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Link to Blog Post: "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice"

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Phil Robertson is being criticized for a thought experiment in which an atheist’s family is raped and murdered. On a talk show, he accused atheists of believing that there was no such thing as objective right or wrong, then continued:

I’ll make a bet with you. Two guys break into an atheist’s home. He has a little atheist wife and two little atheist daughters. Two guys break into his home and tie him up in a chair and gag him.

Then they take his two daughters in front of him and rape both of them and then shoot them, and they take his wife and then decapitate her head off in front of him, and then they can look at him and say, ‘Isn’t it great that I don’t have to worry about being judged? Isn’t it great that there’s nothing wrong with this? There’s no right or wrong, now, is it dude?’

Then you take a sharp knife and take his manhood and hold it in front of him and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if [there] was something wrong with this? But you’re the one who says there is no God, there’s no right, there’s no wrong, so we’re just having fun. We’re sick in the head, have a nice day.’

If it happened to them, they probably would say, ‘Something about this just ain’t right’.

The media has completely proportionally described this as Robinson “fantasizing about” raping atheists, and there are the usual calls for him to apologize/get fired/be beheaded.

So let me use whatever credibility I have as a guy with a philosophy degree to confirm that Phil Robertson is doing moral philosophy exactly right.

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This is a LW discussion post for Yvain's blog posts at Slate Star Codex, as per tog's suggestion:

Like many Less Wrong readers, I greatly enjoy Slate Star Codex; there's a large overlap in readership. However, the comments there are far worse, not worth reading for me. I think this is in part due to the lack of LW-style up and downvotes. Have there ever been discussion threads about SSC posts here on LW? What do people think of the idea occasionally having them? Does Scott himself have any views on this, and would he be OK with it?

Scott/Yvain's permission to repost on LW was granted (from facebook):

I'm fine with anyone who wants reposting things for comments on LW, except for posts where I specifically say otherwise or tag them with "things i will regret writing"


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Discussion of Slate Star Codex: "Extremism in Thought Experiments is No Vice"
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[-]Jiro270

I'm going to repost something I posted there:

I think that Scott is looking at Phil Robertson’s literal words and ignoring context, implication, and connotation. It is possible to parse what Phil Robertson said as a thought experiment which questions the logical consequences of an atheistic position.

But even though his literal words have the form of such a thought experiment, that’s not what he’s doing. He’s stringing together a set of applause lights meant to tell his audience that he fantasizes about the outgroup getting punished for being the outgroup in a way that is their own fault.

It is a scourge of the Internet that people are too literal. Scott is falling victim to this trend here. The way Phil Robertson phrased that, and the circumstance surrounding it, make it very clear that it is not just a thought experiment even if you can take it apart and say “well, a thought experiment has A, and B, and C, and Phil is also using A, and B, and C and in exactly the right order."

Yes, people can use extreme scenarios when they are legitimately trying to argue a point. No, this is not a case of that. It's not even a case of atheists in the audience getting mindkilled. It's a case of atheists in the audience correctly understanding what he's saying. In the real world outside LW, most hypotheticals of this sort are attacks and not sincere attempts to make a philosophical point.

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[-]samath130

Sorry, but I'm guessing you don't spend much time around religious conservatives like Robertson. It's actually quite common among them to reason philosophically like this, mainly due to the emphasis on Christian apologetics. I'm sure Robertson has come across an argument of this form before and just reworked it for this.

Let me offer some more evidence. Listening to a recording of it, there are some chuckles in the audience at the beginning, but it grows silent by the end as most people grow more disgusted. The natural reaction, right in his last line, is, "Yes, something isn't right about this. Atheists do not deserve to be raped, murdered and castrated. The world would be quite chilling if we didn't have the moral authority to declare that some things are right and some things are wrong."

That's the complete opposite conclusion as, "Yes, atheists deserve to be tortured for believing there's no right and wrong." I honestly don't see how you think that could be the conclusion he wants you to reach. You don't promote the Holocaust by talking about how much pain the Jews would suffer in concentration camps. You use weasel words like "the final solution to the Jewish problem." Robertson is doing the exact opposite.

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9Jiro
The fantasy isn't mainly that Robertson likes torturing atheists or thinks his audience does. The fantasy is that their own atheism is responsible for them being tortured and that the awfulness of that demonstrates that atheism is awful. Whether his audience likes hearing about atheists suffering is a side issue. That's a bad comparison because Nazis did not believe that Jews could or should give up being Jews.
4samath
Hmmm, I think a better word than "fantasy" here is "dystopia." Robertson is painting a bleak picture of a world where without moral authority, like the (much longer) bleak depiction of say, Fahrenheit 451 of a world without intellectual freedoms. Again, the natural reaction to reading Fahrenheit 451 or hearing Robertson isn't gleeful cackling, but shocked horror. "Something ain't right."
-1Unknowns
Robertson is mistaken in believing that atheists all deny the existence of right and wrong. However, from a timeless decision point of view, someone who does in fact deny the existence of right and wrong is at least partly "responsible" for it if he is murdered by someone who does not believe that murder is wrong and who would not have done it if he did believe it was wrong. Saying he has no responsibility at all in this sense, would be like saying that the person who takes two boxes in a Newcomb situation is not responsible for the fact that he didn't get the million.
6private_messaging
Precisely. It's also implying that atheists are moral nihilists. Which is BS. Plenty of religious people believe in god who will grant them passage to heaven irrespective of their moral conduct just as long as they repent and accept Jesus; and a plenty of atheists are not moral nihilists.
2Furcas
Exactly right.
0casebash
"and not sincere attempts to make a philosophical point" - So, he's confused atheists and moral error theorists, but the point is rather valid philosophically. It is very easy to say that one doesn't believe in morality in the abstract, but much harder when confronted with a vivid, specific example.
1Jiro
"Sincere" and "valid" aren't the same thing.
[-]dxu210

The problem with Robertson's thought experiment, I feel, isn't that it's extreme or visceral, but rather that it is strawmanning an overwhelming majority of atheists. (Scott actually coined a term for this sort of thing: weak man.)

Most atheists I know don't in fact believe that God is the only possible source of morality; in fact, many of them hold that even if God existed, they would still evaluate each of His commandments on their own merits before deciding to obey. The mere fact that you don't believe in God doesn't make you a moral nihilist all of a sudden. Robertson's thought experiment relies upon the implicit assumption that atheism implies moral nihilism, making it okay to rape and murder, which is frankly a very old argument that has been refuted a great many times, both on and off the Internet.

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3Kaninchen
Can we differentiate between "Atheists ought logically to be moral nihilists" and "If you are an atheist, you are necessarily a moral nihilist" ? I take you to mean the second of these, which is indeed plainly false. The first of these statements is not obviously false. It is (epistemically) possible that there are no good non-religious grounds for moral realism (which is not to say that there are good religious grounds for it either). That said, I do wonder if Robertson actually believes it. If he ceased to believe in God, would he really start behaving "immorally" whenever it turned out to be in his self-interest?
4gjm
I agree, but so far as I can see the strongest arguments against moral realism actually work just as well if there is a god as if there isn't -- unless you cheat by defining your god in a way that presupposes moral realism. That's a common move, of course, and I'm sure it's not generally intended as any kind of cheating, but none of that makes the argument "I have defined 'God' in a way that presupposes moral realism. It turns out that there aren't good non-theistic arguments for moral realism, but if you define 'God' my way then it's easy to deduce moral realism from his existence. Since we all know that moral realism is correct, this is evidence for God." a good argument.
0torekp
Nitpick: Scott didn't coin "weak man", he mentioned it because the term appeared in the fallacy/bias literature. Previous to that on Scott's blog, I coined the term "flesh man"; later someone proposed "tin man". I don't know why Scott didn't use my term :( , or "tin man", either of which is much better. A flesh/tin man is an argument/position that a real person actually holds, but where this real person has been selected to represent the worst of whatever side/camp you want to tar with the brush of foolishness or nastiness.
[-]Jan_Rzymkowski210

My problem with such examples is that it seems more like Dark Arts emotional manipulation than actual argument. What your mind hears is that, if you're not believing in God, people will come to your house and kill your family - and if you believed in God they wouldn't do that, because they'd somehow fear the God. I don't see how is this anything else but an emotional trick.

I understand that sometimes you need to cut out the nuance in morality thought experiments, like equaling taxes to being threatened to be kidnapped, if you don't regularly pay a racket. But the opposite thing is creating exciting graphic visions. Watching your loved one raped is not as bad as losing a loved one - but it creates a much better psychological effect, targeted to elicit emotional blackmail.

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0Ben Pace
So, if we were to follow that line of argument, should we not allow philosophy on television? Is it too dangerous for the public to be exposed to? :)
[-]Dorikka140

Thanks for doing this.

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[-]Epictetus70

Robertson's point is actually quite relevant for religious folk. When I was still a serious Christian, I too wondered how a purely secular approach to morality could avoid degenerating into relativism or a "might makes right" free-for-all.

Any arbitrariness in one's approach to morality risks relativism, as someone else can take a different approach and so reach a different conclusion. For example, utilitarianism becomes a much different beast if I introduce a caste system wherein I take a weighted sum of people's utilities. I may decide that one ... (read more)

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-2JohnBuridan
Cheating and lying does not always devalue other people's happiness though. Cheating on the GRE doesn't obviously hurt other people. Lying (or misdirection) sometimes spares someone a painful truth or leaves them none the wiser. Like when a kid lies to his dad about where he was earlier this afternoon. These pretty simple counter-examples don't refute your point fully. I propose them because I think there is something lacking to say the only reason we can't cheat and lie our way to the good life is because it hurts other people's happiness. Sometimes it doesn't. But cheating in Axis & Allies always separates the agent from the opportunity to gain the happiness that comes from being an excellent Axis & Allies player. I think this type of happiness must be part of your moral reasoning too.
[-]Vaniver130

Cheating on the GRE doesn't obviously hurt other people.

Except for the people whose actual ability is higher than yours, whose slot you took, or the people who get someone of lower ability that the scores suggest, and that's just the first order effects. The second order effects of having a society with less efficient information transfer are also pretty miserable.

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0JohnBuridan
I agree with some provision. My counter-examples can be shown to lead to bad effects, but only in an ad hoc kind of way. I think the GRE cheater could potentially justify his/her actions by pointing toward other evils in society (like nepotism or it's-who-you-know-ism) that require him getting an edge on this allegedly stupid test in order to succeed in a world more interested in money, favors, and quantifying smarts, than it is in true intelligence. He may also counter that there is no "slot" he takes by doing as well as someone with "higher ability" if the ability measured is merely the ability to take the GRE, which our cheater contends it is. There is never an end to the litany of justifications, contingent realities, where a greater good is brought out, or a systematic evil exposed, etc. etc. I mean what were these people thinking? I hesitate to wag my finger only to point out they are hurting other people by this behavior. Is that that is THE rational argument? Do you think demonstrating the second order effects are the most convincing way to demonstrate the wrongness of cheating? My reasons for not cheating aren't solely based on the effects my actions may, but not necessarily, have on others. I also desire to achieve the happiness that comes from excellence at something. As I mentioned above, I think you need both rationales.
[-]samath70

As someone who has spent a lot of time with religious conservatives, I've heard the sort of argument given by Robertson many times before. And they use it as an actual argument used against nihilism, which they tend to think follows directly from atheism. So Scott is completely right to address it as such.

I think Robertson conflates the two because he (and others like him) can't really imagine a coherent non-arbitrary atheist moral realist theory. Can anyone here give a good example of one that couldn't include what the murderer he depicts seems to believe?

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6hairyfigment
What does "non-arbitrary" mean, and why is it a virtue? More, why does Robertson's religion have this property, when plainly no moral claims can logically follow from the existence of some deity unless we start by assuming a connection?
0samath
What I meant is that you could easily just define your ethics to include by definition "murder is bad" and it'd satisfy all of the other criteria (assuming you could coherently define murder). But if I imagine myself telling Robertson (or somone similar) that, they'd ask how I came up with that rule and why someone else couldn't just come up with the opposite rule "murder is good" and so it was just an arbitrary choice on my part.
8hairyfigment
When Lovecraft invented the blind idiot god Azathoth (as the human narrator calls it), he was likely just taking the Old Catholic/Aristotelian view of God and imagining what that might look like given the universe we live in. Azathoth maintains existence by sitting at its center surrounded by vast demonic dancers. There's a mediator, here called Nyarlathotep rather than Jesus or the Pope, who claims to somehow be doing Azathoth's will when he told humans to murder each other. I mention this because we would not consider N's commands morally binding, even in that scenario. We consider hypothetical deities moral or immoral based on whether or not they agree with "arbitrary" rules like not hurting people unnecessarily, not the other way around. Nothing else in the 'philosophical' account of God actually has moral significance. Nor can it provide a foundation for the claims that it sneakily assumes. So one big reason why I look down on Robertson's argument is that the charge he makes against atheists doesn't distinguish theism from atheism.
4DanArmak
Some religious traditions disagree. There are, in fact, people who believe God is by definition good and therefore any known commandment of God is good if we trust its divine status, because our own moral sense is fallible but God is not.
2tog
How about moral realist consequentialism? Or a moral realist deontology with defeasible rules like a prohibition on murdering? These can certainly be coherent. I'm not sure what you require them to be non-arbitrary, but one case for consequentialism's being non-arbitrary would be that it is based on a direct acquaintance with or perception of the badness of pain and goodness of happiness. (I find this case plausible.) For a paper on this, see http://philpapers.org/archive/SINTEA-3.pdf
3TheAncientGeek
Or rule consequentialism, or constructivism, or contractarianism....
0DanArmak
Why does Robertson, or anyone else, insist on moral realism? And what exactly does he mean by it? There seem to be different usages of "moral realism", which is confusing. The main two are: 1. Morals are an objective property of the universe, or possibly of mathematics (e.g. game theoretic cooperation), which can be deduced and agreed on, even separately from purely human concerns and attributes. So we can speak of objective morals. And if one believes that humans are typical of (evolved) intelligences, and that evolution removes behavior that is self-destructive or unstable, it's likely that common human morals are somewhat correlated with these universal morals. 2. Humans are very homogenous compared to all possible intelligent agents. Human moral beliefs, intuitions and actions are more alike than they are different. This shared core is objective or "real" in the sense that it is independent of any particular human or even any particular human culture. So we can speak of objective human!morals.
0Lumifer
Well, Robertson insists on moral realism because he is a believing Christian and Christianity is rather insistent about it -- specifically in the sense of your first usage case. I haven't seen anyone call the second case "moral realism" outside of the LW context.
0DanArmak
When stated like that, it's clearly circular. Is he saying that his moral beliefs are better because they're more like his moral beliefs than other, dissimilar beliefs?
0Lumifer
No, when a moral realist says his beliefs are better, he means they are better because they are true. Under moral realism morality is like physics -- that's just how the universe is constructed and the criterion for truth is matching the territory (reality for physics and God's will for Christianity).
0DanArmak
In this system, do morals have a separate status from other divine commandments and laws? What is the definition of the category "morals", if the only way to discover them is to study divine revelation, and not by introspection?
0Lumifer
In the same way the laws of physics have a separate status from divine commandments like "Though shall not stick a fork into an active electric outlet". What God likes or doesn't like. Alternatively, what gets you closer to heaven or to hell. Moral realism doesn't care about introspection.
0DanArmak
That sounds to me like there isn't a difference between morals and other commandments. If sticking a fork into a socket is a divine commandment, then following it is liked by God (God likes people to follow commandments), and it brings you closer to Heaven (God lets people into Heaven if they follow commandments). If the fork-and-socket commandment didn't bring you closer to heaven or hell, then it wouldn't be a commandment, because breaking it wouldn't be a sin.
2Lumifer
Morals are the underlying unreachable (for mortals) perfection. Commandments are heuristics for getting closer. If morality is like physics, commandments are like engineering And don't think contemporary engineering with calculators, simulations, etc. Think medieval engineering, like building cathedrals -- you don't necessarily understand why things work this way, but you know that the three people before you who tried to do it another way had their walls collapse.
0DanArmak
That does make sense. Thank you for the explanation.
0seer
Well the fact that it appears to be impossible to get two LessWrongers to agree on whether a given moral theory is coherent and non-arbitrary is not encouraging in that regard.
1dxu
As written, this implies that every LWer holds a different moral theory, which seems obviously false. A better phrasing might be, "There does not appear to be a majority position on morality on LW." Also, talking about only LWers seems a bit narrow. I would have gone for "moral philosophers in general", actually.
0TheAncientGeek
Because lesswrongians have philosophical superpowers, so if they can't do it, noone can? But lesswrongian are rather lacking philosophical ordinarypowers, from where I'm standing.
-1TheAncientGeek
But a significant number of atheists are nihilists and relativist, and the reasons seem to be the same...they can't imagine naturalized objective ethics. And the common problem is stopping at personal incredulity rather than researching what anyone else has come up with. Show me the kind of atheists who is a moral nihilist, and I'll show you the kind of atheist who disdains philosophy.
3gjm
What, like J L Mackie? For someone who disdains philosophy, he sure wrote a lot of it.
2dxu
Source? (Also, what do you mean by "significant number"? Over 10%? Over 20%?)
-2TheAncientGeek
Conversations with atheists.
[-]ChristianKl60

Phrasing the moral example this way is likely to cause participants in the discussion to get mind-killed and not conductive to get them to reason freely.

In particular it distracts here from the strawman he's making. Most atheists do think that there something wrong with rape and murder.

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-1Normal_Anomaly
I think the problem is that Robertson doesn't know that.
5seer
Yes, he does. The whole claim underlying the argument is that atheists on some level know rape and murder are wrong, they just can't explain why.
-4seer
The problem is they have a hard time saying what.
4Kindly
I don't think that's true in any important way. I might say: "Killing Joe is bad because Joe would like not to be killed, and enjoys continuing to live. Also, Joe's friends would be sad if Joe died." This is not a sophisticated argument. If an atheist would have a hard time making it, it's only because one feels awkward making such an unsophisticated argument in a debate about morality.
0DanArmak
This doesn't answer the question. Why is doing things Joe doesn't like, or making his friends sad, bad? Consequentialism isn't a moral system by itself; you need axioms or goals.
2dxu
Because ceteris paribus, I prefer not to make Joe or his friends sad (which is an instance of the more general rule, "don't violate people's preferences, ceteris paribus"). And before you say that makes morality "arbitrary" or something along those lines, note that the overwhelming majority of society (in most Western First World countries, anyway--I don't how it is in, say, the Middle East) agrees with me. So yes, technically you could have a preference for violating other people's preferences, and those preferences would technically be just as valid as mine, but in practice, if you act upon that preference, you are violating one of society's rules, and game theory says that defectors get punished. So unless you want to get locked up for a long time, don't kill people. Of course, you might find this unsatisfactory for several reasons. For example, you might demand that morality hold anywhere and everywhere, whether a society exists to enforce it or not. However, the behavior of other animals in the wild definitely contradicts that idea, and humans, for all their intelligence, are still animals at their core, and therefore likely to behave the same way if deprived of societal norms. (Mind you, given enough time, they could probably implement a society from scratch--after all, we did it once--but that'll take a long time.) Unless you're a moral realist or something, which is indefensible for other reasons, I don't really see how you could argue your way out of this point.
0Jiro
Doesn't that also imply you should feed utility monsters?
2dxu
Sure. After all, I value humans much more highly than pigs. Doesn't that imply that humans are utility monsters, at least compared to other animals? EDIT: Vegans, on the other hand, should have a much harder time with the idea of utility monsters (at least from what little I know about veganism).
0DanArmak
And that's pretty much the difference between the two kinds of "moral realism".
-2Kindly
You can always keep asking why. That's not particularly interesting.
0DanArmak
In morals, as in logic, you can't explain something by appealing to something else unless the chain terminates in an axiom. The question "why is it bad to rape and murder?" can be rephrased as, "how can we determine if a thing is bad, in the case of rape and murder?" The answer "rape and murder are bad by definition" may be unsatisfying, but at least it's a workable way: everything on the list is bad, everything else is not. But the answer "because they make others sad" assumes you can determine making others sad is bad. You substitute one question for another, and unless we keep asking why, we won't have answered the original question.
0Kindly
Okay, then interpret my answer as "rape and murder are bad because they make others sad, and making others sad is bad by definition".
-5seer
2[anonymous]
Intuition. Terminal values.
-2seer
You'd be amazed what can seem intuitive when you find yourself in a situation where it would be really convenient for Joe to die.
0TheAncientGeek
That would mean that atheist morality is context dependent, for instance applying different standards at peacetime and wartime. Historically, Christian morality serms to be similar.
1polymathwannabe
For all that Christian moralists criticize situationalist ethics, I've found that all ethical systems inevitably end up being situationalist; i.e. "thou shalt not kill" except when God commands otherwise.
[-]tog60

I largely agree with the post. Saying Robertson's thought experiment was off limits and he was fantasising about beheading and raping atheists is silly. I think many people's reaction was explained by their being frustrated with his faulty assumption that all atheists are necessarily (implicitly or explicitly) nihilists of the sort who'd say there's nothing wrong with murder.

One amendment I'd make to the post is that many error theorists and non-cognitivists wouldn't be on board with what the murderer is saying in the thought experiment. For example, they ... (read more)

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7Jiro
He's not fantasizing about he himself beheading atheists. What he's fantasizing about is subtly different: he's fantasizing about the idea that atheists will get beheaded because of their own atheism rebounding on them, so it's their own fault.
5gattsuru
Robertson doesn't strike me as a particularly scholarly thinker, but even less well-thought religious folk have confronted the problems of evil and tragedy. The story of Job is a common subject of discussion in churches and among religious folk, and it's always framed as horrible things happened to Job because of his belief in a deity and because of the deity. Christians aren't unused to the concept of bad things happened because of their faith rebounding on them. He's fantasizing about the outside world giving 'indisputable proof' of external morality. The religious folk have /countless/ scenarios like this, and the better-spoken ones will explicitly call them tests of 'relative' morality. There's a pretty easy response to Robertson's thought experiment even within that framing -- to borrow from Babylon 5's Marcus Cole, "wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?" -- but the state of promoted discussion by atheists is so terrible that Robertson's probably not aware of it.
0DanArmak
Many religious traditions believe just this. Bad things are punishments from God. When bad things (with no human cause) happen to someone, that proves they sinned.
-2seer
I don't see what this quote is supposed to mean, besides a deep-wisdomy way of saying that you don't want to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions.
7Sabiola
Some people, when something bad happens to someone else, say things like "well, they must have done something bad to deserve that happening to them". This quote means that people like that should STFU. For example, my parents were good people who totally did NOT deserve to die of cancer.
1gattsuru
Ah, it's not really about locus of control: the context is destitute people falling ill due to contaminated food. It's more about situations where bad things happen that are not readily controlled or avoided due to lack of knowledge or circumstance. The point of the quote is that it is no more comforting to be Job, and to have your family killed and everything taken from you because it is a deity's plan, than it is to be a moral nihilist who has your family killed and everything taken from you because the universe is a cold and unforgiving place. To many people, Job's deal is less desirable, because railing against the fundamental unfairness of the universe is a lot more socially condoned where a lot of deities are lightning-bolt-happy.
0seer
So that's an argument for why it would be better if life were fair.
0gattsuru
If the experienced observations were to look different. Stuck with the universe we've got, though...
1ChristianKl
The difference is between taking responsibility for your actions and your outcomes. If you get mugged on the street, are you responsible because of bad karma or being insufficiently trained in martial arts or do you simply have bad luck?
[-]taygetea40

You could construct an argument about needing to reinforce explicitly using system-2 ethics on common situations to make sure that you associate those ethics implicitly with normal situations, and not just contrived edge cases. But that seems to be even a bit too charitable. And also easily fixed if so.

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[-]Xerographica40

I definitely agree with Scott's argument. Using extreme scenarios can help get to the heart of the matter/morality. It's especially interesting because Scott's previous post was... Is Everything A Religion? If everything is truly a religion then Phil Robertson's scenario loses steam. The atheist would simply reply to the intruders that he does believe in God... just not the Christian God. If the intruders pressed the atheist for details... and the atheist was a liberal... then he could tell him that the state is his God. This would be consistent with... (read more)

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[-]Slider30

This is easily turned into a counterexample to basing moral on God. Say that for what ever reason somebody just hasn't have access to bible/christian teachings. Then the harassers visit this guy. It would still be "If it happened to them, they probably would say, ‘Something about this just ain’t right’". Proposedly later the bible and christian teaching were offered to this guy and he later realises that what the guys did was really really wrong. This is really implausible, it is way earlier that he would suspect that this isn't right and would p... (read more)

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-2seer
The claim is that they would not be able to say what.
2Slider
Nobody needs to reference anything religious in order to be be tempted as the receiver of the attack to label it wrong. "Geez this feels really uncomfortable but I guess I can't judge this because I don't have any moral authorities to tell me that would be okay". That would be like arguing that soldiers would be physically unable to shoot unless some general orders them to. While it is true that soldiers under a command of a general will wait till an order to shoot, a soldier that knows they are generalless will not wait for external ques to act. Correspondingly humans are capable of being independent moral agents. They don't need to be told to be moral. Even if their goodness can be boosted by being part of a communal moral discussion.
[-]Toggle20

We here are largely aware of Robertson's comments not because they have particular merit as a thought experiment, but because they occupy the sweet spot of maximizing controversy. That is, it is easy to present as objectionable within Blue Tribe, and easy to present as defensible in Red Tribe, and so in the end it's a fairly textbook toxoplasma. This isn't to say that the general question isn't interesting; it's just more important than usual that interested parties treat the thought experiment like a finger pointing to an interesting argument.

Personally... (read more)

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[-]irrational_crank20

Even if the atheist was a moral nihilist (of course he is conflating atheism and nihilism), it still would not be rational to carry out the action because we would hope that society's condemnation from people with moral systems and appropriate deterrents (e.g the risk of getting caught and getting a life prison sentence) so even saying that moral nihilism will lead to mass murder is wrong, so long as a sufficiently large percentage of the population believe in consistent and sensible moral systems. The moral nihilist would also have to overcome his brain's... (read more)

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-4seer
That's an argument against promoting moral nihilism.
[-]hairyfigment20

The only steelman I can come up with here starts by assuming that he considers Authority a terminal or root moral value. Then he could correctly argue that atheism leaves no basis for believing in Authority as a fundamental value. Neither does theism, unless you specifically work that in - but let's ignore this. Certainly I would expect a greater tendency to believe in this value among theists.

The main problem lies in the fact that I don't need to believe in Authority to oppose murder. He picked an example that has nothing to do with it, precisely so that ... (read more)

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1[anonymous]
I think it is a level subtler than that. Value is downstream from utility - we consider something good because it is good for something. Most values are instrumental. Terminal values are a bit hanging in the air. The theist solution is to call terminal values simply instrumental values for god's purposes and call it a day. I.e. humans practically being gods property or tools. That way all values are instrumental, all goods are good for somethings and it is coherent. The interesting part here is that if feels seductively intelligent. After all most people just consider those things values they feel remotely good about. To see most values as instrumental - for example, to see democracy as not simply something to cheer for, but a tool with advantages and disadvantages - is much more intelligent approach. To be able to tie down every value as instrumental, just some of them are not human instruments, feels super logical. It is a textbook case of "feeling rational" and this is part of why I used to be tempted towards theism in the past, as it makes everything make sense. "We have the UN in order to not have thermonuclear war! We want to avoid thermonuclear war so that we are not extinct! Why shouln't we be extinct? It would be the end of all problems and suffering... but maybe god has plans with us and he is our rightful owner! So let's support the UN!" You can see how elegant and tied-down it is. The proper atheist solution is nowhere that elegant. I can only argue from a Heideggerian "we are thrown in the world and must cope". We are the accidents of evolution thrown in a world that is an accident of the big bang or quantum many-worlds. We cope however we can. Part of that coping is calling those values that are most likely to make life bearable for most terminal values. It is not elegant at all, and I can understand why it is less attractive than theism. But it is more probably true.
1hairyfigment
It's only coherent if you don't expect it to solve the problem (rather than hide it from your view). It's only attractive if you expect God to fulfill your own terminal values. You should be able to see contrary hypotheses, since you say one of them is close to being true (or at least more likely). ETA: Actually, the view discussed in the parent could probably be made coherent, but not sound for the true natural numbers, at least not without straightforwardly defining the word "morality" to mean something else which I don't care about. You could insist that there exists a number encoding a proof that (for example) all attempts at utility functions other than God's contain contradictions, or otherwise imply God's values. This would be a lie - but if you're careful not to accept anything which could prove the lie (by showing certain truths about natural numbers, 'real' numbers, and the linked theorem), it would have a "non-standard model" containing a non-standard object encoding a "proof".
0[anonymous]
Yes, the Alien God metaphor is a good one, it is very close to the Heideggerian "we are thrown into the world and must cope somehow, cannot really expect elegant solutions" I subscribe to. I am not at all sure it is a given that people have, just happen to have terminal values. I think you are assuming too much here, perhaps, a very autonomous upbringing where you are expected to form opinions instead of letting your behavior guided by the prevailing opinion without affirming or denying it. For example some old guy used to go to church and then stopped it because there was some kind of an altercation. At no point he decided whether he is theist or atheist, to him the question felt like taking a position about the many-words interpretation in quantum physics: something far above his "pay grade", he wanted to leave the question to experts, he never had belief and never had unbelief. He did not think he is entitled to either of them. Rather he did the church-going as a social ritual and then stopped it when there were certain social problems. (I don't remember the details, it was something about him being a teetotaller as he disliked drunken fist-fights and somehow the churchiest guys were the drunkiest and then it did not go down well.) I don't really understand the part about natural numbers.
1JohnBuridan
I have trouble seeing two things: It seems to me not all theists reject terminal values, for example, beatitude (transcendental happiness) for some theists is a terminal value, for others serving God is terminal (so to speak); and it also seems theism can be reconciled with Heidegger by being a terminal value itself freely chosen in order to save me from my geworfenheit. "Save me from my geworfenheit" being a customary household phrase. :)
[-]Princess_Stargirl10

Phill presumably believes in Divine Command theory. But its not really obvious why "Divine command theory" really solves the problem. For example consider the following passage: “This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys." - Imagine Phill was an Amalekite. Then the murder of his whole family would be morally righteous?

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[-][anonymous]00

Egoism demonstrates that my right and my wrong are paramount. Not god, not government, me. An atheist morality with absolute clarity, applicability and consistency. Egoism does not rely on anyone else being an egoist, including myself in the past or future. If I say don't kill, I am right.

Tinyurl.com/theuniqueone

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2TheAncientGeek
And if you say you should kill, and someone else says they should not be killed? Egoism is easy enough when no one does anything.
[-][anonymous]00
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[-][anonymous]-20

I recall an early couple of comments I made on vegetarianism on LessWrong. The first was a mildly snarky variation of my opinion of what was wrong with a line of reasoning. The second was a rather graphic depiction of one logical conclusion of that line of reasoning. I was worried the snark might be down-voted, but it was instead up-voted rather heavily. The graphic depiction which I thought was much more direct ended up being down-voted rather heavily. I still don't fully understand the norms of discussion at LW.

Phil Robertson may have been correct b... (read more)

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[-]Dutchmo-20

"there is no God, there’s no right, there’s no wrong,"

Here is the flaw in the logic. Of course this behaviour would still be considered wrong, because: 1) It is illegal. It is a violation of criminal statutes that do not appear to be sourced, either directly or indirectly, from the Bible.

2) It is immoral, in that it violates societal mores.

One of the main problems with providing morals/ethics from God, is that the feedback system is very weak. You only find out whether you have violated God's rules until after you have died. If you violate the l... (read more)

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2seer
So if a law was passed saying its OK to kill members of group X, you'd have no problem killing them. My point is that the "it's illegal" argument is a total cop-out.
2Lumifer
Morality and legality are very different things. These two sets overlap, of course, but are not nearly identical. That assumes God is pretty stupid and powerless. Not a good assumption to along with the assumption of the existence of hell.
[-][anonymous]-20

Even if they think there's no right and wrong or whatever, they probably still want to live. Otherwise they would've killed themselves already.

More personally:

  1. I quite dislike and don't get the point about them being atheists. What's the connection?

    1. In addition to that, reductionally (Although perhaps statistically) there's nothing that says "atheist equals [value]". Perhaps statistically on anecedotally, but not reductionally. Unless HE (and only he, because that's what HE's saying. Because he's making the argument and that's what HE believes
... (read more)
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3gjm
The connection is that the whole point of Phil Robertson's spiel was a criticism of atheism and atheists, the idea being that because atheists can't get their moral values from God they don't, or shouldn't, or can't coherently, have moral values at all (and, allegedly, therefore aren't in a position to complain if their family is abused and murdered and they are mutilated). That's all kinds of wrong, and Scott understands that; the only thing he's defending is one specific feature of Robertson's crappy argument that some people have taken offence at, namely its use of an unpleasant thought experiment in which awful things are done to an atheist and his family.
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