Turning the Euthyphro Dilemma around on atheists

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

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.

I'm not seeing a dilemma here. Maybe, that's because I haven't made a stupid claim like "without my existence, nobody can differentiate between good and bad". Option one is obviously correct - I do good things because they are good - which means that yes, good does exist independent of my knowledge and existence.

Why stop there?

If the good exists independently of your existence, why can the good not exist independently of everyone's existence? If so, independently of all of existence, and thus good and evil exist independent of the material world, and thus metaphysical naturalism has some serious unanswered questions.

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But who determines that causing harm to others is morally bad, and if the source of that moral view told you that animal torture was morally good, would you agree?

Who determines that harm is bad? The facts do: the standard human response to harm is negative, because harm to us- physically or otherwise- is by definition a negative act. There is no sense where harm can be positive (obviously we make caveats for things like self defense, though even there causing harm wouldn't be the preferred option) We as people require each other to survive, both psychologically and in terms of maintaining our standard of living, and so in order to provide ourselves with this necessary social structure, we agree to band together under the proviso that we don't harm one another. Being that morality is about the well-being of thinking beings, that's enough of a basis for deeming harm immoral right there.

As to your second question, no, I wouldn't agree that animal torture is morally good, regardless of what told me it was, because I can evaluate the action with regards to the world I live in, and determine the consequences of it. You've given me a fairly simple example to go off of; in what sense does the utility of animal torture outweigh the pain that it causes? We eat animals, but inflicting pain upon them serves no purpose that I can see, and simple sadistic enjoyment isn't a sufficient justification for doing so; that feeling can be gained through less harmful means.

That's why I find it so strange that you want to turn the Euthyphro dilemma on us; the very basis of it requires a thinking being dictating moral law to actually be a dilemma at all. What I see, when determining a moral continuum for actions, is an assessment of predicted consequences, context, cost and benefit, and any number of other factors that exist within the world that moral decision takes place in. There's no revealing external force to be appealed to, nor a relativistic framework to be hidden; it's all just here, on the planet, waiting to be considered.

Think about that further.

The standard human response to harm is negative, you say. But where does that standard human response come from? From evolution.

But like I've said before, evolution could have turned out differently such that we responded positively to unethical conduct.

Given a different path that evolution took, would you then consider animal torture a moral good, on par with feeding the homeless? Or even if your evolution made you respond positively to it, you would stop and think "Hey, there's something not right about this..."

It seems thus that the atheist can't escape the Euthyphro dilemma by appealing to human response, because all human reactions boil down to evolution.

And if our moral codes are predicated on the whims of evolution, then the rapist and the killer and the torturer are not truly evil, but have just evolved differently from us.