Getting to Ought From Is

[Gadianton]

Lewis criticises the authors for subverting student values and claims that they teach that all statements of value (such as "this waterfall is sublime") are merely statements about the speaker's feelings and say nothing about the object.[3] Such a view, Lewis argues, makes nonsense of value talk. It implies, for example, that a speaker who condemns some act as contemptible is really only saying, "I have contemptible feelings.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abolition_of_Man

Nice. we now have DCP's source for his sound-bite on morality not grounded in "tastes and preferences." (He forces this subjectivism upon every non believer, which is a very minority moral theory as opposed to consequentialist theories.) "Men are that they might have Joy". lol.

Is it wrong to kill an innocent person for no reason if there is no guarantee of an afterlife with eternal punishments and rewards for our actions?

The question he cannot answer.

[Physics Guy]

If Peterson or anyone else is just saying that atheists must be making some faith-like assumptions about basic moral principles, because moral principles can't just be deduced from science, then maybe they're right. Maybe everybody does have to assume some things, and the ultimate epistemological high ground of perfect empiricism is a peak too sharp to stand on. Maybe the difference in rationality between atheism and Mormonism is only one of degree.

If so, fine. Differences of degree can be big and important. When our heater broke recently, the floors in our house didn't reach absolute zero, but they got too darned cold. I'm pretty sure you can base an irreproachable ethics on a much smaller set of assumptions than you need to get you into a Mormon temple.

And I'm not really ready to give up on basing morality on nature. People who dismiss "atoms in motion" must not know much about how atoms move. For example, is musical dissonance versus harmony objective? A lot of people think of music as a pretty spiritual phenomenon, but harmony is a perfectly objective property of waves of air molecule density, namely that their frequencies are whole-number multiples of each other. Dissonance is no doubt a much simpler collective property of molecules than evil, but the difference in complexity and contextuality may be only one of degree.

My hope that it might be possible to understand evil as something like dissonance, only more complicated, is a statement of faith on my part. In my case it's a religious faith. I don't think God would make a world in which good and evil were arbitrary. I think they'd be baked into the way the world worked, in kind of the way that the rules of musical harmony are part of how atoms move.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Mr. Shears, your general idea about ought makes sense to me. I was not remembering a fuss about the issue so asked google. It sounded like the original problem was whether conditions existing are the pattern of how things should be, natural law. I notice that is the idea Physics Guy picked up.

I have not followed what Peterson has been arguing. Does he actually claim we must have an ultimate lawgiver in order to be clear about morals or to have them at all? The alternative to that you pointed out, adding basic value assumptions, make more sense to me. I am puzzled about fitting ultimate lawgiver into Mormon ideas. I remember the idea that there were eternal laws which God has to follow in order to be God. (Sounds a bit close to is determining ought.)

No, that isn’t really his point. Peterson would agree that torturing babies is objectively evil, regardless of whether or not God commands it or forbids it. He clearly doesn’t argue that murder is wrong because God says thou shalt not murder. Rather, he argues that God says thou shalt not murder because murder is wrong.

Of course that raises the question of why is murder wrong? From what I recall him saying over the years, he’s never articulated that. But he does seem convinced that good and evil are metaphysically real things. They are in his paradigm, at least. But in a natural paradigm, he insists that nothing matters. He thinks the following questions are a slam dunk for him: "How do you derive morality from atoms and the void? Or, perhaps, how can "ought-statements" be derived from "is-statements”?"

Because he’s a sociopath who doesn’t understand shared social contracts developed over eons of evolutionary behavior, and because he never actually reads any of these books he claims he reads thus rendering his understanding of the natural world moot?

- Doc

edit and to whit: Morality is an emergent property of the human condition.

[Billy Shears]

Lewis criticises the authors for subverting student values and claims that they teach that all statements of value (such as "this waterfall is sublime") are merely statements about the speaker's feelings and say nothing about the object.[3] Such a view, Lewis argues, makes nonsense of value talk. It implies, for example, that a speaker who condemns some act as contemptible is really only saying, "I have contemptible feelings.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abolition_of_Man

Nice. we now have DCP's source for his sound-bite on morality not grounded in "tastes and preferences." (He forces this subjectivism upon every non believer, which is a very minority moral theory as opposed to consequentialist theories.) "Men are that they might have Joy". lol.

Is it wrong to kill an innocent person for no reason if there is no guarantee of an afterlife with eternal punishments and rewards for our actions?

The question he cannot answer.

25 years ago, I came to the conclusion that the Church wasn’t true. I wanted to know what was true, and all I knew is that the Church wasn’t it. Everything else was open for consideration. I joined an email group and asked for suggestions on where I could find the truth. Several suggestions were made, including several book recommendations. Two of the books really pissed me off, but for opposite reasons.

The first book that pissed me off was C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. The argument that it makes for the existence of God and the correctness of Christianity goes something like this. People feel guilty for stuff. We know that. Since we feel guilty, there must be right and wrong. And since there is a choice between right and wrong and we still sometimes bewilderingly choose the wrong, then there must be supernatural forces that are trying to entice us to do wrong. Therefore Satan exists, therefore God exists, therefore we need a Savior.

That’s Mere Christianity in a nutshell. It really upset me. I wanted to know what was real; not more myths to substitute with the ones I had discarded.

The second book that really pissed me off was Atheism: The Case Against God. I didn’t want to be an atheist. But damn; the logic in that book was clear and convincing. It was like waking up from a long, strange dream and taking an ice-cold shower. I asked for the truth, and I found it. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was exhilarating.

[Billy Shears]

My hope that it might be possible to understand evil as something like dissonance, only more complicated, is a statement of faith on my part. In my case it's a religious faith. I don't think God would make a world in which good and evil were arbitrary. I think they'd be baked into the way the world worked, in kind of the way that the rules of musical harmony are part of how atoms move.

That’s a really interesting analogy. By any chance have you read The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien? That riffs off of the same basic motif. It depicts God the Father (who the Elves call Ilúvatar) as originally being alone in the universe, and who dreamt up some really beautiful, complicated music. He created some demigods to play the music and it was amazing until one of them started to mischievously create some dissonance and no longer play the music that was on his sheet. It ruined the whole piece, or at least seemed to. There was always the hope that the dissonance would eventually resolve itself back to original key and motif, but that was a question left unanswered.

Ilúvatar decided to represent the music these demigods were making in a more complex way, and to that end created the universe. The demigod who was ruining the music became Melkor, who after several eons filled with drama eventually trained Sauron. And the rest is in the movies.

“Objective morality” as Peterson thinks about it could be objective in the way that harmony is objective. Over the years I’ve repeatedly asked him if its possible for the “objective morality” to exist in a universe without God. He concedes that it is hypothetically plausible, but unlikely. What he might mean by that is that “morality” is the attitudes and behaviors that lead to true eternal joy, and in this sense eternal joy is objectively real in the same way that harmony is real. But, and this is the part that he invariably focuses on, objective reality can’t exist if we’re just atoms in the void, because eternal joy can’t exist if we’re just atoms in the void.

[drumdude]

BS: "In a very real way, I’m jealous of you, Professor Peterson. You want to believe in a world with infinite consciousness. Infinite justice. Infinite mercy. Infinite meaning. And you hit the lottery--in your estimation, the nature of the universe matches your preferences."

Yes. I feel very fortunate.

I thought this was an excellent comment, Billy.

Daniel Peterson lives in a universe where the niche religion he happens to have been born into is correct, and all the others are wrong. He happens to be a minor celebrity in that religion which spans the Universe. He is almost a main character in the greatest story ever told.

And the rest of us are so incredibly arrogant for questioning his humble worldview.

It’s a shame you can’t bottle up Daniel’s hubris and sell it.

[Physics Guy]

Yeah, I did once get through The Silmarillion. I think I might even have re-read a few parts. I guess it's a great example of its kind of thing, but it's not really my kind of thing. It kind of undermines The Lord of the Rings to find that Sauron and his ring and all the heroes are only leftovers from the really big stuff that happened ages before, but that's Tolkien for you. All the great stuff was in the past, for him.

[Philo Sofee]

The second book that really pissed me off was Atheism: The Case Against God. I didn’t want to be an atheist. But damn; the logic in that book was clear and convincing. It was like waking up from a long, strange dream and taking an ice-cold shower. I asked for the truth, and I found it. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was exhilarating.

George H. Smith. Yeah that was my impression as well all right. I remember it well, being starkly open mouthed for weeks, head buzzing after having read his exposition. There are book reviews of his text that sort of bring it down to earth some, but overall, a magnificent performance and one Mormon apologists have had the inkling to run away from, thus showing they actually do possess a smidgin of intelligence if they wish to keep a testimony...

[Physics Guy]

I also read a lot of C.S. Lewis long ago. His arguments didn't seem airtight but some of them did seem to raise some real issues. My memory is also that in Mere Christianity Lewis tried to derive the existence of God from the objectivity of morality. That's almost the opposite of what Peterson seems to be saying.

It's probably not really logically opposite, just presented in opposite order. I think they both are probably arguing that morality is objective if and only if there is God. If that's true, then you can indeed infer objective morality from God, and also infer God from objective morality. If: the premise isn't necessarily clear. If it be granted, though, the conclusions follow both ways, either way.

On the other hand, Lewis did (if I remember rightly) start by assuming that all his readers did consider morality to be objective. I don't think Lewis allowed that there might be people wandering around without moral foundations. He did recognize that some people were atheists, but in effect he seemed to be saying (I think), Hey, you're not really an atheist, even if you think you are, because of course you believe in objective morality. Peterson, in contrast, seems to be saying to atheists, Hey, you don't really believe in objective morality, even if you think you do, because you don't believe in God.

So I guess I still think there's a significant difference between Lewis and Peterson, even if they might agree on things up to a point.

[Physics Guy]

Arg.