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Post by Maverick Christian on Dec 20, 2012 23:00:04 GMT -5
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Post by Maverick Christian on Dec 22, 2012 7:58:14 GMT -5
Continuing the conversation from a comment on the blog, I apologize if I offended you when I recommended you learn formal logic, but there’s no need to feel insulted by that recommendation. It’s not as if everybody is trained in formal logic (by which I specifically had symbolic logic in mind), and sadly enough formal logic is not taught as part of standard K-12 education. I didn’t say you didn’t understand formal reasoning, I did imply you were unfamiliar with formal logic when I recommended you learn it. You seem to suggest I was being presumptuous in thinking you were unfamiliar with the discipline. Is it reasonable to conclude a person is unfamiliar with a discipline based on a single mistake? That depends on the mistake. If someone sincerely utters, “Pi is exactly three!” that is the sort of mistake that will lead one to believe the utterer is unfamiliar with geometry. Unfortunately, the mistake (supposing we combine all the mistakes into one) you made was about as grave as this. To a person proficient in propositional logic, the validity of the moral argument is only slightly less obvious than modus ponens, yet you claimed it was invalid. Making matters worse was when you claimed this was invalid: (1) If God does not exist, then objective morality does not exist. (2) Objective morality does not exist. (3) Therefore, God exists. But this was valid: (1*) If objective morality exists, then God exists. (2) Objective morality does not exist. (3) Therefore, God exists. You claimed that changing (1) to (1*) made the argument valid, when the logical equivalence of (1) and (1*) is obvious to one proficient in symbolic logic, akin to how a + b = b + a is obvious to one proficient in arithmetic. And even without transposition, that (1*) follows from (1) is almost the very definition of modus tollens. With all due respect, you gave very strong indication that you were unfamiliar with symbolic logic. Further indication is this: I have since modified the blog entry to make this clearer (evidently I did not sufficiently explain the material conditional before), but believing the antecedent to be false logically commits oneself to accepting the material conditional, as can be confirmed by looking at the truth table. Similarly accepting the consequent as true logically commits oneself to accepting the material conditional.
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Post by Pngwn on Dec 22, 2012 15:54:58 GMT -5
I have since modified the blog entry to make this clearer (evidently I did not sufficiently explain the material conditional before), but believing the antecedent to be false logically commits oneself to accepting the material conditional, as can be confirmed by looking at the truth table. Similarly accepting the consequent as true logically commits oneself to accepting the material conditional. I don't think you read my post closely enough, I said it is the case that the only way that this can be proven false is "if god does not exist" is true, and "Thor exists" is false. That was your point, and you are correct. I did not dispute this. However, as I went on to explain, the inability to disprove a statement does not mean that one must accept the claim. The burden of proof still falls on the person making the claim. Otherwise, we can get contradicting results. You conclude that theists must accept "If God does not exist, then objective morality does not exist." I claim that "If aliens do not exist, then the world does not exist." Does this mean that all people who believe in aliens must believe that the world does not exist? Of course not. They will not be able to disprove it, but they do not need to accept it. Given, most theists believe that without God, nothing would exist. However, they are not logically bound to that idea just because they believe that God exists. I can not stress this enough. An absence of disproof does not mean proof.
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Post by Maverick Christian on Dec 22, 2012 23:29:52 GMT -5
I have since modified the blog entry to make this clearer (evidently I did not sufficiently explain the material conditional before), but believing the antecedent to be false logically commits oneself to accepting the material conditional, as can be confirmed by looking at the truth table. Similarly accepting the consequent as true logically commits oneself to accepting the material conditional. I don't think you read my post closely enough, I said it is the case that the only way that this can be proven false is "if god does not exist" is true, and "Thor exists" is false. Yep, but you also said this: "The implications of first premise being a material conditional are significant. Since the only way the first premise can be false is if “atheism is true” and “objective morality exists” are both true, two things follow: (1) if you accept theism (and thus deny “atheism is true”) logic compels you to accept the first premise, even if you think God isn’t needed for objective morality" I believe this is incorrect. Consider the following. 1) If God does not exist, then Thor must exist. It is the case that the only way this can be proven false is if "god does not exist" is true, and "Thor exists" is false However, that does not imply that all theists must accept the premise. It just means that they don't agree with the antecedent. You denied that all theists must accept the “If God does not exist, then Thor must exist” premise, even though logic compels all theists to accept that premise (as a material conditional). I said that if you accept theism (and thus deny “atheism is true”) logic compels you to accept the first premise of the moral argument, and you specifically stated this was incorrect, even though a truth table reveals I am correct. Again, the fault for the confusion lies on me, since I evidently did not explain the material conditional well enough at the time. However, as I went on to explain, the inability to disprove a statement does not mean that one must accept the claim. The burden of proof still falls on the person making the claim. Sounds great, but then we're no longer talking about that stuff I quoted you on earlier. Nor, for that matter, do we appear to be talking about anything I've written in that blog entry. I never denied the burden of proof in justifying the first premise; indeed trying to justify the first premise is largely what I did in that article. One of the ways I did so was note that if you’re a theist or one who denies moral objectivism, justifying the first premise is easy for those people because the first premise is a material conditional. For atheists who accept moral objectivism though, more work needs to be done, which is what pages 2 and 3 of the article are for.
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Post by Pngwn on Dec 23, 2012 14:59:00 GMT -5
You denied that all theists must accept the “If God does not exist, then Thor must exist” premise, even though logic compels all theists to accept that premise (as a material conditional).
Three things 1) You've used circular reasoning. I was challenging the claim that the truth table necessitates that all theists must accept the premise, and to prove me wrong, you claim the truth table necessitates that all theists must accept the premise. 2) Both things that you quoted me on do not contradict in any way whatsoever. 3) Allow me to illustrate my point in a different way. If your logic is sound, then the following proof is also sound given that I believe in string theory. If string theory is incorrect, then my lawn is blue. My lawn is green. Therefore string theory is correct And look, we can get contradicting premises that you say all people who believe in the precedent must accept. If string theory is incorrect, then my lawn is orange. If string theory is incorrect, then my lawn is purple. If string theory is incorrect, then my lawn is pink. We can do the same thing with your argument. If god does not exist, then objective morality does not exist. If god does not exist, then objective morality does exist. By your reasoning, theists must accept both of the previous premises. The only way to disprove the first statement would be if one accepts that god does not exist and one thinks that objective morality exists. The only way to disprove the second statement would be if one accepts that god does not exist, and one accepts that objective morality does not exist. It is not logically possible to have two premises that one must accept that are mutually exclusive. Therefore, it is not the case that theists must accept your premise. Your rationale for the statement is not evident in the truth table. The truth table only states what is needed to disprove the statement. And again, lack of disproof is not proof. A theist need not accept the statement simply because they will never be able to disprove it. And as a final point, I'd like to note that this is irrelevant. All theists,by definition, already accept your conclusion. Trying to prove to theists that God exists is unnecessary.
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Post by Maverick Christian on Dec 23, 2012 22:57:41 GMT -5
You've used circular reasoning. I was challenging the claim that the truth table necessitates that all theists must accept the premise, and to prove me wrong, you claim the truth table necessitates that all theists must accept the premise. I was unaware that you were challenging the claim that the truth table necessitates that all theists must accept the premise, in part because this is the first time you mentioned the phrase “truth table” in this thread. Still, as I said the first premise is most charitably understood as a material conditional. Once the first premise is a material conditional, then logic compels the theist to follow the truth table of the material conditional. Why think the theist shouldn’t accept the truth table? Are you saying I got the truth table for a material conditional wrong? If god does not exist, then objective morality does not exist. If god does not exist, then objective morality does exist. By your reasoning, theists must accept both of the previous premises. If those two statements are material conditionals, then yes; the truth table for a material conditional proves that. The only way to disprove the first statement would be if one accepts that god does not exist and one thinks that objective morality exists. The only way to disprove the second statement would be if one accepts that god does not exist, and one accepts that objective morality does not exist. It is not logically possible to have two premises that one must accept that are mutually exclusive. In logic parlance, the two statements you have are called subcontraries; they can both be true, but they can’t both be false. If God exists and objective morality exists, then both of those statements are true (if they are material conditionals) and are not inconsistent with each other. Your rationale for the statement is not evident in the truth table. The truth table only states what is needed to disprove the statement. Dear me, it seems I still haven’t made myself sufficiently clear! The purpose of a truth table is not to state what is needed to disprove the statement, rather its purpose is to state what makes the statement true. If the antecedent is true and the consequent is false, then the material conditional is false. If however the antecedent is false, then this is sufficient to make the material conditional true. And as a final point, I'd like to note that this is irrelevant. All theists,by definition, already accept your conclusion. Trying to prove to theists that God exists is unnecessary. The first premise being a material conditional is not as irrelevant as you might think to theists. For a while I was a theist who rejected the first premise, not realizing that the most charitable way of interpreting it was as a material conditional.
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Post by Pngwn on Dec 23, 2012 23:25:08 GMT -5
When you are so charitable with your own proof, it becomes useless. The purpose of a proof is to convince people who don't agree with you.
You can be a theist and reject the first principle (for the reasons outlined) if you aren't as charitable.
If you view premises as they are supposed to be viewed (as tests for ideas), then your point falls apart.
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Post by Maverick Christian on Dec 24, 2012 10:22:28 GMT -5
When you are so charitable with your own proof, it becomes useless. The purpose of a proof is to convince people who don't agree with you. Of course (one of) the purposes of the moral argument is to convince people who are not already theists, but recall that in pages 2 and 3 I responded to the idea of objective morality existing on atheism. I even addressed specifically the best atheist ontological explanation of morality that I could think of.
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Post by Maverick Christian on Dec 27, 2012 5:54:10 GMT -5
Continuing from this comment. The person who had their television stolen has a change in brainstate. In this case, expressed as anger, or sadness, or whichever other emotion they experienced when their television was stolen. If they did not care that their television was stolen, then it might not be considered immoral any longer. In other words, the stealing of the television need not give off an unconcontional ought-to-do-ness, or outhgt-not-to-do-ness. Instead, morality may lie within the state of the brain, which, as far as we know, is all physical. Any conception of morality that did not include unconditional oughtness would not be the same concept of morality that the moral argument talks about. Moreover, it also doesn’t seem like it would be what we ordinarily call morality, e.g. an action is morally wrong for someone only if they ought not to do it, with the sort of ought being the unconditional ought. It’s a free country, and you could redefine “morality” to be whatever you wish in your own writings, but the fact remains that it wouldn’t be the same conception of morality that the moral argument is using. "The warrant problem: we have no warrant for and no reason to believe that objective moral properties exist." If you are speaking of moral properties in the same way as in "1," the same objections apply. I’m afraid I don’t quite understand; what are you referring to when you use the number “1” and what objections are you talking about here? "It’s expected that evolution would occasionally give us false beliefs (e.g. religion) especially if they facilitate survival; and moral beliefs (e.g. regarding limitations on thievery and killing) help society survive." Indeed it would. However, very few people claim that "whatever evolution would have us do" is the best moral system. Furthermore, a truly objective moral system would be completely independent of the beliefs of the agents. So yes, false moral beliefs would (and do) absolutely come about. I'm not sure how that is relevant, but we agree nonetheless. Remember the context: that was part of a list in naturalism’s cumulative case against moral objectivism. I noted that, “When all four items are taken together the cumulative case becomes powerful. All things considered, it seems very likely on naturalism that our evolved intuition of objective moral properties is delusory.”
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Post by Pngwn on Dec 28, 2012 1:01:31 GMT -5
It was not my intent to put forth an objective system of morality.
If a good/bad moral act is only caused by intentional actions (Unconditional oughts would by necessity only apply to intentional actions), and you agree that brainstates are the only causes of intentional action, and that we could theoretically measure brainstates, then we could measure the thing (brainstates) that is the only cause of thing (intentional action), that is the only cause of a good/bad moral act.
As a analogy, if the only way that a certain object can be moved is through gravity, and the only way for an object to have gravity is through mass, and we can only measure mass, then we can measure the movement of the object.
Now, you can hold the strict view that moral statements apply only to the action themselves, (in the analogy, this would be only a direct measurement of the object) and I can say nothing to deductively prove your assertion incorrect. If this is the case, however, then the conversation is useless. We will near-certainly never be able to directly measure
However, I hold that if one can measure all of the things that can effect something, then one can measure the "something" itself.
Again, my attempt was not to disprove your point through an example of an objective moral theory without a god, it was an attempt to show that it might be possible to form an objective moral theory without a god.
The main point here is that your point that we can't directly measure the actions might not matter, because it is theoretically possible to measure all of the things that go into these actions.
Other than that, you have only addressed what you believe to be the most likely atheistic alternatives, not a disproof of the idea of atheistic alternatives.
That was my fault, I didn't make that very clear. In your post, you had a numbered series. I responded to each number. My response to what was listed as number 1 in your post is what I was referring to.
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Post by Maverick Christian on Dec 30, 2012 9:08:44 GMT -5
It was not my intent to put forth an objective system of morality. In which case I'm a bit confused. Here's what you said before: Here it seemed you were offering an alternative to morality including unconditional oughtness (as the "instead" suggests). That doesn't seem to follow. Consider the hypothetical moral nihilist who can measure the pain endured by puppies when he tortures them. Presumably, the more pain he inflicts on the puppies, the more morally wrong his torture of the puppies becomes. Yet moral wrongness (defined as including the unconditional ought; an action is morally wrong for subject S only if S ought not to do it) is still empirically undetectable; the presence or absence of objectively existing unconditional oughtness would not affect the physical world at all, so not only can our moral nihilist not measure moral wrongness, he can't even empirically verify its existence. I didn't just address the most likely atheistic alternatives; I addressed the rationality in general of accepting moral objectivism on atheism. See for example the argument I presented in page 3 of the article. Which number? There are a lot of numbers in that article. Presumably you're referring to the warrant problem, but in that case the objections you mentioned don't seem to apply because the sort of morality the moral argument it talking about involves objectively existing unconditional oughtness, and barring the supernatural the presence or absence of objectively existing oughtness would not affect the physical world at all.
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Post by Pngwn on Dec 30, 2012 14:44:55 GMT -5
As the "may" implies, this is not a claim, only the possibility of a claim, one in which you have yet to disprove.
That is because there is a leap from "pain" to "wrong"
I will say it again. I am not looking to give you a moral theory. I don't need to. You need to disprove that it is possible.
Your only proof seems to be that you think that it is impossible to discern moral qualities from the natural world.
This seems intuitively correct, but you have offered no proof other than the fact that no one has done it.
If that logic was sound then no theory could ever be correct, because there was a time before then in which no one had created the theory.
I've been going one page at a time in the interest of keeping arguments relevant. I'll likely get to page three when current objections have been answered.
If there was an atheistic objective moral theory put forth, then it would obviously include a warrant. Just because a warrant has not been brought to light does not mean that it must not exist.
You have no evidence for this claim. In fact, the point of this page was to prove that, correct? To use this claim as proof is circular reasoning. You first must answer all objections before this claim can be said to be valid. If you can logically prove that it is impossible to devise morality without the supernatural, I await your syllogism.
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Post by Maverick Christian on Jan 1, 2013 15:29:43 GMT -5
I will say it again. I am not looking to give you a moral theory. I don't need to. You need to disprove that it is possible. I need to disprove that what is possible? Perhaps it's the idea that objectively existing oughtness is not empirically testable, but I did provide one bit of support: barring the supernatural, the presence or absence of objectively existing unconditional oughtness would not affect the physical world at all. If that is true, then one could not possibly empirically test it (at least not on naturalism). If there was an atheistic objective moral theory put forth, then it would obviously include a warrant. I don't see how that follows; I could present lots of theories that have no evidence for them. Anyway, remember the warrant problem is specifically about naturalism and objective morality. As I said, barring the supernatural, the presence or absence objectively existing oughtness would not affect the physical world at all. If that is true, then we cannot empirically test for its existence. On naturalism there doesn’t seem to be any relevant connection between objective moral properties and our belief in them that confers warrant upon those beliefs. To illustrate what I mean by this, consider someone seeing that a ball is red with her own eyes. The relevant connection between the ball’s redness and her belief in it is (at least in part) the light waves bouncing off the ball and the photons impinging on her retinas etc. (note that she doesn’t need to know the mechanism of how all this works for there to be an epistemically relevant connection). In contrast, if she had never seen the ball and instead based her belief in the ball’s redness solely on a random guess, there would be no relevant connection between the ball’s redness and her belief thereof that would confer warrant upon her belief. Or to use a perhaps more apropos example, suppose a random mutation gives me the unshakeable intuition that somewhere in the universe there exists a flying spaghetti monster. By chance, there is in fact a flying spaghetti monster created by an alien scientist many light-years away. As a result of evolved intuition I believe in the flying spaghetti monster, but do I know the monster exists? No, because there’s no relevant connection between my belief in the monster and the monster’s existence. Similarly, on naturalism there appears to be no relevant connection between my evolved intuition of these nonphysical and causally inert moral properties and the properties themselves that would confer warrant upon my belief (recall that barring the supernatural, the presence or absence of objectively existing unconditional oughtness would not affect the physical world). You have no evidence for this claim. In fact, the point of this page was to prove that, correct? No; I basically took it as a given and I thought it would be pretty uncontroversial. Because of the nonphysical nature of objectively existing unconditional oughtness, on naturalism the idea of objectively existing oughtness affecting the physical world seems about as implausible as the number 6 tipping over a chair. But I guess we might have to agree to disagree on that.
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Post by Pngwn on Jan 1, 2013 22:18:58 GMT -5
That is what I'm asking you to prove.
Accepted as valid.
Again, I need you to prove this.
The existence of the number 6 is a brute fact, which you specifically denied as being a plausible source of objective morality. As such, I find the analogy lacking.
Well...this is your proof. If it relies on something that needs to be accepted without proof (an axiom of sorts), then it should be a premise itself.
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Post by Maverick Christian on Jan 19, 2013 21:04:01 GMT -5
Sorry for the late reply; I've kind of been away from the blog for a while. That is what I'm asking you to prove. As I said earlier, because of the nonphysical nature of objectively existing unconditional oughtness, on naturalism the idea of objectively existing oughtness affecting the physical world seems about as implausible as the number 6 tipping over a chair. But if you still don’t think so, I guess we might have to agree to disagree on that. If need be, consider it a premise. The existence of the number 6 is a brute fact, which you specifically denied as being a plausible source of objective morality. As such, I find the analogy lacking. I don’t think you understood the purpose of the analogy, because the brute fact of the number 6 is irrelevant here. Even if Platonism is correct (and even if the existence of the number 6 is a brute fact), it is implausible that the number 6 is capable of tipping over a chair. Similarly, because of the nonphysical nature of objectively existing unconditional oughtness, on naturalism the idea of objectively existing oughtness affecting the physical world seems about as implausible.
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