Carrier on a Moral World

The Real Basis of a Moral World
by Richard Carrier on November 12, 2018
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/14879

If you frame the question as “Which worldview will better get people to behave,” of course, one might then say it doesn’t even matter if the worldview is true. This was Plato’s idea, spelled out and argued in his treatise on The Republic: sell the public on a false worldview that will get them to behave. The perfect enactment of the entire blueprint he then laid out for how to do this was the Vatican. And for thousands of years now, we’ve all seen how that worked out.

You mean you are buying the Protestant Historiography on Catholicism?

Do take a double check with Tim O'Neill, will you!

He's one peculiar Atheist who is not sharing the Anti-Catholic accusations as sacred narrative with Protestants.

History for Atheists
New Atheists Getting History Wrong
https://historyforatheists.com/

In reality—as in, out here, where real things happen and don’t conform to our fantasies of how we wish or just “in our hearts” know things will happen—Plato’s project is self-defeating. It leads to misery and tyranny. You cannot compel people to believe false things; and you can’t trick them into doing it, without eventually resorting to compelling them to do it. Because you must suppress—which means, terrorize or kill—anyone who starts noticing what’s up. Which eventually becomes nearly everyone. The resulting system is a nightmare, one that will totally fail to “get people to behave.” Because it inevitably compels all in power…to stop behaving. Simply to try and force everyone else to behave.

Well, that is not what happened with Catholicism.

However, that is what risks happening if some guys figure out they can't sell Atheism, to the masses, but still want a narrative to back up their Atheist morality.

That’s the Catch-22 that guarantees any such plan will always fail. The last thing it will ever accomplish is getting everyone to behave. Or producing any society conducive to human satisfaction and fulfillment, either, which is the only end that “getting people to behave” served any purpose for in the first place.

Well, on a strictly atheist view, who decides that is a desirable end for everyone?

But Commies at least pretended this was what they wanted, also as Atheists.

Worse, any system of false beliefs is doomed also to have many side effects that are damaging or even ruinous of human satisfaction, bringing about unexamined or unexpected harms and failures. Because it is impossible to design any epistemology that only conveniently ever discovers harmless or helpful false beliefs. Which means, while you are deploying the epistemology you need to get people to believe what you suppose to be harmless or helpful false beliefs, you and they will also be accumulating with that same epistemology many other false beliefs, which won’t just conveniently be harmless or helpful. “Ideological pollution,” as it were. You need a cleaner source of ideas. Otherwise you just make things worse and worse. Whereas any epistemology that will protect you from harmful false beliefs, will inevitably expose even the helpful and harmless ones as false (a fact I more thoroughly explore in What’s the Harm).

Indeed, my observation about Communism, Liberalism (Classic European sense in which Cavour was a Liberal), Kantian Conservatism of Prussian type, and the Epistemologies of Kant, Popper, Galileo (before he repented), Newton, Laplace and Herschel, Lyell, Darwin et al.

And all that is on top of an even more fundamental problem: what do you even mean by “getting people to behave” in the first place? Deciding what behaviors are actually better for human happiness, rather than ruinous of it, is a doomed project if you don’t do it based on evidence and reason. Because otherwise, you won’t end up with the best behavioral program, but one that sucks to some degree. Because you won’t be choosing based on what truly does conduce to that end, but based on some other, uninformed misconception of it. Which won’t by random chance just happen to be right. You will thus be defending a bad system.

Well, but you see, evidence of modern scientific type cannot decide what is good or bad per se.

It can decide what factors are better or worse for goal such and such, but on a "scientific method" epistemology, that can't settle how we prioritise goals.

But here’s a Catch-22 again: any process you engage that will reliably discover the behavioral system that actually does maximize everyone’s personal fulfillment and satisfaction with life, will get that same result for anyone else. You thus no longer need any false belief system. You can just promote the true one. And give everyone the skills needed to verify for themselves that it’s true. No oppression. No bad epistemologies. No damaging side effects.

Catch (for the application Carrier has in mind): reliably. Science belief is not reliable even in credenda, let alone in agenda.

Thus, the answer to “which worldview is best?” is always “the one that’s true.” So you can’t bypass the question of which worldview is true, with a misplaced hope in thinking you can find and promote a better worldview that’s false. The latter can never actually be better in practice. In the real world, it will always make things worse.

Yes, if you insist on the priority that a worldview shall promote the good - of everyone.

Which, of course, an Atheist need not as per his credenda. Atheists who do priorise like that have a hangover from Christianity.

But, your credibility as historian sinks from that glib reference to the Vatican.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Didacus OFM
13.XI.2018

Sancti Didaci, ex Ordine Minorum, Confessoris; cujus dies natalis recolitur pridie hujus diei.