Turning the Euthyphro Dilemma around on atheists

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

Plato had the same facts as you, and he reasoned further. Was he illogical? Many great ethicists and philosophers pondering morality reasoned further.

Is everybody illogical except The Great Genkaus?

The given conclusion is all that can be concluded from the given facts, so if Plato and the other ethicists did reason further, then either they were using other facts not in question here or they were being illogical.

Or you're wrong and people can reason further. I'm leaning towards that hypothesis, because your response sounds like a taxicab fallacy.

For instance, if people cannot ground ethics in themselves or others, or rocks, or trees or carpets or horseflies or even the universe, and no material causal relationship can be demonstrated between ethics and behavior, one could very well reason that it's unlikely that metaphysical naturalism is true.

I don't see why that's an unreasonable conclusion, unless you want to go the other way and appeal to moral nihilism.

Well Vinny since you proposed that there is a situation where everyone killing random is morally correct via evolution, could describe the evolutionary situation where that would arise?

Everybody killing random? I don't understand.

But for an analogous example, look up forced copulation in the animal kingdom. Ie, what we would call rape. It happens a lot.

So the question remains: If evolution dictates so, do you rape or do you not?

Since genkaus was here, it is safe to assume the purely philosophical aspect has been addressed.

Beyond that, the answer is both. A sense of goodness is a social construct and a learned behavior reinforced by the release of happy chemicals in the brain. Yet the first can be deconstructed and reevaluated and a new learned behavior instituted to favor the second.

Social contracts fall to the same counterfactual as evolution. If you grew up in a society where the social construct of good entailed torturing people, would you consider it good?

I'm kinda coming to realize Genkaus' answer is the most plausible options for atheists who want to avoid moral nihilism. Which is ironic considering Dawkins is (or was?) a moral nihilist.

We're just asking a question: If evolution had taken a different path, for instance, making the torturing of children morally good, would you consider it morally good and torture children, or still consider it wrong? This is a realistic question because we are still evolving and morality might evolve in the future. So how do you answer?

I would answer that, regardless of what I might think, it would be wrong, because pleasure responses aren't the determining factor, for morality. As I said last time.

You say harm is bad because it objectively causes damage in the real world by invalidating the well-being of others. This makes the well-being of others (or "conscious creatures", as Sam Harris' version purports) the arbiter of morality. But what makes well-being so special? If someone decides that "unwell-being" should be the arbiter of what is morally good, could you prove them wrong?

I absolutely could prove that strange person wrong; I just have to show them, in one way or another, what "unwell-being" feels like, and in a broader sense, how it would affect the social structure.

At this point, I can't imagine that the problems with your own example haven't occurred to you, and so the only conclusion that I can come to is that you're being intransigent. That's fine, but I'll point out that I've said multiple times that what people decide singularly or in groups aren't the sole factor involved here; there are objective facts about reality that surpass individual opinion. So asking me what I think of individual opinions, as you have three times in a row, now, isn't actually asking a question that's a problem for my position.

Damaging people is bad. There is no sense in which damage allows one to better perform useful, helpful, or even enjoyable acts. Being damaged is a less than preferable state, objectively speaking. I shouldn't have to explain why indiscriminate killing and harm would be damaging to us as individuals and social groups.

You couldn't- there's nothing special about well-being, it's just something one species desires. Does morality boil down to whatever a set of species desires? Or whatever makes you feel good?

Don't just listen to me, deconstruct it yourself. Ask yourself why "human well-being" but not "termite well-being"? Discrimination against species, you dirty speciesist.

That's part of the problem: you're asking to boil down a complex concept to a single element, when there isn't a single element involved. There's a series of checks, balances and contextual issues to be applied to a number of different concepts that make up morality, of which well being- and not just human well being- is one.

Okay, so things are complex, and well-being and social structure are but one component of the complex, multifaceted issue. Granted.

But is this complex, multifaceted mutable or immutable (ie changable or unchangable). If it's mutable, and it changes to, say, considering some abhorrent act like spousal abuse to be ethical, would it be ethical or not?

Cards on the table: If it's ethical, then your complex machination is the source of morality, but you're forced to concede the morality of sick and disgusting behavior like child abuse. If not there must be something that transcends it.