Unto an atheist, speak very slowly
Vox Day does just that as he deconstructs yet another set of arguments in his ongoing written debate with Luke, who blogs at Common Sense Atheism. (No, I won’t link thereto.)
In particular, Vox’s dismemberment of Luke’s “desirist” moral code (which, as near as I can figure out, reduces to the assertion that action X is moral if more people want it to happen than do not*) is worth highlighting:
When you assert, for example, that racism is evil under the desirist code, you are therefore required to assume that more and stronger desires are potentially thwarted than fulfilled by it. But this assumption is easily shown to be a false one. In materalist terms, the desire to live is observably no stronger than the desire to propagate one’s own kind, this is why most people will risk fatal diseases in order to engage in sexual relations, why a woman will carry a child to term even when doing so risks her own life, and why men will sacrifice their lives to preserve the lives of their women and children. This indicates that the strength of the collective racist desire for racial purity is stronger than the collective non-racist desire for a multi-racial culture and may even be stronger than the collective desire of the minority races to survive. This is supported by an examination of your chosen example of Triumphant Nazism, which proves precisely the opposite of what you believed it did.
“Turn this knob to the right, and racist desires strengthen throughout the population. Turn this knob to the left, and racist desires decrease. To say that racist desires are evil is to say that turning this knob to the right thwarts more desires than turning this knob to the left. If we turn the knob to the right, many racist desires are fulfilled but the desires of minorities are thwarted. If we turn the knob all the way to the left, no racist desires are thwarted (because they don’t exist), and also the desires of minorities are not thwarted.”
This reasoning led you to an incorrect conclusion because you failed to realize that turning the knob all the way to the right means that racist desires are fulfilled and no desires of minorities are thwarted – because they don’t exist either! As you wrote, turning the knob all the way to the left means that no racist desires are thwarted and no desires of minorities are thwarted. But because a failure to thwart desires is not equivalent to fulfilling desires, this means that turning the knob all the way to the right would not only fulfill more and stronger reasons for action than it would thwart, it would fulfill more and stronger reasons for action than turning the knob all the way to the left even without the numerical requirement of a majority of the population possessing the racist desires. Therefore, under the desirist moral code, the Nazi extermination program is confirmed to be good and opposition to it, or even mitigation of it, is a definite evil.
To Luke’s credit, he does a bit more with the issue of “whence morality?” than do most atheists. One is so used to seeing atheists simply take the prevailing morality of the culture in which they live (e.g. Christian morality in most Western nations) and subtracting the parts (e.g. the limitations on sex) they disagree with (read: “want to engage in”). The rest is simply put forth as being “just so, Q.E.D.” So at least Luke attempts to free himself from this trapping.
Granted, in so doing, he basically walks into postulating the ethics of Satan, adding little more than an appeal to a majority vote of all involved parties onto the usual hedonistic boilerplate. And Vox rightly eviscerates his postulations.
* one notes that under such a system, rape and child abuse could easily be considered morally justifiable if one argued from the perspective of the number of people who might derive gratification from watching videos of such things. I gather that Luke attempts to slip around this point by declaring the “desire” to view such a movie to be a “non-desire,” but that’s little more than some frantic hand-waving intended to hide the underlying ugliness of the moral standard he’s attempting to defend.
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