If you’re following along you’ll know we are on a new chapter, and that I have skipped a section, Free-Floating Morality. I skipped that section because Keller makes no actual claims in it, but instead relates an anecdote about people who don’t know why they believe what they believe. This, like all anecdotes, provides nothing in the way of evidence, the section exists only as a precursor to Keller’s larger point.<\/p>\n
In this section Keller asserts that all people feel a set of absolute moral values and moral obligations. He says everyone believes that there are some things that are wrong regardless of what the people doing them think. That’s pretty much all he claims in this section.<\/p>\n
Amazingly enough I’m going to disagree even with this assertion. I don’t think this is true of everyone, or anyone. I don’t hold the false dichotomy alternative position Keller offers, that of absolute relativism either, however. I certainly believe that people are doing “wrong” things, even if they think they’re doing “right”, but I don’t think the things are just wrong because they’re wrong. There is an underlying reason. Say, murder is wrong, but it’s wrong because it increases suffering and destroys something that cannot be replaced.<\/p>\n
Now, you could say the underlying values are the morals, like that happiness is good and sadness is bad. I would argue that they’re just logical conclusions based on experience, though, which is not what is typically understood by the term “morals”.<\/p>\n
I suspect that people that hold classical “moral” beliefs are doing the same calculations I am doing, just unconsciously. Morals is a sort of short hand, a stereotype for actions. Instead of evaluating each circumstance to base values people tend to lump them into categories for faster results.<\/p>\n
If you disagree, and you believe, as I suspect Keller is leading to, that god has anointed us with a sense of morality, then I would wonder why morality is so different across the globe. There are no universally held morals, which is odd if god gave them to all his children. But I’m getting ahead of myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you’re following along you’ll know we are on a new chapter, and that I have skipped a section, Free-Floating Morality. I skipped that section because Keller makes no actual claims in it, but instead relates an anecdote about people who don’t know why they believe what they believe. This, like all anecdotes, provides nothing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[312],"tags":[313],"class_list":["post-3489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reason-for-no-god","tag-the-reason-for-god"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/generoseberry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/generoseberry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/generoseberry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generoseberry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generoseberry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3489"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/generoseberry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3491,"href":"https:\/\/generoseberry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489\/revisions\/3491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/generoseberry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generoseberry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generoseberry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}