To me, this is yet another intellectual contraption. What on earth does it mean pertaining to an actual context in which moral values come into conflict.
Even relating to extreme behaviors like rape or murder or genocide, something is said to be evil from a particular point of view. Yet there are those able to rationalize them. Not only that but there are those who will insist that, say, aborting unborn babies is extremely evil. On the contrary say others what is extremely evil is forcing women to give birth.
Now, with God such behaviors are deemed to be or not to be sins. But what of a Godless world? How is evil encompassed then? In a world of conflicting goods?
Note my earlier argument in the first of this series re you cannot presuppose there is a God, until you have proven God exists. But as I had proven God is an impossibility and a non-starter.
This is where we just go around and around in circles.
“In your head” you have proven that God is an impossibilty. How? By insisting that the meaning that you give to the words used in your arguments/analyses/concepts are necessarily true. But you have absolutely no capacity to scour the entire universe in order to confirm that there is in fact No God. And you are still burdened with the gap that exist between what you think you know about all of this here and now and all that would need to be known by any mere mortal to know for sure.
Or, rather, as with folks like James Saint, you have not demonstrated to me that you have closed this gap.
You point out:
Note the thread I raised on ‘What is Dasein?’ I am interested what is your conception of ‘Dasein’. I have read a lot on Heidegger but do not have a good grasp of his philosophies.
You need to take this up with others. My aim here is to consider the “concept” of God that others have concocted “in their head”; and then explore the extent to which this “world of words” can be intertwined into the world we live in when men and women come into conflict over value judgments. Either in a world with or without God.
If I am not mistaken Heidegger’s view is humans are ‘thrown into’ existence. Such a view can lead to problems because the implied metaphors [Lakoff and Johnson] like the ‘container’ metaphor where things are thrown “into” some container. This naturally to lead to linking ‘existence’ with some thing, but the reality is there is no thing in the first place. It is only this default metaphor [thus psychology] that compel one to relate to some thing ending as a reified thing from no thing.
Thus philosophically one should not be overly insistence with ‘God exists’ or ‘God do not exists’ but rather faced “reality” as an emergence that unfold interdependently with the subject-as-no-thing.
Again, I have absolutely no idea what this conveys to us about conflicting human behaviors derived from conflicting value judgments in a No God world.
Note an example from your own life of late — an experience in which you can “flesh out” these points for us.
From Kant’s POV of view, what we can do at present is to do the best and prevent the worst evils wherever possible. If we cannot then we have to accept whatever the outcome.
What Kant’s philosophy entriely avoids in my view is the manner in which I construe the meaning of conflicting goods. Encompassed here by William Barrett:
For the choice in…human [moral conflicts] is almost never between a good and an evil, where both are plainly marked as such and the choice therefore made in all the certitude of reason; rather it is between rival goods, where one is bound to do some evil either way, and where the the ultimate outcome and even—or most of all—our own motives are unclear to us. The terror of confronting oneself in such a situation is so great that most people panic and try to take cover under any universal rules that will apply, if only to save them from the task of choosing themselves.
Note where he focuses the beam that is human psychology. On the need to embody certainty in one or another rendition of objectivism.
Sure, one can speak of “evil” as though it can be calculated objectively. But, from my frame of mind, I wonder: how is this actually done sans God?
Why is killing another person is a greater evil than lying?
This rule will have to be deliberated in detail. It is a long story, I will not go into the details but the point is such a rule is not raised blindly from nowhere.
Okay, so there is then a gap between rules not raised blindly and out of nowhere and rules that reflect the political prejudices of those in power at any particular historical, cultural and experiential juncture.
Yet Kant is really no better equipped than the rest of us in drawing the lines here. Not without his transcending font.
Or, rather, so it seems to me.
Yes, it only seems to you.
There is no Universal standards at present, but it not very difficult to establish universal standards and progressively improve on it.
Sure, down the road [maybe hundreds of years from now] there will be a “universal standard” whereby each and every pregnant woman can be told by that era’s rendition of the philosopher-kings whether this particular abortion or that particular abortion is either “good” or “evil”.
As for how difficult this might be, why don’t you start us off by proposing such standards for an issue like abortion.
On the other hand, from my point of view, you will either take your “intellectual contraptions” above to the grave [and many, many have] or you will come to grasp just how immense that gap must be between what you think you know about God here and now and all that would need to be known about Existence itself in order to know this.
The irony [from my point of view] is the extent to which you fail to recognize just how much your own frame of mind here is actually in sync with the religionists as a psychological contraption.
In other words, it’s that you know more so than what you know.
Well, sans the part about immortality, salvation and divine justice.