Originally posted by Halitose
By what moral or ethical code is that decided, if there is no god? Why would murder be wrong? Why would not having murdered be considered good?
By what moral or ethical code is that decided, if there is no god?
Somehow I thought you’d ask that. 🙂 Several ways to respond….
1) By what moral or ethical code is that decided, if there
is a God?
2) From a purely personal point-of-view, I find such things as rape, torture, etc. to be personally abhorrent. If you ask why? I can’t really say; it’s not something I arrived at by logical thinking. Now, you could say, “But if you were a rapist, you wouldn’t find that behavior abhorrent.” Maybe, maybe not. I don’t understand the mind of a rapist, since I’ve never had the faintest desire to commit rape.
All of this however, I realize, is on the purely personal, subjective plane, and really doesn’t address the broader question of social morality.
3) I confess that I don’t have a well-defined moral
philosophy at this point, which is why I read the threads here that deal with it with interest. One position would be simply that we live as social beings and that social moralities develop because of our needs to live together with some degree of harmony. Personally, I’m not prepared to stand on that one; it was just the simplest quick example that came to mind.
4) Regardless of the theory backing it up, it is clear that people who do not derive their morality from God, do have moral codes and, by and large, behave just as morally as, say, Christians—Buddhists for example.
Again, I urge you to read through bbarr’s thread for a start. Maybe some kind person on here can point us both to one or more of the past “moral theory” threads; if not, I’ll go searching.