When it comes to adultery, we have some people who think that God, (who presumably knows what is right or wrong) has told us not to do it in the Seventh Commandment. If there is a God, a take it that it more than just His opinion that adultery is wrong. But if there is not God, or God never said that, then we can still ask whether or not adulterous affairs are good things. One aspect of this has to do with whether marriage necessarily implies a promise to be faithful, which of course would be broken by the adulterous affair. Religious traditions that include the idea behind the Ten Commandments think that there are what philosophers call moral facts: that is, something true about what is right and wrong regardless of what anybody thinks about it. Religious nonbelievers disagree with one another as to whether there are moral facts: J. L. Mackie was a philosopher who thought that moral facts do not exist, Erik Wielenberg is an atheist philosopher who thinks that moral facts do exist.
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Maybe it's a good thing that we do not live longer than we do. I recall one science fiction writer speculating that, if our lifespans were somehow medically extended to a thousand years or even longer, our current attitudes toward lifelong monogamy would have to change, since no marriage could possibly last for multiple centuries.
Of course, if you read the bios of many SF writers, it appears that their own marriages even today seldom last more than a decade - if that.
if our lifespans were somehow medically extended to a thousand years or even longer, our current attitudes toward lifelong monogamy would have to change
The future is now.
Well. For once, I am proud to be a Boomer.
Now pardon me while I go out and watch the snow fall. Something infinitely calming about snow (when you have no plan or need to go anywhere). I like its silence.
Where are these moral facts? Wielenberg's theory is too Platonistic for my taste. Why can't moral facts be weak general truths grounded in human nature of the form 'on the whole, things go better when we all do X/avoid doing Y'. They are made objectively true by the realities of making a life as a human being among other human beings. But what makes them moral? Why do I sense that they obligate me? My suggestion is that they piggy-back on the moral sentiments attached to free-riding that co-evolved with reciprocal altruism.
I never understand people who deny the objectivity of moral facts. Everyone knows that it is immoral to torture babies, or to falsely witness against another person. We know it in the same way that we know that mathematical axioms are true, despite their being unprovable.
I find it extremely interesting that when the young man asked Jesus how to attain eternal life, He answered by listed only those commandments that dealt with our relations with other persons. "Do not kill. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Do not defraud. Honor your father and mother." (Mark 10:19) These need no proof, being self-evident. In this way, they resemble axioms. The other (unlisted) commandments, concerning our relationship with God, need to be taught, and are not self-evident.
How do we get from commands to self-evident truths? I would have thought that moral truths, like most other truths, have to be learned. And not just learned in the way we learn to do arithmetic, say. They have to engage with us in a way that knowing that Paris is the capital of France does not.
David,
Good insight. Once, as infants, we grasp our wants and needs in relationship with other's wants and needs, we have learned moral truths.
I don't think the "commandments" are much more than a reminder of our original programming (to use a computer science metaphor).
“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”
― Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
I think this is also a theological statement.
I remember a quote by, I think, George Bernard Shaw, that goes something like "We are forever one generation away from barbarism" or something like that.
Will Durant maybe? Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
I'm inclined to think that we are born with a nature that supports the acquisition of moral truths and acting them out. This is something over and above our capacity to learn value-free facts. It's the source of the engagement we feel with moral truths. But it doesn't fix those truths, just as our capacity for language doesn't fix our mother tongue. And once we have learned as children to suppress the inflated little egos nature gives us we can begin to see how the universality and symmetry present in the moral truths we have acquired contribute to a stable and flourishing society. But getting those truths into our species collective memory has taken many, many generations. That's the theological aspect. And like all biological systems it works 'in the main', 'on average', provided environmental parameters are in range.
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