Edward Feser: The heresy with a thousand faces

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

The heresy with a thousand faces

In a new article at Postliberal Order, I discuss the disturbing parallels between the woke phenomenon and the medieval Catharist or Albigensian heresy, a movement so fanatical and virulent that the preaching of the Dominicans could not entirely eliminate it and Church and state judged military action to be necessary.

227 comments:

AnonymousFebruary 7, 2024 at 12:06 PM
WCB

The murderous crusade against the Cathars was truly virulent, and fanatical. Mass murder on a grand scale. Not to mention a fanatical lack of religious freedom in medieval Europe. And following up on this crusade, the Inquisitions which became an unholy horror of their own. Do you really want to throw around terms like fanatical as applied to Cathars, Waldenses, and Albigensians, and other similar movements?

WCB
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AnonymousFebruary 7, 2024 at 12:09 PM
The Albigensians were persecuted and killed.
Thankfully, we don't do that to Woke ideologists. At least not yet.
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SacredKnowingFebruary 7, 2024 at 4:44 PM
What, exactly, was so horrific about the Cathars and Albigensians, besides having a new-age feeler vibe to them?

They sounded as evil as Yanni or Oprah Winfrey.
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DNWFebruary 7, 2024 at 5:42 PM
" ... murderous ... truly virulent, ...fanatical. Mass murder on a grand scale. ... fanatical ... unholy horror .... Do you really want to throw around terms like fanatical ...?"

Well, someone certainly does.
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TonyFebruary 7, 2024 at 8:52 PM
Since the God of the Old Testament was identified with the devil, biblical heroes like Abraham and Moses were dismissed as diabolical agents, and divine acts of judgment like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned as murderous.

I would just note that if you are going to chose to impose your own story on the Bible, there is no particular reason you would have to leave it so that Abraham and Moses (or any of the others) are really in cahoots with the God of the Old Testament. You can have them be merely deluded pawns, or have them be secretly in the opposition, or you can totally re-write them from the ground up and make up any position you want for them.

I get why Catharists might object to destroying Sodom merely on account of it being God who does it, but: why wouldn't killing in general be at least a neutral act? The approved of the killing in suicide, and were OK with infanticide, so it didn't have to be self-inflicted per se. Death releases the soul from the body regardless of whether the death was intended or not, doesn't it? I am guessing they cooked up some just-so story to notionally justify NOT simply advocating direct, immediate mass murder, as being too much of a turn-off to attract followers.
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AnonymousFebruary 7, 2024 at 11:41 PM
By definition, the admimistration of justice is not murder, and every Cathar was a capital criminal.
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AnonymousFebruary 8, 2024 at 4:10 AM
People make a lot out of "Woke" like it's some kind of deep phenomenon, when it's really not. It's just a grand coalition of the Left against the established conventions of America/the West. It's anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian, anti-hetero, etc. It's also profoundly anti-intellectual, unlike Marxism which proposed a grand vision of the future with positive goals (in their view). The Woke ideology predominantly just wants to tear down what it sees as the traditional order to benefit its highly diverse constituencies. Since the failures of Marxism became apparent the Left abandoned consistent ideology and embraced a stark friend-enemy paradigm without any coherent political endpoint other than rectifying historic injustice and preventing "Fascism" however defined.
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Laurentius ZamoyskiFebruary 8, 2024 at 7:08 AM
"But these are at best necessary rather than sufficient conditions, and the deeper, psychological root appears to be an unwillingness to accept reality as it is, a morbid obsession with its defects, and a paranoid tendency to exaggerate them."

And envy.
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DNWFebruary 8, 2024 at 7:26 AM
Placing aside the alarm one commenter has expressed over the racialist rantings of a 25 year old attention whore "Incel", a person of self-described Mexican descent, the focus of the prog commenters is pretty much par for the course.

Namely, and in the broadest and most basic terms, that of a moral relativist bleating over what are inconsistent with his relativistic assumptions, presented as presumptively absolute wrongs.

But how can they be judged absolute wrongs, considering the basic assumptions of the relativist?

If they are not really wrong, why bleat?

It's the same thing over and over. A person who is a moral relativist or even moral nihilist appears and begins issuing moral indictments of Christians for not living up to standards which the nihilist demies have any objective claim on one's allegiance in the first place.

'There's no such thing as Jesus, but you better listen to him!! Because....' Because ... Why?

Or, how many times has one witnessed someone whose own metaphysical views rule out the existence of objective truth and values, trot out the, say, " genocide" of the Amalekites ( who ambushed and attacked the Hebrews on their journey post Egypt) as a presumptive wrong, while they near simultaneously deny that good and evil are objective categories in the first instance?

Again, when you stop for just a moment to look at the situation it becomes clear that they are merely seeking out venues such as this one in order do publicly vent a pent up emotional discharge.

It's just representative of the overall psychology and life strategy of a certain type of personality at work. In the broadest and partially metaphorical terms, there are those who manipulate and wrest the sustenance of their lives from the material world, and those who seek to extract their own advantage from productive persons - through some manner of manipulating them: through institutional, emotional, or other means. In figurative terms: some farm the land, and some farm the farmers. Or try to.

Compared with normally functioning humans, progs are more neurotic, more depressed, more medicated, more focused on other people and what those others are doing, and on the distribution of imagined " social capital", than normal people with a healthy outlook.

Is it any wonder that our polity , directed as it is by persons of that character, is being run into a ditch?

Now, think of the Bogomils ...

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AnonymousFebruary 8, 2024 at 9:14 AM
Dr. Mark Pegg is one of the leading historians of the Albigensian Crusade and wrote one of the few current books about it in the English language.
https://www.amazon.com/Most-Holy-War-Albigensian-Christendom-ebook/dp/B006L2XM7Y/ref=sr_1_1?Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=20&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=7&qid=1707411239&refinements=p_28%3Aalbigensian+crusade&s=books&sr=1-1&unfiltered=1

"In A Most Holy War, historian Mark Pegg has produced a swift-moving, gripping narrative of this horrific crusade, drawing in part on thousands of testimonies collected by inquisitors in the years 1235 to 1245. These accounts of ordinary men and women, remembering what it was like to live through such brutal times, bring the story vividly to life. Pegg argues that generations of historians (and novelists) have misunderstood the crusade; they assumed it was a war against the Cathars, the most famous heretics of the Middle Ages. The Cathars, Pegg reveals, never existed. He further shows how a millennial fervor about "cleansing" the world of heresy, coupled with a fear that Christendom was being eaten away from within by heretics who looked no different than other Christians, made the battles, sieges, and massacres of the crusade almost apocalyptic in their cruel intensity. In responding to this fear with a holy genocidal war, Innocent III fundamentally changed how Western civilization dealt with individuals accused of corrupting society. This fundamental change, Pegg argues, led directly to the creation of the inquisition, the rise of an anti-Semitism dedicated to the violent elimination of Jews, and even the holy violence of the Reconquista in Spain and in the New World in the fifteenth century. All derive their divinely sanctioned slaughter from the Albigensian Crusade.
Haunting and immersive, A Most Holy War opens an important new perspective on a truly pivotal moment in world history, a first and distant foreshadowing of the genocide and holy violence in the modern world."

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AnonymousFebruary 8, 2024 at 11:41 AM
WCB

@Anonymous

"Dr. Mark Pegg is one of the leading historians of the Albigensian Crusade and wrote one of the few current books about it in the English language."

There is another book worth noting and reading.
"The Northern Crusades" By Eric Christiansen.
Just as cruel, savage and violent as the Albigensian crusade. These crusades featured among other things, systematic murder of peasants in lands the Teutonic Knights want to annex. Forcing people these lands to flee for their lives. Some of the peasants were Pagan, many Orthodox Christians.

WCB.

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Mick Jagger Gathers No MosqueFebruary 9, 2024 at 8:50 AM
Pope Innocent III called the Crusade against the Albigensians because it was a war for survival - either the Albigensians would exterminate the Catholics or the Catholics would exterminate the Albigensians.

"The Church was threatened from without by Saracens in Palestine, by Moslems in Spain.." according to Joseph Clayton in "Pope Innocent III and his times."

"...Pope Innocent was a Christian statesman, fully conscious that on occasion force and military strength must be used to defeat the hosts of disorder, the iniquities of unscrupulous power."

Of course, they was before the glorious 1960s when Pope John 23rd declared that all we need is love
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AnonymousFebruary 9, 2024 at 9:29 PM
WCB

@Fred

"By the tenets of your own philosophy, genocide is simply another behavior that human beings engage in,...."

Not MY philosophy. Don't mistate my philosophy. I have been arguing in this thread evil actions exist and are not acceptable. We have some here that amazingly, argue that atheists cannot object to mass murder, rape, robbery, genocide et al. I find this rather discouraging that an anti-atheist ideology like this can be so very wrong, that some people seem to refuse to accept the fact atheists cannot object to such horrors for some grotesque reason.

We have the phenomen that most Scandinavian nations are now largely atheistic but are not sinks of depravity, murder and evil. And are at the top of surveys as to the satisfaction of their citizens. Meanwhile Orthodox Christian Russians are committing mass murder and imperialism in Ukraine as we speak.

WCB
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AnonymousFebruary 10, 2024 at 3:32 AM
WCB

@BillMiller

"Are you saying "emotions" are objective morality......"

It is a fact people do not like being murdered, enslaved, raped, tortured, robbed, cheated, abused etc. This then in a healthy society is a basis for laws and moral behavior. Why are so many here incapable of understanding this simple concept.

But as I pointed out, our ability to think abstractly sometimes leads us to create bad and evil ideologies.

Such as racism. Hitler's Jewish holocaust for example.
Putin's war in Ukraine and it's mass murders. ISIS, Boko Haram et al.

Moral behavior then has an added dimension of dealing with these evil ideologies, racism, and other
evil abstract ideas that give sanction to evils like genocide or mass murder.

Why is this so hard for some here at this blog to grasp?

WCB
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Vinccent TorleyFebruary 10, 2024 at 7:32 AM
Hi Ed,

I have to say that I'm disappointed by your latest article. You describe Albigensianism (or Catharism) as a "toxic movement" which was "bizarre and subversive of social order," and you add that "it is no surprise that ecclesiastical and political authorities judged Catharism to be radically subversive of that order and in need of suppression." You deplore the "excess" of the Albigensian Crusade, but not the crusade itself. I can only conclude that you regard the Albigensian Crusade as morally justifiable, objectively speaking.

I started studying the medieval Inquisition over forty years ago, and I'm familiar with the charges laid against the Albigenses (or Cathars) by Catholic polemicists. What readers need to know is that our accounts of what they believed are based on accusations by their worst enemies (Dominican preachers) as well as fanatical converts from Catharism to Catholicism, who became persecutors of the movement to which they'd belonged. In other words, our sources of information on the Cathars are biased.

Moreover, the charges against the Albigenses don't really add up. We are told that they rejected private property. Oh yeah? In that case, why did nobles like Count Raymond VI of Toulouse favor them, and why were they so hard to suppress? (By contrast, think of the German Peasants' War of 1524-25, which was brutally suppressed within the space of just one year.) Again, if the Albigenses were fond of suicide and totally against procreation as is sometimes alleged, then why didn't they die out within a generation? We are told that "extreme debauchery was frequently a part of Cathar life," but similar, baseless charges were laid by the Romans against the early Christians. We are told that "meat and dairy products were also eschewed" by the Cathars, and that they even opposed "using animals for food." Once again, I contest the charge: if that were indeed the case, then why didn't the movement's members die from malnutrition? (As someone who has lived as a vegetarian, I can tell you that it takes a lot of work to achieve a balanced diet.) We are also told that the Albigensians practiced infanticide. However, no evidence is provided for this claim. I should also mention that infanticide was practiced by Catholics during the Middle Ages: at the end of the 12th century, Roman women threw their newborn babies into the Tiber River in broad daylight, according to a carefully researched study (available online) titled, "Neonaticide, Infanticide, Filicide" (Israel: B.N. Publication House, 2017), Professor Emeritus Liubov Ben-Nun of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Faculty of Health Sciences, Beer-Sheva, Israel.

The spark that triggered the Albigensian Crusade was the murder of a papal legate. However, it is by no means certain that he was killed by the Albigensians. The Wikipedia article on the Albigensian Crusade claims that the legate was allegedly killed by one of the knights of Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse. However, William of Tudela, author of the first part of the Song of the Albigensian Crusade, blamed the murder entirely on "an evil-hearted squire hoping to win the Count's approval." Is this enough to justify a slaughter which led to the deaths of at least 200,000 people?

But I have to say that even I was astonished when you linked the Cathars with Marxists, Nazis, and modern-day woke calls to “defund the police.” Ridiculous! You might decry their dualism, but please don't forget that the dualistic Zoroastrians have lived peacefully with their neighbors for thousands of years. Finally, the large number of Catholic to Catharism speaks for itself.

I shall lay down my pen here. Cheers, Ed.
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Alice C. LinsleyFebruary 10, 2024 at 7:36 AM
In other words, there is nothing new under the Sun.
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AnonymousFebruary 10, 2024 at 12:55 PM
WCB

@DNC
All you have done is label an assortment of activities with a label, "evil" and called it quits. That's pretty "dumb".

Are you implying genocide, mass murder, slavery, rape, murder and torture are somehow not evil?! What else are we to call stuff like this? Are you saying atheists have no right to oppose obvious evils like this?

When innocent people suffer horrendous evils caused by fellow humans, it is a duty to oppose these sorts of evils. Or do you disagree with that? and it is a duty to teach our children to oppose these sorts of evils, especially when it is our own government or politicians
that are committing evils. Such as supporting murderous dictators like Reagan, Nixon and Kissinger did. Or politicians lying us into wars like Bush did.

The way to allow evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.

WCB
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Mick Jagger Gathers No MosqueFebruary 10, 2024 at 3:19 PM
The Albigensians were pacifists?

I will leave this link to the Albigensian problem as explained by Hilaire Belloc.

https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/albigensian-attack-10818

It's sort of strange to see such strong support for a heresy that was on the verge of destroying the Eldest Daughter of the Church.
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AnonymousFebruary 11, 2024 at 4:46 AM
WCB

@Anonymous

"The point isn't that these things aren't evil, it is rather that your philosophy of ethics is not sufficient to label them as such. "

You mean I cannot object to mass murder, genocide, murder, rape, torture and slavery? or other obvious evils small and large?

REALLY!? Words fail me. At least words Dr Feser would allow in response to your bizarre post.

WCB
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KevinFebruary 11, 2024 at 11:17 AM
You mean I cannot object to mass murder, genocide, murder, rape, torture and slavery? or other obvious evils small and large?

Richard Dawkins once said:

The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Do you disagree with Dawkins?
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DNWFebruary 11, 2024 at 1:23 PM
" 'The point isn't that these things aren't evil, it is rather that your philosophy of ethics is not sufficient to label them as such.'

You mean I cannot object to mass murder, genocide, murder, rape, torture and slavery? or other obvious evils small and large?"

Not at all. You may go off into a corner and flap your lips and emote till Hell freezes over; and no one would care - until the point at which you began staking what you assert to be objective moral duties and obligations against them, while referencing traditional Christian sounding good and evil moral terminology as part of it.

This leads to the comical aspect of your hyperventilating and indignant performance; one, which has been largely ignored till now except by Miller and Talmid and perhaps another or two.

It is your dismal attempt to leverage emotion into some kind of pseudo teleological groundwork.

But as they pointed out, you have not supplied the missing premisses which will take us from the fact that you experience an emotional reaction, to someone else's duty to respond in a way that pleases you, yet might cost, disadvantage, or inconvenience, them.

In fact, referencing "evolution" and growth, and "flourishing" and "empathy" and like terminology, seems to be a common tactic among moral relativists and moral nihilists as they attempt to shabbily pantomime natural law arguments. Apparently they figure repetition of an assertion will finish the work argument cannot.

Now, to give the devil his due, some do admit it outright. Rorty for example. Or that punk philosoper at Duke who joined the academic lynch mob that went after the lacrosse team. [Wonder if he ever apologized.]

In any event, they make clear that eventually it's all down to enforcing one's will, and first-principles moral reasoning be damned. "It" wants what it wants - insofar as its own residual "anthropology" can be said to represent a coherent "it" with a core and persisting identity.

Well, there is something to be said for the voice that does admit that much about itself. Kinda clears the ground in practical "friend and enemy" terms, at least.

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AnonymousFebruary 12, 2024 at 1:11 PM
WCB

@G Mancz

"What your opponents mean is that you cannot *rationally* object to these things, if by "object" you mean anything more substantive than "I experience negative affective responses" etc.,"

It is more than that. Nobody can point to some objective morality outside of that. after all, a religion that has practiced religious wars, mass murders, cruel crusades, et al has no reliable objective morality they can point to.

And then there are other issues. If we do not draw the line at evil actions, we might become victims of same evil actions.

I cannot say I approve of slavery as long as I am the master and you are the slave. I might with a twist of fate be the slave. The RCC long ago decided it would use its power to crush opponents like the Cathars. In the end, it was the RCC that ended up being crushed, losing all secular power and now controlling only the Vatican City. Bitterly complaining as they lost power over the years.

This entire Objective Morality nonsense is a game. But a dangerous one at that. after all, we have our nativist Christian Nationalists in the U.S. playing the same game. And many of them find that the RCC is not Christian, is a damnable heresy, The "Whore Of Babylon".

Whose Objective morality then?

WCB
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AnonymousFebruary 12, 2024 at 1:29 PM
WCB

@DNW

"Not at all. You may go off into a corner and flap your lips and emote till Hell freezes over; and no one would care"

Ahhhh, the old word game. "I am resolute, you are obstinate"
"I have objective morality, you have only emotions".

Well, no. Islamic radical tell us they have the Quran and the words of Allah, objective morality Islamic style. The problem then is defining exactly what is meant by objective morality and how you know there is such a thing, and what it entails.

For which it seems you are not doing. Give it a try.

For example, don here in Texas, our GOP legislature, let by right winged governor Greg Abbott has refused to open a medicare exchange allowing more poor people to get adequate health care insurance. Leading to many people suffering inadequate health care. Now, tell me how this so called "Objective Morality" of your relates to such callous political actions of the Texas GOP.

As an atheist, I find it abhorrent, brutal and objectionable because it causes suffering to the most vulnerable in our society. Other states have opened Medicare exchanges without problems.

Now, let us see you put your "Objective Morality" to the acid test. You may wish to read Matthew 25:32- 46 first. Do not forget Abbott and our Texas GOP legislators style themselves as Christians.

WCB

WCB
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AnonymousFebruary 12, 2024 at 3:37 PM
WCB

@Fred
"What we are saying is YOU HAVE NO GROUNDS TO DO SO EXCEPT PERSONAL PREFERENCE. "

And some here have a personal preference for some vague, term "objective morality" which does not seem to mean much. Not that anybody here can explain why that is so much better than personal revulsion against horrendous evils like mass murder, genocide, rape, torture, slavery or lesser but still evil actions and activities.

It is then, just a buzzword, rhetoric, polemics at best.
The point is, the RCC with it's vaunted "Objective morality" people here keep posting about did indeed
seem to be rather immoral over the centuries. Religious wars, cruel inquisitions, genocides et all.

It gets hard to take "Objective Morality" seriously when nobody here can expplain why genocide is bad as measured by that "Objective Morality" while my revulsion for genocide and mass murder is brushed of as mere personal preference. Which implies genocide
might be acceptable to some as THEIR personal preference. That my mere personal preference has no moral force.

I think you will find that there are a lot of atheists, agnostics, Nones, nothing in particulars, and cultural Christians, and non-Christian religious people will find this idea that personal preferences in regards to horrendous evils is somehow lacking or a mistaken and foolish concept.

Why is the Mass murder of Cathars evil in the light of
"Objective Morality" Or not.. Rather than attack me, somebody here want to explain that concept?

WCB

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AnonymousFebruary 12, 2024 at 5:04 PM
WCB

@Kevin

Dawkins was right about the Universe being mindless and having no concepts of evil. But We do. We are conscious and we have emotions, we can suffer, we can understand the concept of moral evil that causes suffering.

Do you think Dawkins would not care about Mass murder, Genocide, torture, robbery, slavery and rape? REALLY!

Ezekiel 36
26 A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.
27 And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.
See also Hebrew 8 and 10, Jeremiah 31:33-4

If God can do what these verses say, and does not, what does this tell you about the nature of this world?

WCB
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DNWFebruary 12, 2024 at 6:55 PM
"Ahhhh, the old word game. "I am resolute, you are obstinate"
"I have objective morality, you have only emotions".

You're the one who trotted out seated on your bloody emotions.

As if your emotions counted for something in cases where others who are not you, and not in need of you, and not necessarily well disposed toward you find themselves calculating the cost of tolerating you.

Well, let's see how that nag runs. Put the spurs to it and see how far it can take you.

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DNWFebruary 12, 2024 at 9:57 PM
"If God can do what these verses say, and does not, what does this tell you about the nature of this world?"

It tells me nothing about the world but tells me something about you.

It tells me that you like to spout scriptures quoting a god you don't believe in, because you think that you can manipulate people to your advantage that way.

It tells me that you are out of touch with reality believing that such a scam could work nowadays.

It tells me that your emotional gain setting is turned up way too high.

That, you should probably get yourself a set of barbells and start jogging.

That maybe by exercising more you will begin whining less.

It tells me that you should also explain where the benefit lies in someone's suffering a loss so that you may experience a gain.

And you should further explain why, given your annoyingness and alien nature, anyone should give a damn about your "suffering" if you are of no particular utility to them.

After all, you could end your own suffering any number if ways without dragging in unwilling others.

Who is it that directs that they should act in one way rather than another, or just not act at all?
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AnonymousFebruary 12, 2024 at 11:18 PM
WCB

So, one is not allowed to have an emotional reaction to great evils. according to the Great Ethicist DNW. What?

Or are we supposed to calculate our reaction with out emotion according to so great emotionless calculation according to some principle DNW calls objective morality? And what are those principles DNW? Tells us so we might be able to handle and great moral evil in a DNW approved manner. What cold, calculating unemotional objective morality are you wanting us atheists to use? Without messy emotions, it seem that this objective morality could be programed into an emotionless AI system to unerringly tell us what is evil and what is not evil.

I notice that people here refuse to state what this marvelous objective morality is and how it is to be used to decide such issues.

Objective morality seems to be just a vague buzzword.
With no real meaning, no real world useful application, used only to attack those who dare to state we emotionally are evolved to have emotions that hate being abused, enslaved, murdered, cheated, et al.
"You can't do THAT!".

Put up or shut up. What is objective morality divorced from mere emotion? How does one know what it is? Where does one go to find out what its principles are? How to apply it to any situation? Or are you just ranting about all of this? Explain yourself so any religious skeptic can understand what you think applied objective morality not dependent on emotion is.

Back to you DNW. Any anybody else who wants to demonstrate a viable, non-emotional way of objectively reacting to great moral evils. Or even not so great moral evils.

WCB

WCB
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AnonymousFebruary 13, 2024 at 12:28 AM
WCB

Similar verses tp Ezekiel 36
Ezekiel 11:18-20
Ezekiel 36:25-7
Jeremiah 24:7
Jeremiah 31:33-34
Jeremiah 32L38-41
Hebrews 8:10-12
Hebrews 10:15-17

With the great commission of mark 16, it would seem God would give all mankind an infallible objective morality as per these verses. There would be no false religions, no morally evil ideologies, no moral ignorance.

Since it is dogmatic for the RCC that God authored the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, these verses must have true and trustworthy meaning.

WCB
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KevinFebruary 13, 2024 at 4:01 AM
Do you think Dawkins would not care about Mass murder, Genocide, torture, robbery, slavery and rape? REALLY!

I'm sure he would. But that's not the issue.

You said there were things that were objectively evil. Under a materialistic atheist worldview, no there aren't.

I watch a lot of nature documentaries, and routinely witnes large-scale massacres such as a chimpanzee troop attacking and brutalizing another, or rival ant colonies going to war, or hornets attacking bees. One group of humans committing genocide against another is objectively no worse under any materialistic atheist worldview. It takes subjective qualifiers to achieve that, and what is subjectivity other than personal preference?

If you come back with some variation of "so atheists can't oppose genocide? REALLY" then you've again missed the point. Your caring is evidence your worldview is wrong, because your worldview doesn't provide the justification for your moral conviction that evil objectively exists.

Otherwise, in what way does materialistic atheism support the notion that some acts are intrinsically, objectively evil, but only when a human is the perpetrator?
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DNWFebruary 13, 2024 at 7:48 AM
It is obvious that we have once again and for the umpteenth time, run up against the monomaniacal nominalistic subjectivity of the alternate-anthropology anti-essentialism kind.

The existence of natural kinds and categories is denied. Objectivity in the realm of duties and obligations is held not to exist. And even the human being itself is taken to have no core or persisting identity. Its [ formerly, 'his'] consciousness is considered largely as an epiphenomenal by-product of non-human processes which only provoke the illusion of there being a man or integrated person somewhere beneath this superficial self-awareness. However, so the view goes, in the blind pulsing of the essential nothingness of the cosmic bubble, he insofar as he exists is a largely helpless rider carried along on the mindless genetic worm and those chemical processes beneath it: they doing all the driving or real living that there is to be done. Your emotional life satisfactions then, are just registrations which are part of a feedback loop in the service of something not you, but of which you, inconstant flickering illusion that you are, have incidentally become aware of and can vicariously experience in the form of chemical stimuli.

Huh.

'Well ..." , you say, "...ok fine then. That is a game I judge I can play, and potentially play well. Let it be so, and the devil take the hindmost of you defective, incapable, and annoyingly whining f×

But, oddly enough, that does not seem to please them.

"No! No!" screech the voices now reconceived as emitting from flesh carapaces which manifest in a way they label as 'progressive'. "That is not what we want! It is not to our illusion of self and taste that you should act in such an indifferent way and neglect to affirm our value! On the contrary, we progressives have collected ourselves together and made a rule that says you should regard us with esteem and consideration despite our dysfunctional manner of engaging our surroundings. We call our way progress, and we wrote the rule down on a sheet of paper, so that makes it objective, and that means you have to obey!"

In reply they are told, "That is ridiculous. You don't even believe what you are saying holds any real force. It directly contadicts your own reductive "science" and you are failing to live according to the supposed reality which you have yourself proclaimed as conditioning."

And they reply,

"We know. But what else do you expect us to do!?!"

To which the standard rejoinder is, "As we have seen it all before, and know your character by now, we expected you to do just as you have done."
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AnonymousFebruary 13, 2024 at 8:50 AM
WCB's attempt to claim the moral high ground in a conversation where he denies the moral high ground actually exists will never stop being amusing.

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AnonymousFebruary 13, 2024 at 9:41 AM
WCB

Nobody here can tell us what this Objective Morality is, how we use it, what its core principles are and why it is so much better than revulsion at horrendous evils committed by immoral people.

It is just a fuzzy, vague deepity without any meaning.

WCB
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DNWFebruary 13, 2024 at 12:12 PM
And so we come around to the point wherein the cycle closes. And, appropriately, it is at the point of the conflicting voluntarist and intellectualist analytical frameworks which Feser just recently covered..

For a Divine Commandment theorist of morality, such as the Protestants whom the apostate WCB appears to have a shared conceptual background - insofar as mental predispositions go at least - it is all about will, emotion, urges, and impulses right out of the box; this, be there a God or no god. And with mental operations being reduced to the instrumental role of responding to what are per definition ultimately meaningless welling urges or emotions, there is literally no other psychological space for them to inhabit in order to reconsider the matter from the ground up.

In one anthropology man is a rational or reasoning animal. In the other the human thing is part of a series of concatenations of urges floaing in a skin bag.

There is for them no framework available for analyzing the nature of a thing, or drawing prescriptive normative inferences therefrom, since things have no intrinsic specific natures which command intellectual acknowledgement in the first place, as an initial step in the chain of moral analysis and reasoning.

They may introduce a personified "evolution" as a kind of pseudo creator for rhetorical purposes, but of course, evolution is not a "thing", and "it" designs with the same purposiveness as a brushfire does.

As someone else originally mentioned in other comments above, the A-T and traditionalist starting point is with man as the rational animal.

Contrarily, the voluntarist starts with the unconscious universe generating temporary and momentarily self-aware vortices of urges, behind which there is nothing to see or be grasped.

They say - some of them - they want to end suffering. Lots of ways to put a halt to the suffering experienced by an organism, if suffering is your primary and conditioning benchmark of evil. One method of which is to painlessly put an end to the organism itself.

If in order to put a stop to its suffering, one ends the organism, has one done evil or good in Emo-land? How does the Emo-priest know? Is there some field of value more fundamental than feelings?

Let's suppose the scourage of pederasty could be ended and ended now by painlessly switcing off the hearts of pederasts as they slept: "Good", or "evil", in Emo-land?

Richard Rorty admitted that he could not demonstrate that his system of values was objectively any better than Nazi values. And that did not even address the matter of suffering as an evil. His proposed solution to this perplexing situation was to stop asking and disallow such questions, and to do away with metaphysical reasoning altogether.

John Rawls' calculus of social improvement proposed to reduce overall suffering through eugenics.

Now Rawls would presumably not go so far as to advocate putting sufferers down, but on the Proudly Emotivist's system of value assignment, what would make euthanasia, an "evil" if it were practiced instead of co-existence? Or, would it be, in fact?

WCB imagines he is skirting the question. But he has through his behavior been providing an answer of a sort all along.
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DNWFebruary 13, 2024 at 7:31 PM

Reading through WCB's recent deposit of 2/12, 11:18 PM, left me wondering just how I had permitted myself to - if indeed I had - drift so far off focus so as to allow WCB to begin seemingly quoting me using the term "objective morality", as if I were challenging him with the term, to provide one.

What I recalled doing instead, is trying to get to the bottom of how WCB assessed an act or event, as an "evil" act or event.

WCB had been moralizing about the duties of his readers to act against what he called 'evil' ; and therefore others naturally wished to know both how he came to deliver his assessment, and on what basis or authority it was that he placed his demands against these others.

Was it on the basis of his personal feelings? Did he imagine that when he said we should do this, or think that, that his words carried an indisputable force of duty which others were bound to recognize and treat as visible to all, or objective obligations, and not merely as expressions of his desires?

After all, the ostensible fact-value dichotomy is a longstanding dogma that has attained almost canonical status among the secular religion of humanity crowd, and among anti-metaphysicians, and anti theists in general.

WCB had seemed to indicate that personal or plural liking and disliking constitutes the standard by which the labels "good" and "evil" are to be applied. Unless apparently, one dislikes opposite gender mimics instrucing his kids and participating in his community life, in which case one's dislike of them somehow fails to make them and their presence in one's life, "evil"; regardless of the revulsion which their presence engenders (pun intended) .

Now, WCB likes to quote the Bible a lot too. WCB does not of course believe that the Bible is the word of God. And sometimes he even says that what the Bible instructs is evil. But other times WCB insists that Christians follow the scriptural injunctions - or WCB's usually truncated and polemically deployed version of them - as if they represented the authority of God: who WCB says does not exist anyway and mostly promotes evil. Except when WCB says He does not. But since he thinks God does not exist, it's hard to figure out what WCB imagines he is accomplishing with all of this God, or god, citation work.

At any rate, I went back and looked using word search, and although I had earlier asked WCB if he thought the people he was harranguing had an objective duty or obligations with regard to his insistence that others agree with his evaluations, I did not bring up the topic of "an objective morality" in contradistinction to WCB's ... whatever it is that he calls his system of evaluations and duties.

Because just exactly what it is that he is spouting, and what it is based on, and why anyone else should pay him any mind after he has done it, is precisely what we are trying to figure out in the first place.
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AnonymousFebruary 13, 2024 at 9:01 PM
Is WCB arguing that the moral epistemological problem makes the issue of moral ontological " grounding' basically meaningless . The " grounding " is the rational justification itself which amounts to the ontology collapsing into the epistemology . Is that the angle of the naturalist who also holds to moral realism?
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KevinFebruary 14, 2024 at 5:00 AM
WCB said:

Yes, I do have rational grounds to object to great moral evils that result in horrendous suffering for innocent persons.

1. These evil are obviously and objectively wrong.

WCB also says:

Nobody here can tell us what this Objective Morality is, how we use it, what its core principles are and why it is so much better than revulsion at horrendous evils committed by immoral people.

Whatever the objective morality is or isn't, WCB says some things are objectively evil, meaning he ought to be able to tell us.

Sloppy wording?

One final attempt to get the point across. Throughout history there have been cultures in which things like slavery, genocide, rape, murder of children, etc have been morally acceptable. Without resorting to bias at modern Western sensibilities, why were they wrong and you are right?
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AnonymousFebruary 14, 2024 at 6:32 AM
WCB

@DNW

"What I recalled doing instead, is trying to get to the bottom of how WCB assessed an act or event, as an "evil" act or event. "

It is simple. Does an act cause great suffering to innocent parties. Mass murder, Genocide, murder, robbery, et al.

Political policies that deny adequate health care to millions due to perverse political ideology for example.

And the problem of abstract reasoning that leads to callous behavior and great suffering. Hitler's insane anti-semitism for example.

I am in no way obligated to agree with those fools who claim that we cannot distinguish between moral systems and all moral systems are equal. Including that of Nazis. That is obviously false. A moral system that abhors mass murder is better than a moral system that commits mass murders.

And still, the issue of just what is this theological objective morality is remains unresolved here.

This morality and ethics thing is not that hard if one goes back to basic principles.

1. We have emotions evolution has given us that allow us to suffer.
2. Inflicting great and horrendous suffering on people is wrong.
3. We have the ability to reason abstractly.
4. Abstract reasoning can cause bad ideologies, racism, et al and leads to atrocities.
5. We must rationally think and avoid bad abstract reasons to inflict suffering on innocent persons.

All the rest is details. And this is my personal basic foundation for morality and ethics. What is yours?

WCB
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AnonymousFebruary 14, 2024 at 8:23 AM
WCB

@DNW

"But other times WCB insists that Christians follow the scriptural injunctions - or WCB's usually truncated and polemically deployed version of them - as if they represented the authority of God"

For Trinitarians, Jesus is God. And commands his followers sell all they have and give to the poor. But except for a few nuns and monks, no Christians do that.

This makes us atheists wonder at why so many Christians want to cram religion down our throats, (Prayer in schools, ten commandments in classrooms et al) but refuse to actually follow their own savior's commands?

All I ask is that if today's Christian Nationalists want to
ram their religion down everybody's throats, is that they set a good example and follow the commands of Jesus to the letter. or shut up and leave everybody else alone.

Prayer is to be private, Matthew 6:5-6. Sell all you have an give to the poor. Mark 10, Luke 12, 14, 18, Matthew 19.

No religious oaths. and so on.

WCB
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ficino4mlFebruary 14, 2024 at 9:47 AM
There has been much discussion of objective morality.

Is it accurate to say that objective morality is objective because it grounds ethical standards in a ground that is independent of, and superior to, human minds? By "grounds" I mean, supplies the right-making force of a precept. And is it accurate to say that there are two basic kinds of theories about objective moral grounds, sc. divine command theories and natural law theories?

I don't know whether so-called Virtue Ethics is a species of natural law ethics. If not folded into natural law ethics, then is Virtue Ethics a third kind of theory about objective moral grounds?

Tx.
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KevinFebruary 14, 2024 at 10:43 AM
2. Inflicting great and horrendous suffering on people is wrong.

That's what atheists are unable to provide any basis for believing, other than not liking it. That's hardly troubling to, say, a society that values protecting its own people and so wipes out others for its own prosperity.

But then, you say it is foolish to even present the comparison and ask you to distinguish morally between the society you want and their society. It looks to me you know what would happen if you made the attempt, so you just scoff as a means of avoiding the obvious hole in your atheistic assertion - it utterly fails to demonstrate superiority to even the most heinous civilization.

This makes us atheists wonder at why so many Christians want to cram religion down our throats, (Prayer in schools, ten commandments in classrooms et al) but refuse to actually follow their own savior's commands?

If only Jesus had ever commanded Gentiles to do that, atheists might finally be able to make a point. Looks like another failure though.
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DNWFebruary 14, 2024 at 10:44 AM
"And still, the issue of just what is this theological objective morality is remains unresolved here.

This morality and ethics thing is not that hard if one goes back to basic principles.

1. We have emotions evolution has given us that allow us to suffer.
2. Inflicting great and horrendous suffering on people is wrong.
3. We have the ability to reason abstractly.
4. Abstract reasoning can cause bad ideologies, racism, et al and leads to atrocities.
5. We must rationally think and avoid bad abstract reasons to inflict suffering on innocent persons.

All the rest is details."

Here's a detail for you.

That's a litany of self referential assumptions and question begging assertions, and neither an argument for nor an explanation of why anyone should intellectually accept your emotion based "evil" labeling applications; much less, your assignment of duties to others based on them, when that emotional experience of yours is neither shared nor blindly trusted as a right guide.

Now, one of your formerly appearing and like-minded confrers, eventually admitted that as far as he was concerned all such talk was fundamentally circular and based on arbitrary and subjective impressions anyway.

Which is why with that kind, no matter how much noise is emitted by them in the form of sounds that seemingly refer to altruism, and sensitivity, and acceptance, it eventually boils down to who has the guns.

I do believe you and I have nothing further to discuss; since you are in effect a broken record unable to play more than the one note. If I want to hear more from you all I have to do is look again at your initial assertions, since no real reasoning or explanation has taken place since then.

Which does not mean that I might not have further observations with regard to what you have said. But probably just not in exchanges with you.
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bmillerFebruary 14, 2024 at 11:40 AM
It's as if this person simply does not understand the question.

Aside from being a deliberately dishonest.
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TonyFebruary 14, 2024 at 1:01 PM
WCB says:
It is simple. Does an act cause great suffering to innocent parties. Mass murder, Genocide, murder, robbery, et al.

Political policies that deny adequate health care to millions due to perverse political ideology for example.

Person 1: "Stop denying us adequate health care. You are 'harming' us."

Person 2: "How am I denying you health care?"

Person 1: "You aren't paying for our care from your funds."

Person 2: "But I don't have funds for that."

Person 1: "That's irrelevant, you still aren't paying for it, and that's denying us our health care."

Person 2: "But I don't have adequate health care either. How is it my job to pay for yours?"

Person 1 (Bob, an upper middle class union official representing lower middle class steam fitters in Gary, Indiana): "Still irrelevant - if you aren't paying for our care, you are denying it, and that's harming us."

Person 2, (Ramesh Pandit, from Kolkata, India): "You're using a crazy notion of "denying" you something and calling that "evil", and I am tired of talking to a crazy person."

WCB:
Prayer is to be private, Matthew 6:5-6.

Jesus himself prayed in the sight of others. He was teaching people not to pray as the hypocrites. Praying in public for the goal of honor and esteem from others is the hypocrisy, not simply praying in public.

Like Ramesh above, I am tired of being lectured at by a crazy person who pretends to be able to represent Jesus's teaching to us, when he doesn't believe in Jesus or his teaching. This is trolling behavior, people. Treat it as it deserves.
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AnonymousFebruary 14, 2024 at 3:30 PM
WCB

"2. Inflicting great and horrendous suffering on people is wrong.

That's what atheists are unable to provide any basis for believing,"

Let somebody inflict great and horrendous suffering on you and your loved ones. That will change your mind quickly enough. Or would you sit there wondering, "How should I feel about this?".
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AnonymousFebruary 14, 2024 at 3:47 PM
WCB

@Tony
"Political policies that deny adequate health care to millions due to perverse political ideology for example.

Person 1: "Stop denying us adequate health care. You are 'harming' us." "

GOP "Oh look. huge deficits! I guess we will have to balance the budget by slashing funding for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare. To balance the budget".

A small fact. Trump's large tax cuts to the wealthy and big corporations over 4 years gave us $7.8 trillion in deficits. These tax cuts expire at the end of 2024. And the GOP leaders and rank and file want to make these big tax cuts to the already wealthy and big corporations permanent.

I guess the big deficits that will come can only be dealt with with slashing Social Security, Obamacare, medicare, medicaid and other social services. I mean, there is no other way, right?

What is this called? "Starve The Beast". Google that. The GOP cares only for enriching the wealthy. And does not care about the health of millions of Americans. Down here in Red, Red Texas, our GOP dominated state refused to open a medicaid exchange. Texas has one of America's largest populations of poor uninsured citizens and resulting poor health health outcomes. Oh, and these GOP legislatures are all Christians. Prayer in school is important to them.

There is plenty of resources for social programs. If the GOP stops giving it all away to the already rich and big corporations. Now, go read Matthew 25:32-46.

WCB
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AnonymousFebruary 14, 2024 at 5:03 PM
WCB
Matthew 6:6
"6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."

It does not get more plain than that.

WCB
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ficino4mlFebruary 14, 2024 at 6:43 PM
I am thinking that it's a false dichotomy to suppose that our choices are only "objective" morality or "subjective" morality, where "subjective" cashes out as grounded in one individual's likes or dislikes. What about "intersubjective"? Humans form a community, and together they agree on what actions are acceptable and what not. Like what we see among other communal species, such as lions or wolves, where behavior that harms the group is met with ostracism from the group or the like.

One may say, intersubjective agreement is not enough, that we need objective moral facts or there is no morality at all, only preference. Why can't morality be grounded in communal preference? When you start reasoning about communal preference, perhaps you wind up at a categorical imperative grounded not in God's commands -- it's speculative whether we have access to such -- and not in Nature -- no one here has nullified the "no ought from an is" problem.

If we go with intersubjective morality, obviously there are many fields to dispute details. There seems at least to be a commonality across cultures about some precepts, such as, for the most part, involving murder, stealing, lying, incest ... because all over the world, humans live in groups, and groups need norms.

None of the above is reducible to one individual's emotional needs. Nor does it depend on speculations about divinities -- whose preferences, one might argue, are themselves subjective at a higher level than ours.

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AnonymousFebruary 14, 2024 at 11:46 PM
WCB

Consequentialism. What decides what is good or evil is the results from an action.

If a dictator decides to commit mass murder, people suffer. Many here seem to think suffering in itself of innocent people does not matter. As an atheist, I cannot prove to their satisfaction horrendous suffering is somehow evil. Of course if great evil happens to them, they might change their tune.

WCB
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KevinFebruary 15, 2024 at 12:19 AM
Let somebody inflict great and horrendous suffering on you and your loved ones. That will change your mind quickly enough. Or would you sit there wondering, "How should I feel about this?".

Well this just confirms you are actively avoiding the point, rather than missing it. Not liking something doesn't prove it's wrong. Something being universally despised, if such existed, wouldn't prove it was wrong.

You borrow from sources other than an atheistic worldview when you assert otherwise.
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KevinFebruary 15, 2024 at 12:34 AM
Why can't morality be grounded in communal preference?

I watched some college kid who was unable to explain why Nazi Germany was evil, because he said "to me they were, but to them it was right". He was unwilling to assert they were simply wrong.

I would say that's why. Entire nations can be wrong on a societal level, which has been demonstrated countless times throughout history.
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G. Mancz 滿償喬治February 15, 2024 at 4:46 AM
@ ficino4ml
re: February 14, 2024 at 6:43 PM

I confess your objection surprise me, given that this is a Thomist blog, so please allow me a somewhat lengthy exposition.

I agree that “intersubjective” does not cash out as grounded in one individual’s likes or dislikes. Rather, it cashes out as grounded in the likes and dislikes of some aggregate of individuals, and I’m afraid I don’t see what’s the intelligibly salient difference for the person dissatisfied with the subjective morality. As long as one cannot give what one does not have, this possibility seems to be precluded. Inasmuch as lions or wolves do not inhabit the space of reasons, so to speak, they don’t concern themselves with this, but presumably the situation is different with humans.

One may say, intersubjective agreement is not enough, that we need objective moral facts or there is no morality at all, only preference. Why can't morality be grounded in communal preference?

Nay, I submit one must say this (provided one is not too rigidly modern when it comes to “facts”) to avoid equivocation, if nothing else, unless you wish to adopt an exotic form of legal positivism, as the morality thus procured is hardly distinct from (customary) law.
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G. Mancz 滿償喬治February 15, 2024 at 4:47 AM
Many groups did this, of course, just like many peoples throughout history, not without consequence, limited the applicability of the protections afforded by such law to their compatriots, making outsiders free game, essentially. Were they “wrong” to do this? The archaic belief in the exclusive universal validity of their body of law held by the more ancient Romans, say, seems to have, in some ways, “benefited” their republic greatly, at the expense of the “lawless” – that is, everybody else.

This highlights something, I submit, this proposal does nothing to solve, namely, the properly metaethical problem of the “why” of morality, chiefly at issue with WCB.

Why, precisely, should one abide by such communal rules? The rule that one should abide by them can surely not itself be a communal convention. The response, possibly inspired by wolves, “To avoid adverse consequences”, can be met with the more philosophical “Why avoid them?”/“What makes them “adverse?”, as well as the pragmatic “Thank you, but I can think of other ways of doing this” or a more conciliatory “I’m prepared to abide by them in moderation, what say you?”. It seems like we’re discussing tort law, at this point, not morality.
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G. Mancz 滿償喬治February 15, 2024 at 4:48 AM
Groups can be colloquially termed to “need” norms, just like they can be said to exist, but the meaning is not at all clear if you’re not prepared to reduce them to their members and their accidents (say, in their capacity as moral agents possessing a common good, as on Thomistic natural law). Just what is the nature of this need? If the answer is “the continued existence of the group”, I’ll meet it with “And why should that obtain?”

Perhaps you are yourself content with (mere, I'd say) social contract backed by nothing but collective preference and possibly would not object to this being the common understanding of morality.

However, the unceasing moralising abuse of inherited language perpetrated by WCB prima facie indicates their unpreparedness to limit themselves to such modest “morality”. This, as well as the misleading potential of the above, prompted my response, and seemingly that of the others.

FWIW, permit me to also voice my qualified agreement as regards divine command theories: I believe that, in the abstract, a given divine command theory, in isolation, would fail to address the same metaethical issue, because the question “Why obey God?” cannot be satisfactorily addressed by it, even if the access to the divine was relatively direct. That said, I think divine command – as historically and popularly held to by believers, at least in my experience and given my reading – tends to be accompanied by allied and decidedly “cognitivist”, and “realist” as opposed to “subjectivist”, convictions, resolving into “God knows what is truly good for us and command it, even if we cannot reason to these commands”, with support for the − speculatively not obvious − premise “I should do what is truly good for me” being merely assumed, perhaps, but certainly not positively maintained as true in virtue of an arbitrary divine command.
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G. Mancz 滿償喬治February 15, 2024 at 4:50 AM
To my knowledge, outside of A-T natural law (and arguably, but admittedly less explicitly, (Neo-)Confucianism, and, I suspect, later Stoicism, though my knowledge of that is lacking), no philosophy supplies the (immediate) grounding of the categorical imperative just mentioned.
The way this is done is, apropos the "no ought from an is", is by appealing to the intrinsic teleology of the will, which is, formally, the intelligible good (indicated by the fact of the psychological impossibility of freely doing something not judged worth doing because of some end to be achieved).

The intrinsic teleology of the human generally supplies the hypothetical imperative of acting according with one’s natural ends (goods) if one wants what’s good for them, whereas the intrinsic teleology of the will, specifically, gives the previously lacking premise: “I do, in fact, want what is good for me” (for a undoubtedly much more felicitous exposition of this, please see the last chapter, last section of Dr. Feser’s Aquinas ).

That is to say, if one admits the reality of final causes, as Thomists contend is not rationally avoidable, there are, in fact, certain “is”s out there that yield “oughts” in the “presence” of agents possessed of the requisite appetitive faculty. As Dr. Feser puts it (ibid. section “The good”),

From the traditional Thomistic point of view, however, there simply is no “fact/value” distinction in the first place. More precisely, there is no such thing as a purely “factual” description of reality utterly divorced from “value”, for “value” is built into the structure of the “facts” from the get-go. A gap between “fact” and “value” could exist only given a mechanistic-cum-nominalistic understanding of nature of the sort commonly taken for granted by modern philosophers, on which the world is devoid of any objective essences or natural ends. )
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G. Mancz 滿償喬治February 15, 2024 at 4:58 AM
These “is”s are, in turn, grounded in the Being of God, the objective, non-arbitrary measure of all being, so the Euthyphro is a false binary, on the Thomistic understanding.

P.S.
I initially attempted to respond to your “taxonomic” question above, but my phone failed me for whatever reason.

Re: Virtue Ethics, as you may suspect, I’d say that Virtue Ethics has to “be folded”, that is, it ultimately presupposes “natural law metaethics” like the above for intelligibility, and is devoted to moral prescriptions (and even that indirectly?), as opposed to their general grounding.

For what its worth, one of the leading proponents of VE, Alasdair McIntyre, in his seminal After Virtue rejected something he termed “Aristotle’s metaphysical biology” in favour of, to put it somewhat unfortunately and interpretatively (I don’t have the book presently available to me, so I’m going by memory) socially embodied traditions.
McIntyre later reconsidered this rejection in Dependable Rational Animals . Because of this move, I expect him to be sympathetic to the traditional Thomist account (suboptimally explicated by me here).

As regards other traditions, my impression is, contemporary VEists working with Confucian sources, for example, do tend to favour something like what you’ve sketched above, though I should say that the tradition thus utilised (ahistorically, I believe) can be said to have (had) affinity, with different plausibility, depending on the thinker, with both divine command (archaic Chinese mores systematised by the Confucian school understood as flowing from Heaven as an “anthropomorphic” deity) and natural law, immediately grounded in something like metaphysical biology (plausibly, Mencius), or, later, in “metaphysical cosmology” (Neo-Confucians;), at the very least notionally (and, I’d contend, not merely notionally in many) ultimately grounded in the divinity of Heaven.

What little I know of Indian thought (presently explored by some "Hindu VEists") also suggests interesting convergences in these aspects, though I hesitate to say anything too confidently at this point.
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BillyFebruary 15, 2024 at 5:10 AM
"Humans form a community, and together they agree on what actions are acceptable and what not."

That is still subjective. And, it's just the likes and dislikes of the community, instead of one individual.

"Why can't morality be grounded in communal preference?"

And what if you are in a community, but disagree with them. If, say, your community thinks chattel slavery is okay. But you don't think so. If you try to free a slave, would that be morally wrong?

"no one here has nullified the "no ought from an is" problem."

Sure they have. This problem only arises if you separate ought and is from each other. Just don't make that mistake. Just realize that speaking of what something is already entails what something ought to be. You can't get is without ought.

"There seems at least to be a commonality across cultures about some precepts, such as, for the most part, involving murder, stealing, lying, incest"

Not exactly. There are still members of those communities who don't think these are wrong. By that conclusion, if they get in to a position of influence and power and change the broad norms of the community, what was wrong suddenly becomes right? Or does the community disappear and a new community has arisen?

The primary problem is that this subjective, or intersubjective option makes morality just fiction essentially. A fairytale story we tell ourselves. If a community decides to believe that humans have invisible wings that don't work and no one can experience, it doesn't make it true. It's just a fiction they've made up and agreed to. The same would apply to moral rights and duties.

Why bother believing it? Why even call it morality? Because you'll get ostracized from the community? What if you have enough power and influence that you won't be ostracized? Say that you are a very rich man who is providing economic opportunity, wealth, etc to the community and you are violating every norm, but you aren't ostracized because they know they will lose what you bring for them. Or say that you are a person of great reputation, thus you aren't ostracized as this would cause scandal or bring shame to the community. These kinds of things happen all the time. Does that mean those norms weren't norms, even though others would be ostracized for violating them?

I just don't think any of this makes sense, or makes sense to call morality.
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DNWFebruary 15, 2024 at 10:19 AM
I'm going to drop a comment here involving a matter which should be taken for granted as understood, but which we are probably prone to overlook.

It regards what going back to the Platonic dialogs we might consider the fundamental first step in all (philosophical) analysis or dialog: the clarification and definition of terms and their use. It is also part of the the subject matter of the first chapters of intoductory logic texts which cover informal fallacies.

So, when it comes to phrases such as "objective morality" or "objective morals" we have to determine if we all are reading from the same script and on the same page.

What do we mean by morals, mores, and objective?

A simple etymological dictionary may help us sort quite a bit of that out by revealing what users originally had in mind as they applied word to object or process.

Now, a commenter here has usefully pointed the distinction between moral ontology and moral epistemology. If needed, we remind ourselves thereby of the difference between ethical and metaethical questions.

And as many here will recall, William Lane Craig famously hammered these distinctions home during his debate with Sam Harris over the question of providing a sound foundation for objective moral values and duties.

In that debate both parties contended that morals existed in some objective sense which allowed for the employment of the term "objective morality". The question was how this social phenomenon was grounded and its adequacy in establishing duties and obligations which a rational being could not fail to acknowledge and respect, esteem or also value: "Yes, of course we grant that mores exist and are shared by all termite members or by some in the case of anthropoids. So what?", says the skeptic.

We thus notice that there needs to be a distinction made when referring to the existence of an "objective morality, between the anthropologist's rather straightforward diagnostic criteria for the recognition of a morality system or mores as objectively existing; and "objective" taken to mean observed as binding beyond dispute or rational denial. PLUS - and in calling on the being's own nature - conceived of as native, integral, categorical and universally binding on all members of the general class.

It was upon the rather mundane anthropological basis that I made my initial comment some months ago to someone who had taken the extreme subjectivist stance.

This led to an extended, desultory, and fruitless exchange as there was never any agreed upon definition for any terms at any level of analysis. You cannot exchange views profitably with someone about something which they know nothing about.

But for those interested in the basic groundwork, I would suggest viewing or reviewing the Lane Craig v Harris debate as well as taking a glance at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the definition of morality.

Although as regards the latter I am not completely satisfied with the implication initially presented by the distinction between descriptive and normative definitions of morality - namely that descriptive morality leads to the conclusion that moral relativism is obviously true - it does also imply that moral standards do objectively exist in non trivial or purely subjective senses.

Now, whether your grasp of the meaning and application of the term objective will take you so far as even that, is one thing. Where it takes you after that, is another.
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ficino4mlFebruary 15, 2024 at 12:04 PM
Thank you to all who responded to my last two. Too much to write in reply right now!
I just will throw out there that I'm reminded of Elizabeth Anscombe's argument that "morality" is a -- I think she said -- post-Enlightenment notion that is degenerate or decadent because it trades on what is left over after the earlier notion of (divinely grounded) law was abandoned. Anscombe, IIRC, held that "morality" as it's talked about today by those who don't hold to God as lawgiver is incoherent because those people's "ought" utterances imply that there is some authority, which really should be a lawgiver, telling us what to do.

Anscombe's approach seems different from approaches that seek to justify precepts by appealing to the way things are by nature and the notion that actualizing their natures is good for the things. This presumes that rational creatures, agents, have a duty to seek their proper good.
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DNWFebruary 15, 2024 at 2:54 PM
Lot's of very good, focused, intellectually disciplined and well informed commenters here responding to WCB's bald-faced assertions; and to the attempted derailing tactics once he found himself challenged relentlessly.

Of course, anyone who wished to defend his stance should he also have begun with WCB's first position, could, if brave enough, have gone on to say why suffering or death was bad. But if one were to do that, it would crack the door open to a form of moral archeology which would unearth hidden teleological foundations.

So instead, we get a Utilitarian style of analysis in which pain and pleasure are the stuff and substance of good and evil, rather than signals of more foundational ends being ordinately or improperly met or frustrated.

The problem for this theory of course, is that after the first generation and a half of advocates had had their say, this pure hedonic theory or analysis of the good as identical with physical or emotional pleasure was admitted to be just plain stupid.

Yet we witness a form of it being rerun here.

As a result we note that in its modern reiteration as presented by the commenter here, the application of general anesthetics and opiates to a "suffering" population would be all the response that could legitimately be asked for by someone holding to the position: i.e., that it is the suffering itself that is evil, and the feeling of pleasure per se that constituted the whole of the meaning of good.

The logically sufficient answer then to any of WCB's demands for alleviation? Euthanasia: As good or better than any other approach as judged by the effective and permanent removal of what he defines as "evil".

If no suffering, then, no evil. If no living poor, or one that is happily stupefied, then no suffering.

The person itself is then on the implication of that concepualization, irrelevant in and of itself. At least insofar as no argument has yet been rooted in its continued existence and its end purposes bearing any relation to good and evil. Good and evil having been reduced to near morally free floating independently valorized feelings.

Chemically enhance the feelings in the desired direction, or put an end to them entirely, and you have solved the problem of evil.

It is not the rotten tooth, or the gangrenous foot, or the necrotic liver or the malnourished and abandoned infant that is the problem, but the existence of pain signals or the anxiety associated with those conditions. Eliminate the pain and anxiety through the means of modern chemistry and the the evil has been dealt with; though the flesh may rot and fall away from the yet living body.

After all, what justification could anyone with the WCB theory of emotion-defined evil, have to demand more?
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AnonymousFebruary 15, 2024 at 9:29 PM
WCB

It is not a case of emotion defined evil. It is a case of experiencing suffering from unnecessary evils.

WCB
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DNWFebruary 16, 2024 at 7:56 AM
This rumination is not directed at anyone in particular but is prompted by a commenter's use of the term "intersubjective".

I have used that term myself in what I hoped was the barest bones sense of the term. Perhaps stripped down even from its Husserlian use. Namely to the notion of communicable perceptions of some intentional object perceptible by more or less any given ego. Whether we need to factor in shared social conditions in order to make the perception itself possible is something I ignore.

A critic provides a nice capsule description.

Quote: Husserl avers that an ego constitutes a world as an objective world through constituting it as an intersubjective world; a world which is meaningful not only for the ego itself, but also for others egos who objectively exist. I show, however, that there can be no valid objectivity for Husserl since his view that a subject's own transcendental ego is the only being whose existence can be indubitably affirmed ...

And so in that sense, and loosely, intersubjective straddles the line between subjective and objective: while assuming that egos perceive phenomena in a like manner as subjects, and one which is communicable and can be publicly referred to and understood. However its use remains consciously and deliberately nescient or at least modest in realist terms, as to the ultimate metaphysico-ontological*** status of the phenomenological object.

But boy, the term sure seems to have accumulated a lot of baggage since my time in class. The cooption and deployment of existentialist and phenomenological terms is nothing new of course, and existentialism itself represents an impulse along the same trend line.

It seems emphatic to me now though, that with the empathy bleaters and solidarity pimping types having gotten firm hold of it and injected their pollutions, that its use may require more care than I had imagined.

https://iep.utm.edu/empathy-sympathy-in-ethics/#:~:text=An%20entire%20generation%20of%20thinkers,%E2%80%9D%20%5B%E2%80%9CEinf%C3%BChlung%E2%80%9D%5D.

Quote: An entire generation of thinkers, including Freud, Husserl, and Heidegger, was inhibited from using the precise term “empathy” [“Einfühlung”]. Further more, when they did use it in the context of overcoming otherness, they marginalized it. This was because they were reluctant to invoke echoes of Lipps’ psychology of beauty and art." And ... good for them ...

*** I spent time considering whether ontic or ontical or or ontological or just metaphysical, would do, and concluded that they all made sense to some degree with regard to bracketing, . So I went for the utimate ...
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BillFebruary 16, 2024 at 9:09 AM
Man alive! Many of the comments here completely miss Ed's point. Posts are filled with arguments over what the Cathars actually believed and did when the actual point is society's response to threats against its survival.

While we may quibble about Catharist "theology," we know what wokism affirms. Ed is not calling for violent suppression, for the errors of the current movement may be freely exposed via the spoken and written word. However, when survival becomes a factor, it is morally obligatory to use whatever means necessary to defend oneself. Some people just can't see the forest for the trees.
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AnonymousFebruary 16, 2024 at 11:18 AM
WCB

"Wokism" today seems more like a fake boogy man of the far right. Just another right wing moral panic. A straw man created to manipulate America.

WCB

WCB
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