RE: Moral thinking is logic and reason in high gear!
What is God? You seem to say that it is "natural law". How do we know what natural law is? Cod eat their young. It that a natural law that humans should follow? Eating your young seems abhorrent to you. Is that an emotion? Why is it abhorrent? Does the Bible say it is bad? Did you use logic and reason in high gear to arrive at the conclusion that you should not eat your young? I don't think so. It seems that emotion is involved in morals.
How is emotion involved in morals? Emotion determines what we value. If we value life and personal integrity and believe (no logic necessary) that all living things have a right to life, then we will not kill or eat our young. If we are just living meat, like cod, we can ignorantly eat our young. Our values and preferences are based on emotions.
Any system of morality needs to be looked at by evaluating the underlying values that give rise to the rules. Example: If you value life, you are pro-life. If you don't value life, it is ok to kill an unborn child. If you value honesty, you don't tell lies. If you don't value honesty, you can lie all you want to get your way. etc. etc. Logic and reason come in to play when you analyze the long-term consequences of valuing life and honesty.
I'd love to have a morality base on "God" or some notion of "God". However, in this day and age, "God" can mean many things and God is so easily attacked as a product of superstition so we need to find a better basis.
Aside: This is how society is being subverted: Truth that doesn't agree with your narrative = "conspiracy theory" and anyone's belief system that isn't "secular" = "superstition". "Secular", by the way, is just as much a religion as any other.
"What is God? You seem to say that it is "natural law"" Natural Law can be described as how things work in the universe. The closest description of God I know of.
"It seems that emotion is involved in morals." That is what I claim. Maybe re-reading what was said about virtue would help. Thinking with emotions is necessary, but cannot be done using the facilities of logic and reason. Emotional thinking is a practice in assigning arbitrary values to people, places and things. Those values do not describe the people, places and things, but do describe how we feel about those people, places and things. There is no logic, reason or value in the real world, merely value to the individual who generates the emotions.
"Any system of morality needs to be looked at by evaluating the underlying values that give rise to the rules."
Those underlying values come from nature! Just my opinion.
"I'd love to have a morality base on "God" or some notion of "God". However, in this day and age, "God" can mean many things and God is so easily attacked as a product of superstition so we need to find a better basis."
The universe works the same as it did the year of my birth. I am only 99.9 percent sure of that. Nature as far as I know has worked the same way my whole life. Thus physics is a study of how nature works (natural law), and it has value precisely because it works the same way it did when it was discovered as far as I know.
What does change is mans ability to perceive. That is too huge a subject to attempt to have a meaning full discussion in comments. Sorry!
"Truth that doesn't agree with your narrative = "conspiracy theory""
This is the crux of my point about nature not changing , but man's perception does. What doesn't change in the above quote is the "Truth" agreement, narrative and conspiracy theory all change like the wind.
Thank you for you comment and consideration on this subject. It is important that people seek virtue, which is self examination with the purpose of bettering one's self. Thus creating the mental muscle to be able to put the mind in high gear and use logic and reason morally.
Emotion affects (and, without self-discipline, effects) action. (Hence the root word 'motion' - FYI). Emotion does not choose values; the conscience does. Yes, in the absence of conscience, say in a brute, emotion alone drives towards the "values" of animal instinct/nature; but again, emotion does not choose, there is no choice involved in instinct.
Not to say that you are right or wrong in the statement that "Emotion Does not choose Values; the conscience does." I like this by the way. The thing is though for one to get a conscience one first must choose to be virtuous. Which by its very nature working the logical and reasonable functions of the mind, which produces the neural pathways and then the motor reflex for logical and reasonable moral thinking. That is how I think of it anyways.
Very nice comment that raised the value of this post. I thank you for that.
My pleasure.
I'm not convinced virtuousness precedes conscience, b/c conscience equally can give rise to evil wills like resentment and arrogance and where would your virtue be then?
So, if you would choose to be virtuous, conscience would first have decided good and evil. Conscience as I understand it is that critical voice in your head, that other you who eyes all your thoughts and actions with the harsh judgement of good and evil. The less unsympathetic the judgement of oneself, the less one 'has conscience,' as we say, and as a result one does not hold oneself to a moral standard and allows weakness to grow into vice.
Of course you are right in this. The one thing that I noticed is that Soul, Consciousness and Mind have a common lack. There is no being-ness to measure. Thus we are really using irrational mind to think about these concepts and not logic and reason. Consider however that perhaps Soul, Consciousness and Mind are all really the same aspect of existence. If so than it is not really a chicken and the egg problem as we do know that life occurs at birth or if you prefer at conception. Thus perhaps every experience culminates in the soul becoming conscious and then precipitating a Mind or if you prefer vise versa.
I'm not of course right, but I like that you think so.
About the rest of your comment just now, I follow and agree b/c there seems to me to be a simultaneity of being and consciousness in the process of becoming, and at the moment of becoming the chicken and egg problem would be neant ('would cease to be at play,' I think works in translation).
(To defend my analogy, however: from the view of memory one could see how what he became and that he became something at all was not assured by being conscious.)
When it comes to consciousness I, like how law, culture and tradition answer the question is the person conscious. I read that during the Nuremberg trials, one defendant was asked if he would shoot his own family members if ordered to do so? His answer was a enthusiastic "no!" The Jury found him guilty and he was executed. Supposedly when asked by a reporter how they proved intent? A jurist reply-ed he knew that what he had done was wrong and could not have performed the act unknowingly. Making reference to the aforesaid question in the trial.
I doubt this actually happened, however it shows that law, culture and tradition recognizes that only a conscious person can feel guilt for an action. Our children feel guilt at very early ages. Mostly to me this means that they are in a state of consciousness when they can feel guilt. This is why parents punish for acts they know the child knows better I think. I know I don't punish my children for acts they have know knowledge of the right or wrongness of. I use such occurrences to show them the right or wrongness of what happened.
Morality and Naziism is an interesting case. They say nearly everybody would have been Nazis had they been German citizens then...
The Nuremberg trials were so singularly interested in establishing the inadmissibility of crimes against humanity, that essentially in principle it let off evil; the inhuman villains did not believe what they did was wrong so they did not feel guilty towards our humanity - a humanity they didn't share in.
I think physical punishment after age eight or nine or so, by which time a child begins shaping a moral sense, has a brutalizing effect; in reducing the person to a brute, it dulls conscience. But you sound like a gentle father.
I let the brute be the consequences incurred by their actions. The only time I don't is when the consequences would harm them physically. I don't think it is gentle, but necessary for their development.
"Morality and Naziism is an interesting case. They say nearly everybody would have been Nazis had they been German citizens then.." sadly is not a possible thing that actually occurred as they had to murder a lot of German people to be "Nazism" in the first place.
Whether or not a farther or a mother is gentle is irrational because the values are arbitrary and change from subject to subject. Notice that I didn't say that such doesn't exist mostly because exist is not the right term when speaking about the irrational. The difference is the same difference between an object and a concept. One is subject observable and the other is imaginary. LOL
Not quite following the aside, I think you may mean New Atheism when you write of religious secularism. Or else secular ideologies like Marxism and nationalism.