Orthodox answers

[Lorizael]

I asked you specifically about a universe with no observer. No meaningful evaluation is possible without an observer to make the evaluation.

Again, I'm aware you believe this. Simply put, we don't have the capacity to say how the universe can or cannot be constructed. If the logic we adhere to only has meaning within this universe, we are not at liberty to say what extra-universal stuff determines the properties of the universe (and thus, how things are valued in the universe).

Lori: how can a chosen behavior have the same kind of truth value as a physical law, and what does morality mean in such a context?

There's a problem in the philosophy of science known as underdetermination. That is, the data from reality does not exclusively pick out the scientific theories we believe are correct (or less incorrect than others). There can be equivalent explanations (see different interpretations of QM) or different theories that produce different results in regimes we cannot yet observe (more like general relativity versus QM)

Because of this, all observation is theory-laden, meaning that we have to impart some conceptual framework on what we measure in order to make sense of it. So I can run an experiment to find the value of the gravitational constant, but I can only run such an experiment and come up with an intelligible value if I first have a scientific theory in which that constant plays a role. (When Newton wrote down his theory of universal gravitation, he knew there had to be some constant of proportionality to make the equation work, but no one at the time had a good handle on what the value of that constant was.)

The same thing follows with morality. If you have a theory of morality, you can run a thought experiment along the lines of, "What is the correct action given situation X?" Your moral theory will then return some action A given all the variables that play into creating situation X, which we have to observe and measure in the universe just like any old experiment we might run. In both cases, you pump empirical data into some function which churns out a true answer about the universe.

While this is pretty standard and just looks like some kind of very quantitative utilitarianism, where I diverge is that I don't believe the above experiment to find the gravitational constant actually does necessarily tell us something about the universe. It may only tell us about our model of the universe, which is based on how we interact with and detect the universe. So if the morality analogy gains its validity from the gravity example, my doubts stop it from being valid. That is, we can definitely create a system of morality having to do with how humans should treat other humans that churns out true answers given the theory and the data, but of course we might only be saying something about the best way for humans to get along together.

In either case, to say something about the universe, we need to know some metaphysics--the rules that govern the rules. For example, scientific realism sometimes makes the claim that the objects we postulate in scientific theories (electrons, forces) are really real despite being unobservable (by eye or some other silly human method of perception). This is an ontological claim about reality itself--metaphysics. But modern philosophers take a somewhat dim view of fanciful metaphysics, because it leads to arguments like:

Philosopher 1: The wisest among us know the true nature of the universe is Change.

Philosopher 2: No, you dolt, it's quite clear that the real nature of the universe is Eternity.

Philosopher 3: You're both blithering morons. Obviously, the essential quality of the universe is Formlessness!

Anyway, I believe I've figured out a way to do metaphysics that isn't (a) self-serving (by deciding that reality is just some version of what we want it to be) and/or (b) embarrassing. If I am correct, then a moral theory devised from the correct metaphysics will return values about actions that are actually true. (Note, I emphatically do not believe I have done this. Doing so may require omniscience by way of an ever-expanding telepathic techno-blob, as I frequently say.)

What does morality mean in such a context? It's hard to say. It may reflect the "purpose" of the universe according to whatever created it, or might be an arbitrary set of rules written on some stone hyper-cube, or it might even refer to some reward/punishment system. Needs more data.

[Aeson]

Again, I'm aware you believe this. Simply put, we don't have the capacity to say how the universe can or cannot be constructed.

It is true by definition of the words. The reason I asked you for an example because one cannot exist without changing the meaning of words. An evaluation requires an observer ... That is simply what the words mean.

You can claim it's just a belief, and that everything we can observe (including the meaning of the words) is flawed, but in doing so you are confirming my position. No observer can be absolutely sure of the validity of their assessments because any potential flaw within the observer could be a flaw that hides their own flaw from the observer.

[Elok]

By "external consideration" are you simply referring to supernatural reward/punishment, or is there more to it than that? In other words, would you completely ignore God if he told you that you were going to cease to exist upon death regardless of how good/evil you were during life, or is the reward/punishment only part of the reason that you obey God?

I suppose the former, though it's hard for me to divide "reward/punishment" from the question of larger purpose or end; my life, along with other human lives, has an intrinsic purpose, i.e. to live in communion with God. You could go Euthyphro and say that God could set an entirely different purpose that we would consider immoral, but it's hard to conceive of a God who hated social concord creating a race of social animals. I guess that's true in the same sense that God could have created a universe where 2 + 3 = 78. Yes, but it's hard to say what such a universe would be like, and in any case He didn't.

But that's digression. At the heart of it (for me) is the issue that Orthodox Christian morality has a definite end in mind, and everything else works towards that end. There's a sense of overwhelming purpose at work. Likewise in Buddhism you're trying to escape the cycle of Samsara and either cease to exist or exist less crappily, depending on interpretation. Hindus want to reincarnate in better and better forms until they're something beyond cows, or something. I don't know if Islam gets more subtle than straight-up eating burning devil-headed fruit in hell--I'd assume so, but I don't know. Judaism, as I understand it, is very this-world and community-based, and might constitute an exception in its present form.

Anyway, a secular system can't have that. You can say that there's this thing called morality, and assume a priori that we're supposed to obey it, but there's no argument you can make that behaving morally (whatever that means) is unequivocally better than behaving immorally, or to say that the life of Mahatma Gandhi was any better than the life of Genghis Khan. Except according to your standard of morality, with which the Great Khan differs, because he liked shooting arrows at random schmucks, with sporadic breaks for coitus, and it seemed to work out okay for him. If you begin by assuming that human life is innately purposeless, I don't see how you can end anywhere else.

[loinburger]

The Genghis Khan / Gandhi comparison is quite apt. An atheist can't really say "Genghis Khan was a worse person than Gandhi" because he can't divorce morality from context; however, neither can a theist. I'm not familiar with the history of the orthodox church, but if it's even remotely similar to catholicism then you've got a long history of brutal *******s who were doing God's work. Are all of the Crusaders in hell now? The theist either has to go full bore Ben Kenobi and claim that the Crusaders did nothing wrong, or else he has to admit at least a bit of relativity into his morality, or else he has to damn pretty much everybody born before 1970 or so; the atheist doesn't have this problem because hell doesn't exist. I'll go on the record to say that if the Crusaders were alive today then they'd be *******s, and if I were alive and in Europe during the middle ages then I'd probably fully support the Crusades, because that's how morality works.

Or to take one of the sillier examples from the Bible, what would you do if God asked you to kill your son. Thousands of years ago this would have been a reasonable request from a deity, nowadays not so much.

[Elok]

Like the OP said, we don't say who goes where. The Church has at all times been prone to corruption, which I at least can accept because the Church is an institution run by mortals. Only God is infallible (by definition, since He is the source of right). I believe every age has its characteristic sins, and we are more prone to recognize those of the past than those of the present for obvious reasons. Some of the decisions made in the past were wrong, and either worked against Christian principle, or accomplished vaguely Christian means by immoral ends, as in the persecution of the Paulicians (sort of; in contrast with the West, most of our persecutions, including that one, were ineptly executed and succeeded only in splintering the Empire). Today we corrupt the Church in different ways (in our case it's mostly tawdry poodling or reducing it to a stupid political or nationalist club, which is to be expected from our more settled age and the vastly reduced power our clerics wield).

[Elok]

Re: Isaac, I read a pithy remark by a Jew once that we tend to overlook the story's whole point: that YHWH, unlike the local deities of Abraham's time, does not in fact want human sacrifice.

[loinburger]

Like the OP said, we don't say who goes where. The Church has at all times been prone to corruption, which I at least can accept because the Church is an institution run by mortals. Only God is infallible (by definition, since He is the source of right). I believe every age has its characteristic sins, and we are more prone to recognize those of the past than those of the present for obvious reasons. Some of the decisions made in the past were wrong, and either worked against Christian principle, or accomplished vaguely Christian means by immoral ends, as in the persecution of the Paulicians (sort of; in contrast with the West, most of our persecutions, including that one, were ineptly executed and succeeded only in splintering the Empire). Today we corrupt the Church in different ways (in our case it's mostly tawdry poodling or reducing it to a stupid political or nationalist club, which is to be expected from our more settled age and the vastly reduced power our clerics wield).

I'm fine with "we don't say who goes where," but you're all but saying that Genghis Khan is damned by saying that Genghis Khan was an evil mother****er - sure, he may have had a change of heart on his death bed and so you can't personally damn him (i.e. even if you had the ability to damn him you would still lack the knowledge/wisdom to justly do so), but you still damn his actions and essentially say "if Genghis Khan didn't repent on his death bed then he's damned" because otherwise there's no point to having a moral code that's based on redemption/damnation if nobody gets damned.

Re: Isaac, I read a pithy remark by a Jew once that we tend to overlook the story's whole point: that YHWH, unlike the local deities of Abraham's time, does not in fact want human sacrifice.

That absolves God but certainly doesn't absolve Abraham who was all too willing to commit murder in order to appease a god's whims. If your moral code is primarily or entirely based on hope for or fear of heaven/hell then it's only a happy coincidence that your god doesn't require human sacrifice.

And again, to be fair if an omnipotent deity told me to murder somebody or else I'd go to hell then I have no idea how I'd react; I'd like to say that I wouldn't commit murder just to appease a god's whims but who can really say.

[Elok]

I'm not sure where you're going with the first bit, TBH; yes, some percentage of us has rejected or is rejecting salvation, even if we can't say who. But I don't feel obligated to say that everything bad that was done under the Emperors or Tsars was actually good, etc. Humans are weak and limited by necessity. Sometimes the will of God works to create good ends via bad people and bad actions (e.g. Judas), but sometimes people are just d-bags. And sometimes actions are morally complex. I'm cool with that. Basil II blinded fifteen thousand POWs. I don't feel any desire to defend that, nor Irene killing her iconoclast son.

Re: happy coincidence, no, it's not coincidence at all. Again, by classical Christian understanding what we call morality is inextricable from the nature of the universe and our place in it. I don't take Adam and Eve literally, but in some sense the universe was created as a place of harmony, and our disunion with God is responsible for all the pain, death, chaos, entropy, etc. Supposing an evil God created the universe, what exactly would our choice be? That we further His design of creating a miserable world, or else the world would be miserable? How would that work, as a choice? I guess you could invoke omnipotence to say it might have happened, but it's hard to envision.

There is neither heaven nor hell in the OT, BTW; Abraham obeys because he has agreed to a covenant with God, and trusts that there is a larger purpose behind the request. Also because other Semitic gods asked for child sacrifice as a matter of course, so it wasn't really a surprising request except in the context of "and I shall make of you a great nation." The way I see it, it's not exactly as simple as Heaven or Hell, but I boiled it down to that because I wasn't getting my point across.

Ultimately, everything in human behavior is going to come down to competing incentives, and if you take the idea of altruism too far you wind up in the position of arguing that even altruism isn't altruism because you get a good feeling out of doing it. People do things because they have incentives for doing them, one way or another. If you're going to argue that the highest-priority set of rules we obey should depend on nothing but raw emotional response (which is the most ephemeral of our drives) or conditioning perpetuated for the sake of social engineering (which isn't a whole lot better), well, that doesn't make any sense to me.

[Jon Miller]

or else he has to damn pretty much everybody

This is the right answer. Of course, I think I already said it.

JM
(I recognise that this answer might be very protestant...)

[Jon Miller]

That absolves God but certainly doesn't absolve Abraham who was all too willing to commit murder in order to appease a god's whims. If your moral code is primarily or entirely based on hope for or fear of heaven/hell then it's only a happy coincidence that your god doesn't require human sacrifice.

I would argue that Jews preBabylon didn't have a concept of Hell (as we do now) and had at best a very foggy concept of the afterlife. Of course, they did seem to value their children/relatives more than people do today in the west (maybe more similar to how people in the east value their ancestors?).

What was considered valuable for Abraham is that he had a relationship with God.

JM
(I know I am not an Orthodox, I hope that Elok doesn't mind me posting in his thread.)

[Jon Miller]

Remember the commandments:

30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[a] 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] There is no commandment greater than these.”

Love is a relationship, not a given action in a given situation.

JM

[Elok]

Yeah, you're cool to post. A variety of thoughtful perspectives doesn't hurt, and I don't think Loin is going to confuse us or anything.

[Jon Miller]

Then I will continue to jump in.

Think about Love and my relationship with my Brother, my Wife, my Mother and my Daughter. Unity or a good relationship is the value, but the actual actions are radically different depending on both the relationship and the situation/period of my life/etc. Does this mean that morality or good actions or ethics is relative? Not at all, rather it is that what is valued as being good stays the same (the relationship) but what action improves the relationship depends on a myriad of factors, both internal and external to I and those I am in a relationship with.

JM