[Quote] These weaknesses of the harm-based approach become clearest when Sinnott-Armstrong presents his answer to "why be moral"—that is, why be moral in the way he describes. He can only offer the response that "The fact that an act causes harm to others is a reason not to do that act, and the fact that an act prevents harm to others is a reason to do that act." (Page 117.) But on this account, there is not much to say about why one should care about harm to others, other than the thin comfort of it not being irrational. Sinnott-Armstrong concedes that
"Nontheless, some people still wish for a reason that is strong enough to motivate everyone to be moral and also to make it always irrational to be immoral. I doubt that secular moral theories can establish that strong kind of reason to be moral. For people who really do not care about others, the solution is found in retraining or restraining rather than in theory. (Page 118.)"
http://secularoutpost.infidels.org/2009/12/morality-without-god.html
"I doubt that secular moral theories can establish that strong kind of reason to be moral. For people who really do not care about others, the solution is found in retraining or restraining rather than in theory."
ReplyDeleteI appreciate this kind of honesty. This still doesn't answer why one should care about harming others, the fact that what constitutes harm varies from one person to another, and why should we "restrain/retrain" when such runs cross-purposes to natural selection.
So is some form of divine command theory going to magically make people care about not hurting other people? If someone doesn't see the value in other people as is, then isn't it kind of like one of those jewelry scams where someone is set up to come along and say, "Hey, wow. I'll pay a ton of money [for this fake, cheap, knock-off jewelry]" And then you're like..."Oh, I guess I think it has value, too." Otherwise if people have genuine qualities, then we can skip the divine middle man and appeal directly to those qualities. It's inescapable. I don't see how theism is going to contrive something that isn't basically there already. And the desire for a moral system to appeal to absolutely everyone is naive, and unrealistic. No moral theory can promise that. Any moral theory that actually manages to convince you it will appeal to say psychopaths is a delusional belief system. That's why theist moral systems always fail. They don't bother with reality checks. And so when someone transits into non-theism in an honest way, they really just haven't lost anything they didn't already not have [sorry for the triple negative]. At least that was my experience.
ReplyDeleteBen