Objective Morality, Naturalism, and Euthyphro

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Hi Gil
Here is an AI discussion about the Philosophy of David Hume. He is the original philosopher of what you appear to be arguing against.

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_aac64bab-3fed-467a-ad5d-e39520d5ad1e

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I think a couple of hypothetical questions might help demonstrate the flaw in @Giltil’s ‘logic’.

  1. Could, conceivably, an powerful but non-omnibenevolent (and potentially even omnimalevolent) being create a universe? (Something along these lines has already been suggested in some conceptualisations of a demiurge.)

  2. Would such a being be the arbiter of all morality in the universe?

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It strikes me that this thread illustrates, just as the recently-ongoing thread about “codes” as showing design did, the limits of reasoning when reasoning is limited to purely verbal, rather than empirical, subjects. Concepts like “necessary” and “sufficient” are useful, now and then, in relation to real things, but they are seldom useful when the “things” being reasoned about are themselves merely ideas. And concepts like “contingent” and “non-contingent” are rarely, if ever, useful for anything – in the absence of any sound evidentiary foundation, they represent only speculations about the dependency of one thing upon another.

“Objective morality” is another of these useless verbal twists. We ordinarily regard things as “objective” which we can verify. There is an objective fact as to what the mass of some physical thing is, and we can know it is objective because we can have different people evaluate it and reach compatible conclusions. “Objective” is not a conclusion that flows out of how we feel about a thing; it’s a conclusion that flows from its being quite beyond all argument.

But ask for definitions of “objective morality” and what you get are always only statements about result, not about the means and results of ascertainment and measurement. People will tell you that something is objectively wrong if it is – well, wrong in an objective sense. But how does one TELL whether a particular moral proposition is objectively correct or not? Nobody ever has the slightest clue.

And anyone who’s actually struggled with resolving ethical problems has practical reason to doubt that moral questions normally have definite, inarguable answers. Even the basics like “killing people is wrong” have to be hedged in with exceptions, clarifications, definitions, provisos and codicils that fill thousands of pages of the reports of common law courts. When a fraudster has gotten out of town with both the money and the goods from some transaction between two other people, there may be all manner of difficulty in deciding upon which of those two people part or all of the loss should fall, especially because no possible outcome is satisfyingly “fair.” Surely if there is an “objective morality,” then there should be a straightforward method of ascertaining, in every case, what the one and only correct answer is. But one will struggle to find it, and the proponents of the idea that this “objective morality” exists are of no help.

And so “objective morality” is another of these utterly useless, purely verbal notions. It corresponds to no ascertainable thing, occurrence or phenomenon in the real world. Its contents cannot be divined by even the wisest and the most even-tempered and fair among us.

But let us suppose, for a moment, that it “exists,” in some ethereal sense: that some being which is beyond all scrutiny holds, in its own peculiarly large heart, the true and best moral answer to every moral question, in all its complexity, that could ever arise. Where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us in a place where that particular form of morality is utterly inaccessible to us. It may exist, but it is a matter of, as Huxley once said, “lunar politics,” about which nothing at all can be said. And it leaves those who insist there is an “objective morality” in possession of nothing but their own opinions, based upon tea leaves, necromancy, or secret messages decoded from cuneiform, as to what that morality consists of: in other words, their own subjective morality.

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This is incredibly muddled. The first sentence simply doesn’t follow. If God is the source of all that exists, that doesn’t (in and of itself) mean that all (or any one of ) his pronouncements must reflect existence. There is one or a couple of missing premises here. Please explain how Y follows from X.

My understanding (taking it at face value since I am not a theist) is the premise of God’s omnipotent and omnibenevolent natures would support the aforementioned conclusion that God’s pronouncements reflect existence, but this is separate from whether or not God is the source of all that exists.

But there is another more severe issue here. You state that since “God’s pronouncements reflect existence” that makes these objective, since “objectivity refers to reality”. I think you are using ‘objective’ in a very unclear manner. Something is ‘objective’ if it is contingent on the ‘object’ in question. For example, the fact that my pizza has mass is contingent on object itself. It’s not contingent on a subject’s experience of the object. If nothing except for the pizza exists, it still has mass. However, me thinking the pizza tastes delicious when I take a bite, that is subjective since that is contingent on a subject (me). In the case of “God’s pronouncements”, that is subjective since it is contingent on the subject (God), not on the subject (existence).

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Wouldn’t the combination of omniscience and omnibenevolence yield a stronger argument for (something resembling) objective morality than omnipotence and omnibenevolence (keeping in mind that God is envisioned as all three)? An omnipotent, omnibenevolent, but not omniscient, being would want to declare the best possible morality but, lacking omniscience, would have insufficient knowledge to know what that was.

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It might, but it would not support the apologetic goal of demonstrating that objective morality can only exist if God exists. Your model is consistent with “objective morality” being something that exists in the world regardless of whether God exists. God just happens to know what it is and wants to make sure we all know about it.

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I don’t think so, since even if we assume God’s nature is the reference of morality, that still means morality is still subjective… in that it is dependent on a mind or subject (God). Morality would not be dependent inherent nature of the object itself (any action in question).

I think theists tend to play and loose with the concepts of “subjective” and “objective” and never clarify what they mean when they say this. If we define “objective” to be “depending on the object, and mind independent” then objective morality means that any given action would have inherent qualities that determines it’s moral status. No reference to a mind or subject would be needed. But that is not what theists say, obviously. They claim morality is dependent on God’s mind, but that would be “subjective” by definition. At least the common definition that I am using here. I suspect that theists use “subjective” to mean “based on arbitrary choices, or on personal whim.”

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Another thing I find unconvincing about this idea of morality being an expression of God’s nature:

One argument theists will often make in favour of “objective morality” is an appeal to our moral intuition. They will argue that it just seems obviously true to everyone that “It is wrong to torture a child just for your own pleasure.” However, the position that morality is an expression of God’s nature seems, to me, to undercut that. By that position, morality is just an random trait of preference of God, just like someone might find pistachio ice cream delicious and another find it disgusting. There is no reason that God, by his nature, could not deem torturing children for pleasure to be a morally virtuous act. It is just by chance that he doesn’t feel that way.

That, I believe, goes against our moral intuition that there is just something inherently right or wrong about certain acts, and they are not just a matter of the whims of someone’s “nature.”

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You’re correct, a premise is missing to go from X to Y, which is that God always speaks the truth. But that God always speaks the truth is traditional thinking in Christian theology.

Don’t think so. The more a statement about a thing reflects what the thing really is, the more objective it is. And who is the most capable of pronouncing objective statement about something if not its creator?

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So because it’s traditional, therefore it’s true? Not very convincing reasoning. Anyway, it doesn’t help your claim. If God always speaks the truth, his pronouncements on morality are true, but he is merely reflecting an objective standard that’s external to him.

Sure, that makes sense. Chickens are the most qualified to tell you about eggs, right?

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Except that chickens are not the creators of eggs, not at all.

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So who or what does create chicken eggs?

How do you know?

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The egg fairy?

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Silly boy - fairies don’t lay eggs.

Their reproductive organs are mammalian, even if their wings aren’t.

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So you’re telling me that no mammals lay eggs?

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No, only no mammals that fly.

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That’s just an assumption (which is a subjective act, to define God as always speaking the truth, it doesn’t actually show that God is always truthful).

And it wouldn’t make morality uttered by God objective. It would just mean he would be speaking the truth when he states his subjective opinions. In other words, that he is not lying about what his opinions is. If God says humans ought to do X and God is always truthful, all that establishes is that God has spoken truthfully about his opinion. It wouldn’t establish that it isn’t his mere opinion.

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Statements are not objective. They are stated by subjects. They are contingent, therefore, upon said subjects. Their truth-value, insofar as they have one, is a matter of objective fact, but a subjective articulation of some objective matter of fact is not itself therefore objective.

In order to argue that morality – God’s or anyone else’s – is objective, we need to establish that there is such a thing as a subject-independent moral fact. It makes no sense to say that God is (objectively) correct about morality until morality is something it is even possible to be “correct” about in principle. And, of course, if or when we can establish that premise, there’ll be no need for a god to anchor any of that objective morality, because being objective is literally synonymous with specifically not depending on a subject.

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I disagree. Statements can be objective if they align with reality. For example, saying that the cheetah is faster than the giraffe is an objective statement, right?

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No. I have explained how and why not in the rest of the paragraph you quote me out of, and delineated between the categories you confuse. Without further query or challenge to any of that, there seems to not be any need for me to repeat myself, for now.