It's not saying much more. Even when we understand and acknowledge Hume's observation, morality may or may not be Objective, God may or may not exist.
But if God does not exist, morals are not Objective. Just our inventions, along with God and we used both for our comfort/survival/thriving. And what's fascinating is that in such a world, all those times Theists (and Atheist Humanists) proclaimed that humans had value without scientifically-accepted empirical evidence they would not have been acting Immorally/Wrong.
Most people I know also accept that humans are highly irrational in most areas of life, and yet at the same time are capable of rational thinking (and using science as a tool for this) and understanding these irrational processes.
It always struck me a bit as 'begging the question' when Christians I talked to pointed out the inconsistency of 'not believing in objective morality' and yet 'holding strong moral viewpoints', because this very need for consistency kind of assumes that there should be such a consistency. Perhaps this is is a justifiable thought if you assume that there's a God who created things in an orderly fashion. But that's a premise many people don't share.
While you might not be making this exact argument, my point is that if you can accept the, in my opinion, overwhelming evidence we are not very sensical creatures living in a not very sensical world, the problem you point out isn't really a problem.
We have evolved to act as if there are moral absolutes, just as we perhaps have evolved to dress up our need to copulate, procreate, and combat loneliness as 'romantic love'. I can believe the latter and still be a romantic without any problems.
As far as others suggesting you resolve inconsistencies and hold logically consistent conclusions: yes, to arrive at Truth by examining what logically follows from true and sound reasoning you are going to have to first adopt the 'dependency' of Western logic. But, indeed, you only need do this if you care to know Truth. Many humans reject the use of Western logic (eg, the New Age community) and prefer vague, unexamined existence but I agree this ultimately is each individual's prerogative.
Your perspective seems to be "humans often hold untenable positions and Earth has not yet been destroyed because of this (or apparently impacted in any significant way from it) therefore I may (without impact) hold untenable positions", a position I and your Christian interlocutors I think unsurprisingly reject. My most sincere advice to you and to all everywhere is found in Rousseau's echo of Juvenal's motto "Vitam impendre vero"—you must stake your life on Truth.
Re: your ability to be a romantic you'll note that the conclusion in Vladimir Solovyov's truncated syllogism "Man is descended from the apes; therefore we must love one another" does not follow. Materialists can practice what looks like romance but cannot be romantics in any meaningful sense of the word.
I must say I really enjoy reading about your position in this and, to be honest, would wish nothing more than to be in agreement with it. I was a devout Christian for much of my life and I still feel the loss. But my reason for quitting this search and need for capital-T truth was that the Christian version of it (as well as the few others I explored) just wasn't convincing. It felt like a convenient lie to give meaning to my life rather than some Truth I happened to have figured out.
But all this doesn't mean that I now spend my life an exhausted nihilist. There's plenty of room for values and truth in a world-view that holds that ultimately the Objective nature of these things is probably unknowable. By the standards I used to hold as a devout Christian, I'm quite possible a better Christian now than I was back then. Plus I'm happier.
Anyways. I see your point, and I respect it for the most part, but I think it's a bit overreaching and arrogant to argue that a materialist cannot be a romantic in any meaningful sense. By my definition of meaningful, my romantic relationships are very meaningful. And practically speaking, I'm pretty sure my experience of romance is not so different from that of a Christian anyways.
Eventually, I would run into a philosophy B.A. who was also a Christian. I constantly pressed them for justification of their belief and their main response was this quote by Kierkegaard: "If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?" -- If there were no God, life would be despair (and Siddhartha would be right) so we believe. This line of thought upset me. What I wanted was to know what was actually the case, how the world actually was and not how we might like it to be. Truth at any cost no matter how inconvenient, bewildering, or painful.
I studied Buddhism and Eastern philosophies (which are basically methods of coming to terms with and accepting nihilism). But I retained an idea that human suffering was bad and humans somehow had value. Reading Hume is what changed me. Unless an outside rubric existed that would declare human suffering bad, human suffering never actually had been bad at all. But I believed internally stronger than any other belief that somehow it truly was bad and this instinct seemed to be a self-evident truth. What Hume shows is that this instinct that we feel is either placed in us in relation to a Supreme Being and its existence functions as a unit of evidence called natural revelation or it is a strange delusion we invent and we delude ourselves that human suffering matters.
A liberating realisation was that, in light of this, if the second scenario were the case, it was also not morally 'wrong' anytime humans proclaimed suffering was wrong, one would have merely paid the universe a compliment it would not have deserved. If the unempirical does not exist, then proclaiming it does is not wrong. In the words of philosopher Thomas Nagel: "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either".
As far as quitting the search and holding logically untenable positions, I suggest this remark by Walker Percy: "This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him." He portrays a worldview known as the supernatural existential, desiderium naturale, or Man as Wayfarer in his book The Moviegoer explained here: http://liamk.org/moviegoer/
>>What Hume shows is that this instinct that we feel is either placed in us in relation to a Supreme Being
You seem lost in that you think what atheists I doesn't come from something more despite us not having a name for it. You may call it a god, Yahweh, etc, I call it a feeling of existential validity. I believe also that my instinctual feelings come from something beyond, something greater, a higher order, whatever you want to call it but it's far beyond what we have knowledge of and so far from Christian mythology that I refuse to call it "god" or "gods". I prefer not to be linked to that.
And your mentioning of suffering, beauty, love, etc over and over makes it seem to me that you're coming from an emotional point, not a logical one. Not all love is good. Sometimes doing without love makes us stronger. Sometimes suffering is good, it builds strength and character. Sometimes feeling "bad" is "good", sometimes the opposite. You'll never find real logical truth when you base it on such ambiguities. Life is way too complex to just say 'I like love, therefore god".
If life is good and meant to be, then that which nurtures and perpetuates it is good. Sometimes it's suffering to strengthen oneself, sometimes it's suffering to strengthen humanity and weed out the weak so that in the end, we have left ones who don't suffer so much. Love for oneself and humanity is an emotion that in itself, can be a weakness. Too much and you have vanity and pride, which can be a weakness of successful living and leadership. If love is mercy and tolerance, sometimes what's needed for living isn't mercy and tolerance. You seem to praise certain emotions and instincts as if they're infallible. Believing in gods is also a weakness when you count on those gods to look out for you when you should be looking out for yourself. Some don't care what we do to the Earth because they count on their gods to save them or about space travel because they rely too much on their gods not throwing balls of fire at us, or they pray to their gods to save them from medical illness. All this is predicated on the presupposed notion of life being good so we should perpetuate it. And it takes your love of love, beauty, suffering, etc out for a proverbial spin because life sometimes needs needs what it doesn't wish for, for it to flourish.
>>What Hume shows is that this instinct that we feel is either placed in us in relation to a Supreme Being
You seem lost in that you think what atheists reason about the universe doesn't come from something more despite us not having a name for it. You may call it a god, Yahweh, etc, I call it a feeling of existential validity. I believe also that my instinctual feelings come from something beyond, something greater, a higher order, whatever you want to call it but it's far beyond what we have knowledge of and so far from Christian mythology that I refuse to call it "god" or "gods". I prefer not to be linked to that.
And your mentioning of suffering, beauty, love, etc over and over makes it seem to me that you're coming from an emotional point, not a logical one. Not all love is good. Sometimes doing without love makes us stronger. Sometimes suffering is good, it builds strength and character. Sometimes feeling "bad" is "good", sometimes the opposite. You'll never find real logical truth when you base it on such ambiguities. Life is way too complex to just say 'I like love, therefore god".
If life is good and meant to be, then that which nurtures and perpetuates it is good. Sometimes it's suffering to strengthen oneself, sometimes it's suffering to strengthen humanity and weed out the weak so that in the end, we have left ones who don't suffer so much. Love for oneself and humanity is an emotion that in itself, can be a weakness. Too much and you have vanity and pride, which can be a weakness of successful living and leadership. If love is mercy and tolerance, sometimes what's needed for living isn't mercy and tolerance as they can disintegrate the core foundations of the merciful and tolerant. You seem to praise certain emotions and instincts as if they're infallible. Believing in gods is also a weakness when you count on those gods to look out for you when you should be looking out for yourself. Some don't care what we do to the Earth because they count on their gods to save them or about space travel because they rely too much on their gods not throwing balls of fire at us, or they pray to their gods to save them from medical illness. All this is predicated on the presupposed notion of life being good so we should perpetuate it. And it takes your love of love, beauty, suffering, etc out for a proverbial spin because life sometimes needs what it doesn't wish for, for it to flourish.
I'm a lurker, not used to commenting so I don't know why but I can't edit comments.
If one gave as one's reason for seeking truth "humans sometimes happen to seek truth" you are correct, this would be an invalid reason because of the Is-Ought limitation. That cannot be the reason one seeks truth.
>you think what atheists reason about the universe doesn't come from something more...I call it a feeling of existential validity. I believe also that my instinctual feelings come from something beyond, something greater, a higher order, whatever you want to call it but it's far beyond what we have knowledge of
Discussing this issue is tricky because ultimately, being a Christian, I don't disagree with your experience in which you intuit something greater or with Hume's pinning of essences on a Supreme Being or with almost every person of every belief system I have ever met who feels very deeply something is actually going on here and I might refer to this universal experience as the supernatural existential or desiderium naturale. Ultimately I am not arguing against morals actually existing and so don't mean to put down this feeling you have, only let you know what is required for such a feeling to not to be dismissed as delusion. Strict Empiricism cannot account for it and must reject it but you, I, and even Sam Harris (cf. http://www.newsweek.com/rationalist-sam-harris-believes-god-... ) seem to reject this Empiricism. The Empiricist says your feelings here are a delusion but I'm saying they are not--quite the opposite.
>mentioning of suffering, beauty, love
The inclusion of terms like beauty and love is not at all illogical. What the "Is-Ought" Facts-Values gap shows us is that nothing is truly Immoral unless it holds such a quality objectively. In other words, unless murder objectively holds the quality:'immoral', when an individual says "Murder is Wrong" the meaning of that sentence is nothing more than "I dislike murder" -- a subjective opinion. The limitation is extended not only to 'shoulds' but to values generally. That is, we see the difficulty in locating 'beauty'. A sunset is not truly beautiful unless something about it objectively holds the quality:'beautiful'. If this is not the case, when an individual says "that sunset is beautiful"—even if 99% of humans agree with him (ad populum)—the meaning of that sentence is nothing more than "I like this sunset" -- another subjective opinion. In subjectivism, no one can ever be truly wrong about any value statement (what is moral, what has beauty, what deserves value/love) and so a sunset carries the same objectively neutral quality as excrement. Only if conditions are endowed with objective/mind-independent values, which cannot be located using empiricism, can something be understood to truly be beautiful or worth loving.
>If life is good and meant to be
A oft-assumed contingent that Empiricists do not have evidence for. And that pure Reason does not insist upon. As Hume writes "It is not contrary to Reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger".
The argument is that for morality to be objective, something external must be the source. You are making a huge jump by calling it god, and then you go even further and claim it's the christian god.
>> But if God does not exist, morals are not Objective. Just our inventions, along with God and we used both for our comfort/survival/thriving.
If god does not exists is health an invention? Science has liberated us from attributing health to gods, I suspect the same will be true of morality. To me it already is more moral to care for someone just because they are a fellow human being than to do it because some ancient manuscript may have commanded it by fear of ironically, itself immoral and eternal torture.
>> And what's fascinating is that in such a world, all those times Theists (and Atheist Humanists) proclaimed that humans had value without scientifically-accepted empirical evidence they would not have been acting Immorally/Wrong.
I'm assuming you mean 'humans had no value'?
This is what Hume shows. Can you refute his observation by providing a source of objective morality that is Empirical/not external/not supramundane? (You can't. There is none.)
>>If god does not exists is health an invention?
No and by volunteering a metaphor that compares the existence of objective moral facts (Values/Ought) with empirical facts like health (Facts/Is) you betray a laughable lack of understanding of the Is-Ought gap.
>>Science has liberated us from attributing health to gods, I suspect the same will be true of morality.
The question at hand is whether we do so tenably.
>>because some ancient manuscript
In the case of Christianity the attempt is to follow the instructions of an actual Person and the central feature of Christianity that distinguishes it from perhaps all other religions is that actions must lack self-interest, ruling out actions based on fear as Tim Keller explains http://subspla.sh/8149923
>>immoral and eternal torture
Conditional immortality is an area of exploration, cf. http://jewishnotgreek.com/
>>I'm assuming you mean 'humans had no value'?
No, that's what I meant. If morality does not truly exist, it was not morally 'wrong' anytime humans proclaimed it truly did. We remember the realization of the Marquis de Sade that if God does not exist then everything that is, is Right; but further, if the unempirical does not exist, then proclaiming it does is not wrong. In the words of philosopher Thomas Nagel: "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either". Fun.
Every major religion claims a lack in self-interest. Almost all of them offer torture as dissuasion.
>> This is what Hume shows. Can you refute his observation by providing a source of objective morality that is Empirical/not external/not supramundane? (You can't. There is none.)
That is not what he shows, no one has been able to show this external source. That is what he postulates. And I think he is wrong.
>> No and by volunteering a metaphor that compares the existence of objective moral facts (Values/Ought) with empirical facts like health (Facts/Is) you betray a laughable lack of understanding of the Is-Ought gap.
What you don’t understand is that you only called them values because you have no explaination for them. Is-Ought is only a problem if you chain yourself to the baseless idea that Oughts have to be supramundane(??). Science can tell, empirically, what ought to be, and it already has in many many cases; it tells us with a very broad body of evidence that women are not inferior to men, thus we ought to treat them equally. Is that objective? it is objective enough at least in the same sense that medicine tells us objectibly that we ought not to vomit every day. That is why the analogy works.
Your argument fails because at the end of the day it is nothing more than the god of the gaps argument: You don’t know were morality came from, therefore god.
For a start, look up Nihilism on Wikipedia or Moral Anti-realism on the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: this is why people are Nihilists and Anti-realists.
>>And I think he is wrong.
No surprise, you can't provide a source of objective morality that is Empirical/mundane/"scientifically-verifiable". You give no reason why Hume is wrong because you seem to still not grasp the reach of what he "postulates".
>>Is-Ought is only a problem if you chain yourself to the baseless idea…
Dismissing it while unable to give a coherent refutation shows it not to be baseless but painful perhaps.
>>Science can tell, empirically, what ought to be…it tells us with…evidence that [X: empirical fact]…thus we ought to [Y: behavior].
This presumes we ought to treat men a certain way. On what grounds should a human not murder another human? Because society will inflict a certain consequence? That's called Hypothetical Morality, and it falls under Moral Nonrealism. It can be ignored if one is willing to accept the consequence or can evade the consequence. Just because a neurobiologist says something on stage at TED does not make it the case. Though the Sam Harris fan club is often not capable of being persuaded otherwise.
>>medicine tells us objectibly that we ought not to vomit every day
Here you presume human health to be an ultimate good. We (hopefully obviously) can't reason "Humans like to practice violence therefore humans should continue to practice violence" and likewise we can't reason "Humans like to avoid vomiting therefore humans should avoid vomiting" as strange as that can at first sound.
>>You don’t know were morality came from, therefore god.
It's more an observation that our only options are
#1 Moral Realism (cannot be shown Empirically) / "Theism"/departure from Empiricism
#2 Moral Nonrealism / Atheism / Empiricism / Materialism
You have chosen the second camp and seem to dislike the logical conclusions that camp is forced with, namely in such a world nothing is truly Moral or Immoral. How anyone is unfamiliar with this very real dichotomy this far away from 1738 is a puzzle. And you are without grounds to declare that those who proclaim camp #1 are truly acting Immorally.Nihilism is a problem that is not solved by postulating a god, doing so doesn't get you any further. It is useless. You don't get meaning from anything by adding a god to it.
I don't presume human healt to be an ultimate good, experience has shown that it is an ultimate good, or as ultimate as a goal can be. Of course health nihilism is also a thing, but is also not gonna get solved by postulating an invisible, undetectable agent, even if you call that agent god.
I have not chosen a camp. You have provided no evidence for your position, and even gotten as far as claiming you don't need it, how convenient, and have dismissed offhand every argument against it in this thread simply because you don't understand that the "is-ought" problem is not as complicated as you make it sound.
I don't dislike the conclusion of my position, I'm fine either way, ultimate objective morality to me is just as irrelevant as ultimate objective medicine. What you want is to ground morality to something so objective in a perfect sense, to which no other human developed idea has or can be.
Why you want so bad for morality to be grounded on a god, and one of the worst if not the worst as the christian god is beyond me.
What you need is evidence but you have none.
I'm familiar with Sam Harris' argument. We have measured levels of health, pain response, serotonin, dopamine, and various other yardsticks with new technology. Harris argues that assuming our goal is to maximize happiness and reduce pain, these technologies can help us track our progress. He's right. But this assumed suggested first principle of human empathy isn't novel. Hume in 1738 was very familiar with the concept of human empathy. It was not enough then to tell us how to act and never can be.
>>I don't presume human healt to be an ultimate good, experience has shown that it is an ultimate good, or as ultimate as a goal can be.
Being only a subjective human, your personal opinion about health, which is all this is, is not infallible and is validly rejected.
>>I have not chosen a camp...ultimate objective morality to me is just as irrelevant as ultimate objective medicine.
This is a real dichotomy, not a false dichotomy: moral statements refer to objective moral facts (Moral Realism) or they do not (Moral Nonrealism). You do not currently believe moral statements refer to objective moral facts, correct? That's one of the two camps. There is no neutral position, you have chosen.
>>we have made incredible moral progress
In your camp, Moral Nonrealism, morals (statements about what humans should do) don't refer to objective moral facts. Instead they are subjective whims and invented delusions we use to help us survive and thrive and to give us comfort. Just as one subjective moral opinion in America today cannot be objectively better than a differing subjective moral opinion in Brazil today, subjective opinions that differ across time also cannot be said to be better or worse than any other. Thus, while change occurs "progress" never does.
>>one of the worst if not the worst as the christian god
A common response to a proposed Upside-Down Kingdom, where the currently first will later be last.
>>What you need is evidence but you have none.
Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism
There is seemingly no reason for many laws to exist other than the fact that historically it was what humans believed in the past to be right or wrong (eg. sodomy laws). Laws exist because most people agree to abide by them for the most part, because kings or parliament have codified them, and because they are enforced with coercive power. The reason morals exist is because people agreed with them, priests codified them and they are enforced with coercive power (not so much in modern secular society, but softer coercion such as shaming and shunning still exist).
Laws are a social contract enforced with coercive power, I don't see how morals are much different. If you're arguing against those who can't see the gap between Is and Ought, that is fine, but I suspect most people have accepted and moved on from there once they realise it, and yet they still behave in moral ways for the most part.
When we wonder why there seems to be a lack of behavior that follows these morals in the world, we approach the concept of morality from a descriptive sense (we observe that human behavior has changed). Increased insight in this pursuit is found when we examine how humans themselves have approached morality from a normative sense (what is actually proper and improper). When humans have considered morality they have come to understand that the morals humans proclaim—again, language that contains imperatives—either correspond to real, objective moral facts ("Moral Realism") or are merely invented delusions expressing human emotions ("Moral Nonrealism").
Prior to the Enlightenment, there was a category of accepted knowledge outside of empirically observed nature (e.g., the non-natural, supramundane, supernatural, etc). The Enlightenment itself was a shift in human thinking that rejected this category as invalid, switching our criteria of acceptable knowledge to the material, to the empirically observed.
The shift in thinking did not happen all at once. Certain beliefs remained, held over from earlier times—somewhat as dependencies—until they could be examined and dismantled individually if they lacked empiric evidence. Western society's assumption that objective Moral Facts existed in a material universe remained for some time until examined by David Hume in 1738 in his A Treatise of Human Nature. Here Hume observed the difficult reality of the relationship between facts (that which is) and values (that which we claim ought to be), concluding that we cannot assert prescriptive or normative values based on descriptive facts.
Hume's Is-Ought observation upset the world, and has resulted in our modern condition. If empirical observation is categorically never able to locate oughts, a world that accepts Empiricism alone is one forced from Moral Realism to Moral Nonrealism: morals no longer correspond to Objective Facts, but can only be understood as invented whims and emotions, which—apart from society's ability to enforce or inflict punishment for as a conditional consequence (what Kant termed 'hypothetical morality')—can be ignored without consequence.
The transition from a society whose intellectuals and leaders held Moral Realism (viz, Christendom) to one where artists, philosophers, and intelligentsia hold Moral Nonrealism (the Modern West) has been a long, painful process since 1738. The Marquis de Sade astutely summed up the painful condition of man following Hume's revolution in thought saying "If there is no God, then everything that Is, is Right" and the majority of Western thought since then has either been in reaction against this belief (i.e., revivals of Evangelical Christianity) or experiments exploring this accepted world (e.g., Surrealism, Dada, Modern Art, Existentialism, Egoism/Individualism/Anarchism, Deconstructionism, Postmodernism, etc).
From the introduction to Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor by the American Heidegger-scholar and philosopher Charles Guignon:
Briefly put, the issue is this. Either God exists or He does not exist...if God does not exist, then the picture of the universe formulated by mechanistic materialism must be true. But, in this case, given the point of view of modern science (what Ivan calls "Euclidean reason"), the universe consists of nothing but meaningless material objects in causal interaction, effects follows cause according to the laws of physics, people are determined to do what they do, no one is guilty of anything, and so there are no such things as right or wrong, good or bad. Or, more precisely, the ideals of justice, goodness, benevolence, dignity, and so on turn out to be purely human inventions, the results of projecting our needs and wishes onto brute, meaningless matter, and so they are illusions lacking any basis in the order of things.
...Dostoevsky regarded [this] as the inevitable outcome of the perfectionist stance of detachment and moral superiority: the idea that, for higher people, "everything is lawful." [If] "God is dead"...then why not step outside the law and do whatever you want? From this standpoint, morality looks like a suckers game. The paradox [of] Westernized ideals, then, is that its austere discipline of detachment and self-transformation tends to undermine its own moral underpinnings. In the end this form of idealism spawns a self-serving moral nihilism.