheistic is interesting. The big civilizations all around had multiple gods, and Genesis sounds as if it had been lifted from a bigger mythology and retrofitted to their patron god. In the early books of of the OT, the Hebrews are aware that other tribes have their own gods and constantly worry about losing members of their tribe to those other gods. Egypt flirted with monotheism (Aten) for about the five minutes, at just about the same time the Hebrews started on their quest for a homeland. The first one, i mean, after leaving Egypt.
So far, we've found no ancient declarations of atheistic faith.
Very cute. Since atheism has no
faith or ritual, all the evidence you
don't find is evidence of atheism.
My point is that morality was understood by mankind from the beginning in a religious context.
How do you figure? First, you have not pinpointed the "beginning" of anything, not even religion. A body buried in the fetal position, wearing his leggings and bracelets, doesn't demonstrate a religious context for a moral code. None of the archeological evidence from prehistory shows anything about the rules of conduct or their philosophical bases. In historical times, the rules were made by rulers, who cited invisible sky-daddies as their authorization and heavily-armed enforcers to drive the point home. All this tell us is that both religion and law serve the interest of power. It says nothing about the
origins of etiquette, obligations and trust among equals.
So when we throw out that context, we can't be too surprised if morality itself seems to disappear as well.
That's a longish stretch of the begging-bowl. Odd, how well secular social organization works for elephants and gibbons.
And hence the "search." There was no known prerequisite for an entirely secular conception of morality. Such a thing would have to searched out, and a rationale for it would have to be found, because in human history we had not seen such a thing before.
Yeah, while you're at it, send out a search party for Pegasus. Recruit winged hounds.
You need some sensory inputs, data, or patterns. My point is that "rationality" isn't a mill that works without any grist.
Of course. Once the input ceases, rationality becomes unnecessary - like oxygen.
Think of it like mathematics.
Why? Reason is nothing like mathematics, or botany or crossword puzzles. Reason is a
faculty of the brain - a kind of function - while disciplines and pastimes are
products of the human imagination, in the devising of which reason plays a key role.
So you could say this: rationality is a process that operates without respect to partisan considerations.
OK
But without a given content ,
Not content, material. The data that reason processes is not held within reason itself, nor is it "given", but is a constantly incoming stream of ephemera. Rationality has no portmanteau or cheek-pouch: memory-storage is a separate facility.
set of taken-as-certain premises (or "partisanship" if you will)
I won't, because it's wrong. Reason starts working on incoming data as soon as the infant can distinguish its mother's face and make the logical connection between its own howling and the appearance of that desired presence.
Everybody thinks. That's what the brain does for a living. But not all thoughts are rational.
Reason isn't the only human faculty, nor the only source of thoughts.
Being genuinely rational takes more. It entails that the brain operations are logical and formally correct. If they're not, then it's just one of the other brain operations, like imagining, guessing, hoping, dreaming, inventing, aspiring and so on. It's not rationality unless it's also rational.
Rationality is hardly ever the dominant faculty operating in a human mind. Those other fact6ors are always present, as are physical sensations and emotions and external influences. What's that got to do with morality?
[IC -- Most people still seem to believe that one day "rationality will tell us" all what morality requires. ]
[S - Where are these people?]
Kant, Habermas, Rawls, and so on.
Three men, two of them dead, even with all their live adherents, hardly constitute a majority of the human race. Does it really make a difference to the overall behaviour of social organizations what a few eggheads are hoping for?
if there's no "data," there is no "data-processing" ...From whence comes that data?
It's a large universe, generates quite a bit of information. Then, of course, there is the close-up human contact.
Were that true, you would still not warrant the claim that because of it you know that objective truth doesn't exist.
It's not a claim. It's a statement of opinion, with reasons explained.
Somebody you DON"T know might have it, or it might still exist outside of the present stock of human knowledge, just as the non-geocentric universe existed when nobody believed in it at all. It might simply be awaiting discovery.
Might be and is are not synonyms.