Beliefs which we are justified in believing even in the absence of arguments for them. As I’ve already said. Basic refers to the fact that they aren’t arrived at by inference.
We accept a belief pragmatically when we treat it as true because it is useful to do so, not because we have any justification for thinking it is true. Such a belief does not constitute knowledge - it lacks the justification part. We accept a belief rationally when we have justification for it, and such a belief can constitute knowledge.
The proper basicality of a belief counts as intrinsic justification for it (though it can be countered by justification for its negation). The regress problem in epistemology demonstrates that some beliefs are properly basic in this way. Applied to moral epistemology, at least some moral intuitions are properly basic, or we have no moral knowledge at all.
And that’s enough of a crash course on my understanding of properly basic beliefs for now…
I’ve provided my reasoning for that inference elsewhere. I feel like you’ve already asked this, and I’ve already responded in the same way:
I do understand that your time is no less limited than mine, so if you don’t want to read my blog, that’s fine. But maybe instead of assuming that I’m “confusing subjectivity or contingency with falsehood”, you could consider that I may, in fact, have reasons for my claims that I haven’t taken the time to repeat here, though I’ve repeatedly alluded to them.
Now, this whole side conversation (about premise 0) is already a supporting point on a supporting point in the conservation - I laid out the moral argument by way of trying to explain how I arrive at my solution to Euthyphro, and why I see it as coherent. I’m going to try to steer the conversation back to Euthyphro shortly…
Totally false. Go back and read what I wrote under premise 7b.
Only vacuous if you have no idea what the terms are. It wasn’t my intention to say that this argument is meaningful if you have no idea of what moral perfection means, only that we don’t need to know the complete, precise definition for the argument to make sense. (I did not add in those qualifiers before, but I did talk about having a partial idea of what moral perfection means in the very next sentence…)
I simply don’t understand what you find problematic about this. Yes, our intuitions are not the standard. It follows that we do not have perfect knowledge of moral perfection. And…? Does this undercut my moral argument? My solution to the Euthyphro dilemma?
Keep in mind that how we know something and what makes something true (what grounds it in reality) are very often not the same thing.
I intend to get around to it. But I’d like to continue discussing Euthyphro first. As I’ve said, this objection relies on further premises, and is about the consistency of my solution to Euthyphro with other beliefs, not about the coherence of the solution itself.
Not at all! Why would it? Replace all mentions of “God” in my argument with the (far wordier) “a necessary being distinct from the natural world who is essentially morally perfect”. I give exactly the same support to the premises and I still believe the conclusion is true, regardless of further discussion about the identity of said being.
If you read earlier in the argument, I called it something like deism, and my applying that label was intended to be a helpful shorthand and nothing more. The actual definition of 6b is… get this… “One or more non-God supernatural entities distinct from the natural world”, and earlier statements in the argument make it clear that “God” refers to “a necessary being distinct from the natural world who is essentially morally perfect” and the the supernatural entity or entities referred to in 6b are concrete objects as opposed to abstract objects.
The negation of a conjunction is the disjunction of the negations. If God is “a necessary being distinct from the natural world who is essentially morally perfect”, then a being that is not God is any being that is either not necessary, or not essentially morally perfect, or not distinct from the natural world (with “or” understood inclusively, and where, for greater clarity, “necessary” means “necessarily existent”, as in “not possibly non-existent”).
All I see - if naturalism is true - is matter moving around. Some of it makes noises.
For some areas of truth, that is true. For others - debatable. I’d go back to talking about properly basic beliefs, rational intuitions, the foundations of our beliefs structures, and so on, but I’m tired of epistemology.
Now back to Euthyphro! Actually I’m out of time for now. I will comment again later.