Then they cannot be said to be properly basic, I would suspect. Have you any examples in mind?
This is an interesting conversation, but it is lopsided because there are too many people replying and it is hard to follow the threads anymore. Iām going to keep @structureoftruth, @John_Harshman, and @Faizal_Ali on the main thread, and put everyone else to the side comments. Please follow this rule!
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Hereās a possible example. I suspect many people have the following rational intuition: if you have two sets of things A and B, the combined set has more members than either A or B. This intuition is wrong - it fails for infinite sets. Nevertheless, its not unreasonable for a person who doesnāt know about infinite sets to hold that intuition (even without consciously reasoning it out).
Please note that it is not necessary to my argument to hold that all rational beliefs or all moral beliefs are properly basic. Only the foundational ones, the ones not justified by inference from other beliefs, need to be so. If the example I gave is not actually a properly basic belief, that doesnāt mean that there are no rational intuitions which are properly basic (such as the law of non-contradiction). Similarly, if the example you gave (circumcision) is not actually a properly basic belief, that does not mean that there are no moral intuitions which are properly basic (that human beings have moral worth and ought to be treated with dignity and respect, for instance).
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OK, so how do you demonstrate that that is a properly basic belief, and not just an incorrect ārational intuitionā such as the example you gave?
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To be clear: in the example I gave (the set size intuition), I am saying it is still a properly basic belief - it is one the person is justified in holding, absent sufficient reason to believe otherwise. Properly basic does not mean the belief is infallible or not subject to correction; it means the belief is reasonable to hold even in the absence of arguments for it.
In my second paragraph, I was saying even if it wasnāt properly basic - say, because it was actually inferred from some argument, so would be an inference rather than an intuition - that doesnāt mean that there arenāt other rational beliefs that are properly basic.
If I recall, those rational intuitions were simply that a real world exists. That intuition is necessary to function at all. In this sense the intuition is basic, though I think your use of the word is unclear and is forced to carry more weight than it can bear. But because itās basic is no reason to think that itās true or that it points to some fundamental reality. Itās just necessary. If you grant the same status to moral intuition, I donāt see how that helps you. Also, ācomes from the same placeā is an odd and confusing way to put it.
Iād say premise 0 is right off questionable. Moral intuition supports no such thing. Also, the Euthyphro dilemma shows that if such a standard exists, it canāt be God.
1 seems like nothing more than a definition of āobjectiveā. No controversy there.
2 Seems a false dichotomy. There could easily be shades of gray. Further, how do we define moral perfection, absent a standard? We canāt define it by reference to a morally perfect being; thatās circular.
3 Defines God, but it doesnāt guarantee that the hypothetical person you call God fits that definition.
Not sure of the function of 4 or 5. You certainly havenāt exhausted the possible range of supernatural beings or of beings called āGodā in 6. What about, for example, a non-necessary but morally perfect being?
I believe thereās a typo in 7, and you mean to say that the natural world canāt ground a necessary objective standard. One might also ask what purpose ānecessaryā serves except to remind us of a necessary being and so associate the two. Why canāt an objective standard arise from a contingent reality? Why couldnāt moral laws follow from the facts of the universe? (Mind you, I would go back to a rejection of premise 0 and claim that all this reasoning is pointless.)
Iām not sure why there would have to be a causal connection between our intuitions and platonic forms in order to make them an objective standard.
Iām not sure why a being would have to be perfect in order to be a standard of morality, if a being could be a standard at all.
I donāt see why being necessary isā¦necessary for a being to be a moral standard or why perfection would be necessary either.
I will at least agree that if you accept all of premises 0-7, the conclusion 8 does follow.
6a is false for many reasons, but Euthyphro comes in elsewhere.
It fails for any case in which A or B is a subset of the other too. Iām not sure of the relevance. I also donāt see what load ābasicā is carrying here.
Thatās closer to my understanding of āproperly basic,ā not that I am claiming with confidence that my understanding is correct.
I will also say that I do not hold that to accept beliefs as PB is not the same thing as asserting they are true. I tend to think of these as our subjective experience of the evolved computational processes of our brain. That is to say, our minds perceive and understand the world in terms of concepts like causation, external reality, personal identity, etc. that are so baked into our brains after 4 billion years that it is impossible for us to conceive of a world without them. But does a dog or a cockroach or a mollusc or an E.coli bacteria have similar concepts? Possibly not, to likely not, to almost definitely not. But they all manage to make their way thru the world more or less as well as we do.
To the present topic, morality could be similarly viewed as our subjective experience of some of the brain processes the allow us to function as a social species.
Hmm. I have a different, and far narrower, understanding of the term. I think of properly basic beliefs as those which cannot be derived from any other knowledge or beliefs, but which appear to be axiomatically true to everyone whose mind is working properly, and which form the basis of all other knowledge. As such, the set size intuition would not qualify because we first need to have a concept of āsetā and the mathematical rules pertaining to them, from which we can conclude that set A and B together has more members than either set alone. The logic involved in this is so simple that it might appear properly basic, but nonetheless I am not convinced that it is.
That aside, I think you are still not really dealing with a core issue here: Regardless of whether they are properly basic, if moral intuitions can be incorrect just as the set size intuition is correct, then on what basis do they serve as evidence for the existence of God? That is to say, why is a god necessary for us to hold moral intuitions that appear to us to be obviously true, but which could be false?
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I really donāt understand your point here. Because cockroaches donāt think about causation, the world doesnāt contain causation?
What reason is there to believe that they are false? The point is that we are reasonable to accept them as true absent sufficient reasons otherwise - that is what I mean by calling them properly basic. And the mere fact that, for all we know, they could be false is not a sufficient reason for thinking that they actually are false.
As for on what basis do they serve as evidence for the existence of God - please see the nice argument I articulated above. With numbered premises and everything. @John_Harshman agreed that it was logically valid, even:
I disagree. Properly basic beliefs are a legitimate source of knowledge. They are beliefs we accept rationally, not merely pragmatically (which is what you seem to be saying). Denying this leads to radical skepticism. But that is a whole other rabbit trailā¦ might just have to agree to disagree on this. (Iād point you to my blog again for more on the subject, but you are disinclined to read it, apparently.)
They do, actually. The inherent meaning of moral intuitions requires that there is an objective standard for them to make sense. If there is no objective standard, our moral intuitions are false. Blog, yet again. Afraid I donāt have time to reiterate my arguments for this point from there any further.
Care to start from the top and actually explain why?
2 is literally an instance of the law of excluded middle. A or not A. Tautologically true.
I donāt believe we actually need to know the definition of moral perfection to use it as a term in a logical argument. We can still see that the argument is logically valid (as you yourself conceded that it is; thank you for that, by the way). Of course, it helps to evaluate the truth of the premises if we at least have a partial idea of what moral perfection means. But we do have a partial idea, from our moral intuitions.
Agreed; problem for another day.
A non-necessary but morally perfect being would fall under 6b. I certainly have exhausted all the possibilities; please take a closer look. Each fork of 3-5 just divides the remaining possibilities into two disjoint and mutually exhaustive categories.
Correct, thanks.
Because our moral intuitions tell us that the objective standard is necessary; thatās part of premise 0. It isnāt just that it is wrong to (say) torture innocent children for fun: it isnāt even possible for that not to be wrong. It is necessarily wrong. And if the objective standard is necessary, then what grounds it in reality must be necessary as well.
Feel free to show me how its done. Until then, itās intuitively obvious that facts about value arenāt going to emerge merely from facts about the physical universe.
To make them an objective standard, no. To make it so that our moral intuitions bear any resemblance to that standard, yes. Without that connection the theory is self-undermining (it defeats the reason for accepting premise 0).
The standard works like this: if someone acts the way a person with Godās character would act, that matches the standard and so is good. If someone deviates from the way a person with Godās character would act, they deviate from the standard and are to that extent bad. This shows that the being that grounds the standard must be morally perfect. (It also shows that having the standard be grounded in a being is perfectly coherent.)
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Logical validity is a low bar and means little, however. Donāt forget that.
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I recognize that. But itās a crucial component to soundness.
I have no idea what you intend by āproperly based beliefsā or āaccept rationallyā as opposed to āaccept pragmaticallyā, just as it isnāt clear what you mean by ābasicā. And I donāt see how you can go from our having moral intuitions to the inference that there must be a moral standard provided by God. As far as I can tell, moral intuitions are based on instinct and upbringing, the former a result of lengthy primate evolution as a social species. How does that feature God or any objective standard?
I think you confuse subjectivity or contingency with falsehood.
Your attempted escape, that God is his own standard whose very character is goodness, just isnāt coherent. It renders the concept of goodness circular. We know heās good because heās God, and God is good. How do we know that? Because heās God.
I think you consider the two characteristics featured in A as unitary, with not A lacking both. You fail to consider anything lacking only one.
All true, but so what? If I say āIf A, then B; A; therefore Bā, thatās a logical argument, but itās also vacuous without knowing what A and B are.
I donāt think that helps, since you reject our intuitions as a standard. If they were, that would be an external standard by which to judge Godās goodness. Further, Godās actions frequently violate our moral intuitions, or at least they violate mine. So far you seem unwilling to say.
It seems to be a problem that destroys your argument unless solved. Would you agree?
Donāt see it, especially since you declared 6b to be deism. My understanding is that the deist God is necessary, and whether heās morally perfect is not considered. One problem is that 2a considers three characteristics, and we donāt know which one, or two or three, weāre rejecting if we accept 2b. āSomething supernatural, but not Godā in 3b doesnāt clarify, nor does 4 or 5. 6b allows that distinctness from the natural world wasnāt a defining characteristic, but we are left without any knowledge of whether necessity or moral perfection was the distinction, or whether they are considered unitary.
Your moral intuitions may. Mine do not. I reject premise 0.
They emerge from evolution, both biological and social, in reaction to the conditions of primate and human social environments. If thatās true, does it fit your description? I have to say that your intuition is doing a lot of work here, and intuition isnāt all that great a guide to objective truth.
I donāt think so. What you have there is an arbitrary rule. Itās just defining āgoodā as āwhat God would doā. But how can we say that what God would do is good, unless we have some standard of goodness by which to judge his character?
Crucial, but trivial, as it may equally be true of an unsound argument. Itās the premises that you need to justify.
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Not quite. Rather, since we can only perceive the world thru our mind, we cannot assert that things like causation exist in the world apart from our mind.
There is an analogy I (partially) recall that I believe was made by Daniel Dennett: When you delete files from your computer, you point your cursor to the icon representing the file, then drag to the Recycle Bin icon and drop it there.
Of course, that is not what you are actually doing. You are not physically dragging something to a physical bin, and depositing it there. These are just graphic representations on the screen which acts as visual interface between the user and the processing going on in the computer.
Similarly, it is conceivable that the concepts we use when we think, such as the rules of math and logic, the existence of an external world operating in accordance with rules of causation, the very existence of ourselves as subjects, could be the equivalent of the icons created on the computer monitor by the operating system, and the real world is akin to the electronic process going on in the computer itself, which could be represented in any number of other ways. So a cockroach has a different kind of operating system suited to his particular evolutionary history.
Which is besides the point. You are arguing that they are true, so you need to do more than just demonstrate that they could be true.
Since it is premise 0 (Not even premise 1!) that is being questioned, it doesnāt matter how nice the rest of the argument is. I am asking you to support premise 0.
I also do not necessarily agree with this. I would say I live my life as if an external world exists because there is no other pragmatic way of existing that I can think of living. Speaking colloquially, I would even say I ābelieveā the external world exists. But if asked to demonstrate its existence by rigorous logical argument in a metaphysical discussion such as the present one, I cannot. So to that extent, it would not be entirely accurate to say I believe in its existence.
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Beliefs which we are justified in believing even in the absence of arguments for them. As Iāve already said. Basic refers to the fact that they arenāt 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 thatās enough of a crash course on my understanding of properly basic beliefs for nowā¦
Iāve provided my reasoning for that inference elsewhere. I feel like youāve already asked this, and Iāve already responded in the same way:
I do understand that your time is no less limited than mine, so if you donāt want to read my blog, thatās fine. But maybe instead of assuming that Iām āconfusing subjectivity or contingency with falsehoodā, you could consider that I may, in fact, have reasons for my claims that I havenāt taken the time to repeat here, though Iāve 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. Iām going to try to steer the conversation back to Euthyphro shortlyā¦
Totally false. Go back and read what I wrote under premise 7b.
Only vacuous if you have no idea what the terms are. It wasnāt my intention to say that this argument is meaningful if you have no idea of what moral perfection means, only that we donāt 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 sentenceā¦)
I simply donāt 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. Andā¦? 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 Iād like to continue discussing Euthyphro first. As Iāve 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 āGodā in my argument with the (far wordier) āa necessary being distinct from the natural world who is essentially morally perfectā. 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 isā¦ get thisā¦ āOne or more non-God supernatural entities distinct from the natural worldā, and earlier statements in the argument make it clear that āGodā refers to āa necessary being distinct from the natural world who is essentially morally perfectā 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 āa necessary being distinct from the natural world who is essentially morally perfectā, 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 āorā understood inclusively, and where, for greater clarity, ānecessaryā means ānecessarily existentā, as in ānot possibly non-existentā).
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. Iād go back to talking about properly basic beliefs, rational intuitions, the foundations of our beliefs structures, and so on, but Iām tired of epistemology.
Now back to Euthyphro! Actually Iām out of time for now. I will comment again later.
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Well, now. Those are two different things. Just because a belief isnāt arrived at by inference doesnāt mean weāre justified in believing it. Intuitions are frequently wrong. Which one of those two things does ābasicā mean?
That would include our beliefs about the existence of a reality corresponding to our senses, wouldnāt it?
Why?
Again, why? Is this still true if we reject premise 0?
Iām willing to believe that you may, but Iām certainly not going to consider those unexpressed reasons as an argument in favor of your pont.
Just not true. Our moral intuitions could exist for good empirical reasons having nothing to do with objective standards. They could, for example, make for a society that would function better, with benefit to its members, than a society without them.
I did. I donāt see that it satisfies the conditions I stated.
Iād say that itās vacuous if you have no satisfactory, clear idea what the terms are. If your vague idea of moral perfection is merely that it satisfies our intuitions, thatās not good enough to support a point, and I believe it destroys your point, as it sets an external standard.
Yes, absolutely.
Iām not sure what āgrounds it in realityā means, if it isnāt a reason for believing that itās true. If God acting in a way that fits our intuition is a reason for believing he heās perfectly good, isnāt him acting in a way the doesnāt fit a reason for believing he isnāt?
Why are those three things necessarily conjoined? And of course if thatās the definition of God, then God is morally perfect by definition. We still have no reason to believe that this entity, whatever name you give it, is morally perfect.
Is a 6b entity necessary? Perhaps a flow chart would explain this better.
Some of that matter is people. Do you really think that if naturalism is true there can be no morality? Is your religion all that keeps you from casually murdering strangers? I find this view incomprehensible, but Iām very glad that such people are religious.
You appear to be able to tell the difference, but I canāt see how.
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Now back to Euthyphro! (Sorry it took so long.)
Analogy time. @Faizal_Ali brought up the prototype meter in the other thread, so Iāll run with that. (Thereās an obvious point of disanalogy that Iāll discuss shortly, so please donāt start responding before reading the whole thing. Also, youāll have to pretend this is a world where they havenāt updated the SI unit of length to be based on c yet.)
Letās say we have a few metal bars in various metrology labs in whatever society we are a part of, and we use them to make meter sticks. Problem is, they donāt agree with each other. Realizing the very concept of a meter requires that it is something that everyone has to agree on, we go about trying to find the correct standard for the meter. We trace down calibration certificates (or whatever), and eventually we find the bar that was used as the original prototype meter, locked in a vault somewhere.
The metrologists now say: aha! This is the correct standard for the meter! (We had forgotten about, haha, oops.) Anything that has the length of this bar is one meter long. Some of the bars that we have match it more closely and others less closely, and we set about adjusting the ones that are out of spec.
But no, someone comes along to say. A bar whose very length constitutes one meter, just isnāt coherent. It renders the concept of a meter circular. We know itās a meter long because it because it is the prototype meter, and the prototype meter is a meter long. How do we know? Because it is the prototype meter.
And again, he says. What you have there is just an arbitrary rule. Itās just defining a meter as āthe length of that barā. But how can we say that bar is one meter long, unless we have a standard by which to judge its length?
Okay, first: the obvious disanalogy. The prototype meter is arbitrary. We could have just as easily picked any other length of dimensionally-stable metal and called it our unit of length instead.
God, on the other hand, is not arbitrary. He is the center of reality and the cause of existence of everything beside himself. Moreover, his character is not contingent, and thus, it is not possible for the objective standard of morality grounded in his character to be different than it actually is.
Now, it doesnāt actually matter at this point if the person raising the Euthyphro objection thinks thereās no reason to believe that God exists, or that his character is necessary, or any of that. Euthyphro is supposed to demonstrate an internal incoherence in the way the theist proposes grounding objective morality in God. So what matters is how the theist is proposing to do so.
And the way the theist proposes to do so is to say that goodness is grounded in Godās character. The horns of the original Euthyphro dilemma are either:
- What is good is so because God wills it, or
- God wills what he does because it is good.
The problem with (1) is that it makes goodness arbitrary, since God could will whatever. The problem with (2) is that it means goodness is something independent from God, so that God is not the ultimate reality after all. But by saying that goodness is grounded in Godās character, the theist avoids both these problems. Goodness is not independent of God, but neither is it arbitrary because his character is what it is necessarily.
Here is the point of analogy that I want to emphasize:
The discovery of the prototype meter in this little story did not suddenly remove everyoneās knowledge of what a meter is. It did not make the concept of a meter circular or vacuous. The man on the street still knows what a meter is: itās roughly yea long, he might say, and heād be right. His knowledge of a meter comes from the meter sticks heās used, manufactured using the imperfect (but still approximately correct) bars that were in use at the start of the story. At the same time, it would be silly to say that he needs to grab one of his meters sticks to go measure the prototype meter before he can accept that a meter really is the length of that particular bar. If he does that, and finds they donāt match, what needs correcting is his meter stick.
In the same way, a philosopher or theologian claiming (perhaps because of an argument like the moral argument I laid out in this thread) that what actually defines goodness is what God would do, doesnāt make the concept of goodness circular or vacuous. We still have our moral intuitions to give us imperfect knowledge of what goodness is. (And our moral intuitions are approximately correct - at least in the broad strokes, because God put them there, yet they can go wrong because of sin or faulty reasoning, etc.) Yet, we donāt need to verify that God would only do good (as determined by our moral intuitions) as a precondition for accepting this theistic metaethical theory. And if we do compare our moral intuitions to Godās character - assuming we have the correct information about Godās character - it is our moral intuitions that need adjustment when they donāt agree.
(There are, of course, nuances here. Such as God is not a human being, which is why in an earlier post I said something to the effect of āgoodness is what a person with Godās character would doā rather than merely āgoodness is what God would doā. But I digress.)
TL;DR I have here a perfectly good resolution to the Euthyphro dilemma. 
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We might as well reason as follows: since we can only perceive the world through our mind, we cannot assert that the world exists apart from our mind. In fact, you say something like that at the end of your post. I think thatās patently absurd, no offense, and that should be a clue to go back and consider that you might have taken a wrong turn. Be skeptical of your skepticism.
I actually donāt think that is conceivable. As in, I literally think it is impossible to conceive of those things (with the sole exception of the non-existence of the external world). You might decline to consciously entertain the fact of your existence, but you cannot have a coherent concept of your own non-existence as a subject while simultaneously being the subject of an illusion of your own existence as a subject. Similarly for logic and even, I believe, for causation.
I am not arguing that they are true on the basis that they might be true. I am not, strictly speaking, arguing that they are true at all. I am saying that I know they they are true in a properly basic way, and defending the reasonableness of that claim. (And I think you can know that they are true, too, and in the same way. Just takes some consideration of the nature and content of those moral intuitions.)