Fisking a paper on atheist morality
July 28, 2008
John C. Wright is in fine form in this two-part series (part 1, and part 2) in which he dismantles, almost line-by-line, a position paper by Frank R. Zindler on the source of morality in an atheistic framework.
In the end, the discussion comes down to this: within a purely secular/empirical framework, we can posit as to the various ways in which behaving in a “moral” manner might be beneficial to us, both as individuals and members of a larger, wider species. But this way of looking at things is ultimately a fallacy: that a human being possesses capacity for behaviour X and may derive benefit from it (X could here be something like altruism) in no way implies or concretely means that the human being is obligated to exercise behaviour X. There is no way to derive a moral “ought” from an empirical “is”.
Do read it all.
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