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hammurabi -> RE: God and morality (5/17/2008 5:46:29 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Jhud
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But aside from that. Couldn't it be argued that if God is arbiter and judge, then anything is permitted because the consequences are always known - all acts have telos, there is always retribution and reward - but to the non-theist, or in a world without God, all actions are not permitted because there is no knowledge of consequences, hence all actions are indeterminate and unknowable? If I am free, and I am free outside a judicial system, all actions refer back to "why and how" - what is it I can do, how am I permitted to do them? I'm not sure if this line of reasoning holds, though. Partly because it's not well reasoned.
I think you are just playing with the word ‘permitted’ here. If God doesn’t exist, then it’s not that there is not ‘permission’ to do something, it’s that ‘permission’ is irrelevant to the activity in question. That fact that there is no minister of breathing to grant me a license to take a breath doesn’t mean I’m ‘not permitted’ to breath, it simply means permission is irrelevant in that context.
And you are also conflating permission with what is allowed. God allows us to act contrary to what He permits (that is, he doesn’t control us in a way that keeps us from acting in such a way), but that doesn’t mean He permits everything. In fact, if that we couldn’t do the things that He didn’t permit, then His ‘permission’ would be unnecessary; seeking permission is an recognition of proper authority, not a recognition of what can and can’t be done.
Well, okay. With less word-shifting, what I mean is this:
If God exists, then we have a distribution of power across the entire ethical plane. All acts are ethical, because all actions are teleologically oriented towards an end (death and resurrection). There is nothing that escapes the authority of an overarching ethical set of decrees. All things are here allowed, but not all things are permitted, then. And as such, every choice has a necessary consequence; a necessary effect, a quantifiable scale of ethical reserve set up in heaven for a time after death.
If God does not exist, then power is distributed across a merely ontological plane, and ethics arises somewhere from it. No acts contain a priori ethical quantities because no action becomes ethical outside its social irruption into ethics, and ethics becomes distributions of security, power, well-being, regulation, fulfillment. No ethical act has a necessary consequence beyond its natural consequence, and so the question of what is permitted become a question of what consequences are desired to be achieved; or what intentions will fulfill an end; or what actions will produce social harmony. It means nothing is permitted because nobody is permitting or delimiting actions, and so they don't have implicit moral teleology. It requires baseless decision-making.
For example, you said:
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The belief that God exists will affect moral choice making, whether He exists or not.
The belief that God doesn’t exist will affect moral choice making whether He exists or not.
With God, the question of God's existence isn't an ethical question, because it doesn't pertain immediately to the moral; it only serves to regulate the acceptance of a specific, but teleologically oriented, morality. (Unless you argued that getting into heaven is a moral good). If God doesn't exist, then the act of assenting to God's existence becomes an ethical dilemma, if in fact it changes the way a person acts, because the actions have uncertain ends and no guarantee of correctness.
Just some thoughts. I could by all means and probably am wrong, however. [:)]
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