For those confused by some of the comments, this article used to include a defense of utilitarianism but I have since removed it in favour of a general explanation of various popular theories!
I’m keen on exploring and discussing alternative meta-ethical systems to theistic ones. To me, Utilitarianism still seems to fall into the trap of ‘personal preferences’ rather than descriptive of objective moral reality, however. To use your example: if I find the stash of food and eat it myself, sharing nothing, can it not be said that I have done nothing morally wrong, because what does it matter to me that the other five stranded people live or die? You might say, ‘their happiness/flourishing matters too’, to which I might reply, ‘upon which basis? Your personal preferences?’ You might say, ‘you’ll never achieve true flourishing on your lonesome, so you must share your food with the others so that you may achieve a higher standard of flourishing together.’ But to that I may simply say, ‘who are you to say that flourishing in an of itself, either by myself or with others, is in any way desirable? Is that not simple your preference?’
So, that to me is why theistic meta-ethics are satisfying to people - they outsource this ‘personal preference’ issue to a divine source, which a theist would conceive as infallible, or at least ideal. God’s preferences must be better than yours or mine, if he’s any God at all. If it’s just you or me, then who are you to say in any way why your preferences are ‘better’ or ‘more ideal’ than my own? Even if you point to the consequences of my selfish actions, I might view these same consequences desirable or preferable.
I’d love to hear more from yourself on this subject, if you’ve the time!
Well interestingly some philosophers like Peter Singer defend a form of "preference utilitarianism" which revitalises flourishing and suffering to the subjective preference. Whilst I think this is okay on occasion, we can look for universal preferences to ground utilitarianism more broadly. For example, every living being has the preference to not be tortured. Cool. So torture is immoral. If, hypothetically, one came across someone who actually likes to be tortured, then the act is less immoral. But, one also has to consider the psychological damage done to one's own self by committing heinous acts. This is why the act itself is considered a "consequence" under utilitarianism. Drawing from the Buddhist tradition (and others), I would say that it is a brute fact about humans that loving actions and cooperation increase happiness of both the self and the other. Outsourcing all of this to God may seem neat and tidy, but certainly isn't necessary.
There is no morality with god, bc god is based on nothing other than imagination. If your decisions can be guided by a being that doesn't exist, that's not morality, that's doing whatever you want and calling it moral for no reason.
I have to disagree with you on this one, bud. I'm agnostic (leaning towards atheism) but even I have to concede that without a God, good and evil cannot exist. Right or Wrong can only exist objectively if a God exists. If there's no God, then absolute morality cannot exist.
You laid out 5 alternatives to objective morality but unfortunately this does more harm than good to your argument. So which one of those 5 systems is "true"? How can you justify one being "better" than the others? You are right back to the main problem and you haven't solved the problem, you've only made it worse.
Imagine a semi-abstract picture hanging up in a gallery and there are 3 of you looking at the picture. You think it looks like a dog, the person next to you think it looks like a bear, and the third person thinks it looks like a house. Which one of you is correct? Well you could try and bring evidence to argue that it looks like a dog. You could show evidence of other paintings of dogs that look similar to this one. But would that really prove anything outright? Maybe you could argue that you are all correct because the truth is subjective. The only "real" way to know who was right would be to ask the artist who painted the picture. If God is the artist of the universe, then he's just right, end of story. If the universe doesn't have an artist, then everything is subjective and we are all arguing over something we can never prove.
Thanks for your perspective! The problem with your argument is that it conflates epistemology and ontology. The question of how do we know what good and bad are, is a related, but ultimately seperate question to what good and bad actually are. The same with your picture example- whilst we may all have differing perspectives, the artist likely created something with a particular intention in mind, whether that be to painted some specific, or deliberately vague. So although epistemologically, we may disagree about it, ontologically, there is still a fact of the matter.
Basically you are mixing up what we can know for what actually is the case. For example, it might appear to us from our limited human senses that the earth is flat as we can't perceive the curve from our perspective, but that obviously doesn't mean that the earth is actually flat, only that we need particular methods or tools to discover the truth of the matter.
But surely that is trying to apply scientific knowledge to something which can never be proven or disproven. No matter what we think, you can always think that it goes deeper and that there are more levels. There could be a God, and he could have created the universe, but for all we know, there is a god above him, and he created our God, then there could be a God above that, and so on and so on indefinitely. There's no way to prove anything - we could all be sitting as brains in jars somewhere. Science seems to only get us so far, and like Godel's incompleteness theorem, we will always hit a wall that we can't climb. In your example of the flat Earth, then the only way to know if “reality” is flat is to have a God that is at the top of the tree telling us it’s round or flat. Humans, with all the scientific knowledge in the universe, could never reach the level of a God.
We don't know if our God is telling the truth, maybe Good is Bad and Bad is really Good. I don't know, this sort of mental masturbation isn't really going to get anyone anywhere. That sort of thinking would paralyze any action.
The God of the Bible is, for all intents and purposes, the top of the tree. There's nothing above him. There is no equivalent to him in our material world because you can always go a level deeper in the physical world. With God though, there's no one else above him, and there are no deeper levels. Therefore, whatever God says is the absolute truth.
I just don't know how you can get around that thinking. If the universe has no God, then meaning can only exist subjectively. We can't even work out who is moving in the universe, and who isn't, without stepping outside of the universe. And even then you would have some flippant philosophy major remarking that “how do we know the existence outside of the universe isn't moving either?”. That's why true objectivity seems to only work if there is a God (and the God really is who he says he is).
Without God telling us stealing is bad, we can think of a million scenarios where stealing is good (to steal food to feed a starving child). This is where it is impossible to come up with objective morals without God, and you will always have the push/pull friction of the needs of the individual vs the needs of the group.
I don't know, maybe I'm just stupid (quite possible as I am an idiot) but I just think any morality system that isn't based on a God is absurd, futile, and doomed to fail.
Well you aren't stupid as far as I can tell, but your own radical skepticism will undermine any truth claim you make. If you want to say that true knowledge is basically impossible, then introducing a God to the picture doesn't help because you could never know whether said God actually exists or if anything he says is true. You need to assume some level of epistemological certainty to say that God exists in the first place. You could say that it's impossible to ground truth without God, but that's different from saying that knowledge is impossible without God.
You've lost me again (see, told you I was an idiot). I'm using God as the stand-in for the last, fundamental layer of knowledge/reality. It means there is nothing beyond God - he is the ultimate ground level of knowledge. This, of course, has to be taken on some level of faith since you could always say that God is just the God of this reality, but there is a higher God than him and so on and so on.
I don't think there can be such a thing as knowledge or truth without there being some sort of base level. It's the same problem we have with Matter, where we can just keep asking what it's made out of, and each time we zoom in, we find matter is composed of smaller and smaller things. There's no way we can ever say we found the smallest thing because, for all we know, there is a whole new set of physics once you go smaller than Planck's length.
I don't see how either truth or knowledge could exist without a God. We can use science to explain the things we see around us, but we could be completely wrong about the causes of them. We know tons about quantum physics, for example, but at the same time, we could be living in a simulation, so while the observations are correct, the reasons for the things happening are all wrong.
Like I said, I don't really believe in God, but at the same time, without some sort of base level for knowledge to grow from, you have the problem of never knowing 100% what is true and what isn't. You can always think of ways to move the goalposts. Without that outside observer, all knowledge, information, truth, and morals are floating around in a relative universe, where each person could only see it from their point of view.
It's a similar point of view to viewing the universe. You have always got the question of "well, what's outside that?". Our universe might be a bubble inside something bigger, and that something bigger might be in something else, and that something might be part of something bigger...and so on and so on. The only way you would ever know the real truth is to have God say, "yup, this is everything, I know cause I made it.". Surely, without God, you just keep falling down a hole and never hit the bottom.
I just think trying to come up with a moral framework without the existence of God is impossible. It's the exact same problem as trying to work out how fast you are traveling within a system. There's no way you could work out how fast you are going or if you're even moving at all. You might be traveling fast in a car, but that car is spinning around on Earth, that Earth is traveling around the sun, and the solar system is flying through the universe. Different observers viewing you from different places would all give you different speeds. The only way you can 100% sure tell how fast you are moving is to stand outside the system, the universe, and look in. This is basically God - someone outside the system and as such isn't affected by it. He knows the truth, but for everyone trapped in the system, you have no hope of ever knowing the truth. This is how moral frameworks seem to me - and unless that moral framework comes from an outside source, it is every bit as useless as trying to work out the speed you are traveling at within a system.
Anyway, I wish I were smart enough to understand these things. Love your Substack. Have an awesome day, bud!
I think I just conceive of "pleasure" in a broader sense than merely "nice experiences". That's why I like to use the word flourishing instead. Infinite nice experiences doesn't actually make one happy. If that contradicts the hedonistic version of utilitarianism then so be it 😂
For those confused by some of the comments, this article used to include a defense of utilitarianism but I have since removed it in favour of a general explanation of various popular theories!
I’m keen on exploring and discussing alternative meta-ethical systems to theistic ones. To me, Utilitarianism still seems to fall into the trap of ‘personal preferences’ rather than descriptive of objective moral reality, however. To use your example: if I find the stash of food and eat it myself, sharing nothing, can it not be said that I have done nothing morally wrong, because what does it matter to me that the other five stranded people live or die? You might say, ‘their happiness/flourishing matters too’, to which I might reply, ‘upon which basis? Your personal preferences?’ You might say, ‘you’ll never achieve true flourishing on your lonesome, so you must share your food with the others so that you may achieve a higher standard of flourishing together.’ But to that I may simply say, ‘who are you to say that flourishing in an of itself, either by myself or with others, is in any way desirable? Is that not simple your preference?’
So, that to me is why theistic meta-ethics are satisfying to people - they outsource this ‘personal preference’ issue to a divine source, which a theist would conceive as infallible, or at least ideal. God’s preferences must be better than yours or mine, if he’s any God at all. If it’s just you or me, then who are you to say in any way why your preferences are ‘better’ or ‘more ideal’ than my own? Even if you point to the consequences of my selfish actions, I might view these same consequences desirable or preferable.
I’d love to hear more from yourself on this subject, if you’ve the time!
Well interestingly some philosophers like Peter Singer defend a form of "preference utilitarianism" which revitalises flourishing and suffering to the subjective preference. Whilst I think this is okay on occasion, we can look for universal preferences to ground utilitarianism more broadly. For example, every living being has the preference to not be tortured. Cool. So torture is immoral. If, hypothetically, one came across someone who actually likes to be tortured, then the act is less immoral. But, one also has to consider the psychological damage done to one's own self by committing heinous acts. This is why the act itself is considered a "consequence" under utilitarianism. Drawing from the Buddhist tradition (and others), I would say that it is a brute fact about humans that loving actions and cooperation increase happiness of both the self and the other. Outsourcing all of this to God may seem neat and tidy, but certainly isn't necessary.
Ethics is contingent on shared priorities: https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/the-mandate-of-libertarian-fascist
There is no morality with god, bc god is based on nothing other than imagination. If your decisions can be guided by a being that doesn't exist, that's not morality, that's doing whatever you want and calling it moral for no reason.
https://eliamraell.substack.com/p/here-it-comes-suffering-again?r=5pb4rx
More clarity without confrontation...Hard Pass
I have to disagree with you on this one, bud. I'm agnostic (leaning towards atheism) but even I have to concede that without a God, good and evil cannot exist. Right or Wrong can only exist objectively if a God exists. If there's no God, then absolute morality cannot exist.
You laid out 5 alternatives to objective morality but unfortunately this does more harm than good to your argument. So which one of those 5 systems is "true"? How can you justify one being "better" than the others? You are right back to the main problem and you haven't solved the problem, you've only made it worse.
Imagine a semi-abstract picture hanging up in a gallery and there are 3 of you looking at the picture. You think it looks like a dog, the person next to you think it looks like a bear, and the third person thinks it looks like a house. Which one of you is correct? Well you could try and bring evidence to argue that it looks like a dog. You could show evidence of other paintings of dogs that look similar to this one. But would that really prove anything outright? Maybe you could argue that you are all correct because the truth is subjective. The only "real" way to know who was right would be to ask the artist who painted the picture. If God is the artist of the universe, then he's just right, end of story. If the universe doesn't have an artist, then everything is subjective and we are all arguing over something we can never prove.
Thanks for your perspective! The problem with your argument is that it conflates epistemology and ontology. The question of how do we know what good and bad are, is a related, but ultimately seperate question to what good and bad actually are. The same with your picture example- whilst we may all have differing perspectives, the artist likely created something with a particular intention in mind, whether that be to painted some specific, or deliberately vague. So although epistemologically, we may disagree about it, ontologically, there is still a fact of the matter.
In English please, lol, use less syllables and speak to me like I'm 5 years old. Use analogies.
Basically you are mixing up what we can know for what actually is the case. For example, it might appear to us from our limited human senses that the earth is flat as we can't perceive the curve from our perspective, but that obviously doesn't mean that the earth is actually flat, only that we need particular methods or tools to discover the truth of the matter.
But surely that is trying to apply scientific knowledge to something which can never be proven or disproven. No matter what we think, you can always think that it goes deeper and that there are more levels. There could be a God, and he could have created the universe, but for all we know, there is a god above him, and he created our God, then there could be a God above that, and so on and so on indefinitely. There's no way to prove anything - we could all be sitting as brains in jars somewhere. Science seems to only get us so far, and like Godel's incompleteness theorem, we will always hit a wall that we can't climb. In your example of the flat Earth, then the only way to know if “reality” is flat is to have a God that is at the top of the tree telling us it’s round or flat. Humans, with all the scientific knowledge in the universe, could never reach the level of a God.
We don't know if our God is telling the truth, maybe Good is Bad and Bad is really Good. I don't know, this sort of mental masturbation isn't really going to get anyone anywhere. That sort of thinking would paralyze any action.
The God of the Bible is, for all intents and purposes, the top of the tree. There's nothing above him. There is no equivalent to him in our material world because you can always go a level deeper in the physical world. With God though, there's no one else above him, and there are no deeper levels. Therefore, whatever God says is the absolute truth.
I just don't know how you can get around that thinking. If the universe has no God, then meaning can only exist subjectively. We can't even work out who is moving in the universe, and who isn't, without stepping outside of the universe. And even then you would have some flippant philosophy major remarking that “how do we know the existence outside of the universe isn't moving either?”. That's why true objectivity seems to only work if there is a God (and the God really is who he says he is).
Without God telling us stealing is bad, we can think of a million scenarios where stealing is good (to steal food to feed a starving child). This is where it is impossible to come up with objective morals without God, and you will always have the push/pull friction of the needs of the individual vs the needs of the group.
I don't know, maybe I'm just stupid (quite possible as I am an idiot) but I just think any morality system that isn't based on a God is absurd, futile, and doomed to fail.
Well you aren't stupid as far as I can tell, but your own radical skepticism will undermine any truth claim you make. If you want to say that true knowledge is basically impossible, then introducing a God to the picture doesn't help because you could never know whether said God actually exists or if anything he says is true. You need to assume some level of epistemological certainty to say that God exists in the first place. You could say that it's impossible to ground truth without God, but that's different from saying that knowledge is impossible without God.
You've lost me again (see, told you I was an idiot). I'm using God as the stand-in for the last, fundamental layer of knowledge/reality. It means there is nothing beyond God - he is the ultimate ground level of knowledge. This, of course, has to be taken on some level of faith since you could always say that God is just the God of this reality, but there is a higher God than him and so on and so on.
I don't think there can be such a thing as knowledge or truth without there being some sort of base level. It's the same problem we have with Matter, where we can just keep asking what it's made out of, and each time we zoom in, we find matter is composed of smaller and smaller things. There's no way we can ever say we found the smallest thing because, for all we know, there is a whole new set of physics once you go smaller than Planck's length.
I don't see how either truth or knowledge could exist without a God. We can use science to explain the things we see around us, but we could be completely wrong about the causes of them. We know tons about quantum physics, for example, but at the same time, we could be living in a simulation, so while the observations are correct, the reasons for the things happening are all wrong.
Like I said, I don't really believe in God, but at the same time, without some sort of base level for knowledge to grow from, you have the problem of never knowing 100% what is true and what isn't. You can always think of ways to move the goalposts. Without that outside observer, all knowledge, information, truth, and morals are floating around in a relative universe, where each person could only see it from their point of view.
It's a similar point of view to viewing the universe. You have always got the question of "well, what's outside that?". Our universe might be a bubble inside something bigger, and that something bigger might be in something else, and that something might be part of something bigger...and so on and so on. The only way you would ever know the real truth is to have God say, "yup, this is everything, I know cause I made it.". Surely, without God, you just keep falling down a hole and never hit the bottom.
I just think trying to come up with a moral framework without the existence of God is impossible. It's the exact same problem as trying to work out how fast you are traveling within a system. There's no way you could work out how fast you are going or if you're even moving at all. You might be traveling fast in a car, but that car is spinning around on Earth, that Earth is traveling around the sun, and the solar system is flying through the universe. Different observers viewing you from different places would all give you different speeds. The only way you can 100% sure tell how fast you are moving is to stand outside the system, the universe, and look in. This is basically God - someone outside the system and as such isn't affected by it. He knows the truth, but for everyone trapped in the system, you have no hope of ever knowing the truth. This is how moral frameworks seem to me - and unless that moral framework comes from an outside source, it is every bit as useless as trying to work out the speed you are traveling at within a system.
Anyway, I wish I were smart enough to understand these things. Love your Substack. Have an awesome day, bud!
Also wrote an article on this topic from a more neuroscientific kind of view. I think it aligns pretty well. Curious what you think!
https://substack.com/@timsey/note/p-159403010?r=5a403q
I shall check it out 😁
Curious to hear your opinion of the pleasure mashine argument as critique.
Peter Singer's preference Utilitarianism is a good response but comes with it own set of drawbacks 🤔
I think I just conceive of "pleasure" in a broader sense than merely "nice experiences". That's why I like to use the word flourishing instead. Infinite nice experiences doesn't actually make one happy. If that contradicts the hedonistic version of utilitarianism then so be it 😂
Okay follow up question. Is what one needs to flourish the same for everyone or relative to the subject? 😄
Meta ethics is complicated af 😆
I wanna say both 😂 You can draw out broad inter-subjective trends, but there will always be a bell curve!