Atheism and morality (Introduction)

by xeno6696 @, Sonoran Desert, Friday, November 05, 2010, 02:27 (5110 days ago) @ David Turell

Though, to answer a minor point, the need to seperate right/wrong and morality, for me, comes from the need to have one defined as absolute, and the other as our attempts to live the best we know how.
> 
> Here is an article on an atheist philosopher, Philippa Foot, who believes in 'natural goodness'. Her point of view seems reasonable to me.
> 
> http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/death-of-a-grande-dame-can-we-build-m... misreads Nietzsche completely... Nietzsche was concerned with how morality actually plays "in the real world," and by no means takes a position that the things he ascribes to "Master Morality" are the right things; but that it is the "Master Morality" that discovered the creation of values for moral actions. She apparently decides that Nietzsche values the worth of an action based on the type of the individual; I can't begin to tell you in how many ways this contradicts what Nietzsche was trying to say. -When she talks about his attribution to "the spontaneity, the energy, the passion of the individual agent..." she's referring directly to "A Genealogy of Morals" where his entire POINT of that book is in the title; where do morals come from? -She takes this as to say that "Nietzschean morality" (Which doesn't exist) means that "the ethics of the noble/strong are the good ethics." Nietzsche simply points out that the morals/ethics that predominate only occur when some entity with power enforces them. -"In my book [Natural Goodness] I take Nietzsche on. I say, 'Look, what you're suggesting might be possible for some race of beings, but not for humans. I know you think that if only people will read you and believe you, human beings will become quite different, but I don't believe a word of that. You want to judge actions not by their type, by what is done, but by their relation to the nature of the person who does them. And that is poisonous." When we think of the things that have been done by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, what we have to be horrified at is what was done. We don't need to inquire into the psychology of these people in order to know the moral quality of what they did....It's wrong-headed to leave aside, as he does, the question of what human beings as such need, or what a society needs in the way of justice, fastening instead on the spontaneity, the energy, the passion of the individual agent...'"-I don't agree that we "have" to be horrified. I worked in an ER for 4 years; most things that would "horrify" most people I can shrug off with ease. The psychology of those people is exactly what's at stake; Hiroshima for example. The consequences and psychology of anyone's actions must constitute the analysis of the act. All moral norms are cultural. -I don't think there's any foundation for universal ethics/morality in what Foot discusses here. (Aside from her shallow reading of Nietzsche.)

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"


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