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Is Theistic Morality Reducible to Secular Morality?
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Is Theistic Morality Reducible to Secular Morality?


I stumbled across this video, posted by the Muslim apologist featured therein and bearing one of those blatantly biased titles that make me groan.  In the interest of taking at least the occasional foray out of a potential echo chamber, I decided to watch it, and I just couldn't resist posting a rather verbose comment, especially since most or all of the other comments were from arguably smug theists (my username is TranslatorCarminum, in case anyone wants to read the whole thing).  I took the opportunity in the final paragraph (quoted below) to make an argument that I think should be made much more often than it has been so far in my experience.

Quote:Let's say you convinced me that God is real, that he has certain qualities and/or preferences, but not that I am obligated to act in accordance with those qualities and/or preferences. How would you convince me that I should in fact adhere to God's moral code? I highly doubt you could do so in a way that does not ultimately appeal to some form of divine reward and/or divine punishment. Now, any reward by definition entails some form of well-being, and likewise, any punishment by definition entails some form of suffering. I am a sentient creature, or at least my soul is. So your argument would inevitably rely on the presupposition that a sentient creature should experience well-being and/or be spared suffering. Even if you make it more about how God supposedly feels whenever I act against his will and/or nature, God is still a sentient creature for whom you are seeking to enhance well-being and/or reduce suffering. So even if Islam (or Christianity, etc) were correct, the deity in question would not be the ultimate basis of ethics. Instead, it would be at least one layer of reasoning beyond that ultimate basis.

Of course, my own rather Harrisian views on morality are by no means unanimous among non-believers, but I think it should be telling if theistic morality can indeed be reduced in this way to at least one popular formulation of secular ethics, even if it's not the only one.  Anyway, I'm curious about others' thoughts on this argument.  Have I missed a critical flaw or overstepped in any way?  Have any of you encountered a religious response that in fact doesn't reduce to an appeal to reward or punishment?  Have you ever made this or a similar argument yourself?  If you happen to like it as much as I do, why do you think it's not presented very often?  I think the last sentence or two may hint at the Euthyphro dilemma in a way, but from my perspective at least, the rest seems to come up quite rarely.
The only sacred truth in science is that there are no sacred truths. - Carl Sagan
Ἡ μόνη ἱερᾱ̀ ἀληθείᾱ ἐν τῇ φυσικῇ φιλοσοφίᾳ ἐστὶν ἡ ἱερῶν ἀληθειῶν σπάνις. - Κᾱ́ρολος Σήγανος


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Is Theistic Morality Reducible to Secular Morality? - by Glossophile - 04-09-2020, 10:02 PM



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