On Euthyphro

[structureoftruth (Matthew Dickau)]

@Faizal_Ali

If you are conceding that moral values are contingent upon a number of factors including the type of beings we are discussing, the circumstances of their existence, etc, then it appears to me you are blowing your entire argument out of the water.

Then you are not yet understanding me.

That some act is right or wrong for creatures of a certain nature does not make that moral evaluation subjective or contingent - the rightness or wrongness of said act for creatures of that nature is still an objective (not constituted by merely subjective features) necessary (could not have been otherwise) moral fact.

@Faizal_Ali

You can think whatever you want. You still haven’t demonstrated it.

And you haven’t demonstrated that what I think is incoherent, or even unreasonable. Again, here’s it stripped down to the bare minimum:

@structureoftruth

At the very least, I would say that we can plausibly infer from, say, the cosmological argument that there is a necessary being that is the cause of the universe, and we can plausibly infer from the moral argument (which I outlined above) that there is a necessary being which is the ground of the objective moral standard, and that it is a reasonable move (via considerations of parsimony) to assume that those two beings are in fact one in the same.

I’ve spent some time defending the moral argument in this thread and pointed to writings where I’ve defended it further. I’m not going to bother laying out the cosmological argument here - but I have written about it on my blog, and you can probably find posts by me here on PS where I’ve defended it in the past. The move linking them is a completely natural appeal to Occam’s razor; it’s not an arbitrary choice. So your objection that I haven’t overcome Euthyphro with the usual “objective moral standard = God’s character/nature” move because such a move is “arbitrary” is, from my perspective, ultimately baseless.