Back To Morality

A couple of posts ago I did a piece on morality that got pretty good response.
I gave readers a rating system and a series of 11 questions that pretty much popped into my head over a 20 minute period. I'm not trying to pretend I'm a philosopher or an expert on morality.

Two things. It was not an empirical study; it was a casual quiz. I was not collecting data, merely openly comparing results. Secondly, the purpose of the quiz was to prove that everyone has a different concept of what the DEFINITION of morality is. I wanted to illustrate that the DEFINITION of morality is SUBJECTIVE, not that morality is subjective....this is a different idea. My point is that unless we can make the DEFINITION of morality OBJECTIVE we cannot even attempt to answer whether morality in itself is objective or subjective.

I hope that isn't confusing.

Speaking about confusing, I think I sort of confused a few people like The Ethicist Atheist (he is really the Atheist Ethicist, but he calls me the Jewish Atheist, so this is my revenge). He wrote a blog entry ripping me to shreds I think, and I think he was implying I'm stupid or something like that, but I can't really tell because I can tell by his writing that he is smarter than me, and by the fact that I find a lot of what he writes hard to comprehend and follow. I believe he was confused about what I was trying to prove (once more, that the definition of morality is subjective). He wrote a further piece that gives me the impression that he finally got what I was trying to say. I did leave a few comments on his blog. And even though I was tempted, I didn't whip out the thesaurus to sound smarter.

I started a thread about the definition of morality being subjective over at Raving Atheists. Feel free to read it. It does get off topic and bizarre at one point.

If you are still here, now for the fun part. I would like to see your definition of morality. Try to make it as broad or concise as you feel you need to make it, and post it in my comments.

To help everyone along, I'll give you my refined definition:

The parameters in my definition are that any act that anyone on this planet deems to be a moral or immoral act is one that I have to address as either moral or immoral to at least some degree.

That being said, to me, a moral act is an act that is not immoral. And an immoral act is an act as an act that causes the individual committing the act any degree of guilt and/or an act that was done maliciously or selfishly or unlawfully that causes any degree of hurt or grief onto another living being.

Oh and the guilt can't be caused by failure of motor skills (a dropped ball in a football game) or the guilt caused by failing to do a job properly when the intent was to be successful and not to screw up.

Now, your idea of of what morality might be what you think God or Jesus or Allah thinks you should do in any given situation, or it could be simply not breaking the laws of the state, or it might be a combination. It could also have to do with what is evolutionary beneficial.


Besides giving an exact definition of morality, you can also mention where you think morality comes from. To me, I think it is mostly innate and evolutionary in origin, and partially based on societal laws (that are really offshoots of what is innate).

Oh and the point of this. Unless someone defines morality, they have no business making statements like "Atheists have no morals," or "Atheists have no real basis or guidelines for morality."