You’ve blown your cover. You came with an agenda - and a closed mind.

How disappointing.

You evidently don’t understand free thought. Free thought is the premise that beliefs should be formed with science, reason, and logic, not through any form of dogmatic approach. In the context of Evil, we have come to a scientific conclusion that humans are a social animal, and therefore should not do harm to one another. Anything that does do harm to humans through a visible process of thought rather than the natural instinct is classified as “Evil”.

My morality is affected by others, but the evidence behind it is scientific (which is why I believe in Evolution along with the majority of scientists). Since morality is a social idea, I don’t think you can apply the idea of free thought to it as a whole, but certainly you can apply free thought to the morals that come out of morality. For instance, in parts of American it is immoral to be homosexual, yet there are people who are free thinkers and have used the scientific method to disprove this on the grounds of evidence.

Lets get passed ‘who said’ to ‘what is said’. I hesitate to ‘pull rank’, especially when my qualification in sociology did not extend far into religion, but I wish to compliment you interesting ideas that have much merit, but for:

Adrian said - “The key thing to remember here is that there was no Bible or religion back in those days, so where did morality come from? Evidently human instinct has a large part to play in deciding our morality.”

But there was superstition and it was passed down by the means available at that time - word of mouth. Look back 4,000 years. What we now call superstition we may then have called religion.

The problem with a structural analysis is first that its categorization has overlap and exception. What morality once allowed the Eskimo to watch his mother walk out to die of exposure? It was when she no longer had any function in contributing to the family survival and became only a consumer. Her last act was to be the food that enabled the survival and procreation of the polar bear her son may one day kill and use to feed and clothe the family. That maybe a cruel reality in such harsh environments, and I use it only to illustrate the issue.

Structure merely describes what is there. It’s a description, not an explanation. What made it come about, what maintains it and why may it change? Change is the norm but all too often Structuralists resist change. To do so they claim that the cause is equally ‘fixed’ and not worthy of examination. You fall into this trap - “…that is our instinct even to this day.” What instinct determines when is killing murder? - when the victim is an aggressor, a family, societal, or racial member, or what?

Contrary to the current fashion, the delight of humans is that little of human behaviour is instinctive and even those instincts we have we can and are expected to control. Penile erection is a (instinctive) reflex to stimulation but a woman has the legal right to say ‘No’ even in the midst of sexual intercourse.

Even those instincts we have must have originated somewhere, which points to the ultimate fallacy of Dawkin’s position. The origins must lie in learning or a ‘creator’. If it is a creator then we are forced to accept the structuralist argument. If is learning then we must look at the function of the original behaviour that was selected to become such an instinct.

Killing is not instinctive as shown in British Law, where self defense is only justified by reasonable force. The Old Testament may say an eye fro an eye, but the New testament says that no-one may take God’s law into their own hands. That is now embodied into most laws.

The ultimate question of morality is therefore: In the absence of the ultimate sanction of not getting past the pearly gates of life ever after, why shouldn’t I kill you?

Again I urge you to move this discussion to a new thread to encourage wider participation.

“in today’s modern society, ruled by democratic systems, the vast majority of morality is decided by the majority”
You would answer:
Yes, Slavery is evil in America, but virtuous in Cambodia.

The problem with your system is there is no transcendent hook to your morals, there is no ‘ought’. I ought to love children instead making them slaves. What you have instead is just a preference. The other problem with your system is, what do you do when the majority is wrong? In your system. the majority is never wrong, which presents you with the problem of condeming things that you would have supported if events were different. One philosopher put it this way “In some countries they love their neighbor, in others they eat them. Do you have a preference?”

Jack - Forcing is not allowing. As Ivor Richards said of such heated debates “..knowledged ducks between to ‘NOs’. ”

True in western society much of morality has been preserved and passed down by Christianity, but that does not mean that social morality will not have evolved by other means. At times Christianity strayed far from its own moral code.

I don’t think there is any “glue” that holds us together in the first place. I had a very interesting discussion on morality last night with a Christian, and he accepted my view of “democratic morality” as a well structured argument, and something he would have to consider more. Evidently my argument is good enough to convince someone of faith, but maybe I’m not presenting the argument well here.

I think the evidence for certain “democratic morality” is present in today’s society as much as it was thousands if not millions of years ago. So called “cavemen” lived in small groups, often mixed families, and yet they didn’t go about killing within the group. There is evidence that they were very hostile to outsiders, but then that is our instinct even to this day. If someone knocks on your door and asks to come in, you are immediately suspicious, as our instinct has kicked in and the possibility of a threat is played out in our mind.

The key thing to remember here is that there was no Bible or religion back in those days, so where did morality come from? Evidently human instinct has a large part to play in deciding our morality.

The people who wrote the Bible and other religious works simply used the most effective and agreed democratic morals at the time, namely “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not steal”. There was murder and stealing before the Bible, but it was viewed as morally wrong in society. Why? Because the majority of people were against it. This is the way society has worked for the entirety of human history.

Let me propose a “hierarchy” of morality then. I think the lowest type of morality on the tree is our instinctual morality, i.e. the morality which is unique to each individual. This is the kind of morality that can be dangerous, since some people can see no wrong in murder (examples such as Charles Manson etc).

The next branch up the morality tree is our “close social” morality. This is the morality formed within close bonds like family and friendship. It has special rules that mean certain acts such as “stealing” are viewed as less harsh. For example, nobody in my flat would mind or indeed care if I “stole” some of their bread or milk, whereas if I went up to someone in the street and drank some of their drink, it would be viewed as completely wrong.

The final tier of the morality tree is the “expanded social” morality. This is the democratic collection of all different moral views in order to find one that the majority agree on. There are of course different scales for expanded social morality, as some countries like America support the death penalty, but other countries such as the UK do not. On a world view, the death penalty probably has more people in opposition than it does in support, and so the world moral on the death penalty is that it is bad.

I hope now you can see that in the context of Nazi Germany, the expanded social view of the world was that it is wrong, yet the expanded social view of Germany itself was that it was right. Both are valid morals, but the latter was not supported by the rest of the world.

I am not claiming that there were not people in Nazi Germany who weren’t against Nazism, but that these people were more related to a close social group than the expanded social view of Germany itself. They were the minority, not the majority.

To conclude, although this is just a “hypothesis” that I have created to try and explain my arguments (and I am no way a sociologist), I think that in simple terms we can break down morality to those three groups. Expanded social morality is the accepted view of the state, but can be overridden by various groups of close social morality, which in turn can be overridden by our instinctual morality. The UK as a state opposes murder, and yet there are gangs such as the mafia who are close social moral groups who think it is fine within certain boundaries. The close social morality has overridden the expanded social morality in this case.

To relate to religion, when religion was first starting, it latched on to the moral views of the expanded social grouping, and claimed them as their own. Religious morals did not come from religion, they came from the expanded social morals that were already accepted at the time. If anything, religion is a carrying force for those morals, and although this was helpful in medieval times, in today’s modern society, ruled by democratic systems, the vast majority of morality is decided by the majority, i.e. the expanded social group. Religion has been an excellent driving force, but the source of morality hasn’t changed, and it never will.

I respect your comments about debates/and discussions on this site. My frustration with Adrian has been his unwillingness to face the obvious conclusions of atheism. Also, atheist tend to be guilty of the same things that they criticize religion for.

I’ve forcing Adrian into a corner over morality in order to allow him to deal with the void that is there. However, he continues to retort with I’m a moral person!! I am willing to accept that, but he is borrowing his morality from religion and he either doesn’t see it or doesn’t want to see it.