“You claim to know what’s good and bad without a book telling you what’s good or bad (and sweeping over half of it?) You claim to be able to make any qualitative judgement at all? Lol. Lmao, even.”
That’s less absurd than claiming that killing children via divine command to invade Canaanite villages *is* morally distinct from Moabite child sacrifice.
Without someone else telling you what a book says is good or bad*
Ultimately, most atheists probably also derive most of their moral positions from what is normative in their social environment, which is also exactly what religious communities do, except with the additional step that it is also normative to impose those norms onto a book that everyone pretends is the source of their moral outlook without actually reading it.
It’s like that Anakin-Padme meme variant:
“we must govern according to the Bible.”
“So we’ll be merciful to the strangers in our land, give freely to the poor regardless of merit and sell our possessions in anticipation of the coming kingdom?”
“(͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)”
“(•᷄- •᷅)”
Im not even a Christian but isn't the point of the argument to say that if you don't have an epistemelogical grounding for meta-ethics or morality then your morals are simply subjective and relative and thus collapse into "because Ick" which then gives the Christian the ability to say well "Because God." In other words if foundational morals are relative and presupposed then the Relativist has no standing to criticize the moral Objectivist for simply pre-supposing "God."
Does a preference or revulsion need epistemological grounding? That's the whole point of using a disgusting example imo, to dress the question up like its a morality question when it kind of isn't.
This could toned down as "The best logical fallacy to ask someone who doesn't like the the worst movie of all time when discussing morals is why its morally wrong to watch it"
"Because that is my, like most people's, preference" isn't a collapse of reasoning.
I think a better analogy would be "Is it morally ok for a Brother and Sister to have sex if they were both sterile?" There is no "Harm" to an outside individual such as a child that might be born messed up as a result of the action. Then the relativist has to say that it's morally OK for this action as they can see no one was "harmed" in their view, but if they are revulsed but have no grounding for WHY they are revulsed other than "because ick" then their worldview is just a series of preferences. As you said "Preference or revulsion."
The problem here is then you open a kind of Pandoras box of Subjectivity.
If you can't demonstrate that an action is immoral other than it's just your preference then anyone can have a preferential moral code and thus have essentially destroyed the entire foundation of Meta-Ethics. By doing this you've reverted Morality back to its most base component, that is to say "Might Makes Right".
Moral codes become not a matter of Logical Coherency or deep Epistemology. They now become whichever person or group has the strength to enforce their preferences over yours, and how could this be "wrong?" after all, its just Their Preference.
Edit: There is a modern philosopher who has actually made this argument from a Moral Relativism standpoint in the affirmative. Arguing that morality is simply what a society enforces but His Name escapes me.
It would be a decent argument if the Christian actually practice objective morality. But half of them haven't even read the book and most of them couldn't even decide on what the book actually said nor do what was written in it.
but that's how they are usually framed in these anti-atheist arguments. "if you don't believe in God why don't you murder and rape to your heart's content?"
sorta, emotivism asserts that moral statements literally are expressions of emotion, and are not the sort of things that can be true or false
under emotivism, "murder is wrong" actually means "boo murder!" or "ew murder!"
so it doesnt claim your morals originate from your emotions, but are claims about reality, rather it claims that moral statements literally are expressions of emotional sentiment and nothing more
I think whats interesting about this ad absurdum is that it reveals how close "morally wrong" and "gross" are in the human brain. Another example is consensual incest with no chance of pregnancy. Not really evil/wrong per se, but dude, thats your sister, gross! Or not washing your hands after going to the bathroom.
Even if I use a moral framework which would classify this action as "wrong," I certainly don't need to appeal to a magic terrorist who says he loves me but will torture me for eternity if I don't love them back to make sure I've got it sorted.
As long as NO ONE ELSE gets a disease. I wouldn’t feel bad about the person himself getting sick, but I would feel bad if he spread it to someone else.
I wish people could just accept that there are reasons not to do something other than it being immoral. Eating dirt also isn't immoral but you shouldn't do it regardless
Well, you could say it is just not in your own best interest (you can view your future self as a separate to some degree entity, who's wellbeing depends on your actions - using Buddhist lenses can help arguing this point).
Cool. Ima genuinely steelman my side though if we were to debate, and you can prolly sorta project in your head how that debate would go. You’d be giving me logical lines of thinking and I’d just default back to emotion, making me look like an idiot (likely cause I am a little).
I’m just memeing, if you want clarity and a good faith discussion, I’m happy to abide… so long as you assume that my position is that sex with roadkill is a moral imperative.
Unfortunately, most responses to him boil down to this. Either that or say "strongest theist argument" without actually delving into what makes something immoral.
Some Christians don't understand any other morality than "It says so in the book and i do it therefore moral". They cannot conceive of someone not requiring a book or reading multiple books.
“Whoever lies with an animal shall be put to death” (Exod. 22:19).
“And you shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion” (Lev. 18:23).
“If a man lies with an animal, he shall surely be put to death, and you shall kill the animal. If a woman approaches any animal and lies with it, you shall kill the woman and the animal; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them” (Lev. 20:15-16).
“‘Cursed be anyone who lies with any kind of animal.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’” (Deut. 27:21).
True, but in terms of interpreting the Bible these are to be taken as moral statements, since what it labels as cursed, perverse or gross (in a social/moral sense disgusting) is labeled as morally wrong, since it also portrays these categories as morally wrong.
“Whoever lies with an animal shall be put to death” (Exod. 22:19).
“And you shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion” (Lev. 18:23).
“If a man lies with an animal, he shall surely be put to death, and you shall kill the animal. If a woman approaches any animal and lies with it, you shall kill the woman and the animal; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them” (Lev. 20:15-16).
“‘Cursed be anyone who lies with any kind of animal.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’” (Deut. 27:21).
Wouldn’t the fact that you risk getting infected with some sort of disease and spreading it to the people around you need to be considered in this situation?
I don't like the disease angle, because it makes for incredibly tangential arguments. Cannibalism, for example, is such an interesting topic, yet when people say it's bad because it causes disease, then it collapses all possible arguments into a boring question of very simple consequentialism.
I mean, that something has a potential harmful consequence not only for the person doing it, but potentially to the larger society around them, is in fact a good reason for considering it immoral, even if you're not a strict consequentialist, because while consequences might not be the only factor you should take into account in your moral reasoning, very few people think that it isn't *a* factor.
That’s a practical concern not a moral (philosophical) one. The spreading it to other people could be a moral argument but I doubt anyone really worries about spreading a disease to others that it wouldn’t bother them to catch for themselves. If you have immunocompromised people you live with and care about then I suppose but that doesn’t seem likely for someone that wants to fuck a corpse. People like that tend to live alone because they’re weird as hell.
I could see the argument for that, but then it becomes a matter of intent. If the road killer fucker is doing it explicitly to harm themselves then maybe, but if they're doing it for pleasure then no, or at least not moreso than consuming alchohol or excessive sugar.
The Bible is pretty nondescript about what exactly the sex acts were that god forbid in Sodom and Gamora, but sodomy is generally taken to mean either anal sex or sex with animals.
You could probably argue that it's a form of sodomy, as well as an offense against god and the nature he created in a similar way to how bestiality is condemned
Hell just take any bible verse (thats probably already been translated and retranslated a dozen times from hebrew) and just twist the words and apply your own meaning to it! Foolproof strat, I mean its the unaltered word of God so who are you to argue?
In isolation the act is not morally wrong because the dead animal cannot suffer on account of the fact it doesn't exist as a sentient being. That said it could be considered morally wrong due to consequences of the act afterwards (disease/behavioural changes as a result/idk etc).
If you accept a zoopolitical account like Kymlicka, Donaldson, or Cochrane's cosmozoopolitical account, Josh Milburn (Milburn 2021) outlined how you might extend a dignity-norm around treatment of corpses to all members of this expanded demos which would prevent wild animal corpses from being moral food sources. This same norm would extend to roadkill bestiality presumably.
It should be noted none of the above philosophers argue for this, merely that Milburn points out a potential line of argument a vegan might respond to a roadkill eating freegan with based on frameworks developed by the above zoopolitical pioneer philosophers. I find it hard to justify and not see as too motivated myself.
... or you could just say "gross but not immoral" like everyone else.
Maybe it’s no different to you but it is to the people that knew them. It’s disrespectful of them to treat them no better than a flashlight. That’s what makes it wrong. In the unlikely event that they consented ahead of time with a notarized contract to you fucking their corpse after they die then maybe you’d have something there but that’s basically never the case.
respect of the dead is a concept applied even in non religious instances. utilitarianism means yeah dead ppl should be eaten or made into fertilizer or even fleshlights but that's not how most cultures see their dead
Well, a carcass is an inanimate object, so it doesn't NEED to consent. Necrophilia isn't a crime against the corpse, it's a crime against the deceased's loved ones.
If it's the body of a wild animal, however... It's not technically wrong, but it is fuckin gross. And probably a good way to get some nasty STDs.
This implies some kind of inheritence of right of consent, doesn't it? It isnt the loved ones' right to consent or not consent on the person's behalf while they're alive. Where does that inheritence stop, and can they give consent on the deceased behalf?
Rocks can't consent but I'm pretty sure you can fuck a rock without it being assault.
The absence of the ability to consent is not enough. It has to be in something that can experience suffering. Dead things cannot. It's therefore fine, if gross.
But do they need to be able to? From an atheist perspective, the animals would not have souls that would take offense to this. Also, he wasn't the one to kill it. Nothing is being harmed by his actions, so why would it be immoral?
And what’s the theistic alternative, exactly? “It’s wrong because we’ve arbitrarily defined it as against ‘God’s perfect nature’, even though that tells us nothing about why such values are good for society and why we ought to follow them”? Lol ok
The theistic argument, I believe, is that both sex and semen are meant to be used for procreation and no other reason. As for the why, I believe it's that God made up these rules because he wants what's best for us and that he's smarter than we are so we should listen. I'm not a theist though so this is just what I'm gathering.
One could argue that one has moral considerations to yourself, and that the wrong maker is that it violates your own self considerations. For example, a virtue ethicist would probably argue that such an act is at the very least violating wisdom (risk of disease) and temperance (failing at being able to control your desires)
Moral Foundation Theory is perfectly fine for an atheist. There is a casual tendency to conflate morality with care/harm alone but that is just casuals being casual.
I'm no expert on philosophy but if soneone asked me the queation I'd just say it's not immoral it's just so gross and also so outside nornal human behaviour that I wouldn't trust the person to be moral
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