Objective Morality

 

Dennis Prager narrated one of his short videos on 3/20/17, entitled If There is No God, Murder Isn’t Wrong. I took notes on the video which I will comment on: “Good And

Evil: do they exist? The answer separates Judeo-Christian values from secular values.

 

Is murder evil or wrong? How do you know murder is wrong?  There are secular facts but without God there are no moral facts.”

 

My response: God created the world and put natural law in place to operate that world based upon regularities and desired patterns of occurrence. God created humans in De’s own image, and gave us the Ten Commandments, God objective moral facts) to live by. Only God gives us objective morality, so if that is so, and it is, Prager argues, then murder is wrong.

 

I mostly accept Prager’s view though objective morality is not certainly true knowledge about values, but instead is knowledge about values of high probable certainty.

 

Prager: “In the secular world there are only moral opinions. God tells us murder is wrong, and that is objectively wrong.

 

First, there are kind atheists, so that is not connected to the question about do good and evil exist if there is no God.

 

Second, there are religious people that did evil, even in God’s name. God’s existence is not a guarantee that people will do good.

 

If God exists good and evil objectively exist. If there is no God, only moral opinions or moral relativism exist. Morality is not an absolute, only relative to the individual or society.”

 

My response: Prager the wise and good Jewish scholar and elder is reminding us that objective morality gives us a real chance to discover from God what objective values are, so that we born sinners now possess a solid set of the right values, so we then know how to live and act. We have the gold standard, and now all we need to do is live up to it. To the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, and other Biblical moral rules, I would add egoist ethics and Aristotelian-grounded self-actualization theory.

 

I am not quite as optimistic as Prager that an objective moral code from God exists or is at least ascertainable and translatable with full clarity and complete intelligibility, but his presentation comes close enough to match my own moderate moral system; Prager comes close to providing an objectivist/subjectivist moral code, or an egoist-individualistic/altruist-collectivist.

 

His moral code is objectivist/subjectivist but is more altruist-collectivist than egoist-individualistic like mine is.

 

Prager: “If God does not exist, then good and evil are just another way of saying ‘I like’ or ‘I don’t like’.”

 

My response: Ayn Rand offers an Objectivist-Objectivist moral code, which is fanatical, unrealistic, and likely does not apply in reality; still, she is more right than wrong.

 

Max Stirner, the subjective egoist, radical nominalist, pure anti-foundationalist and complete anti-essentialist, is the moral contradiction to Rand, being a Subjectivist-Subjectivist, and his fanatical moral subjectivism and moral relativism leads to explosive growth of immorality and chaos among people. With no religious and moral moorings, a society of Stirners would take their secular values and grab the nearest, favorite cause or fetishized, idolized abstraction and worship it as true believers, complete with the mass movement, their demagogue or strongman worshiped as a divinity as Lenin still is in Russia, in their communist or fascist totalitarian hell holes. Satan can walk the earth like a prowling lion once Stirner and the postmodernists wipe out Western, American, and Judeo-Christian culture and religion.

 

I am an Objectivist-Subjectivist morally as is Prager, but I am a egoist-individualist in ranking the primacy of moral motive (primary but not sole moral motive to be attended to and lived in accordance with), while Prager makes altruism-collectivism his first moral motive, and egoism-individualism is his secondary moral motive to follow, and I think Jordan Peterson and Christians would accept this Pragerian ranking of moral motives in terms of emphasis.

 

Both Max Stirner and Ayn Rand would favor egoism-individualism as the primary moral motive, with not much or anything good to say about following altruist-collectivist moral motives, utterly rejecting, and neglecting them as not useful, not interesting and Rand considered them wicked, self-defeating, and bad for people, and I generally agree with her.

 

I believe that Rand thinks people are basically good, that the universe is benevolent or neutral, that we have pure free will if we reason our way to a productive life of full meaning and self-development as a first hander.

 

I am not sure that she is a psychological egoist but she is a normative or rational egoist.

 

Stirner: how does he feel about basic human nature? His epistemic denial of any ability to verbalize concepts or abstractions in any way would preclude him from characterizing a priori whether each individual’s nature is fixed, let alone basically good, basically neutral, or basically wicked.

 

Prager, Peterson and I think people are not born basically good, and I go farther, thinking we are born basically wicked, but the morally and biologically recessive traits in our soul and being—the ability to be morally neutral or come to love goodness and strengthen once’s puny, but existent native goodness of the will--and that our mission from God is to use what strength, free will, intelligence, resources and creativity as we can each muster to renounce Satan and Lera, and to work for the Father and the Mother: we are to self-realize and spiritually and morally work for the Divine Couple, period. That is our life mission: we cannot escape it, and will pay for ignoring the call to arms to serve and pack guns while serving as the children of light in our generation, to work for and with the Good Spirits, all around us and among us.

 

Peterson and Prager are both psychological egoists who regard selfishness as immorality, and would favor some kind of rational altruism (It is reasonable to be good for the sake of others, and then the self will feel good and justifiably proud of earned moral worthiness based on service to others.), and they regard altruistic  other-interest as moral.

 

They are normative altruists that like the Western core principle that the individual is sovereign, which, I complain can contradict their altruist normativism. They have not addressed this contradiction which I challenge them to resolve by adopting or blending my Mavellonialist ethics with their altruist ethical code. If they do not address this contradiction, or heed my criticism about the defects in their moral code offered to the world, these wise and good elders of the West cannot offer people a sufficient, modern, upgraded space-age value system to live by.

 

I am a psychological altruist (People are born selfless and self-hating, and selflessness is evil, and selfishness—or better is the phrase enlightened self-interest—is good.) but a normative egoist, or more accurately and moderately a normative egoist as the a=major emphasis, and a normative altruist as the second moral emphasis.

 

 

Subjective morality of various ilk lead to moral chaos, selection from a multicultural smorgasbord of competing, relativist value systems. Subjective moralities, some immoral and some amoral, grow evil in each agent and for the world.

 

Objective morality as championed by Prager is roughly the way to go—even if it were but a useful, instructive fiction—as it may be in part, but it mostly existential reality and a divine claim made by the benevolent divinities upon each of us for a lifetime, while on this mortal coil.

 

Prager: “If there are no moral absolutes will people still not murder because they do not want to be murdered—that is wishful thinking. With no God, there are no Judeo-Christian values.

 

Without God and Biblical values, in the 20^th century, 100 million people were killed.

 

Slavery has always been around but it was eliminated and outlawed in Western countries based on Judeo-Christian values. God and these values are the source of other huge political, cultural and moral reforms: human rights, the emancipation of women and liberty.

 

Today the rejection of moral absolutes and Christian values has led to moral confusion. Fact: Without a God who is the source of morality, morality is just a matter of opinion.”

 

My response: Because humans are born without protective moral instincts to make them behave, and because God gave them the power to reason, to devise concepts, linguistically expressed, organized and reasoned into arguments and as a popularly accepted metanarrative that will characterize the traditional culture of any people anywhere, people have free will to make decisions about how to act, and God will reward them when they behave and punish them in this world and the next when they misbehave. There is no cosmological free lunch.

 

We are born sinful, mostly despising God and goodness, and favoring or loving Satan and wickedness. Satan is the leader of all packs or crowds, and humans are born selfless, group-living and nonindividuating (living the life of a mediocrity in the pack without joy, hope or dreams) in a world where the Good Spirits do not control much of the earth, but the Evil Spirits dominate because people refuse to grow up and work for the Divine Couple, the good deities and with and for the Good Spirits.

 

Our job, each of us, is to live by good values, a secular set (Randian) or a sacred set (offered by Prager and others) of objective, absolute moral values. We then secondarily can enjoy our altruist-collectivist ethics. The access to absolute moral values, that may exist but are not accessible to humans of limited mental capacity, is not the issue: the issue is to latch onto an objective moral code, whether or not it is a useful fiction or not, we need that useful fiction to build good lives and a good world.

 

Now I must contradict myself, but this is moderate or dialetheistic truth. We need objective moral values, but if we are not cautious, moderate, and humble, we can do murder and other horrible crimes in God’s name when we allow our objective values (whether they are actually objective or just some regional set of values ascribed universal and necessary attributes).

 

We need absolute values but we must not allow these useful values to be degraded into bad values if we become intolerant, violent extremists about every one living by our values or else. We must not become totalistic, fanatical, absolutistic or totalitarian in our expression and assertion of our objective values or the ism that we worship or live by.

 

And we must never use suppression of free speech and free thinking and threats of holy war, totalitarian government, threats of terrorism, torture, and visits from secret police to make people conform to our bad values.

 

People are individualists and individuators first and foremost, when they are spiritually and morally good, and as self-actualizers that worship some good deity, they accept or reject any religious faith or all religious faiths of their own free will. Adherents of ‘one-true-faiths” can try gentle persuasion but that is it. To use force, coercion, intimidation, group pressure, pogroms, government terror, holy war, and threats of violence to suppress and silence opponents who dissent and use their free speech against one’s cause—these bad means to promote ‘the good end” or the one true faith will pervert and transform that faith into a devil cult.

 

For example, yesterday, October 7, 2023 Hamas gunmen invaded Israel. They killed an Israeli soldier and a bunch of the killers surrounded the body and stomped into mush while yelling that God is great.

 

The Muslim faith is a great faith, and its mullahs, and adherents would likely assume and declare that it is the one truth faith, that believers will go to heaven, and unbelievers will burn or something like that. Their epistemology, their theology, their ethics would claim that their values and doctrines are absolutely objective and certainly right binding on all humans, and that is okay. For 1600 years this great faith has guided billons of believers and given them hope and salvation and meaning.

 

When Islam is not modernized, not moderate and demilitarized, like with Hamas, then what is a great objective spiritual and moral systems of belief is modified into a demonic nightmare, a totalitarian, violent mass movement whose true believers just know they are going to heaven as they butcher infidels and set up their universal caliphate. They are not working for Mohammed and Allah at that point—they are working for Lucifer and the Evil Spirits, and they will burn in hell. This goes for secular, totalitarian communists and fascists of any stripe or any other religious extremist, black and white thinkers.