Atheism and morality (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 20, 2010, 16:42 (5293 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: I have said many times that I think humans have the capacity to know the difference between right and wrong, but not the capacity to do the right thing. The idea that a societal consensus can define something 'right or wrong' is utter rubbish. What society can do is make something legal or illegal, which has little if anything to do with right/wrong or moral/immoral. There does exist a 'right/wrong', but it does not lie in a book, or society, or in a legal system. It lies in the 'heart' of a person.-I have had difficulty with this, and Matt has provided an excellent summary of his view and mine: -"[...] our moral sense is developed by (and only by) our contact with other people. And the culture we live in is what determines what is 'right' or 'wrong', even though no objective 'right' or 'wrong' exists.-In your last post, Tony, you have given us several examples relating to sex, drugs, war etc., all of which seem to me to confirm Matt's view and mine. Concepts of right and wrong change according to different circumstances, different times, and different societies/cultures. Right and wrong, moral/immoral, legal/illegal may not always be the same, but they do often coincide ... in our own society, for example, murder, rape, child abuse, theft would fit into all three categories. You say you like the categories of sex, drugs and war because they illustrate shades of grey "that humanity normally manages to goon up as well as being things that are not implicitly good or bad, right or wrong." You could hardly state the case more clearly that there is no such thing as objective right or wrong. "Humanity" in the form of our culture or society makes the evaluation. And unless that society is governed by one of Matt's famous tyrants (I would include despotic religious leaders under that banner), the decision will be by consensus (with the possible exception of war, which depends on a much wider variety of circumstances).-To say that right/wrong does exist and it lies in someone's "heart" sounds to me like a recipe for moral chaos, unless there are enough hearts beating in synch to form a consensus. However, the whole of your last post gives me an uncomfortable feeling that somewhere along the line I have either misinterpreted your statements, or in the original statement quoted above you have not said what you mean. Perhaps you could make it clearer by telling us what you disagree with in Matt's summary, and why.