Note: Blogger posted this prematurely, I was intending to post it on Sunday. I'm leaving it up since it's been up for a few hours, now. I'll edit it more tomorrow.
Many atheist-materialist-scientistic notions of"ethics" or ersatz, fake, synthetic morality will involve itself with absurd notions such as the one that would claim that you can get something like the obviously religious morality of the Golden Rule, loving your neighbor as you love yourself, equality, equal justice, providing for those in need and distress, etc. from natural selection when all of those are violations of the selfishness that is the aspect of natural selection that interprets animal behavior, including human behavior. I've given the formulas of that from Darwin and his entirely conventional scientific disciples over and over again. Selfishness, ruthless competition, trying to prevail in a struggle for existence, reproductive advantage, etc. are the essence of natural selection. It is in every single way the opposite of morality as derived from the Jewish religious tradition and as adopted and expanded by later Jews, Christians and Muslims.
That incompatibility was noted from the 1860s by both critics of Darwinism such as Frances Cobbe and scientific Darwinists enthusiastic to be let off from the morality of Christianity and Judaism. Assertions of the inequality of human beings, of the evil effects of allowing those deemed inferior to live and have offspring, of the evil of providing medical care, food, social services, to those deemed inferior or "weaker" the good that would come of genocide of groups ranging from the disabled and sick within racial and national groups to wiping out entire races, the victors stealing their lands and resources for themselves were all deemed good by Darwinists from Darwin on.
The idiotic patches of that by those who wanted Darwin for the damage they found he did to religion but without the more dangerous and unsavory aspects of the inversion of morality that it asserted as a law of nature were just that, idiotic and doomed to lose out to the more "scientific" views that, it is a fact, the Nazis put into effect in their genocides just as the conventional Darwinist biologist Vernon Kellogg warned that the scientist-military officers during World War One were asserting was the basis of their behavior in that war.
And if it isn't that complete idiocy, there is the other idiotic source of such phony morality, utilitarianism. Utilitarians assert that whatever is the ultimate source of the most happiness to the most people defines what is good, with modifications of the statement of that constructed as the problems with that basic claim are brought up.
The classic examples of problems with that involve one of the favorite contemplation of the utilitarian "ethicists" who should we kill. If every other person in the world would be made happier by the murder of every last Jew - Jews being a rather small minority of the human population - then certainly it would be moral to kill every last Jew, or Kurd, or Palestinian or you name it. Or just one child. What if sacrificing one child to the Minotaur a year ensured the happiness of the rest of the community then, certainly, under the general scheme of utilitarianism, that would be a good thing to do. Or to maintain one of a group in misery, to torture them to derive sadistic pleasure, etc.
But the problem of such phony materialist-atheist substitutes for morality are more basic than that. It requires that some calculation of competing levels of happiness both in terms of happiness and in how many people will be made happy that are impossible to define and certainly impossible to calculate in any real way. One of the things that critics of this absurd idea that is so widely held by the ironically self-entitled profession of "ethicist" have pointed out is that it is impossible to determine the outcome in the distant future of potential acts in the human present. If Adolph Hitler or Joseph Mengele had been murdered as children, what would the results for millions of people in history have been? If Charles Darwin had gotten drunk one night in college and broken his neck or been stung by a swarm of wasps and natural selection had not been invented A. R. Wallace not having the same influence with the right kind of people to get it adopted. Who knows what good or bad the descendants of children who died in childhood due to the British Poor Laws - which Darwin decried were too much aid to the least among us because it kept children of the poor alive long enough to have children - would have done if they had lived?
Utilitarianism is in the running as one of the stupidest philosophical positions ever to gain widespread adherence by people trained in philosophy in academic institutions, it is, as I noted this morning, at best, an idiotic and useless exercise in ivory tower speculation, at worst it turns into a program of promoting infanticide, active or passive, "doing or allowing" the performance of what are obviously and rightly considered evil acts.
I used to be indulgent of such nonsense out of the lazy, irresponsible habits encouraged modernist-scientistic libertarianism because it is impossible to come up with mathematical proofs in any of this - why they don't let that bother them about natural selection or utilitarianism is evidence of the comfort for their selfishness derived from those substitutes - the kind of cowardly refusal to assert the obvious truth that so often comes after the generally vile phrase "who is to say that . . . " "That" slavery is evil, that providing food and medical care and habitation to the destitute, the poor, to the other is good, that killing every last Jew or Indian or gorilla, is bad.
I can answer that, now that I've seen through these things, we are to say it.
We are to take the responsibility to assert the rightness of the Golden rule, of doing justice, of giving to the poor, of protecting habitats and wild animals of doing no harm. It is one of the just condemnations of modernism, of scientism of atheism that it denies that responsibility, that it lets us off the hook to make that choice. Without us making that choice, no one else can be depended on to make it either.
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