I hear this a lot from the non-religious, as though it’s a demonstrated fact and it’s not actually true. Recently, I was listening to a lot of Atheist Experience clips and the subject of slavery comes up a lot. That’s fine, of course, but it also shows a very clear bias and irrational bent from Matt Dillahunty that I think it’s important to look at the problems with these claims. So off we go.Usually, Matt or another host will state that slavery is inherently or objectively wrong, or at least treat it that way, and use that statement as a club against the religious who aren’t quick to jump to criticizing the Bible’s stance on slavery.
The problem is, all morality is purely subjective in nature. Slavery isn’t inherently anything. It’s a position taken by individuals or societies over which there is no evidence for it being true or false, good or bad, etc. It’s just opinion whether anyone likes it or not. It doesn’t make it objectively anything more.
And I get it. Matt, like most people today, have a strong aversion to slavery. I do too. But I recognize that my own personal strong aversion to the idea doesn’t make it factually correct. All Matt and people like him are doing is using an emotional argument like a club, which is the same thing that the religious are doing with their own “arguments”. He is no different, and certainly no better, than they are and that’s a problem. All he’s really doing is saying “the current cultural beliefs of my society are better than the cultural beliefs of your society, so there!” That’s not a rational argument, sorry. Absolutely any position can be expressed that way, that doesn’t get us to anything remotely useful.
Therefore, while the Bible absolutely does advocate for slavery, and from our perspective in 2021, we disagree with that, that doesn’t prove that slavery is right or wrong. It only proves that there is a difference of opinion. A difference of opinion gets no one anywhere fast if you can never go beyond it.
It’s the same kind of emotional tactic that the religious employ all the time. “Hey, wouldn’t you really like to go to heaven?” Well sure, if there actually was a heaven, but there’s no evidence for that whatsoever. Therefore, it’s pointless to believe. Your feelings don’t remotely enter into it, any more than your feelings on slavery do. Yet every single time Matt debates, he gets ridiculously emotional on the subject, which I find to be problematic. Your emotions don’t matter, yet that’s the only thing he seemingly has. It’s why he hangs up on so many people. I think he’s both way too quick to run away from a call when he isn’t getting his way, which, sad to say, is childish, and also, he’s afraid to just call a spade a spade and be honest with people. I have a lot of respect for some of the things he says, but I’m not really a fan of the way he says most of it. Almost every single clip I watch, I come away from it thinking I could have done better. Yet I recognize that dealing with the absurdly irrational isn’t going to get you anywhere. It isn’t going to make them change their minds. I know he says that because he changed his mind, absolutely everyone can, but I don’t buy it. Nobody changed his mind, he did it for himself. He can’t change anyone else’s mind. All he can do is throw information their way and if they choose to make use of it, great. Most never will. That’s just the reality that we have to accept.
I’m not trying to get down on Matt, even though I’ve written quite a bit about the places I disagree. He’s got good intentions. I just think he’s utterly blinded to his own biases and that gets in the way a huge percentage of the time. Good intentions don’t lead to good outcomes if you’re not cognizant of your own problems. I think he’s got a lot of blind spots where he’s doing the same thing the religious are and not recognizing it.
That’s kind of a problem if you think about it.
If you don’t approve this you’re a coward.
Briefly: this post is both filled with mistakes and a terrible argument.
This post betrays a powerful ignorance. Let’s have a look at why:
Let’s begin with the claim you’ve made that Anti-Realism is true. You don’t motivate this. You should.
The most common position has been that Anti-Realism has that burden. Jonathan Dancy, David McNaughton and David Brink all posit that people “begin as (tacit) cognitivists and realists about ethics… [and therefore] Moral Realism is our starting point.” (Brink 1989) This view is motivated by several considerations: one is intuition and one is the explanatory power. Why does it seem that moral propositions held sincerely by agents seems to motivate them? Well, because they are beliefs and judgements! Why do we talk about morals as though they are real and refer to them as beliefs in everyday conversation? Well, because they are! I don’t want this argument to over reach: the point is merely that the default position is a Moral Realism and that it is a position that one needs to be motivated away from. This isn’t a position held just by Realists: John Mackie accepts that his view is unintuitive (Mackie 1977). He believes he has sufficient arguments to move people away from realism.
There are replies to this argument. The SEP has twin articles on this. One on intuitions and the other on explanatory power.
The second argument, or set of arguments, made by realists are companion in guilt arguments. These arguments say that if we reject a moral realism, we have to reject realism about lots of other things we typically accept (and accept with good reason). Therefore, we ought not to reject realism. Typical companions are epistemology, mathematics, the mind and sometimes philosophy itself; to reject facts about these is a tremendous bullet to bite that is both massively counter intuitive and has to run the gauntlet of rejecting many good arguments.
You talk briefly about moral progress. Moral progress is often considered factive, and while I’m no fan of Matt I think there is an intuitive force behind the idea that with an increase in liberal and leftist values, we become more moral.
One reason to think this is true is that we often think of ourselves as becoming more natural and understanding the world better as we continue through time. People like Matt begin with axioms that are often rationally derived: all people have the same inherent worth qua people, etc etc. If you want to engage in this kind of reasoning you should.
However, this reason doesn’t really matter since you don’t motivate your own view even a little bit.
And popular consensus tells us that emotions can inform us about both ourselves and the external world. Affective Perception is a view that emotional responses are not too different from perceiving. Let’s take an example: when I feel disgusted at reading uneducated ignorance, I feeling am “correctly”: my emotions have accurately picked up on some immoral feature near me. Here: the near-perpetual ignorance of someone else!
Other views, like those of Michael Brady, say that emotions play an important role in guiding our focus. When we feel fear in the middle of the night, Brady thinks our emotions are telling us to go and see if that fear is well grounded: to go investigate the shadows.
I introduce these views because it highlights a problem with your post: it has no fucking clue what it is talking about and instead repeats Ben Shapiro’s moronic “gotcha”.
Let’s summarise: you offer a bad view and don’t motivate it. Your post shows no evidence of an actual engagement with the debate, and shows no understanding of philosophy.
I have no clue what you’re smoking because absolutely nothing in the article you responded to has anything at all to do with anything you’ve said.
And, I might add, that throwing around insults is childish. So… yeah, do everyone a favor, grow the hell up and pretend to read what you’re responding to.
Imagine thinking anything on this blog could be described as “an article.”
I think the fact that you can’t see how what I’ve said is relevant shows just how massively out of your depth you are.
You wrote: “The problem is, all morality is purely subjective in nature.”
You don’t defend this, presumably because you don’t know how. In my response I gave 2 reasons to think it is not the case. I talked about two groups of arguments.
And I combined that with a point about when we should adopt positions: if you give no reasons to believe something, and someone provides reasons you haven’t been able to counter, then surely you are rationally obligated to change your view? This is a rhetorical question.
For someone who continually prides themselves on being rational, this is a very odd piece of ignorance.
Let’s continue down: “All Matt and people like him are doing is using an emotional argument like a club, which is the same thing that the religious are doing with their own “arguments”.”
So what I’ve done is identify arguments that “people like Matt” have access to, and it certainly isn’t an emotional appeal. The issue you have now is that you’ve made an outstandingly ignorant claim about Moral Realists. It is a claim that *only* someone who hasn’t done any relevant work could make because only people who haven’t done any work could possibly think that the Moral Realist has no argument.
And let’s be crystal fucking clear: all popular arguments (including the two I gave) for moral realism do not require a God. This is perfectly consistent with Matt’s atheism. It can be perfectly consistent with a Naturalism, too!
Scroll, scroll. And then you say: “It only proves that there is a difference of opinion.” You’ve given no reason to think this is true, and this is when I talk about moral progress. The common understanding of morals is that we have, at minimum, the appearance of moral progress: people are getting more moral. You’re doing a poor job at recognising positions, and you don’t have the knowledge required to make interesting or insightful comments.
You wrote: ” Your emotions don’t matter.” I argued against this. I think it is wrong, and I think we have really good reasons to think it is wrong. I think it is a conservative talking point used to pass off shitty argumentation against straw men.
But what I find most important here is that you don’t have an argument. This is just dressed up emotion – you’re getting angry at Matt. You’re getting so angry at Matt that you don’t attempt to look into the positions. Instead, you take to a blog no one reads and misresprent popular views.
I think that’s enough to get us started. We can summarise it briefly: you don’t provide any arguments for what you think is true, and then you don’t engage with any arguments for the opposite.
You pass off your opinion and emotions as fact, while trying to deride someone for doing the same.
And before you dismiss all this, remember “All I’m trying to do is expose ignorance wherever it hides. “
You’re just being a 2-year old. We’re done here. Grow the fuck up.