A funny argument for traditional morality

cousin_it

I just had a long conversation with my brother, a devout Christian. With my help he has outlined the following argument why it might be good for me to follow Christian deontology:

Many of my moral values arose from my upbringing, as opposed to biology. This is evidenced by the fact that biologically similar people living in different places and epochs have different ideas of what's right.
Therefore many of my values originally came from the society that raised me.
Society's values were strongly influenced by Christian values, and many of our core moral prohibitions are inherited from Christian tradition.
The world is full of people who may want to edit my values ever-so-slightly while I'm not looking, in order to further their own agenda.
Also my values may drift, and most drift is harmful from the perspective of my current values.
A good recipe for countering this insidious deterioration of values is to consciously pull them back toward their original source, as long as it's something unchanging, like a book.
That means editing my values to more closely match Christianity. QED.

What do you think?

I just had a long conversation with my brother, a devout Christian. With my help he has outlined the following argument why it might be good for me to follow Christian deontology:

Many of my moral values arose from my upbringing, as opposed to biology. This is evidenced by the fact that biologically similar people living in different places and epochs have different ideas of what's right.
Therefore many of my values originally came from the society that raised me.
Society's values were strongly influenced by Christian values, and many of our core moral prohibitions are inherited from Christian tradition.
The world is full of people who may want to edit my values ever-so-slightly while I'm not looking, in order to further their own agenda.
Also my values may drift, and most drift is harmful from the perspective of my current values.
A good recipe for countering this insidious deterioration of values is to consciously pull them back toward their original source, as long as it's something unchanging, like a book.
That means editing my values to more closely match Christianity. QED.

What do you think?

All values, wherever they come from, need to be re-examined on their own merit. At one point slavery was thought to be acceptable by a lot of people. If you grew up in that society, you would probably inherit that belief as well. There are very likely similar beliefs that you have right now, that were given to you by some source you find credible (society, the Bible, or LW) that you might be better off not having. That's why you need to examine every single belief that you have aside from its source. You can't assume they are automatically correct because they fit a moral framework, unless you are also absolutely certain that moral framework is right. And proving that a moral framework is right requires a LOT of evidence.

More specifically:

3) What about all the other people in this world. Many of their morality is based on principles have little to do with Christianity or the Bible per se. Are they automatically wrong? Automatically right? What makes Christianity special? If you were in their shoes, you could do this step by step argument for Buddhism or Islam or in fact any other moral framework.

4) Just because it will further their own agenda, doesn't mean it won't benefit you.

5) Consistency for the sake of consistency is bad.

6) The book can be interpreted in multitude of ways. In fact, every time you read the Bible, or any other book, your interpretation will be slightly different.

Consistency for the sake of consistency is bad.

I disagree - it's neutral at worse.

There are some advantages if everybody in a society has similar social norms; obviously driving on a certain side of the road, but also things like whether tipping in restaurants is "morally required" or not (it is in the US, it isn't in France, in both cases the pay of servers is adjusted accordingly).

Or if you're talking about consistency at the individual level, having consistent values makes one slightly more predictable, and the expected correctness of a set... (read more)

1cousin_it15y

The post assumed that protecting the morality you happen to have is a worthwhile goal, which is orthogonal to the problem of finding the "right" morality that your comment is trying to address.

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A funny argument for traditional morality

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A funny argument for traditional morality

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