Re: I'm Right, You're Left

A response to a Christian friend's argument against moral relativism. Original exists as Facebook comments.


Synopsis of "I'm right, you're left"
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The tragedy of disbelieving in God is not that a person ends up believing in nothing. Alas it is much worse… a person could end up believing in anything.
GK Chesterton

Moral Relativism is good for learning and critical thinking, but ultimately any set of ideas can be used as a basis of thought and any ideology, no matter how depraved, can be justified.

Some people, notably several children the author knows, see little reason to act morally as it is out of their interest. Counterarguments suggest that ethical laws are an inherent product of reason and common sense, but there is no basis for them. Self-evident ideas are not supported by reason.

Acting upon reason and selfish motivations leads one to a life which is beneficial to the one's self but detrimental to society; a population embracing such a lifestyle would suffer on the whole.

Without solid moral roots we cannot have a moral society. What we've built will crumble into chaos and apathy.


Response:
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Your argument here is that without a source of moral absolutes we can't justify moral behavior. We need a basis for further reasoning, or a complete code for the purpose of achieving this justification. We need a perfect God, then, which encapsulates absolute truth. And one is quite conveniently evident at work in this world. Therefore, our absolution is to be his word.

My reasoning divides from yours at the necessity of a God. In consideration of the fallibility of human beings--we can be deceived and commit error in evaluating what we see--I accept that while the universe may function on objective rules, we can only observe the consequences of said rules, modeling them subjectively. Any objectivity at work in the world is therefore as good as dead to us.

We need to find our own bases for thought. And those dwell in human intuition.

Your God and your Truth may well be concrete entities, but it's little matter to me; I have no good reason to choose them over the others presented me save the evidence; as a philosopher I don't care for empirical proof scientific or otherwise. Additionally, I'll argue, even provided the existence of your God and your Truth my statements stand as valid.

My God--my use of the term--is the rules which we can only guess at and will never objectively know--something which orchestrates all and is manifest in all things. An unsolvable mystery.

My Truth is contrary. It is what sense we can make of the chaos presented to us; our world paradigm with representation for every character, thing and rule we can construct.

My muse. Intuition. She demands more explanation, given I have placed her where your personal God sits. This is a thing which acts from within the confines of the mind, making its suggestions to those who care to listen. She, like your God, suggests morality even as reason struggles to replace it with ethics. She, like your God, is a partner in dialogue and a responder to hard questions in hard times. She, like your God, is a source for all the assumptions (irrational!) that we build our system of ideas upon.

If your God speaks to the heart we may well be saying the same things in different languages.