Please help me understand non-religious metaethics.

[bedstuy]

For one thing, the existence of God is irrelevant to ethics.  If doesn't do anything to establish conceptions of the "good" and God doesn't seem to have a benefit in terms of ethical behavior.  There's no evidence that any supposed Gods have established ethical principles or even that being a creator of the universe entitles you to make up ethical principles.  What if a God is evil?  Surely, ethics can't come from an evil God, right?  So, I don't get that. 

And, I don't really get how "meta-Ethics" are really all that problematic.  By that I mean, there's no actual debate on these issues outside the ivory tower.  It's essentially semantics because these issues never crop up in an actual discussion of an ethical problem.  It's only raised by religious people who claim for some strange reason, "without God, there's no morality."

The basic underpinning of ethics is our collective human experience.  People have a collective memory and collective sense of what is beneficial and detrimental based on experience and knowledge of the world.  And, after all, if you're defining an idea, you're always vulnerable to a infinite loop of these definitional questions.  It's not like you could capture "goodness" or "truth" and put it in a mason jar.

[bedstuy]

By what sort of robust definition could a creator deity even be evil? If there was something that independently of that deity set any kind of objective moral norms, the deity wouldn't be capital-G 'God' as that term is conventionally philosophically defined because it wouldn't be omnipotent. There would be something identifiably existing outside its demesne, something that it likely wouldn't have created (I guess it's conceivably possible that a deity could establish moral norms according to which its own actions would be wicked, and that would indeed raise the question of why exactly the pronouncements such an apparently self-contradictory being should be considered trustworthy). It would be some sort of demiurge and whatever mechanism or principle set the moral norms would be if anything closer to being 'God' than it would. If there was something that independently of that deity set moral norms that weren't objective, how if at all does that differ from other forms of moral relativism or moral nihilism? I grant that it's not by any means self-evident that creating the universe would give a deity the right to establish moral norms but I don't see where else in a divinely created universe moral norms could have come from, without positing either that the deity that created it is in some way not omnipotent and has less than complete power over it or that the moral norms are not objective. I don't see any options for a theistic universe having any other setup than its creator deity establishing moral norms or morality being entirely subjective, and neither of those provide any real basis on which to call the creator deity 'evil'.

Point one, your writing style is needs some work.  Try not using excessive jargon or run-on sentences so people can understand what you're saying.

My point is that being a God doesn't give you any necessary right to determine ethics.  There's no evidence about the characteristics of God or Gods so resort to them to explain anything is basically worthless.  As far as illustrating my point, think of a Greek God that was evil like Hades.  What if Hades was the God that did the creation of the Universe?  And, the real point I was making was that we could perfectly well disagree with a God about ethics.  I don't see why not.  It's just that God provides no explanatory weight, because God is purely conjectural and we can't make any assumption about what a God could or would or might be like.  God can never explain anything, because we can make no factually grounded assumptions about the nature of God or Gods.

The last sentence of this paragraph is as far as I'm concerned and as far as I can tell manifestly untrue, in that the mere fact that non-theist metaethicists exist renders the issue such that I'm...really not sure why you'd claim that, actually. Metaethics is just the discussion of by what process one distinguishes good from bad. The idea of 'moral realism vs. moral non-realism' as a dichotomy or an argument is probably most people's idea of The Big Metaethical Question, and it's completely false to claim that that's an issue that only religious people raise. That doesn't, of course, mean that it's not an 'ivory tower' issue--it is--but I don't understand why whether or not an issue is 'ivory tower' has any bearing on whether or not it's a legitimate subject, unless one's view of the world is thoroughgoingly pragmatist.

I can't see how this underlying question would trouble you in determining the ethical path of behavior in a situation in your life.  So, I think it's just needless abstraction.  But, to elaborate, here's my basic take on what I think you're asking again. 

The basis for ethics is facts and circumstances of being human, as established by the laws of physics and biology.  We have a limited life-span, we experience pain, we have emotions, we share basic characteristics with other humans.  Those are just the circumstances of being human as they happen to be.  They inevitably lead to a set of ethical precepts which all humans seem to agree to.

[bedstuy]

The basis for ethics is facts and circumstances of being human, as established by the laws of physics and biology.  We have a limited life-span, we experience pain, we have emotions, we share basic characteristics with other humans.  Those are just the circumstances of being human as they happen to be.  They inevitably lead to a set of ethical precepts which all humans seem to agree to.

To be honest, this comes across as a shallow justification for your preconceived moral beliefs; in effect, what you're doing is appealing to human tradition and to "science" as the basis for your morality. But what if I made a conscious decision to break with human tradition and with my biology, and commit an act that, according to you, those things should lead me to believe is objectively immoral? What would you say to convince me that this is the improper course of action?

It's hard to say if you're not specifically saying what action you're taking. 

And, I think you're misinterpreting me.  I don't think science creates an ethical framework.  I think the basic facts surrounding our human existence inform our basic ethical intuitions and give them content.  It's not so much "science" as the material facts of our human community and relationships. 

[bedstuy]

The basis for ethics is facts and circumstances of being human, as established by the laws of physics and biology.  We have a limited life-span, we experience pain, we have emotions, we share basic characteristics with other humans.  Those are just the circumstances of being human as they happen to be.  They inevitably lead to a set of ethical precepts which all humans seem to agree to.

To be honest, this comes across as a shallow justification for your preconceived moral beliefs; in effect, what you're doing is appealing to human tradition and to "science" as the basis for your morality. But what if I made a conscious decision to break with human tradition and with my biology, and commit an act that, according to you, those things should lead me to believe is objectively immoral? What would you say to convince me that this is the improper course of action?

It's hard to say if you're not specifically saying what action you're taking. 

And, I think you're misinterpreting me.  I don't think science creates an ethical framework.  I think the basic facts surrounding our human existence inform our basic ethical intuitions and give them content.  It's not so much "science" as the material facts of our human community and relationships. 

I'm certainly not going to argue that our experiences don't inform our conception of right and wrong; what I disagree with is the assertion that our experiences will necessarily lead everyone, everywhere to conclude that a common handful of things are immoral. For example: a hunter-gatherer has a self-interest in cultivating a sense of empathy and compassion towards fellow members of his tribe. However, he also has an interest in denying those same virtues to members of an alien tribe. How would you go about convincing this individual to value the lives of his competitors to the same degree that he values the lives of his neighbors and his kin?

How is that different from our view of ethics today?   We still care more about our family and friends and have no absolute rule against conflict with other groups.

[bedstuy]

I don't really understand why it's necessarily in a primitive human's interest to dehumanize anyone outside their immediate family and social group. 

[bedstuy]

I don't really understand why it's necessarily in a primitive human's interest to dehumanize anyone outside their immediate family and social group. 

It isn't just in a primitive human's interest; it can be in our interest, too.

Let's say that you're a goat herder living in the Negev. A stranger happens to be sojourning in your land, and he asks you for a meal and a place to sleep. You're under no obligation to grant these to him, and since you're unlikely to ever see him again, the discomfort that feeding and boarding him would create outweighs the discomfort that you'll experience while turning him away. Since you don't believe that there's an objectively right way to treat one's fellows, you do turn him away, and you don't feel bad about it, either.

Incidentally, your Bible-believing neighbor happily provides the stranger with what he asks for.

A more modern example would be the homeless man begging for alms. Most of us would move past him with a guilty conscience if we didn't at least give him a token donation, but to the totally rational individualist, recognizing that he derives no material benefit from the exchange renders such feelings of guilt a foreign concept. How would you convince this person that he ought to feel otherwise?

I don't follow your logic at all or why you're contrasting Christians with "individualist/rationalist" Ayn Rand types.  I never said self-interest is the sole human motivating force and it evidently is not.  And, indeed, religious people are no kinder than non-religious people, so I'm just at a loss here.