(November 22, 2013 at 8:25 pm)Vincenzo "Vinny" G. Wrote:(November 22, 2013 at 8:53 am)genkaus Wrote: 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.
(November 22, 2013 at 6:08 am)Esquilax Wrote: 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.Think about that further.
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.
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.
Vinny, evolution doesn't have "whims". It's not a conscious entity. It has no agenda. It "dictates" nothing.
I think you're making the common theist error of interpreting the atheist "view of the universe" as one broadly similar to the theist one with "God" taken out and "evolution" inserted in its place.
There are two problems with this: 1. There IS no "atheist world view" as such; there are world views which are atheistic in nature but "atheism" is not a world view in itself. It's a single answer to a single question. 2. Evolution is not only NOT a conscious entity like a God, it isn't even an unconscious force like gravity.
Evolution is a CONSEQUENCE. It's what happens when life forms reproduce under environmental pressure. It's the RESULT of forces, not a force in itself. It doesn't "want" anything.
As such your "what if evolution dictated that torturing animals was good?" question is nonsensical*. Evolution dictates nothing and has no concept of "good". It merely favours characteristics which aid reproduction. By definition sadism doesn't aid anything. It wastes time and energy and creates unnecessary hostility.
God, by contrast, ABSOLUTELY has whims, and his morality is subject to those whims. He cheerfully orders genocide and infanticide while also commanding people to love their neighbours. He drowns the whole world then regrets it and promises never to do it again. He's anti-shellfish but pro-slavery.
It's theistic "morality" which is whimsical. Can you imagine a secular philosophy which would have mandated cutting little girls' vaginas off? You need God for that sort of depravity.
*Don't assume that asking an unanswerable question constitutes "victory". It might just be that the question makes no sense. What colour is fear? What does seven smell like? How tall is time?
