(November 20, 2013 at 6:08 pm)Vincenzo "Vinny" G. Wrote: Most people are familiar with the Euthyphro dilemma against a deity. Theists, particularly intellectually sophisticated theists have some interesting responses to the Euthyphro dilemma (Richard Swinburne's response is one of the most unusual), but we can get into that later.
What if we flip it against atheism?
"Do you do good things because they are good, or are things good simply because you do them?"
If you pick the first option, then the good exists independent of human existence or knowledge. If you pick the second, then people can deem anything they do as good.
No, that doesn't work at all. It supposes that one's SOLE criterion for determining what's good is "whether I and I alone think it is".
While we are all the final arbiters of our own behaviour* we don't come to that decision in an ethical vacuum. We have thousands of years of evolving human morality, as well as myriad social and inter-personal influences to draw upon. It's not simply "it's good cos I say so", it "it's probably good because it's what most reasonable people would say was good." One can still have ethical standards without them being imposed by a supernatural entity.
*This goes for theists too, incidentally. You may think you've been handed a set of rules by some god or other but how you INTERPRET those rules comes down to your own personal moral perspective. We know this, since were it not the case individuals of similar theological backgrounds would have identical moral attitudes, and this is demonstrably not the case.
