I just found your reply. I appreciate its readability, although not its personal attacks and your use of “mental disability” as a slur. Looking back at my own comment, I’m a little surprised I took the time to write so much. I think it was motivated by my enthusiasm for your work. I remember enjoying your debates and lectures, and how surprisingly unreadable your writing was. I can’t be the only one to have ever told you that.

Your response was almost entirely based on mistaken assumptions. My background is of multigenerational poverty, including my own life so far. I would be happy to make the extra effort to read the writings of someone who struggle with literacy. I didn’t think that was the case with you becsause you have a PhD… If that it is an issue for you, I apologize. I understand that there are reasons beyond themselves why many people don’t have the opportunity to realise their potential.

I don’t care about petty rules of grammar either, and I’m not attached to the English language. Let it change and evolve for all I care. I resent the fact that I learned English instead of the languages if my own parents, because of racist policies and attitudes to “assimilation” of migrants. This makes me more negative in some ways about English. I do however much prefer comprehensibility of what I read.

Your suggestion to mentally listen to your writing is possible for you because your writing habits are from your own mind. The problem for others is that without normal full stops, it’s often not possible to know when a sentence begins and ends. It becomes much more ambiguous. I get it when full stops are used for emplasis etc. un a tweet or SMS, but this is on another level.

In an extended piece of writing, if full stops don’t indicate when a sentence begins or ends, it’s too ambiguous to read aloud or listen mentally. Pauses, pitch, tone of voice and emphasis need to be different depending on where the sentence starts and ends. Without normal full stops, it’s hard to know how a sentence should sound. It’s a lot more mental work for the reader than it needs to be. Again, you wouldn’t experience that because you wrote it.

Now I remember why I wrote so much. It’s hard to explain concisely, I’m bothering to write this because I want to help you to communicate more effectively in writing, despite your insults and false assumptions.

Maybe. I’m not sure which feature of human psychology you are referencing.

There is the question of value disagreement vs. factual disagreement, such that an episemically rational person will agree on a moral conclusion if they agree on the facts and share the same values relating to it, e.g. abortion. But this is unrelated to the epistemic problem: motivated reasoning—e.g. values unrelated to abortion—causing people to refuse to believe, and fiercely resist, any correction on the facts.

So two people can share the same values but still sharing facts won’t change minds because they are devoted to not accepting the actual facts (they are resistant to evidence and reason itself).

Here, it is that people need certain things to be true; not that they differ in valuing human life, but differ in wholly unrelated values that require defending an ego- or identity-position.

There is no philosophical solution to this. It’s a psychological problem. People have to agree on epistemic values before they can agree on facts; wholly apart from the moral values one would then appeal to in response to the facts.

I cover this somewhat in What’s the Harm, Vital Primer on Media Literacy, and Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning.

It seems unnecessary to attempt to provide grounds for objective morality.

Of course it’s necessary. If objective morality has no ground, it then by definition does not exist (that is the ontological function of a ground). And if it does not exist, then all claims that anypne ought to behave a certain way are false.

That reduces all moral language to vacuous descriptive theories with no prescriptive imperative truth-value, e.g. “culture A says B is wrong” can never get you to “you ought to do B” (or not do B). Example: “Conservative Iranian culture says women showing their hair in public is wrong” but you can’t get from that to “Therefore women should not show their hair in public.” Just because some people think a certain thing produces no logical warrant to do it. And if there is no warrant to do anything, no imperative is true. And morality is vacuous if it lacks true imperatives.

The observation of the natural order, anthropology and history make it quite clear that morality is an emergent property of a functioning society that operates by consent and is relative to the needs and consent of that society.

You are either contradicting yourself by claiming a ground for morality, or you are nullifying your point by admitting none of this has any imperative force: no one ought to heed any of this. If they ought to, that’s a ground (that’s literally what we are talking about); ergo if there is no ground, it is not true that they ought to heed anything.

And then all you are describing is how people act, not how anyone should act. Which leaves you with no compelling argument that anyone should act any way over any other. Whereas once you try to build such an argument, you are inescapably building a ground.

See Darla the She-Goat, Moral Ontology, and The Real Basis of a Moral World for perspective here.

This is elitist nonsense. As long as what we write is intelligible (and it will be if you speak it out in your head; e.g. if you actually listen to what is being said, rather than just pedantically look for punctuation, which does not exist in spoken speech), it’s good to go.

I suggest you get over your petty hangups and just read texts as written, and not grammar-police their punctuation. Perhaps you have an actual mental disability in this regard. If so, seek therapeutic help with that. You will feel better. And be able to listen to what people are saying instead of winging over the irrelevancies of their sentences’ syntacical protocols.

I’m sure you’re more than capable of doing better. You speak much better than you write, and I know you have a PhD, so I’m wondering whether there is an explanation other than poor writing skills. Perhaps this is an unedited machine transcription from an audio recording. If so, you have underestimated the value of human editing. Maybe you’re trying to achieve an informal effect to connect with your less educated audience. If so, I don’t think it’s working, and you should give higher priority to clarity. If you are trying to avoid ovely long sentences, you need to do a bit more than simply swapping commas with a full stops and capitalising the next letter.

I discovered you on Youtube, I am interested in your work, and I am here to find out more about it. I haven’t yet read any of your books, and I expect you would have a professional editor. Nevertheless, I find the idea of reading your books much less appealing after reading this example of your blog. Your content is interesting, but your bad writing is a major turn-off.

I don’t expect perfection; I don’t care whether you split infinitives, and I have not taken much time to edit this post. I’m sure you could find several errors with my writing, and I could probably find more. I think the difference is that your writing is so bad that it’s below the threshold of readability, and I believe it would be well worth the small amount of time and effort you would need to fix the problem. For me, writing this post is a good deed with a high likelihood of being ignored. For you, it’s you’re job.

You need to consider the structure of each sentence. It will become natural and effortless with practice. I recommend that you word your sentences in such a way that if somebody listened to you read your blog aloud, they would not have to guess where the full stops are. If you have started a sentence with the word “And”, “But” or “Because”, you should probably use a comma instead.

I would have preferred to send this message to a private email address rather than on a public forum. I don’t care whether you reply, and I have said everything I think I needed to say — except for thanks for the educational, interesting and entertaining public debates you have participated in. The world very much needs your kind of free and clear thinking.

It seems unnecessary to attempt to provide grounds for objective morality. The observation of the natural order, anthropology and history make it quite clear that morality is an emergent property of a functioning society that operates by consent and is relative to the needs and consent of that society. Starting with the smallest social group the family – and an imperative to protect my gene pool – murder and cannibalism are acceptable survival traits for that pod if they are outside of the familial group. Socially we discover that we need to widen the gene pool to prevent poor mutation which brings in a larger group and survival determines that we do not murder/eat members of the group … larger nomadic groups introduce increasingly stringent rules to ensure the group remains cohesive – an certain activities become verboten as the destabilise the social structure (theft, adultery …) before we reach a settled agrarian society we have a set of rules which reflect (eg) the Ten Commandments – these don’t require a god – but the notion of one with divine consequences may be a useful way to enforce. This scales to agrarian societies dependent on warrior classes to defend them .. .to urban societies. The enforcement of the moral codes is given by the consent of the majority to the trusted few – whether this is warrior class or a lawmaker (priest) class. By the time we get to the 21st century we have drifted through a slew of morally acceptable practices for their times – torture of heretics, stoning, beheadings of enemies, capital punishments, slavery, slaughter of foreigners, punishment of homosexuals, yet each of these is by present standards abhorrent and immoral, yet in their time we’re viewed as just and right. I was asked if I thought that Hitlers slaughter of the Jews therefore was “good” – and for me the answer is no – but clearly for the German society of the 1930s they gave consent for this to be carried out – Hitlers rhetoric persuaded his society to grant that consent – based on the failure of the economy and its harms to that society. It may be uncomfortable to be set into a sea of moral relativism- but stability of society gives the best survival outcomes for individuals and the definition of good/evil just/unjust are derived from the needs of that society and the benefits it grants its members – if I err society will do its best to remove privileges I have – freedom/wealth/power – I cannot freely make “immoral” decisions because there are consequences – in the here and now. In the clash between western and eastern culture we see that variations in social structure lead to similar but differing moral constructs – feudal Japanese ethics and morality were alien to the European world. morals and ethics become a minimisation problem depending on survival outcomes for individuals as a function of the stability of society, That fn will also interact with the fn of competing/cooperative societies and will find stable minima of its own.

You might have another blog there. I find that a lot of people (and I mostly hang with Lefties, but everyone does it) stop at the “factual belief” option. Even if I tell them that the facts show that it’s very difficult to change someone’s mind by presenting facts, they will ignore that fact and keep telling me about the YouTube I should watch, again.

I think facts and values are tied together in a way most people don’t see. The values that we form early in life steer us toward finding facts to validate them and seeking education that is in line with those values. I believe you’ve implied this before, but not sure if you’ve laid it out in detail anywhere.

Try it this way, Matthew.

We all can agree that at least some Nazis thought that what they were doing was “right”, even if in some beleaguered and hateful sense, I hope. They had a belief system that they viewed as a true morality. They thought that they would actually produce good outcomes for the stakeholders they felt had moral rights.

We don’t just disagree with Nazis about the facts. We disagree with their morality. Even if large amounts of Jews were in fact dangerous outsiders rather than ordinary people living in their societies with just as much patriotism as anyone else, that would be no reason for their death or even imprisonment. One would still need to try individual traitors. The lazy racist collective responsibility isn’t just a fallacy of reification, but also gross moral reasoning.

The Nazis had a morality. We can say it was internally inconsistent, but that isn’t relevant here. It was false.

But now that we’ve said that, and are abandoning a subjective moral grounding, what are we doing to differentiate sources?

Wielenberg and others can cite potential ways that people reason morally. But the theist is saying that those reasons aren’t reasons. They are arbitrary. They are not meta-ethically grounded.

If I say that in basketball you shouldn’t travel, you can tell me “Who cares? I don’t play basketball”. You can reject the rule set as being some you don’t want to play by, while acknowledging that the rule set is real, and codified, and even internally consistent and possibly relatively complete.

That’s why Richard gave the Star Wars example. Someone like Wielenberg can point to true facts of human cognition that neither empirically nor ethically actually mandate the implied behavior. “You like Star Wars” is actually no reason to redecorate your room to match it. You may also want to do that, but the mere liking is essentially tangential to the decision to redecorate. It’s at best necessary but not sufficient, and even then not that.

Even if someone like Craig isn’t arguing the 1, 2 and 3, and I think he is, some theist can. So ethical theorists need to have a reason to say “You should pick basketball over the other games you could play” or to translate, “You should choose X moral code, and here’s why”. That’s why Craig used the term “human illusion”. Morality could be like driving left or right on the road: it’s a convention, not something actually true. (Of course, it being a convention comes from true facts, which provides the clue here: you can prove that the choice between one of two conventions is arbitrary, but that all other choices are drastically sub-optimal in comparison). We need, *at the minimum, reasons to select moral conventions (which is the basis of things like political and economic and sociological theory), and preferably reasons to think that they’re not mere conventions at all. That’s what Craig is priming his audience to be afraid of not having.

To partially rectify this, I have written an article about how terrible the moral argument is here. Unless I deeply misunderstand what you are saying, what I argue in this article seems to be what you think atheists should do more.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-does-william-lane-craigs-brain?s=w

Craig twice says morality can exist without God: he discusses morality as social construct and as a biologically evolved “her morality.”

Why do you keep claiming otherwise? This is bizarre, Matthew.

Craig argues that socially originated moral sentiments and biologically evolved moral sentiments give us no reason to prefer or follow them (over any other morals, or none). Craig is thus not saying these moralities can’t exist (he even explicitly says several times that moralities can exist without God; I sent you direct quotes here!). To the contrary, he is saying there is no reason to prefer them to any other (or none). I have documented this with bold print quotations from Craig. Continuing to deny this makes no sense. I really don’t know what you are on about at this point.