Tag Archives: Error Theory

Morality and Coercion

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I have been working on a series of posts about morality for a while now. In some previous posts I talked about the following:

  1. The human perception of morality is not rationally justifiable and can’t be justified without an appeal to some supernatural Something-Like-God.
  2. That any attempt to explain objective morality will always end up being a religion, for religions are what you get when you assume morality to be objective and then come up with an explanation of how that can be.

In one of my older posts I mentioned in passing that morality is (almost) always non-personal and is perceived as applying to everyone. In fact, it so strongly applies to everyone that it even applies to people long dead. Continue reading →

What is Morality? The Relationship Between Morality and God

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Note: This post takes several of my threads (i.e. What is morality?, What is atheism?, What is theism?, What is religion?, One Moral Will, and the concept of meaning-memes) and shows that they are all deeply inter-related.

This was the final conclusion I was able to draw from my last post on Supernatural Morality:

Theists can rationally justify (though they do not prove) their belief in objective morality via their additional premises (i.e. the existence of an afterlife, with perfect knowledge, and inescapable consequences). Atheists cannot justify their belief in objective morality and are merely being rationally incoherent when they believe in (or act as if there is) objective morality despite all the evidence against it.

Now, of course, this is probably a hollow victory if there is in fact no God. If there is no God, does it really matter that morality is a delusion? This is a thought for a future post. But the question does point out one thing: there is some sort of link or connection between belief in God and belief in Morality. At a minimum, that connection is the rational coherence of morality as stated in the quote above. (Making here some possible allowances for an “atheist” that receive answers to prayers or believe in heaven.)

I now want to explore the relationship between belief in God and belief in Morality further, for there is clearly some sort of link there that few speak enough of. Continue reading →

What is Morality? Error Theory and Supernatural Morality

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Note: For those that don’t want to read the whole post, there is a short summary at the end. But remember the rule of summaries: they are not equivalent to the whole argument.

In my first post on Error Theory, I summarized Richard Joyce’s arguments that demonstrated morality was rationally incoherent in a naturalistic (only) worldview. In my second post I summarized his arguments that evolution can’t vindicate morality, and in fact undermines it as objectively existing. (See shorter summary here.)

Joyce, being an atheist, then goes on to argue against any supernatural view of morality. (i.e. arguments in favor of morality that invoke the existence of a “God”, Something-Like-God, or any other type of invisible world that our current science cannot see.) In this post, I am going to explore the idea of Supernatural Morality as well as include a short summary of Joyce’s argument against it. At this point, I’m just exploring, not arguing for or against. But no discussion on morality would be complete without considering the possibility that morality stems from the existence of a supernatural reality (or Being) that we do not yet see. Continue reading →

What is Morality? Error Theory Summarized

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In two previous posts (see here and here) I discussed “Error Theory” which is an explanation of our moral senses that, following a naturalistic world view to its logical conclusions, finds that our moral sense is actually a delusion.

Those two posts were long and unwieldy as blog posts. They were pretty good summaries of Richard Joyce’s arguments in favor of (his form of) Error Theory out of his book The Evolution of Morality. But I thought it might be useful to have a shorter summary of his thoughts to reference and because I doubt most people would bother reading my longer summaries.

However, I would ask people to keep in mind the rule of summaries:

The Summary is never equivalent to the Whole and this thus misleading.

And at this point, we are now dealing with the summary of a summary. That being said, here is Error Theory in a short summary:

Error Theory Summarized

Error Theory starts with the realization that there has never been a logically consistent wholly naturalistic explanation for what we experience as morality through our moral sense. Despite some rather smart philosophers coming up with some rather clever arguments, all (so far anyhow) can be demonstrated to be either logically inconsistent or homunculi arguments. (i.e. arguments that sneak the conclusion into the premises and are thus circular.) [1] Continue reading →

Error Theory Part 2 – Can Evolution Vindicate Morality?

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In my previous post I described Error Theory and used Richard Joyce’s arguments to explain that our morality sense includes supernatural seeming notions such as the existence of a ‘moral equilibrium’ or ‘moral facts’ in the world that exist as inescapable demands by an outside authority.

This does not sit well with many a moral atheist, so several attempts to ‘explain morality’ via a naturalistic explanation have been attempted. The primary approach is to use biological evolution as a means of vindicating morality as naturalistic. Specifically, why can’t we use the fact that evolution produced morality as some sort of naturalistic vindication of our feelings of moralities objective rality and profound importance? This is the idea that Joyce now makes short work of. Continue reading →