This is incredible common, but here’s yet another example from The Atheist Experience where the hosts just don’t understand what the hell they’re doing wrong. It isn’t just Matt that used to pull this stuff, it’s a lot of them because I think there are people of a particular political persuasion who just can’t figure it out.

So let’s explore it.

First off, here’s the video in question. Go take a look, it’s short.

Alright, I will admit that Ruben didn’t do a  good job here. He started out calling this a fallacy but I’m fairly certain that he doesn’t understand what that means. Had it been me, I would have insisted he provide the name of the fallacy and I’m sure that would have been met with a bunch of hemming and hawing because he doesn’t know what a fallacy is.

That aside though, Forrest and Dave went entirely off the rails thereafter, demanding that slavery is “wrong” in all times and for all people, period. Just ask them. Now while I don’t want to defend Ruben here, he was right. At the time that slavery was socially and legally accepted, it was, indeed, socially and legally accepted. The people who owned slaves certainly thought it was morally proper to do so, from ancient times all the way up to the American slave trade. According to their version of ethics, they were in the right.

I’m not going to make a case either way, because whether anyone likes it or not, morals and ethics are entirely subjective. A thing is as moral as the people who hold it to be moral think it is. Morality and ethics aren’t set in stone and both the religious and the hosts are wrong to assert otherwise. It’s just a shortcut to “I’m right!” without ever showing that you actually are. It’s why moral realism is such a ludicrous joke because most professed moral realists are just looking for an emotionally comforting way to get to “I’m right because I’m right” without having any way to prove it.

Lots of people fall into that trap for the same reason they fall into religion. It feels good to think you’ve  got it all figured out, even though you’ve got nothing to prove that you have. They get so caught up in thinking in terms of “right and wrong” that they can’t think in terms of reality. Did people keep slaves? Yes. Undeniably. Do you like that today? No. Does your opinion today affect what happened in history? Not one bit. This is just a way to coddle your own feelings and pretend that you’re superior to everyone who disagreed with you.

That’s just not how any of this works. In another hundred years, when slavery comes back, hypothetically, those people are going to think that the whining hosts on TAE were laughably wrong, just like the TAE hosts are doing right now. It’s been a constant phenomenon throught history. You’re not right because you want to be, you’re only right because you can show that you are and none of them are remotely interested in backing up their assertions in demonstrable fact. Prove that your ethical claims are more than an emotional crutch or stop making a fool of  yourself. That’s where all sides go wrong, but you’d think that the supposedly educated hosts of TAE might have figured it out.

It’s really sad that they haven’t.