Morality and Coercion

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? Error Theory and Supernatural Morality

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