Morality without god

So even though I can provide many examples of existing societies that has legalized gay marriage and not collapsed and they can not provide an example of a society that has collapsed because of gay marriage our positions are equally valid?Even though I can quote authorities like this from here

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The American Psychological Association stated in 2004:[15]

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... the APA believes that it is unfair and discriminatory to deny same-sex couples legal access to civil marriage and to all its attendant benefits, rights, and privileges.

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The American Sociological Association stated in 2004:[18]

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... the American Sociological Association strongly opposes the proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

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The Canadian Psychological Association stated in 2006:[20]

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As the CPA stated in 2003, the stressors encountered by gay and lesbian parents and their children are more likely the result of the way society treats them than because of any deficiencies in fitness to parent.

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The American Anthropological Association stated in 2005:[23]

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The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

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The American Academy of Pediatrics concluded in 2006, in an analysis published in the journal Pediatrics:[36]

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There is ample evidence to show that children raised by same-gender parents fare as well as those raised by heterosexual parents.

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The United Kingdom's Royal College of Psychiatrists has stated:[42]

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... lesbian, gay and bisexual people are and should be regarded as valued members of society who have exactly similar [sic] rights and responsibilities as all other citizens. This includes ... the rights and responsibilities involved in a civil partnership ...

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and all they can say is stuff like this

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This is the most important reason. Whenever one violates the natural moral order established by God, one sins and offends God. Same-sex marriage does just this. Accordingly, anyone who professes to love God must be opposed to it.

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You would maintain that our positions are equally valid?Edited by Dogmafood, : No reason given.

I'll try not to answer in Tangle's place, but allow me to make an observation.There was a time not so long ago when your latter example was the moral tenet of the day accepted as truth by their superior enlightened circles and what very few held the former view were not just shunned by all society but were actively barred from the company of women and children.In our western society today the former view is quite new and not fully accepted as deeply as the latter used to be. Except, of course, in our superior enlightened circles.edit: Just to put a point on it: note that I did not answer the question.Edited by AZPaul3, : kinda obvious

The views that I have expressed represent the application of the formula to the best of my ability with the information that is available to me. They are as objective as I can make them.Of course my views are culturally influenced but I don't see the relevance. My culture is not homogenous and in fact I am sure that I hold a minority position on many questions regarding morality in my culture. I can identify the same morally correct answers in many cultures that are not my own.While it may be cause for suspicion that I think that my own views are correct, I do not think that my own views are correct because they are my views. They are my views because I think that they are correct. How do you account for the remarkable adherence of Western liberal thinking with regard to the actual perihelion of Mercury? Was Newton equally correct? The same way that I account for the fact that people have been wrong about the age of the planet and the fact that some people still are.How do you account for the fact that it did not elude many of the great thinkers of history? What is your point? The formula is simple. It is the quantification of harm that is difficult and complex. Our ability to do so is increasingly accurate. The manner in which we have done and continue to do this is unchanging.After you figure out how to do a thing you can look back and see your mistakes and you can avoid those mistakes in the future.

Well are we enlightened or not? I do not see what the popularity of the viewpoint has to do with it's correctness.

From who's perspective?

Well, as you know, I personally believe any form of discrimination is a moral wrong so I'm rather at a disadvantage arguing the position. But those against homosexual marriage blame much of society's problems on the breakdown of marriage generally, with the subsequent growth of single parent families, citing homosexual marriage as just another example of it.But I note you didn't answer the simpler moral conundrums where harm and benefit are easier to identify?

enlightened [ɪnˈlaɪtənd]
adj
1. factually well-informed, tolerant of alternative opinions, and guided by rational thought

Indeed and so are those who actually hold the position. And they are wrong. Allowing people to get married can not be the cause of people not getting married. Single parent families are not caused by allowing people to get married. They are wrong and we can know that they are wrong by employing logic and reason. I will answer them in a bit if you like. I thought that we had had plenty of examples of the formula being employed.

Yes, I understand the term.Factually well-informed under what state of knowledge?Tolerant of ..., guided by ... Both of these are scalable as well.Tolerant to what degree? To include all difference of all human philosophies (child sacrifice to their gods? second class status for redheads? the religious obligation to proselytize in the public square? the use of mushrooms in native rites?). And guided to what degree? Absolute rational logic with no truck for emotion or empathy?So the question remains. From who's perspective ... In who's opinion ... are we enlightened or not?Edited by AZPaul3, : finger fiddles

What is a state of knowledge?It is possible at this point in time to know x amount of things about what causes harm. Someone who knows most of them or a lot of them or 73% of them is well informed. Tolerant to the point of accepting behaviour that causes harm. Emotion and empathy have a logical place in the calculations. From any rational person's perspective.

OK, let's do it this way.From the Athenians of 300 BCE you are hardly enlightened. You have no phallus outside our doors to stroke for luck as you leave your homes and you keep separate bath and toilet facilities for men and women instead of common facilities for all. You are prudish, embarrassed, intolerant and afraid of your bodies. That is hardly enlightened.Nor are you moral. Instead of executing or expelling your criminals you lock them in cages and caves like dogs on a leash and leave them there for years, decades. Even the ones you will execute you keep in your cages for decades contemplating their pending death. A quick thrust to the throat would have been the merciful, the humane thing to do.From the New Houston Asteroid Colony of 2620 CE. What despicable, backward, unenlightened barbarians you are. You incarcerate the social deviant and kill the psychopath instead of treating their conditions. You still live in a backward world that needs such a thing as a "foreign policy" and you use war as an instrument of that policy. Good lord you still use scraps of paper for commercial exchange and allow a greedy few to horde the most of it.And your morals are even worse. You poison your environment and think the deaths of hundreds are "acceptable losses" in the name of progress. Even though your society can well afford to you refuse to feed your hungry and heal your sick.No. You are neither enlightened nor moral from either end of history.The point being, no society is acknowledged enlightened or adequately moral from the view of others.In our time we see the rise in Western society of both stronger reason and greater tolerance, slow to be sure, but progressing steadily around us. And, yet, in this time Western society is the least enlightened and the least moral, except for all the others.So, are we enlightened or not? It depends.Edited by AZPaul3, : dint like the phrasing.

Well that is just not true. I carry mine with me everywhere I go and stroke it often. : But I do not do that. I completely reject that statement. I am none of those things. This quite simply does not apply to me. I have never done any such thing.While these examples may apply to others in my society or even to my society in general they do not apply to me as an individual. There are many things that my society does that I regard as being immoral. There are many things that the Athenians did that I would consider to be moral and enlightened. I would not hold them morally culpable for their ill informed medical practices but I do hold them culpable for the keeping of slaves. I do not hold the Hippocratic Oath to be without fault or irrational sentiments but they had the do no harm part right. And I would be the first to admit it under the light of new information. In fact I admit it now. We do all kinds of immoral things as a society but this has no impact on the fact that there are morally enlightened members of our society. If it is possible to cure the psychopaths then that would be the moral thing to do. If it is not possible to reform them then the moral thing to do is keep them from causing harm. This will not be any different in 2620. The method that they will use to determine if an action is moral or not will be the same as it is today. The information available to them will supposedly be more accurate and more complete. Well I agree in as much as no society, including my own, is or has been perfectly moral. I disagree that there is no way to know which behaviours of any given society at any given time are moral and which are not. This is why I can say today that it is not, for example, the smoking of marijuana that is immoral but rather the prohibition thereof that is immoral. I can say this in direct contradiction to the current laws and practices of my society. I can say this by assessing the identifiable harm caused by the respective practices. Yes it depends on whether we are or not. It does not depend on whether we think we are or not and it does not depend on who we are. It depends on how much we know and knowing that we do not know everything is a good part of that.Edited by Dogmafood, : No reason given.

Civilized and enlightened. This is good. Sure you do. You don't use the ladies room as a matter of course, do you? Uh, Dog? Do we need to talk? So all this time you were talking of a personal enlightenment and a personal morality? [diabolus causidicus]Of course smoking pot is immoral. It rots your lungs, slows your ability to think and react, lowers you inhibitions to things you would never consider doing sober, like driving under the influence which makes you unsafe on the streets, a danger to others and to society.[/diabolus]You can now take all the variability, all the subjectivity, all the differences of opinion on what is moral, what is rational, what is empathetic, what is enlightened and what is not as viewed between societies and multiply that by 7,000,000,000.You think you have the correct equation to determine morality and enlightenment based upon your own world view, your own intellect, sense of what is rational and your personal emotional base all of which are superior to those of the fundamentalist christian, the devout jihadi, the Kalahari bushman and the Chinese Central Committee member.Guess what? They think the same about their way.But you are right and they are wrong, yes? (actually I could almost agree to that if I was forced to given those choices) But your view of rational, tolerant, ordered and empathetic is as culturally dependent and thus personally subjective as is theirs.What is important is that segments of society band together under an agreed upon tenet of Enlightenment and try over time to move the social fabric toward an agreed upon tenet of reason and morality.I personality like, very much, your approach to rational morality as "doing no harm". What I object to is your insistence that this is born of absolutes.

Of course. All action and knowledge must be assessed at the level of the individual. It is only individuals who carry out actions. It is only the individual that holds knowledge. Summaries, averages, outliers and net results come later. You have to honestly account for all of the harm on both sides of the equation. You can not use generalizations without affecting the accuracy of your assessment. You have to actually identify the harm caused as best you can. Sure but this also applies to the fact that I think that I have the correct equation to determine the area of a circle. The bushman and the christian can use the same equation to assess my beliefs and behaviours as well as their own.I fully appreciate the fact that everyone's individual assessment of harm is subjective because it is a self referential assessment. It can not be otherwise and this is universally true. Because we all belong to the same species there is agreement on the majority of questions regarding what constitutes harm but certainly not all of them.I contend that if you isolate the action of the individual and deconstruct it you will be able to identify the motives and any net harm that results (at least as far as we are able to project). Again the formula is simple but the inputs are myriad. They are not necessarily superior and if they are it is not simply because they are mine. I would not say that a devout fundamentalist christian is an immoral person because they belong to that group. I can only assess the morality of their individual actions or beliefs. The fact that they can be generally categorized has nothing to do with assessing the morality of their actual individual actions.Morality only applies to individuals. We can say that a society is immoral but only because it is full of individuals conducting discrete immoral actions. This is true but are there not globally accepted rules of logic and rationality? Does the fact that we arrive at our conclusions using subjective inputs mean that we can not determine if the conclusions are right or wrong?

Why is agreement necessary? It is not necessary for my child to agree with me regarding what is best for him to eat for supper in order for me to know what is best for him to eat for supper. It is not necessary for the YECs to agree with me regarding the age of the earth in order for me to know that they are wrong. It is not necessary for me to agree with Son Goku regarding what is the best model of quantum physics in order for him to know what is the best model. It is not necessary for the barbarians to agree with me that female circumcision is immoral in order for me to know that it is.If the simplistic condition for ideal moral behaviour is to cause no harm can you not even imagine a situation where no harm is being caused? The ideal is to cause no harm. Just because it is sometimes difficult to make the calculation does not mean that there is not a best answer. Just because everyone is not equally enlightened does not mean that some people are not actually enlightened.