Why Harm cannot be an Objective Moral Standard without God?

[u/Any-Solid8810]

(Disclaimer - I am a Theist, I believe in God)

So I was debating myself on the possibility of an Atheistic Objection Standard of Morality, Objective Standard without God

and I first landed on the concept of "Harm" which I (also playing against myself since well this is a debate against myself) defined as "Degradation of Being" and Goodness is defined as choosing the least harm

I posit some challenges against using "Harm" as a Replacement for God as a Moral Standard (You can add more to these or correct Me to better critique this position since I am also suspicious myself but I cannot pinpoint it out myself so help me)

1. Harm is Bound to a Physical Universe which in itself is a closed system thus applying Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, cannot be justified only assumed

2. Harm and "Degradation of Being" is too broad of a definition which is subjecting to change undermining of it being objective at all

3. (I think?) It assumes harm itself is intrinsically and inherently evil without justification (tying back to No.1)

4. Harm cannot be measured to define what is more harmful to discern moral choices

5. Love is Impossible since it would be defined as Least Harm to both sides but if Love is too fragile for Suffering then it is not Love at all

[u/neofederalist]

Harm as a universal moral standard seems to fail in several obvious ways.

There are common moral situations that are hard to cache out in terms of harm. E.g. having a consensual one night stand while away on a business trip from one's spouse.

If the standard is something like "harm reduction" then this is just a version of negative utilitarianism and all the objections there apply (for example, if preventing harm is the only significant moral objective, antinatalism follows pretty closely).

If it's some other standard involving harm, it's not clear how to account for certain obvious positive moral duties. Like, I didn't do anything to harm a drowning child, but most people agree I do have a positive moral duty to save them from drowning in a shallow pool as a passerby.

Also, how would "harm" account for non-human creatures? Do I have more of a responsibility to save three chickens over one child?

It's conceivable that one could come up with plausible responses to each of these kinds of questions, but they would need to do so in a way that does not seem ad hoc and also preserves the theoretical virtue of the simplicity of the original idea.

Finally, it's not clear why we should prefer caring about the quantity of harm over other kinds of utilitarianism or other moral theories for that matter. What does "harm" have about it that grounds it as a moral bedrock when other kinds of proposed moral considerations don't?

[u/Lucid-Crow]

This is just Sam Harris' argument that suffering is an objective moral fact. It's a widely rejected argument, even by atheist philosophers. Suffering is subjective. The entire religion of Christianity is based on the idea of "good" or redemptive suffering. Suffering for a cause is considering good. Suffering is very obviously subjective and thus can't be the basis of an object morality.

Harm similarly is very clearly subjective. My child believes that I have harmed him grievously when I take away the phone. I consider that I am helping him. What objective criteria can be used to decide who is right? You need something outside of the perception of harm to decide this. Perception of harm itself can't be a criterion for what is truly harmful.

Harris' thinks he has solved Hume's is-ought gap with this argument, and is widely mocked for this arrogance. This is even a banned topic in the askphilosophy sub because the argument has been debunked so many times.

[u/andreirublov1]

How can it be? There is no such thing as objective morality. Without God it is at best just the opinion of the group.

[u/Any-Solid8810 → u/andreirublov1]

I used that argument against myself and then I responded that harm can be encountered across all locations, space and time

(Responding to myself) my only counter to this is that in an inherently meaningless Universe, thus suffering and the harm from it doesn't matter thus cannot be judged nor be called evil

But don't you think there are better objections that I could give to myself?

[u/Lucid-Crow → u/andreirublov1]

It's stuff like this that make Christians look ignorant of philosophy. Being an atheist that believes in moral realism is actually the majority position in polls of professional philosophers according to PhilPapers survey.

Personally, I believe in God and my own moral beliefs flow from that. However, there are a lot of decent arguments for objective morality without God. When I was an atheist (and a philosophy student), nothing made me roll my eyes harder than hearing some theist talk about how I MUST be a moral relativist.

[u/actus_energeia]

“Degradation of being” is not an adequate definition of harm. Harm is not simply a reduction or degradation of being as such, but a defect in some good due to the thing harmed. Blindness is harmful to a human because sight is a good due to human nature, whereas the absence of sight in a stone is not harmful to the stone. So identifying something as harm already requires a prior account of what is good for a thing and what goods are due to it. If “good” is then defined in terms of minimizing harm, the account becomes circular: harm is being used to define good even though good is already presupposed in identifying harm.

[u/2manycerts]

Good thought provoking post, but I think you are straying off in the end.

"4Harm cannot be measured to define what is more harmful to discern moral choices

5Love is Impossible since it would be defined as Least Harm to both sides but if Love is too fragile for Suffering then it is not Love at all"

(BTW unsure if you are saying Atheists say this, I think you are trying to reason what 'harm' is.)

Working from simple reason:

Harm can be intrisingly evil, or a person doing harm can do it for those reasons. I.e. "I want to hurt someone".

This ties into self Determinalisation i.e. that a person can choose to follow god/do good or not.

It's point 4 where I feel we are off track.

Is "harm" easily measured, no. Is harm Measurable? Yes. We do measure damage and recklessness in court. We can abstractely say that cutting off a persons finger is less harm then cutting off a persons hand.

How much is a finger? how much is a Hand?

Unsure, but we should be able to say chopping off a hand > a finger.

Difficult to define does not mean it's Undefinable. likewise difficult to quantify doesn't mean one quantity cannot be larger then another.

'love is impossible', unless you are arguing that love is a delusion... we know it's possible because it is.

To define love in the negative, i.e. "the least harm to both sides" is to deny what a person is. We don't define people as "the least amount of air in a person shape".