James,

You say "Raping someone, for instance, is not wrong. It is just unbeneficial." What do you mean here? I doubt seriously if anyone doing normative ethics (excluding non-cognitivists) would say they cannot account for the wrongness of rape. Kant, Mill et al accounted for such actions without grounding ethics in God's nature. As I have said on another thread, can God make a rock more valuable than a human? Or perhaps I could say, could God make smashing a rock unethical? The answer to both questions is no (I hope this is obvious), but this should show that the nature of ethics is grounded in the intrinsic nature of those in the moral community in virtue of their constitution, not what caused them to exist. As such, a naturalist and a theist could both account for ethics. I often get the impression that for many Christians, a secular ethics is somehow a compromise of the Christian faith and I am not sure that it is. There are a lot of important issues that have not been discussed or clearly explained, e.g., Platonism, nominalism, realism, hedonism. What a lot of Christians mean by naturalism is actually reductive physicalism or eliminativism. These latter views definitely have problems accounting for ethics.

Originally Posted by apwilson

I posted this mistakenly into the middle of a well-established debate. I should have started a new thread it seems!

 

I am relatively new to the Reasonable Faith website but have found it a worthwhile source of stimulating material.

By way of introduction I am Tony from the UK and hold an evangelical christian worldview (in the emerging "red letter" sense of Tony Campolo).

I was very interested in the debate between Drs Craig and Antony on the possibility of the existence of absolute morality in the absence of God. By choosing to play "burden of proof" volleyball, Dr. Antony effectively admitted she had no substantive reason to justify her belief in absolute morality and she simply had to repeatedly ask Dr. Craig to explain his position on Euthyphro. I won't delve into this too deeply because I see there is a debate going on this already.

Instead I want to focus on Dr. Antony's insistence of a self-evident moral obligation to protect sentient life. She explained that she was not "speciesist" in the sense that she considers our moral obligation extends to other lifeforms with less well developed consciousness. I am not sure where she stands with respect to vegetarianism or animal experimentation, but I assume she would have to embrace the former and reject the latter. If not, then we are drawn into establishing a scale of moral values. Is it acceptable to experiment on a monkey in order to save human life? If not, are laboratory rats acceptable?

Consider an alien life form whose sentience and intelligence exceeds ours by the same factor that differentiates us from rats. It could be perfectly justifiable for them to enslave us, farm us and even perform live experiments upon us if it could be shown that the benefit conferred to their species was significant. Moreover, if the universe really does have moral absolutes in some kind of Platonic sense (the only way I think Dr Antony can really hold that this is true), it could be our moral obligation to assist the alien species to carry out their programme against the human species. It would be morally wrong to resist.

I have listened to the debate but have not heard any of the Q&A so I am not sure if issues of this kind were discussed.

Any comments?