Go watch that video first and then come back because I’m going to get into some of the details. It’s okay, I’ll wait.
The problem with Matt’s position, and not only Matt gets this wrong, is that he’s just presenting his personal opinion as established fact. I probably wouldn’t say if he’d consistently state “this is my opinion” but he virtually never does. Somewhere in there, he says something about “you either get it right or you get it wrong” and then presents his views as right and anyone who disagrees with him as wrong and that’s not how it works. He’s welcome to his opinions, we all are and I even share his views, but that doesn’t make them magically correct.
I think this happens way too often though, especially in the modern world, where people simply assume that anything they believe is true without having to back it up objectively. Because people in the era of slavery, they had views too and they thought slavery was just fine. If you put them and Matt in a room together, they’d just scream at each other incoherently and accomplish nothing. You can’t just assume that you’re right and have that mean anything. You actually have to demonstrate it.
Unfortunately, a lot of moral questions don’t have objective demonstrations. You can’t prove that anything is right or wrong because right and wrong have no singular meaning. Different people have different views and there’s no way to show one is objectively more “correct” than another. You might have an emotional attachment to one side or the other, but that doesn’t make you factually correct.
This isn’t just Matt either, don’t get me wrong. On another episode of Atheist Experience, Jim Barrows said that happiness, his choice of criteria for morality, is paramount. You can measure happiness and that ought to be what we accept. Except religion makes a lot of people happy. Does that mean we ought to stop trying to get rid of religion? Racism, the feeling that some people are inherently better than other people, that makes a lot of people happy too. What do you do then? And if you argue that most people don’t feel that way, you’re just arguing for mob rule and might makes right, something a lot of people, myself included, have a massive problem with. And going back to the era of slavery, most people there agreed with slavery. It is situational, but most of these people don’t seem to see it that way.
Unfortunately, I know, based on the responses these people are making, that they’re just going to take the things they believe for arbitrary reasons and declare those things correct, just because they like them and reject those they do not favor as inherently wrong. Sorry, that’s just not rational. And if this is not precisely how they feel, then they need to be more careful in how they state their positions because these are not the first time, or even the tenth time, that I’ve seen it phrased this way.
Matt has gone on record saying that well-being is the standard that we ought to use. Okay… says who? How do you justify that? Or is he just expressing his opinion, which he’s welcome to do, and how does that actually get us anywhere? We know that picking well-being as a standard is subjective and arbitrary. I think everyone acknowledges that. However, what would Matt do if suddenly, society didn’t pick that as their go-to standard? We have many, many years of history of religion, for instance, pushing standards that are not predicated on individual well-being. It was the well-being of the church, not the well-being of the people that mattered. What do you do in that instance? Rail for revolution? Based on what? Your opinion?
Because this is really what we see so much today, especially on the political left. They think they are automatically right, just because they like to think they are. They have arbitrarily chosen standards, picked entirely emotionally, and they think that means everyone has to be held to their standards even though they can offer no rational or objective justification for them. It’s the ultimate feels over reals scenario. We recognize the harmfulness of that with religion, but when it comes to politics, the same ideas are held up as a virtue.
It’s really sad having to wade through this nonsense, knowing most people just don’t get it. Matt is a smart guy. but I think he has an emotional attachment to a lot of ideas and I’m not sure that he’s steeped back from his beliefs to evaluate them intellectually as much as he’d likely like to think he has. I don’t know, I don’t have any idea what’s going on in his head, I have to go by the words coming out of his mouth, it’s just something to think about and I really wish more people would think about things more often. We might not have a lot of the problems we do if they did.
An observation that I am going to make, which will make people very angry at me, is that there are some people who want to be slaves. They want to be told what to do all the time and be taken care of. They are frightened of independence and self-reliance.
This is observably true, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that slavery is “moral”; just that you may have to use much more nuanced arguments against allowing slavery. Perhaps because it is inefficient, and degrades society and both the slave and the slave-owner.
There will be those who deny that such people exist; but do they also deny that there are those who rent out their bodies for sexual purposes? And people in the BDSM community who enjoy other people hurting and humiliating them?
There are certainly people who actually prefer living in a totalitarian society; people who would feel lost and afraid living in a libertarian community.
There definitely are. I’ve heard this from Christians a lot. “If you’re not God’s slave, whose slave will you be?” Um… nobody’s? If you cure the cancer, what disease do you replace it with? Nothing! I do not understand people who can’t get that through their heads. It’s why I keep calling these people children. That’s what they act like. How can they possibly be expected to take responsibility for themselves? They need constant supervision because they’re not capable of doing it on their own. Of course, religion isn’t the only problem there, there are tons of people today who want the government to do everything for them so that they don’t have to do anything for themselves.
This is really where morality isn’t even part of the discussion. Like the religious, there are a lot of people who are desperately looking for some unchanging “truth” to which they can point so they don’t have to talk about it anymore. Morals and ethics are inherently messy and you can’t just say “this is good for all time and that is evil for all time and we can stop debating it!” That’s not how any of it works. Morality just isn’t the one-size-fits-all solution that a lot of people wish that it was. What if, tomorrow, we decided that slavery was fine again. Maybe we can make Christians slaves because they seem to like the idea. What would that do to our moral views of today? A lot of people pretend “that will never happen!” but it has, demonstrably, through history. North Korea wasn’t like this a hundred years ago. Nazi Germany wasn’t like that in the 1800s. Things change and not always for the better. Look at what’s happened in a lot of the Middle East before the return of fundamentalist Islam. If you go back into Saudi Arabia in the 70s, it was a really progressive place where women had equal rights. The idea that this stuff can’t change is ludicrous. It can and it does, for better and worse. It’s sad how many people couldn’t handle it if that time ever came.