Turning the Euthyphro Dilemma around on atheists

[Esquilax]

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..."

There's a couple of things wrong with this, though: one is that... so what? Saying things could be different doesn't invalidate that things are as they are now. We've got to deal with reality, and there's no devaluing of events because there are so many other potentials.

Also, harm, by definition, is that which is harmful. I'm not saying harm is immoral because of our response to it, but because of what it objectively does in the real world. It invalidates the well-being of another creature, and therefore, regardless of how it makes us feel, it's an immoral act. As I said in my initial post, sadism isn't a sufficient justification for a harmful action; those positive feelings can be invoked using means that do no harm, and therefore there's no excuse.

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.

This isn't a matter of "everything we think is necessarily true, and therefore our morals are determined solely by our own pleasure," it's a matter of the physical facts of the world that exist objectively, externally to us. This is why Euthyphro doesn't apply here: the "objective source" of morality is simply the fact that we exist in a consistent world.

The rapist, murderer and torturer are performing objectively evil acts. Why? Because those acts cause demonstrable harm to their victims, beyond the responses of the actors themselves. It's just a fact, and their responses aren't justification. It's the same reason we restrict certain harmful chemicals, despite the fact that they produce favorable responses in those that ingest them; response isn't the premise for morality.