Euthyphro Dilemma, revisited

(A follow-up to the earlier posting, Euthyphro Dilemma: metaphysical or epistemological?)

Below I reproduce an email I sent to Maverick Philosopher the other day after having seen his recent posting related to the topic.

To what's below I want to now add a summary/clarificatory note: I think that the metaphysical and epistemological issues hadn't been so clearly distinguished not just for the reasons I note below, but also because what both issues or aspects come down to is this: any grounding for moral knowledge must come from reason(s), meaning that any moral command, to be authoritative (not authoritarian), must be grounded in reason.  In the theistic tradition, God is (the ontological principle of sufficient) reason or logos, and must rule or command accordingly.  This is why the 'naturalism' vs. 'voluntarism' debate among (late) medieval ethical theorists as discussed in the Irwin (The Development of Ethics, vol. 1 [Socrates to the Reformation]) comes down so decisively in the naturalists' favor.  Which is to say, that whatever the ultimate source of morality's authority, the only means we have for discovering any such grounds is via our unaided reason (drawing on the evidence of the senses) - which is why moral philosophers have been at work without any substantive resources (that I can see) being provided by Divine Command theory qua such.  And isn't this a vindication of what many take to be Plato's original point - that "what's favored by the gods" doesn't give a useful answer, and that it is the task specifically of philosophy/reason to discover what merits the gods' favor?

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[To Maverick Philosopher]

I made a blog post last month in which I indicate that one could approach the Dilemma in at least two ways, which I term the metaphysical and the epistemological.

The metaphysical: The question of the origin of morality and its authority.  Does morality('s authority) require the existence of God?  Does this authority depend on God's mere willing as in voluntarist interpretations, or is this authority constrained by the nature of what God created as in naturalist interpretations?  (I find this dispute covered at length in the 'medieval' section of T.H. Irwin's magisterial historical survey 'The Development of Ethics', and the debate seems to come down decidedly in favor of the naturalist view.)

The epistemological: how do we come to discover (the content of) moral truths, whether or not they are brought into existence by God?  Or: How do we come to know what a perfectly benevolent being would command, or what conscientiously virtuous agents would do?

It's not hard to see how these distinct ways of coming at the Dilemma could be conflated throughout the history of addressing it, since they both end up raising the question of the basis for moral authority or goodness.  

And the epistemological question seems like the one that we're actually most interested in, since we need to know how any putative truths have authority for us, and that leads us to inquire in the ways that moral philosophers have inquired (in meta-ethics and normative ethics).

And if the question is how we come to know moral truths via reason, then the metaphysical question drops out of the picture for all practical purposes, since whether or not we have good grounds for thinking there are moral truths (and for what those truths would be) doesn't seem to be settled by the metaphysical issues.  I don't see thinkers such as Aristotle and Kant directing their ethical inquiries in the metaphysical direction (except inasmuch as Kant treats God, freedom and immortality as postulates of practical reason, but these are matters ultimately of faith rather than knowledge; and it's not like he doesn't present some pretty good reasons for behaving morally regardless of these postulates; his argument for the possibility of libertarian freedom is seriously undercut by his phenomenal determinism in any case, when he could have quite readily, sensibly, and plausibly denied that all of nature has to be deterministic in order to be lawful, i.e., the laws applying to human actions would be of a special sort based on our unique organizationally complex makeup, a point about causation that I think Aristotle and Aquinas would accept).

(The Dilemma raises tougher challenges to those who appeal to Scripture as the source of authority, since Scripture appears to contain a lot of genuinely erroneous things that are putatively God's will[*], and at the same time does not to contain moral truths, or ones stated unambiguously, that have come to be widely acknowledged since Scripture appeared (e.g., Lockean natural rights).  I think that perhaps a work like Summa Theologica is better suited for philosophical purposes.)  [* - I had this in mind when writing this sentence.]

Anyway, I will look again/closer at your recent Euthyphro post to see if it covers these points.

Euthyphro dilemma: metaphysical or epistemological?

[Note: follow-up posting here.]

As I read about the topic of the meaning of life at the SEP entry (and in connection with thinking about Tolstoy/Schopenhauer on "the problem of boredom," which may be either the biggest roadblock to better living through philosophy or a book by that name, or the biggest launching-board to such...), the Euthyphro dilemma pops up again.  It's probably been hashed over plenty already, but here's how I conceive the issue:

(1) The 'metaphysical' problem: What grounds goodness (in the context of Divine Command theory)?

(2) The 'epistemological' problem: Assuming that divine command grounds goodness, how do we know what the good is?

The dilemma as typically posed seems to address the 'metaphysical' problem as stated above, but isn't it really addressing the 'epistemological' one?

To explain: The 'metaphysical' problem tends to be concerned with whether God's command alone suffices to ground goodness, or whether God bases commands on some independent standard of goodness, which presumably would itself suffice to ground goodness.  Assuming the latter, does God's explanatory role in this fall afoul of Ockham's Razor?  (I think it does.)  But a Divine Command theorist might still come back and say that God is a perfectly good being (which runs into another problem - I'll call it the Problem of Morally Pointless Suffering - e.g., animal suffering) who creates the world, its laws, and human nature, that last being crucial in grounding human goodness.  Without this Creator, there would be no goodness at all (or evil, or anything at all, for that matter).

What I don't see is how or where this metaphysical grounding of goodness, even if true, answers what I think is the real concern raised by the Euthyphro dilemma, which can be stated in perhaps multiple ways, but perhaps most importantly: How do we discover what it is that God commands, i.e., how do we discover goodness?  For the typical philosopher, simply pointing to some holy book where X is prescribed, or simply claiming as a matter of faith that God commands X, isn't going to cut it.  There's too much disagreement on the contents of these putative commands.

(Does God command that there be a welfare state, or laissez-faire?  And when there is a commandment, "thou shalt not kill," how does that get interpreted and applied?  If we specify that only innocents shall not be killed, then what about killing human shields in wartime, something that many a Southern evangelical finds acceptable while declaring with utmost confidence that even a "morning after pill" is murder?  One might consider how/why they've not had much luck persuading the skeptical of the latter claim.  [On a related, blatantly political note: I hear quite a bit from evangelical types about how Trump was sent by God to "save America."  So how did God allow America to be put in the position of requiring saving in the first place - I'll gladly liken the academic left and its spawn to a cancer that (supposedly?) God both inflicts and then sometimes cures people of - and why Trump of all people?  Lord working in mysterious ways, as usual?  And are the dialectical 'antipodes' of the academic left and the evangelical right in America's best interests?])

What we really want to know is, regardless of how goodness comes about in a metaphysical account, how we determine what's good or not.  In other words, we are tasked with the hard epistemic work of sorting through competing moral claims, something that divine command theorists qua such (i.e., in that capacity, where some theory is appealed to as an account of their ordinary folk-wisdom moral judgments, which are usually quite reliable across a great range of cases [excluding political questions...]) don't seem to be up to doing, which is an acute cause of philosophers' frustration when it comes to people not doing hard epistemic work to support their opinions.  Of course, the Euthyphro dilemma is one way for the philosophers' frustration to be sublimated and the ball put in the court of the epistemically lazy.

(It could also be that the hard epistemic work that philosophers seek to do is too overwhelming for so many "mere" possessors of folk-wisdom; that I can understand.  Perhaps "God commands X" is shorthand more or less for "There is moral truth and it comes from somewhere even if we don't know where, but if there is a God then the morally true is of course what such a being would command."  [The question of ultimate justice in an afterlife, or a setting-right beyond this world of animal suffering in this world, is a further question requiring hard epistemic work if we really want credible answers; all that I can see at this point is that such ultimate justice or setting-right makes a perfectly good-and-powerful God consistent with morally pointless animal suffering, but the morally pointless suffering seems to be consistent with there being no God, as well.])

Another consideration, related surely with the "meaning of life" issue althougly less clearly or directly so with Euthyphro problems: As far as we know, this world and this life is all there is.  The likes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche seem quite ready to take the implications of this head-on, wherever the argument leads (even if it leads in a very dark or terrible direction, as clearly the case with Schopenhauer).  Do all that many theists have a back-up plan for what to do/think about this life just in case it turns out they don't have a good reason for belief in an afterlife?  (Also: does the question of meaning reduce to the question of reasons, i.e.: What is the reason for life/living; and how does the principle of sufficient reason enter into this?)  And aren't the standard practices of philosophy, as overwhelming as they might end up being to some or at some times, a gateway to better thinking about or formation of such a back-up plan?  Alternatively, if we do indeed have access to ethical and other knowledge independent of our (non-)beliefs about a Creator, does such (non-)belief make any actual difference to how folks tend to lead their lives?

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A couple newly discovered blogs that look interesting (what took so long?...):
https://reasonandmeaning.com/
https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/

Pelosi, Trump's wall, and compromise with immorality

Speaker Pelosi has declared that Trump's proposed border-wall expansion is immoral.  My training in ethical theory tells me that moral reasons override or trump (ahem) other reasons -- prominently, prudential ones -- by their very nature.  They are all-things-considered reasons.

Usually when we face a challenge to a moral principle and make for an exception to a generalized moral statement, we find a way to subsume that exception under morality itself: "Morality dictates X except under a narrow set of circumstances."

Pelosi has categorically declared the (Trump-expanded) wall to be immoral, not a reflection of America's values.  So if Trump comes with an offer of, say, amnesty for the Dreamers in exchange for his wall funding (or, say, the 3-year extension he has offered, followed by amnesty once the wall-expansion is built [per Krauthammer's proposal]), by her own statement she should reject that deal and any other deal that contains the wall funding.  Not to do so would be to compromise with evil, by her own statement.

Does that seem reasonable?

Where a political culture is intellectually bankrupt, we shouldn't expect political leaders to be experts about morality and moral reasoning.

[Addendum: One suggestion I've heard (offline) for how to resolve the shutdown standoff: Trump gets his border wall, maybe even gets Mexico to literally cut a check to pay for it, and he resigns his office.  Would that still be immoral, under Pelosi's authoritative declaration?]

[Addendum #2: I am unable to locate the posting(s) in question, but Maverick Philosopher has pointed out that Trump's proposal adds to an existing border wall, so how much border wall is immoral in Pelosi's view, exactly?  Should the existing one be removed?  Her exact wording is "A wall is an immorality. It’s not who we are as a nation."  Being charitable, she just means Trump's border wall expansion proposal is the immorality.  But she isn't being charitable toward Trump when she attributes to Trump a racist motivation for his immigration proposals: "That plan is a campaign to Make America White Again." Don't believe that she made this beyond-the-pale remark (which fellow Democrats enable and practice in abundance themselves on the basis of flimsy evidence)?  Watch.  Trump for his part has said that he wants people to come here, but through a legal process.  Do I need to explain how Pelosi's irresponsible rhetoric calls her own moral credibility into question?  That where she's coming from here markedly taints the credibility of her moral pronouncements?  To clarify: the notion that Trump is a racist is based on flimsy evidence, as anyone well-trained in logic and evidence assessment can readily figure out.  Try getting a philosopher concerned with his reputation to affirm that Trump is more than probably, or likely, or certainly a racist, given the existing evidence.  (I would assign some low-to-medium probability to the proposition, under any reasonable construal of the term racist.  [See also Rand on racism, a view I am essentially aligned with.  I should make a posting connecting this with the topic of contemporary race relations in America, along with the role of both Trump and a pathological left-wing echo chamber in all that....]  There is some amount of evidence to suggest it, but it's still pretty flimsy as a basis for a conclusion, especially if we're dealing with something beyond unconscious bias on his part, for which the evidence is considerably stronger.  Easily the least unconvincing piece of evidence in the linked list would be the early-'70s housing discrimination stuff; essentially all of the rest is poor inference from things he said, typical of left-wing-style race-baiting rhetoric.  There is that one comment he made about "the Mexican judge" he thought would be biased against him, and this was called out as an objectively racist comment -- which it is -- by then-Speaker Ryan among others.  I attribute the comment to a much more well-established pattern on Trump's part: he can be a jackass, a lot, especially on twitter; he is racially insensitive, but he is insensitive about a lot of stuff politically, which is plenty bad for a president.  But then yet again, have you seen his opposition?)  And then compare/contrast the expected careful evidence-assessment there with the "it's a no-brainer" kind of garbage flowing from the Democrats.  This is definitely an area where leftists process information differently than others and thereby make constructive communication that much more difficult.]

[Addendum #3: In regard to Addendum #2, a bit of seeking leads me to learn of a philosophy professor, George Yancy, who appears to have gone out on that "Trump is (definitely) a racist/white supremacist" limb.  Given my overall (but hardly unqualified) respect for the philosophy profession in its current form, and for philosophy's exceedingly low tolerance for bullshit which runs rampant in politics and elsewhere (but especially politics, it seems), this should make for a good exercise and/or blog fodder for yours truly.  Just a bit to start with...he says in an interview: "...I tried to create a mutually vulnerable space where white people could reveal the ways in which they harbor racist assumptions, emotions and embodied habits." I applaud the idea -- and would apply it not just to white people and any implicit racism they may partake in, but to all (groups of) people on gobs of important matters, which is pretty much the very task of philosophy.  And so while we call out white people for their failings, is the political left ready for non-whites to be called out on theirs, without flipping out?  One question that certainly merits examining: How much is "progressive"/leftist talk of institutionalized American racism actually a product of a refusal to confront evidence that their social policies have failed?  Are(n't) leftist assumptions, emotions and embodied habits destructive?]