Yes, that's my theory - the theory described in the conclusion of the argument I gave.

Moral prescriptions are the prescriptions of a subject, Reason. And so if the subject prescribes it, then it is right.

Again, that's the theory, not a problem.

I described the problem - and most would agree that the problem I described is a huge one and that I wasn't replacing the hard problem with a softer one - but by all means describe a harder problem if you can, for I don't know what it would be.

I don't understand. If the handle is on the left, it is true - yes. What does adding the word 'subjectively' do?

truth itself, of course, is subjective. But that's another matter.

No, I don't divide truths at all. There's what's true and there's what's false.

You can't refute a theory by describing it.

No, because that doesn't describe an apparent problem, it just describes the theory.

How does 'objectively true' differ from 'true'?

What is 'objective information'?

Well, because 'Euthyphro' is used by most people to express no very clear objection, do you accept my attempt to clarify what the objection is? For I am not going to kick at a moving goal or at a cloud. Here, then:

1. If moral values are the values of a subject, then what is morally valuable will be contingent, not necessary.
2. Moral values are necessary, not contingent
3. Therefore, moral values are not the values of a subject

That is the argument I can address, but if you have something else in mind then I need to hear it before I can address it.

If you say that moral values are so as such regardless of anyone's judgement you are an absolutist. The only way you could be considered to be a relativist would be to say that the absoluteness of moral values are relative to the absolute valuations of an absolute subject. — Janus

Are you being sponsored by Mistakes-R-Us or something? I have argued - argued, not just blankly stated - that moral values are the valuings of a subject. Not an 'absolute subject' whatever one of those is (and I have no idea at all).

So, that doesn't mean that something is morally valuable regardless of anyone's attitudes, does it - for 'anyone' includes Reason herself. No, something is morally valuable if Reason values it. Now, because I am not Reason, then if something is morally valuable it is not valuable because I value, but irrespective of whether I do.

I am a relativist about morality in the sense that I think that the truth of a moral proposition is contingent, not necessary. And so I think the truth of a moral statement is relative to when (and possibly even where) it is made.

So it is not relevant to morality that morality is made of a god's values and prescriptions? I don't even know what being 'relevant to morality' means, incidentally, as morality - being a collection of prescriptions and values - is not something that has interests. But meh. Like I say, I think you just dislike my conclusion, for you've yet to address my argument. You've just told me I'm playing with a toy theory. I don't even know what a toy theory is, either.

Perhaps it doesn't interest you - perhaps you find rigorous defences of metaethical theories boring. Okay, go put up a shelf then.

Yes, but I was accused, without supporting argument for the accusation, that I did not understand it. :smile: — Janus

Yes, quite right - I could not make head nor tail of what you represented the Euthyphro to be. I then very kindly laid out what I take the Euthyphro to be and asked if you agreed, but you said nothing.

So here is the relevant portion of that post again, copied and pasted.

Tell you what, to move things along I'll suggest what the supposed problem may be, and you can just confirm that it is as I say it is.

The problem is that if moral values are the values of a subject, then they can change over time. What's morally valuable at one time, may not be at another. For after all, we know from our own case that what we value can alter. I may value sunshine at one time, but not at another. Tastes can and do change.

And thus, though - for example - pain seems to be in generally something that is morally bad, nothing stops it from being the case that in the future pain might be morally good. For the subject-whose-valuings-constitute-moral-values - let's call her Trisha for convenience and so that you don't keep calling her God - may value us suffering in the future even though she currently seems to disvalue it.

Why is that a problem? Well, because, as most contemporary moral philosophers agree, moral truths appear to be necessary truths. Just as it is necessarily true that the conclusion of this argument will be true if the premises are -

1. If P, then Q
2. Not Q
3. Therefore not P

likewise it is necessarily true that sadism is morally bad, when it is bad.

The above argument does not just happen to be valid at the moment. It is always and everywhere valid. Its validity does not alter. It does not have a best-before date.

Likewise for substantial moral truths. Such truths may be very complex and sometimes hard to discern - like the answers to complex sums - but whatever they are, they are necessary truths.

So, expressed as an argument, the problem the Euthyphro draws attention to is this:

1. If moral values are the values of a subject, then what is morally valuable will be contingent, not necessary.
2. Moral values are necessary, not contingent
3. Therefore, moral values are not the values of a subject

Fair enough?

Okay, well then you're not seeing aright are you - I mean, you couldn't be more wrong if you tried.
Reason is a subject. So, Reason is an object, as subjects are objects. Now, to 'reify' something is to 'mistakenly' identify it as an object. Am I mistaken? No. If I am, show me - you haven't yet.

And 'our reason' is a 'faculty'. A 'faculty' is not an object. So, in calling our reason what it is - a faculty - I am not reifying it.

I ask one question - what is wrong with my argument? Is it invalid? No. Are any of its premises false? Well, I can't see any reason to doubt any of them and plenty to think they're all true.

Now last time I checked, that's how we figure out what's true. We don't ask ordinary folk. We ask Reason by consulting our reason.

I suggest that you simply feel revulsion at where my argument leads. Well, we're not 6 anymore and we have to grow up and realise that what's true isn't always what we want it to be. And I thought I was the one who was supposed to be a child in a nursery playing with toy theories who was going to be taken to big school by you - come on, I've put down my bricks, show me my mistakes, it's the only way I'll learn.

So, for you reason is a human faculty and Reason is the values and prescriptions that faulty gives us an awareness of? But what if different people's faculties of reason show them different values and prescriptions? How could we know whose faculty is dysfunctional and who would be, consequently, wrong? How could our faculty of reason, by itself, tell us such a thing if it is dysfunctional as it may well be? — Janus

Yes, reason is the faculty that gives us fallible insight into the values and prescriptions of Reason, who is a subject, a mind, like one of us though also importantly different.

Different people's faculties manifestly do give them different representations. And what this tells us - and our faculties of reason themselves tell us to think this - is that our faculties of reason are not infallible and thus not to place too much trust in what your own says but to compare it with those of others.

So, my reason says that if something is morally valuable, it is morally valuable irrespective of whether I happen to value it. Now I know that virtually everyone else's says the same thing, for this apparent fact about moral values is widely acknowledged among those who have reflected on the matter - that is, those who have consulted their reason on it.

The word 'reason' is ambiguous which is why I have not used it until now. We have - most of us - a faculty of reason. faculties give us awareness of things (or are capable of doing so). But it is important not to confuse a faculty with that of which it gives us an awareness.

That important mistake is easy to commit when one and the same word is used to refer both to the faculty and that of which it gives us an awareness, as in the case of Reason.

the faculty of reason - what we often call 'our reason' - is a faculty that gives us an awareness of the values and prescriptions of Reason herself. But Reason herself is not the faculty, any more than the things I see are my sight.

Okay, then take me to school Daddio and show me the mistakes.

I mean, I agree - if you don't ruthlessly follow Reason, you probably won't arrive at my conclusion. But that's to my conclusion's credit, I think.

What, the method of ruthlessly following Reason?

Plus, even if a group can value something, you'd have to attribute a mind to the group - and then you haven't refuted my argument for no premise is challenged. All you've done is, perhaps, discovered the subvening base of the mind who is Reason.

No, there's considerable evidence of the use of metaphor and commission of the fallacy of composition.

I mean, if you resist my conclusion on the grounds that if enough of us approve of raping others, then rape will be morally good, then I'm not remotely worried - anymore than I would be worried by someone who insists my claim that 2 + 3 = 5 is false because 3 + 4 = 9678. (Although obviously I'd be worried 'for' them, for they seem to have lost their reason)

No, but the truth of its premises does. And you haven't yet cast a reasonable doubt on any of them, so far as I can tell.

No the incoherence comes from thinking a group of subjects is itself a subject.

A group cannot value something. Not unless you attribute a mind to the group - a mind distinct from the individual minds composing it.

Now, if you say that the group of all of us has a mind of its own, then although I think that view has nothing whatsoever to be said for it, I would simply say that that mind - a mind, note, quite distinct from any of ours - is the mind whose values constitute moral values. Or at least, she could be.

But if by 'us' or 'we' you mean not a subject distinct from ourselves, but just a collection of subjects, then your view is incoherent as you are supposing that valuing is something a group of things can do, when in fact only subjects can value things. A mistake, of course, encouraged by our tendency - useful in many contexts, but misleading in this - to talk about groups as if they are people.

You have argued that to be moral is to be valued by a subject. — Janus

No I haven't, I have argued that to be morally valuable is to be being valued by a subject (the subject being Reason).

And you have argued that since we, as subjects, often value differently, we human subjects cannot be that subject who is the moral-maker. — Janus

No I haven't. Where? I have argued that as what is morally valuable is morally valuable regardless of whether I happen to value it, then I am not the valuer whose values constitute moral values.

I am not positing 'absolute' moral values at all. I am not an absolutist. I am a relativist.

My arguments are valid and sound regardless of whether our minds are immaterial or material. So again, not relevant to the issue here.

I do remember thinking, the only problem with rape is not enough people approve of it.

Gosh, I am getting a good education here.

Okaaay. Thank you wise one.

The view that moral values are 'our values' is actually even less plausible than the view that moral values are 'my' values. For both views are obviously false in that we cannot make rape right by favouring ourselves raping people, and the latter - your proposed view - has the additional vice of being incoherent, given that only individual subjects can favour things, but groups cannot.

And I would also point out that we test the credibility of a moral position not by doing surveys of what others are thinking, but by consulting our reason.

I would point out that if we all say, right now, 'rape each other!' rape would remain wrong and bad.

I would say this:

1. If moral values are our values, then if we value something necessarily it is morally valuable.
2. if we value something it is not necessarily morally valuable
3.Therefore, moral values are not our values.

So there can't be a moral obligation not to destroy a forest, then? That someone who thinks there is a moral obligation not to destroy a forest is conceptually confused?

Regardless of whether we think we actually have obligations not to destroy forests, the fact is a person who believes we do is not thereby demonstrating conceptual incompetence.

Here: "there is a door to my left". That is a representation. It is a representation I made. I, a subject.

Reason makes representations. She represents the arguments I have been making in this thread to be valid and sound, for instance.

I have not mentioned an 'absolute entity' and I don't know what one of those is when it is at home.

You don't need to, and you cannot, reinvent the wheel from scratch. — Janus

Yes you can. I mean, I am not, But you can. Tim invented the wheel. Then he forgot. Then he reinvented it. So that's wrong.

No, along the lines I said - I know, if I know, that I am in the same mental state as someone else when Reason represents me to be.

Knowledge, whatever it involves, must involve a belief being endorsed by Reason, no?

I am not sure why I need to do this work of figuring out what a mental state is given that my argument seems to be in fine working order as it is and this seems to be another of those orthogonal issues.

For example, let's say you mistakenly believe that mental states are physical states. Okay, how will that affect my argument? Not in the least, it'll just mean that the subject - the one whom we call Reason - is a physical thing.

But Descartes was right about almost everything.

Okay oh wise one.

Incidentally master, earlier I could not help but notice what seemed to me to be a mistake, though of course it is much more likely I am mistaken, so ignorant am I. But you mentioned Moore and said that a point of mine was Moorean, yet the point in question was Kantian, not Moorean, though certainly other points I made were Moorean.

I am now using a capital because she's a person and that's her name, or the one we've given to her.

I like that you like the word 'represents', for its presence serves to underscore that this is a person we are talking about, as only subjects - persons, minds - can represent things to be the case.

To answer your question then, by 'represents' I meant 'represents'.

You told me to think on it some more. That assumes that there is some mysterious knowledge that you possess and that I do not, and that if only I think as much as you do it will become apparent to me. That's how I took it anyway.

But even if that's true, it is a remarkably inefficient way of getting it - why not just tell me what you think I don't know, rather than hoping my own fumbling thinking will eventually reveal it to me?