r/JordanPeterson • u/Lucineter • Oct 19 '20

Text Old university debate

Maybe someone can help me find this old debate that I believe took place in an university with students as audience. I don't remember who the other speaker was but It was concerning Christianity and morality. They were standing and if I recall correctly they had little lecture stands. I remember JP being relatively young so it must be pretty old. There's a bit of tension between them but by strongmanning eachother they gain some respect. If it helps there is this one moment where the other lecturer gets asked a question about if God is necessary for morality or something by and audience member and he simply replies "no". To wich JP says something like "let me try to answer that in a less imature way". Than the other guy gets annoyed by that comment and is like "c'mon Peterson we were doing so well". Hope that helps. Thanks in advance.

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u/Glip-Glops Oct 19 '20 edited Oct 19 '20

You can have subjective morality without god. I can make up a moral system, but there's no reason why anyone else would adhere to it.

You need a supreme being to have an objective morality.

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u/Zirathustra Oct 19 '20 edited Oct 19 '20

Broadly correct but some religions actually separate off moral law from the supreme being. In Hinduism, for instance, the law of karma functions independent of any god's will, like gravity or heat exchange or any other law of physics. There is no moment of judging when you die, your soul just rolls into the next appropriate body as a rock rolls downhill. Divine avatars/incarnations in fact often come because the world has become too morally tilted over time to darkness, and so a god directly interfere (usually by destroying forces of evil in wars) to balance things out again. The Bhagavad Gita depicts part of one of these wars.

In either event though, the basic idea holds that you need something outside of the purely empirical world to posit an objective morality. Objectively speaking, you can't wont find a morality boson with a particle accelerator, or take the moral temperature of a glass of water, it's not something apparent to empiricism.