An Amoral Manifesto Part I
A special extended column from our (erstwhile) Moral Moments columnist Joel Marks.
This is basically the argument that some will throw at me. They do believe in objective morality, so they can point to this or that behavior as particular examples of the “wrong thing to do”. Whereas I am not able to convince myself that any behaviors at all are inherently, necessarily wrong. So, some will retort, “what are you saying, that torturing a baby is okay?!”
And, admittedly, there is part of me that hesitates in concluding that, in the absence of God, all things [such as this] are permitted. But I can’t come up with a definitive philosophical argument that, in the absence of God [or His secular equivalent] is able to demonstrate which behaviors all rational and virtuous human beings are, in fact, obligated deontologically to either choose or to eschew.
And what of the narcissists and sociopaths, who, for whatever reasons, given experiences in their lives very different from my own, have come to conclude that morality revolves around that which sustains their own personal satisfactions. Period.
How would someone demonstrate that this frame of mind is necessarily wrong in a No God world?
“In reality” of course this part can get especially convoluted. He likes and dislikes things as opposed to insisting that he likes things because they are moral and dislikes things because they are immoral. But liking and disliking something from my frame of mind is no less an existential contraption rooted in dasein.
And in that respect how is vivisection – animal-testing.procon.org/ – not just one more example of conflicting goods?
Deception here is still just a point of view embedded in a world where value judgments are subjective assessments ever subject to change given new experiences.
Even performing experiments on human beings is able to be rationalized by some. Consider the film Extreme Measures: youtu.be/SBRFmU-3mf8
My reaction to it:
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Precipitating reactions of others: