God is Impossible: hiding your religion from rebuttals

I found a post called Atheist Delusions. The author of that post, Laurensheil, must have expected a response from atheists. And indeed I am one of the atheists who replied. In the post, Laurensheil bemoans atheists demanding proof of theists’ claims, but then not providing any evidence for their own position; an argument that entirely misses what atheism is and where the Burden of Proof lies. The burden of proof lies with the person making a claim, and the claimmaker is the theist. The atheist makes no claims.

The post then goes on to claim that atheists mistakenly believe that their position is a scientific one. So I proceeded to offer a number philosophical defences of atheism (in addition to the burden of proof). My summaries are rather trite, but here they are:

Paradox of Omnipotence: can God create a boulder so heavy not even He can lift it?

If you want to limit “omnipotence” to “omnipotence within logical limits”, that’s fine. But that certainly is less-than-omnipotent (and is my point and not yours). But, where did logic come from, to limit the omnipotence? In the theist’s narrative I believe I am correct in saying God is the creator of everything, and God authored the logic that limits him. So God is omnipotent, except for the limits He put on Himself?

Logic does not limit God when it comes to questions of causing the universe. How can something lie in a causal relationship with nothing and effect a universe? (Effect, as a verb, means to induce. Affect, as a verb, means to interact with. I have used that correctly.) How can causality exist without time?

The Problem of Suffering: how can there be suffering in a world micro-managed by a benevolent and omnipotent God?

Many theists say that suffering is caused by freewill, that God must allow us to harm each other else He’d have limited our freewill. But God could have bestowed us with more empathy (He gave us some, why not a little more?). But that doesn’t account for why God would allow natural suffering: famines and droughts and earthquakes etc.

Many theists assert that this suffering is morally necessary on the grounds that it is the only way to more peace, later. But this imperfect solution is not a sign of omnipotence; it is a sign of an imperfect Being negotiating with the state of the world.

The Paradox of Omnipotence and Omniscience: if I know the future, how can I be free to change it?

If I know what you will have for breakfast, and it is impossible for me to be wrong, then you must have for breakfast whatever it is I know you’re going to have. And if I am omniscient, I do know what you’re going to have for breakfast tomorrow; you have no freewill.

I also know what I am going to have for breakfast tomorrow; therefore I cannot eat something else for breakfast. There is something I cannot do, therefore I am not omnipotent.

Or, I am omnipotent, therefore I am free to have anything for breakfast tomorrow, therefore I don’t really know what it is. There’s something I don’t know, therefore I am not omniscient.

The Incompatibility of Mercy and Justice: mercy negates justice.

Justice is an exact response to an action. Mercy is anything that is lenient on the exacting of justice to the favour of a party involved. If one is a negation of the other both cannot be realised at once.

The Hidden God: if He wants this loving relationship so much, where is He?

Assuming the definition of a personal God includes the description of wanting a loving relationship with me, there is one step He needs to take. This step isn’t going to infringe on my freewill. This step is to show that He exists. God needs to show Himself. Given the levels of atheism, God has clearly not demonstrated Himself (unless you believe that an omnipotent demonstration of His own existence would fail). In fact, God seems to be at pains to hide Himself behind a very convincing facade of reality being explicable by natural means. Not only has He not demonstrated Himself, He is hiding. That is not the behaviour of a consciousness that wants to have a loving relationship.

I consider the God that conforms to these definitions impossible. That is pretty clear. And I would think that this position would be interesting to a theist who claims: “I love a good theological or political debate.  Arguably (or should I say debatably) that’s what this blog and my whole purpose for writing is all about.” I’m not just unconvinced, but for the God described above, I actively think it’s impossible. But on the very grounds that I think this definition of a God is impossible, the author refused me a debate: “But I will not enter a theological debate with someone who will not accept even the possibility of an outside deity.”

I am open to a definition of a lesser God; a God that is less than perfect in its actualisation of the above traits. I suspect that if we resolve each of these paradoxes we will end up with a powerful being from outside our universe that made our universe from something else outside our universe. The being would be very clever, but mostly indifferent to us (we’re like an ant farm, if the being has noticed us here in this nondescript point in the universe). But not omnipotent, not omniscient, not benevolent and, most importantly of all, not in any way verified or verifiable.

What is the Conflict between Science and Religion?

It is easy to assert something; it is slightly harder to back it up. But endeavour, my comrades, for in the effort of backing a claim up you finally add some substance, enter into a real conversation and, most excitingly of all, run the risk of learning something. “Religion and science are incompatible”. Is that true? It’s not just true; it’s true on many different levels.

Science is not a body of knowledge. But, at its most superficial reading, science is a body of knowledge: The Periodic Table of Elements, Newton’s Laws of Motion, Hoyle’s Gas Laws, enzymes, digestion, nutrition etc. And it is possible to make the case that the body of knowledge, science at its most superficial, is incompatible with religion. This is the very reason we have Creationists pitting a marketing campaign against evolution, and better orators of the apologist variety challenging anything we may know about the Big Bang.

“[The Pope] told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God.”

- Stephen Hawking

Through history, as the body of knowledge of science expanded the conflict between science and religion became clear: religion was being pushed out. The amount we know goes up, and God isn’t there, and at the very perimeter between our knowledge and our ignorance an investigator has the choice between continuing the investigation and thus discovering something, or to invoke a God and stagnate discovery. In Newton’s Principia he does not make reference to any deity. The motion of the planets had always been put down to God, but Newton understood it and so he never had to mention God in order to give the laws of motion. But his laws of motion did not account for all the planets. He could do what is called a “two body problem”, which explains why one object orbits another and the forces those two bodies exhibit on each other. But once he looked all the bodies of the sky his maths fell apart and he couldn’t fix it. In that moment Newton was at the boundary of his own understanding, and he says this:

“The six primary Planets are revolv’d about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts and almost in the same plan. Ten Moons are revolv’d about the Earth, Jupiter and Saturn, in circles concentric with them, with the same direction of motion, and nearly in the planes of the orbits of those Planets. But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions: since the Comets range over all parts of the heavens, in very eccentric orbits. For by that kind of motion they pass easily through the orbits of the Planets, and with great rapidity; and in their aphelions, where they move the slowest, and are detain’d the longest, they recede to the greatest distances from each other, and thence suffer the least disturbance from their mutual attractions. This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being”

- Isaac Newton, 1726

Okay, so that’s arrogant. Because Newton could not do the maths to turn his two-body problem into a multi-body problem he assumed no one could and that the regular motion that we see must be the “counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being”. And then he stopped investigating.

“Even if you’re as brilliant as Newton you reach a point where you start basking in majesty of God and then your discovery stops. It just stops.”

- Neil deGrasse Tyson, in this speech

But Newton did create one more part of the body of knowledge that was not compatible with God, and God receded. Then, along came Laplace. Laplace used a mathematical technique called perturbation theory* to turn Isaac Newton’s two-body problem into a multi-body problem. Where Newton had given up and invoked God, Laplace had understood. Even Newton’s God was forced to recede.

* it is worth saying that perturbation theory is simpler than differential and integral calculus. That is worth saying that simply because Newton invented calculus to explain the orbits of the planets, but as soon as he had God on the brain he lost that magic.

The body of knowledge of science was incompatible with God.

At a deeper level, science is not its body of knowledge. Science is a method. And the method, also, is incompatible with religion. Religion is top-down knowledge: whether you get your knowledge from a Book or a mystic, that’s it. The whole process is encouraged by our intuitions; the same intuitions Newton succumbed to. But, nonetheless, intuitions. There’s no room in that for science.

“Science is the philosophy of discovery. [Religion] is the philosophy of ignorance”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

If science worked that way, we’d still believe God authored the motion of the planets, because Newton said so. But Laplace probed the solar system and the solar system taught him something. Aristotle thought that the speed things fell was proportional to their mass. If science was like religion, we would still believe that. But Galileo inquired a little further into the matter and demonstrated that wasn’t true. And then NASA demonstrated it a little more. The method of science is not top-down and authoritative. Science is about not knowing, and then asking the Universe: experiment. Evidence is when the Universe answers.

In science we have evidence, and evidence is the Universe telling us how It is. Religion is people telling us how they think it is.

To demonstrate, consider the following two narratives:

The Bible

Approximately 4,600 years ago, the entire planet flooded. There were mass-deaths across all species. The only survivors were a single family of humans and either two or seven individuals of each species (depending on whether they were clean or dirty animals).

Science

The Egyptian Dynasties progressed right through this global flood, unimpeded (despite their death); archaeologists have been unable to find a layer of animal remains in the Earth’s crust to suggest mass-deaths of everything; there are no oceanic sediments in places they shouldn’t be; genetic analysis does not show a human population bottle-neck as extreme as six individuals; there are intact desserts and soils that are hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old.

How are these compatible? And if they’re not, which is more reasonable to believe?

Well, this is a little embarrassing, isn’t it?

Reblogged from the superstitious naked ape:

• 
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There are degrees of embarrassment; those graceless, mostly self-inflicted pickles which typically range from the mild unease of being caught in a harmless white lie to the runaway shame of accidently sinking your own flagship, the HMS Victoria, as the British Navy did during a somewhat poorly thought-through parade manoeuvre in Tripoli Harbour, 1893. Stupendously embarrassing, unquestionably, but even this rather awkward moment in history pales to the almost unfathomable humiliation awaiting the triune of Abrahamic religions the moment they confess to their congregations what’s been known for well over a generation: Abraham and Moses never existed, and the Exodus never happened.

Read more… 891 more words

Proving the Bible wrong might not prove God doesn't exist. But if the Bible is wrong, even in its core stories, why do you believe in this specific God, again? (Also, show John Zande some love)

Why Do Women Wear Make-Up?

Women, generally, wear make-up. Men, generally, do not. I’m not opening with a ground breaking observation, am I? There is an argument that this is the case because men have decided women should be judged on their appearance and thus when women wear make-up they are conforming to their own subjugation. There may be a penny of truth in that, but I don’t fully believe it. After all, I shave and cut my hair and look after my weight and try to combat spots; I’ve recently spent money on dressing in a style other than “sewn together suicide bomber”. I too acknowledge that I am book that shall be judged by its cover.

(Here’s an observation for lovers of irony) While wearing make-up, women still judge men by the content of what they say: our humour and how well we hold them in conversation. In what sort of a relationship can the subjugated hold their captors to a higher standard?

I have a slightly different hypothesis, based on what I have seen in all sort of environments: work, clubs, shopping, school-run; and in many countries. I think pressure and competition birth a compulsion for some women to wear make-up, espeically those that wear a lot of it.

Tell me if you also have this observation (because, if you don’t, I am probably wrong). Picture a woman where you work who noticeably wears a lot of make-up. I suspect that woman is either above you in the hierarchy of your organisation or is desperately scrabbling her way up. I say “desperately”, because I mean she is probably not doing it by the conventional means of working diligently and effectively. She is probably the same person who flings the responsibility of her failures on her colleagues while simultaneously sucking up to her boss. Of the women above you in your organisation, I predict there is a distinct separation between the ones you trust, who have probably worked hard and that you can rely on compared to the ones you think are there with a sense of self-entitlement, smugness and no sense of responsibility. And I predict that make-up is one of the identifying things.

When I pick my brothers up from school I see the parents picking up their children. Most of them are mothers. This is an entirely non-hierarchical situation; all people are equal (except me, I look like an ageing teen parent. I’m 24 and I pick up an 11 and an 8-year-old). Nearly none of these women wear make-up. And the few that do are visibly making snide comments and jokes about the rest of the parents.

My hypothesis is this: no to small amounts of make-up are of no particular indicator of a woman’s personality. However, heavy amounts of make-up are an indicator of a woman’s sense of self-entitlement and drive to be superior.

(Just as a note, and to try to guard against being seen as a misogynist: men have this nature too. You can see it in ostentatious fashion, very expensive but ill-fitting clothes. The reason I didn’t particularly see it as worthy of note is that the snake-oil salesman and man so-charming-he’s-definitely-up-to-something is someone already in our psyche. We already know this man.)

Should Governments Fix the Rates of Foreign Aid?

(This should stimulate an argument)

Britain is continuing to not-quite discuss the issue of whether it should be a part of Europe. There are essentially three sides: yes, no and if we can negotiate a better deal for ourselves. But no side, yet, has been clear about the benefits of their view or the problems with other views. Leaving Europe will affect our trade, somehow. We deserve a better deal from Europe, for some reason. Staying in Europe will create more jobs, apparently. It’s all speculative nonsense and if you try to read up on it yourself, it looks like no one can tell the truth on the issue.

So I’ve decided to talk about something else: foreign aid. The foremost reason I want to talk about it is to dispel an old myth: aid leads to corruption. When one country takes a large sum of money and gives it to a few people in the government of another country, then corruption is rife. But if you want to have a sensible conversation about aid, that is simply not the type of aid you talk about.

The real aid, aid that actually helps the people of a country is activities like building infrastructure, eradicating disease, securing clean water, and offering legal and social support to bridge inequality gaps. These things are real aid. And, thanks to the insidious nature by which they infiltrate communities, it is now non-Government organisations like Churches and religious charities that are best positions to deliver on these activities. This type of aid also offers a model of service-delivery that governments should pay a lot of attention to: outsourcing responsibilities it knows it’s not good at. The government knows that it doesn’t really know how to offer this type of aid, so it outsources it to people who can.

I could get on my high horse and say that this aid should be offered by non-religious organisations. Aid should be available without a religious tint. But it would take years, if not decades for non-religious groups to get roots in communities at a level that would allow them to change things for the better.

But the question was one of whether government should fix a rate of aid to foreign countries. Let get the obvious element of that question out-of-the-way first: should we offer anything? I think the answer is obviously yes. Malaria, starvation, malnutrition and no clean water are all problems I don’t have to worry about. And these are also all problems that are much worse than unemployment and banking reform (cheaper to fix, too). I challenge anyone to say (and to mean) “that 1 million people are unemployed is worse than the fact 1 million people are starving to death”. The problems of the countries we might offer aid to run deeper than our own. Much deeper. And despite the deficit, we do have the money to help. Moral considerations aside, successful aid makes countries wealthier. Wealthier countries have more benefits for trading with them. Aid can, quite accurately, be seen as an investment.

But should we fix the rate? Should we tie our own hands? Should the current government be allowed to tie the hands of future governments? Basically, no. We don’t know what will come in the future, and we can’t commit to things like that. If our country becomes poorer we will need to stay flexible on the amount of aid we offer. Minor (but very real) issues we have in our own country with homeless and starving people will be worse if we get poorer, and we shouldn’t have to commit to aid at whatever level we can afford now. Similarly, if we become a much wealthier country, we should not become complacent and feel the rate we could afford before is now enough.

Do People Need the Idea of Heaven?

There is a TV show in the UK called The Big Questions. The other week the show asked the question ‘Do people need the idea of Heaven?’ Hungover, I watched the superficial commentary the participants had while trying desperately not to offend anyone; I wrote notes into my phone. I have been busy since then. But I am now going to try and answer it between bouts of gardening (I do not like gardening).

I shall start with advice: try to find assumptions made in questions. On the face of it, there must be some obvious reason we might need the idea of Heaven, else no one would have asked it. Based on the show I watched I am going to make what I think is a pretty reasonable guess at the reasons it seems obvious we might need Heaven: purpose and morality. It is easy to say that you are following God’s will, or following the unknowable* but transcendent rules He’s imbued reality with, but every religion has set up the ‘carrot and stick’ narrative of reward and punishment. Even if God is grounding for morality and purpose, why do you value it over a wellbeing based morality or purpose set up around the needs of society? Assuming that morality and purpose are tied up with each other in the religious narrative (which seems inescapable), do we really need Heaven to value that?

*if you think the rules are knowable then you have to explain how so many people from within the same religion can get so many answers. One set of rules may be crystal clear to you from your reading of a Book or your “relationship” with God, but another person interprets different rules with the same clarity and with the same method.

I’ll start with what Heaven is, and I’m doing to define it in the vaguer sense to include as many religions as I can. Heaven is an immaterial place where a transcendent form of you will go to reward you for having lived a good life. The place will be blissful and tranquil and perfect. No suffering can happen here. I believe that incorporates Heaven and Paradise and Nirvana (if not, forgive me and educate me).

Originally I wanted to hedge my bets and say ‘maybe some of us need this to be good, but most of us do not’. But that felt patronising, and I don’t believe it. I don’t think any of us need it, and I don’t think it convinces anyone that wants to do harm. And if you are wondering what your purpose is; why you exist, I don’t think the promise of living forever will be comforting or answer the question. The suggestion that a religious person could not reason to themselves the wonder and joy of simply being alive, or the need to do good without Divine authorship should be offensive to the very humanity of all of us.

As opposed to being a bad reason, the promise of Heaven is damaging. We relinquish the urgency of justice to the promise that justice will be served out over eternity. No matter what true justice is, we do not need to seek it because we will be dead pretty soon and justice will be dealt with in a top-down fashion by God. So don’t you worry about it.

(As an aside, there is an odd narrative in a lot of religions that calls of the living to take justice into their own hands—stone the blasphemers and adulterers, kill homosexuals and uppity children etc—despite the idea that all transgressions will be exacted in the afterlife. Which is it?)

However, we cannot untie Heaven from the rules that govern it. And that is my last criticism of the idea that we need Heaven. It is hurtful to human progress to make promises about following top-down moral rules. Encouraging humanity to follow arbitrary rules makes us end our own critical thinking. Worse than that, it allows our minds to be infested with arbitrary and non-moral ideas: you must wear a burka**, you cannot read fictions like Harry Potter for they contain witches, keep the Sabbath a Holy day of rest, do not mark your skin with ink, do not express your sexuality outside of marriage and never if you are gay. The moment we accept that rules of entry to Heaven are our purpose is the moment we surrender our right to critically evaluate these rules and with it we hand over our humanity.

** “you must wear a burka” is oppressive, subjugating, creates power inequalities on gender lines and is very different from “a burka is a symbol of being worth more than your appearance and way of being liberated from the leers of other people; you are free to wear it or not”.

Mining in the Moral Landscape: explaining why Sam Harris’ moral framework is still better than a religious one

I like addressing and engaging with challenges to the ideas that I share here (I run a constant ask me anything policy). A blogger called Debilis shared a few challenges to The Moral Landscape that I want to discuss (on my post The Evidence for Objective (secular) Morality). I may not be the best person to discuss the issues, of course, because I am not the author of the book. But I consider myself an articulate writer (even though my blog is rife with errors and omitted words—grammar Nazis be warned!). I also think that I have given the issue a lot of thought, so I’m going to give answers a go.

 

Is this a commitment to total wellbeing or average wellbeing?

In a population of the same size, the total and the average are functions of the same thing; there is no difference. However, issues come up when you consider a choice between two actions that lead to two very different worlds: one with a low population, where everyone has a high wellbeing; against one with a very high population where everyone has a low wellbeing. For those that are having a hard time picturing this, consider the following:

Reality 1

Population: 1,000

Average wellbeing units, per person: 90

Total wellbeing units: 90,000

Reality 2:

Population: 50,000

Average wellbeing units, per person: 1

Total wellbeing units: 50,000

Assuming that ‘wellbeing units’ (which I’ve made up) can be negative, and a wellbeing unit score of 1 still isn’t suffering, which of the two realities above should we aim for?

I first want to discuss the issue with the question. I cannot conceive of a way any person would be faced with a choice where the implications are as significant as above, without there being a lot of murdering involved. And murder causes suffering: it cuts off people from the wellbeing they could have experienced; it causes feelings of loss among those that loved and knew the people; it creates fear and panic in those that think another person has taken it on themselves to take other lives. So, I think the question lacks power when you consider no action can realise the choice in an isolated fashion. No dramatic change in population will occur without the associated lowering of wellbeing that comes with either great deaths or dwindling resources.

That said, my intuition is to defend average wellbeing. I am very Malthusian in this way, and I am very aware of the Tragedy of the Commons (I try not to drop in terms like that without an explanation, so I’ve linked them to Wikipedia). To introduce new people into a system, knowing that it will lower the wellbeing of the existing system seems immoral to me. But even then there is a measure. Consider the merging of these two populations:

Population 1:

Population: 50

Average wellbeing units, per person: 100

Total wellbeing units: 5,000

Population 2:

Population: 50

Average wellbeing units, per person: 10

Total wellbeing units: 500

The average wellbeing of these two populations is 55. Imagine, now, the merging lowers the wellbeing of Population 1 from 100 to 90; Population 2’s wellbeing goes up from 10 to 60. The average wellbeing of the system then is 75.

Merge, to become Population 3:

Population: 100

Average wellbeing units, per person: 75

Total wellbeing units: 7,500

Is Population 1 morally obliged to incur this wellbeing loss? I think so. Can we very easily sympathise with Population 1 resisting this? Of course. And violent resistance will alter the average (and total) wellbeing.

For those that haven’t figured it out, my answer is that I don’t know the answer to the question. I suspect the question is moot, and I don’t think it is a fatal flaw. Practically, it is mere detail (although the philosophical power of the question is clear).

 

If consciousness is key (as I gather from your reference to Sam Harris), are those whose consciousness is inhibited exempt from moral worth?

Yes, consciousness is key. Yes, it does mean we should consider people and animals who experience consciousness, suffering and happiness differently in the light of their own experience. This does not mean the suffering of a person with a certain psychological condition is of different moral “worth [sic]”. Just as avoiding suffering is one horn of The Moral Landscape, fostering and encouraging happiness is another.

The question extends beyond learning difficulties, though. What about people in comas? Assuming it is true that a person in a coma is neutral to suffering and happiness (I’m not sure this is a valid assumption; I don’t know whether they are capable of registering things. But I shall run with it) the question of moral considerations to coma patients boils down to a few questions:

• Will they ever wake up?
• How will the family feel about decisions you make regarding the coma patient?
• How many people are being deprived of medical care, and to what extent, to pander to the wellbeing of the family? To word that differently, is maintaining the coma patient lowering or stagnating the average wellbeing of the hospital/family system?

If I am wrong in my assumption that a coma patient is neutral to happiness and suffering, then the coma patient needs to be considered like any other thing that experiences wellbeing.

 

As there are possible worlds where the peaks of well-being are not characterized by anything we’d normally call “moral”, does it make sense to simply identify morality with well-being?

It is possible I’ve been a bit sloppy with definitions, and if so I’d like to take this opportunity to clarify. Morality is still about the decisions of conscious creatures. If a sunny day heightens your wellbeing, the sunny day is still not moral. A sunny day is not conscious. There will be a lot of background noise to any graph that attempts to plot wellbeing because of variables like weather, hormone cycles, personal health and other non-conscious variables. Only the changes caused by decisions made by conscious creatures count towards morality. This may make the moral truth hard to pinpoint and difficult discern, but it does not make it not true.

 

Do we consider the well-being of future generations (who do not yet, and may never, exist)?

Yes. It is intuitively obvious that making the entire planet happy, now, by depleting all the natural resources and polluting the atmosphere is immoral. This is because future generations will have to make do in a polluted and depleted world. And the wellbeing of future generations will be a real thing. It will be true. Historically, we can know that medical advances have been moral by the decrease in disease-based suffering over the last few hundred years.

There is an obvious practical issue: the existence and conditions of future generations is unknowable. We will have to be guided by our best understanding. Live in the context of what you do know! We know that low biodiversity and limited access to natural areas causes misery; we know that starvation and living on the brink of survival is unhappy; we know that infant mortality and no access to medical care is not preferable. And we know that future generations probably will exist (after all, future generations have existed ever since life began; hence life). And we know (approximately) the impacts we are having through time. So we should consider future generations, and we should be guided by our best guesses. We may be wrong. But if we are wrong, it will still be a discoverable truth about reality!

 

Is it a moral duty to spread a falsehood (say, belief in a false religion) if it will increase well-being?

Theoretically, yes. And in the short-term, lies may well help people. But in the long-term, coming face to face with reality and having a lie you have believed challenged often causes more harm than good: it damages relationships and trust; it causes and inner turmoil. Sam Harris has written a short book called “Lying”, it doesn’t take long to read, and I implore you to read it. It covers exactly this.

With specific regard to religion, I think it gets worse. There are some people, and I talk to some of them on here, who honestly are happier with their religion. But I have friends who have to live with their idea that I am going to Hell and that God refuses to stop things like earthquakes and tsunamis. Another religion-specific issue is that it causes you to blame yourself for your failures, but delegate rewards of success to God.

So, in theory, if a lie could keep everyone happy it would be immoral to destroy that lie. But from my experience no such lie exists.

 

Most importantly, how can this position show, rather than assume, that it is objectively true that we ought to promote well-being?

Show me anything that proves (or demonstrates) itself and it is circular reasoning. I think this question is the “is/ought” dilemma, which is not even nearly as complex or as difficult as some make it out to be.

Originally I defined “morality” according to linguistics. When people talk of morality they are talking of decisions made based on wellbeing. There can be other bases to your decision-making, like economics or selfishness or flipping a coin or religion. But when your decisions are based on wellbeing we call that morality. Nothing about that obliges you to do anything. I have not provided you with a single “ought”.

“Ought” comes in later. If I want my car to run smoothly, I ought to change the oil. Nothing obliges you to change the oil expect for your own want and some basic mechanical knowledge of what is. If I want to be clean I ought to shower. Nothing about the word “ought” is tied up in morality. Consider this: “if I want to purge the German people of Jewish pests I ought to kill all the Jewish people”. If you define morality as what you ought to do, anyone who acts according to what they want cannot be said to be immoral. However, if you mean to define morality as “what you ought to do, according to God’s commands” you are making the same leap: from what is (God’s commands) to some value judgement on what you ought to do (obey, either out of respect or out of fear of Hell or desire to go to Heaven).

The definition I am using for morality does not make any “is/ought” leaps. It simply says that if you say you are being moral (i.e. motivated by the safeguarding of wellbeing) then we can measure to what extent you have succeeded.