We're getting off topic here, but it's your thread, so...
SF is one of my favorite posters here
If there isn't a common source, I'm not really sure what communication there is to be had. I mean, if I agree with the NAP, and you agree with the NAP, but we agree with it for different reasons, we can still have a discussion on what the NAP implies in situation X. But if I believe in the NAP, and you don't, there is absolutely no way either of us can prove our points without an appeal to an outside authority. It is what it is.
"What Would Jesus Do" first requires believing in Jesus. Secularists more often quote the Golden Rule, but without a belief in Christ (Or someone else who said the same thing) there's no basis for this. I agree we should have empathy, but why? Without a belief in some higher power, your standard that we should have empathy is just as good as someone else's standard of why we shouldn't. I've even heard some liberals say that killing a dolphin is morally equivalent to killing a 5 year old based on raw intelligence. How do you know? Of course, I'm a human exceptionalist, but I have REASONS for this worldview. Without a religious foundation, there are no reasons.
I continued to edit my post above while you were responding, so you probably missed the bolded part below:
Mini-Me said:
We've all been impacted by religious morality in one way or another, but we also derive morality from our internal conscience (empathy, which is reinforced by religious arguments like "WWJD") and reason. In the absence of proof, it's really a matter of opinion which came first: Conscience and reason, or religion.
Understand that Christianity is only one of many (nearly all) religions containing the Golden Rule across a myriad of cultures, many older than monotheism. From a secular perspective, this is evidence that the Golden Rule is probably baked into our instinctual sense of fairness and empathy, and it was only clarified and articulated by religious texts, not necessarily handed down as something entirely novel by divine inspiration. You're free to disagree, but the point here is that there's no logical reason why you
have to be right.
As far as dolphins go, you're right: We CAN'T absolutely prove one way or another that dolphins have rights with respect to human behavior. The fact that we do have empathy for animals (especially those most intelligence and/or most like us) is a hint in what I believe to be the right direction, but it's not proof. There are a LOT of things we can't prove (see Kurt Gödel), and that can be a little scary, but we have no choice but to accept that (or live in denial): We have to use our best judgment, justify things the best we can (with the humility to consider the severity of the implications in case we're wrong),
and once we get to the point of infinite regress, we have no choice but to use a circular argument or take some axiom on faith.
Now, you believe having a religious foundation gives you an airtight reason for your morality (God invented it, and not just God, but your specific version of God), but you're using special pleading for your specific religious faith over all other faith-based claims (overtly religious or otherwise). Everyone except absurdists and nihilists take some things on faith, i.e. the same basis as your belief in God and the Bible; the biggest difference between you and them is that you're more effective at fooling yourself about the certainty and exceptionalism of your faith-based beliefs. Most other world religions use the same special pleading as well, so "presuppositional apologists" of any faith aren't exactly going to win any ground among people who don't already - for completely circular reasons - believe in their particular axioms.
I take leaps of faith when I have to (e.g. universal morality exists), but as far as I'm concerned, faith in the Bible in front of you is not just a single leap of faith...it's at least four leaps of faith, two of which are highly suspect from a probability standpoint. It requires:
- faith that a very particular ancient religious book is true while others of similar claimed origin are not (red flag)
- that it could not have possibly been manipulated by human hands like everything else in the world (red flag; can only be resolved by circular belief in something very specific)
- that your senses are correct in conveying you the content of its text (requires a priori faith in your senses; this is a leap of faith everyone must make before believing religion)
- and that your logical reasoning, etc. is correct in interpreting the text's meaning (requires a priori faith in your ability to reason; this is a leap of faith everyone must make before believing religion)
Not everyone is willing to make all those leaps of faith, but you can still sometimes find an alternative common ground. That brings us back to why we got on this tangent:
You said, "As for religious arguments, I take the position that you cannot know ANYTHING without a religious foundation of some kind, so I kind of dismiss the argument that my position is religious." Now, you can dismiss the existence of secular morality if you want, but you have to understand that the people you're debating with often don't and won't. If you insist on debating people using
your faith rather than
theirs, you're going to find yourself at an impasse, and you won't have the tools necessary to convince them to change their minds.
If you want to effectively debate someone on a political or moral issue when they come from a different worldview, you need to first find common ground where you can, then work with the common ground that actually exists instead of the common ground you wish was there. In the case of morality, "universal morality exists" is a common enough basis for conversation that you and I can still converse about the NAP, even if we arrive at it differently. You and I don't
have to prove it to one another using a common set of axioms or circular beliefs, because we already agree on it. We can have meaningful discussions using it as a common basis without one or the other demanding further justification (up to the point of infinite regress or realizing that our axioms or circular justifications don't coincide).
Why is the simplest answer right?
Are you familiar with Occam's Razor? The simplest answer isn't necessarily right, but if multiple (or many) explanations are all consistent with the evidence, Occam's Razor says the simplest answer is probabilistically more likely to be correct. As a result, the more complex answer requires greater evidence to accept over the simpler one.
There are at least two reasons for this: First, by observation, universal laws tend toward simplicity and elegance. Second, the more constants you add to a proposed "equation," the less likely you'll have the correct value for all of them from the standpoint of probability. The more variables you add, the less likely it is that your "test data" was sufficient to properly characterize their relationship under all circumstances. Complexity is error-prone. The more complicated your solution is, the more equally complicated alternatives there are...and if your 3-billion-variable solution only fits the data as well as someone else's 5-variable solution, and a plethora of other 3-billion-variable solutions exist that fit the data just as well, the burden is on you to justify not only the addition of all the variables (and/or constants, etc.) but also why the particular relationship your solution describes is any more likely to be correct than that of any of the other 3-billion-variable solutions.
Why must a secular standard be reciprocal? Natural Law, a common secular basis for morality, necessarily implies rape and murder, because these things happen in the natural world. Not to mention that according to secularism people are really just another part of nature. Rejecting secular, Darwinian standards, or accepting them, has dramatic implications for morality, based on that religious decision. you can't just ignore that.
A universal secular standard doesn't HAVE to be reciprocal, but it does have to be universal (tautologically). If it's not reciprocal as well, there needs to be sufficient evidence to justify the messiness and inequality of non-reciprocal morality. I mean, if you're going to say that a very particular cabal of elites thousands of miles away has more of a right to decide what to do with my life, my body, my labor, etc. than I do, then you have to justify more than just why their power to decide is more important than me being the [obviously] biggest stakeholder. You also have to justify WHY the correct equation for universal morality specifies these
very particular people and organizations and not others. The common justification is "Democracy says so," but that adds even more variables like the kind of election (plurality, range voting, etc.) and thresholds, and again, "Why this version and not another?" The claim that some other particular person or group is greater than you are, better than you are, and that they have the right to your life/labor/etc. (and you don't) is so complex and arbitrary that it requires a heck of a lot more justification than the null hypothesis that "if anyone owns my body, it's me." Moreover, why does their authority over people suddenly stop at some arbitrary national boundary? That's another arbitrary element requiring justification, and things just get more and more strained and arbitrary from there. In short, no such justification really exists, especially on a universal level, and Occam's Razor simply tips the balance in favor of the simplest and least arbitrary hypothesis. Once you consider fallibility and the potentially disastrous implications of, "What if you're wrong?" it becomes even more obvious that sticking with self-ownership is the safer bet: Even if self-ownership isn't "the right answer," it's close enough to a least common denominator that it's likely to be a lot less wrong than all of the other wrong answers.
On the subject of universality, self-ownership is an inherently universal standard, and it's easily applicable to all situations under all civilizations that have ever existed or ever could exist. It's applicable to cave men, hermits living alone, and highly interconnected global societies. (Moreover,
except for the behavior of government, almost every society has based the morality of ordinary human interaction on a similar principle in practice as well.) In contrast, the statist idea of positive rights primarily applies under extremely limited sociopolitical circumstances assuming a certain level of socioeconomic development, and it requires an untold number of arbitrary specifics. (Find two socialists who agree in the slightest about exactly how everything should be run, such as how much each person of 6 billion or so people should rightly receive from the fruits of your labor. Their distributions are all going to be a whole lot different, and for the most arbitrary of reasons.) It's kind of absurd to argue it can compete with self-ownership as a universal standard for morality, when its particulars demonstrate it's far from universal.
Pure ideological international communists could conceivably get around the limitless arbitrary nature of most utilitarian morality (since they might satisfy a spatial universality criterion), but such a moral system inherently requires the international centralization of power, i.e. a particular institutional basis. After all, how else will an absolutely moral communist know right from wrong? How will he know how much of his product he should distribute, and to whom? The need for international organization to create an external authority/arbiter with a bird's eye view is inherently built into the international communist moral system itself, just so that individuals can have any idea of what's "right" and "wrong." Therefore, the moral system itself must somehow justify why some people and not others have the right to oversee and administrate the whole thing...something that's basically impossible to do even remotely correctly, especially considering every human implementation inevitably ends in absolute despotism and inequality of the worst sort. (The implications of the "What if we're wrong?" question are absolutely dire in this case.) Or if the "one true universal communist morality" requires an AI to tell everyone what to do (what software version does it mandate?), how on earth were people before the advent of AI supposed to live morally? This would seem to defeat the temporal universality of international communist morality, because it simply couldn't have applied as a universal moral basis over all time periods.
In other words, socialist morality adds a TON of variables without effectively justifying the addition of bottomless complexity and trivialization of stakeholders (individuals), and it even violates any reasonable notion of universality. However, it's worth noting that there are still unknowns under any moral standard: For the secular NAP, what are the rights of dolphins? Dogs? Cats? Bacteria? The NAP is also quiet regarding verbal and emotional abuse, etc. The Bible may offer an answer for those, and it may even answer "When does life begin?" However, does it answer, "What about Siamese twins?" There are other unknowns that apply to both the Bible and NAP as well. For instance, at what point does physical contact become assault, between "pushing someone away from an oncoming train" and "punching a hole in someone's head?" The latter scenario is extreme enough that we can distinguish between the two using objective criteria (e.g. permanent harm), but comparing two actions closer on the spectrum illustrates how difficult it is to escape from subjectivity entirely.
There are always going to be sticky moral issues that human beings will need to resolve to the best of our limited ability using judgment calls. That's a bit scary, since we won't be able to prove everything, but that's no reason to say, "Well, if you can't prove absolutely everything based on your axioms, your moral standard is worthless." Nobody can. We COULD use "might makes right" as an alternative null hypothesis to "self-ownership," i.e. reject the notion that universal morality exists altogether...but the societal implications are so dreadful that almost everyone would rather just assume, "Okay, let's say there's such a thing as right and wrong, and take it on faith. Now we just have to figure out which is which and when and hopefully come to an agreement."
Is Occam's Razor a foolproof way of separating the wheat from the chaff? No, of course not. It's just a probabilistic argument, so it's fallible. Still, from an outside perspective, it's nevertheless better at probabilistically distinguishing between competing secular moralities than
any non-circular standard is at distinguishing between competing religious moralities! Also, as far as self-ownership is concerned, you might be interested in reading about Hans-Hermann Hoppe's
"Argumentation Ethics." It's another imperfect argument that fails as a full-blown "proof" but strongly "winks and nudges" in the direction that self-ownership is the most logical basis for morality around. At the very least, it's the most logical basis that human beings are ever likely to agree upon...which once again brings us back full circle to the reason we're talking about this.
Still, dividing the liberty movement over the abortion issue is kind of pointless anyway, at least at the federal level: Even the pro-choice segment of the liberty movement is pretty much united behind Ron Paul's Constitutional logic (because he's correct). Roe vs. Wade was an unconstitutional decision with twisted logic of the worst kind: It used the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to imply a general right to privacy from the Fourth Amendment (shaky ground already), then assumed out of hand that laws against abortion violate that right, because abortion is practiced in private. However, if their argument held water, it would by extension make almost all laws against violent criminal acts "unconstitutional," because almost ALL crime, including almost all murder, is also committed in private. We can still prosecute crime committed in private once we have probable cause for a warrant to gather evidence, then enough evidence for an indictment, then enough for a conviction, etc. It doesn't require a police state, Fourth Amendment violations, or an invasion of privacy. (In the case of abortion: You had a huge bulge yesterday from a third trimester baby, and you no longer have a huge bulge today, nor do you have a baby, and you can't account for it. That's probable cause, just like: You had an infant in your home yesterday, and someone close to you noticed you don't have the infant today, and you can't account for it. Same deal.)
