On Euthyphro

[structureoftruth (Matthew Dickau)]

@Faizal_Ali

I don’t see why that is the case.

Because conceiving of being wrong in those ways, specifically, would require conceiving how it would be if we were wrong in those ways. (At this point though, I’ve forgotten what this branch of the conversation was supposed to lead to…)

@Faizal_Ali

There’s also a long tradition of philosophers saying that’s a load of bollocks, so you need a better argument than this, sorry.

My point is that those arguments remove the grounds for your charge of arbitrariness against the theist. You can still deny that the arguments work, and that’s another debate, but within the theistic framework they give a principled reason for saying that God is the ground of goodness. You can no longer claim that this is an internal inconsistency.

@Faizal_Ali

And even if the the bar that defines a metre was made of indestructible and unalterable material such that its length could never be other than exactly what it is, that would not change the fact that using it as the standard is completely arbitrary.

This ignores what I said next:

@structureoftruth

So as long as we have some independent reason for thinking that God actually is morally perfect if he exists, then we can infer that necessary existence and moral perfection are necessarily co-instantiated, even if we can’t explain why.

I think we do have such reason - coming from our partial knowledge of moral perfection via our moral intuitions, compared against the way God has revealed himself in the world.

And I might add that even if all we have is reason to think that God’s character partially fits our moral intuitions, without being able to know that he is morally perfect, arguments such as the ontological argument would allow us to infer God’s moral perfection.

@Faizal_Ali

And if I was interlocutor 2, I would answer “Sure. Why not?”

So your argument fails.

Wow. If you genuinely believe it is possible for things that are (in actuality) moral atrocities to be morally permissible, then obviously you have different moral intuitions than mine.

But I have zero reason to trust your own intuitions over mine on this, so…

@Faizal_Ali

TBH, it appears to me you are smuggling in a number of assumptions that could taken as given if you were discussing with people who already accept Christianity are only disagreeing on the fine details of how the religion relates to moral epistemology and ontology. But that’s not the case here, so you are going to have to support many of the claims on which your argument rests and which have not yet been demonstrated to be true.

The Euthyphro dilemma is, I take it, supposed to point out an internal inconsistency in the theistic metaethical view. So I ultimately see nothing wrong with utilizing such assumptions, particularly since I think they are defensible (even if I have neither the time nor energy to go further and further back defending each and every claim I make). I’ve put some effort into showing why I find those assumptions plausible, but at the end of the day you’re always going to be able to find something to disagree with, if you so desire.