many thanks – highly apposite.

I am not sure. But not because anything you say is incorrect, but because it’s not engaging with what they are trying to do, so they’d just twist it back into their rhetoric. This happened with my recent debates with Christian nationalists on exactly that question (see comment thread there which was in response to this comment there).

So, rhetorically, I think when the God-grounder asks, ‘What is your standard of morality?’ the best answer is to start somewhere they can’t escape from: “that which follows without fallacy from true premises about people and the world.” Then they will try to wriggle out of that by arguing that standards can’t be derived that way. Which will be an ironic own goal, because that amounts to admitting moral facts are not rational. Which is the actual significance of denying the Euthyphro dilemma that they usually avoid by deploying rhetoric against it that avoids that revelation. So don’t let them avoid that revelation. Make it the center-point.

I answer this way because I realize now that we should not be assuming they are merely confused and actually have a coherent point for us to take seriously. When they ask, ‘What is your standard of morality?’, to them that is just the opening move in a rhetorical chess game, and not a sincere concern for your answer. They are waiting for that line to trigger some common response that they have practiced a gameplay around, so they can out-wordgame you.

The only way to win that game is not to play. Force them right onto the horns of the dilemma but without any way for them to try jumping from one horn or the other mid-argument. Start right at square one: that which is moral is and can only ever be that which is concluded without fallacy from true premises about people and the world. And keep defending that proposition; don’t let them change the subject (and they will try, so keep sharp and be ready to catch when they do).

A sincere person who asked that question would welcome a more substantive answer because they actually want the answer, and are not just taking a “kata stance” to “fight” whatever you say. But you will almost never hear that question from someone sincerely asking it. So never act like that’s what’s happening.

If by rare chance it turns out your interlocutor is sincere, their questioning will get there smoothly from your starting point, because they actually want to know how it gets there, rather than wanting instead to deny whatever you say. And you will quickly see the difference in the direction of their discourse. And since it ends in the same place anyway, the better move is always to take the rhetorical move I recommend.

But just FYI, that “sincere” line of inquiry will go something like this:

Q: What is your standard of morality?
A: That which follows without fallacy from true premises about people and the world.

Q: What does follow without fallacy from true premises about people and the world?
A: That cultivating empathy, honesty, and reasonableness makes everything statistically go better for you.

Q: By what standard of better?
A: That which will bring optimal satisfaction to you, with yourself and your life.

Q: What if being evil satisfies you most?
A: It can’t. Science shows that that is always self-defeating and leads to perpetual dissatisfaction with both yourself (Bergman) and your life (Axelrod), which you will deny but admit when being honest. And true facts only follow from true premises, so the “being honest” part is what is actually true about you and thus entails what would actually be better for you even when you are committed to denying it.

Q: What if you just want to be irrational and believe false things?
A: It would still be objectively true that you will honestly be more satisfied with yourself and your life if you weren’t irrational and didn’t believe false things.

Q: What if you don’t want to be satisfied with yourself and your life?
A: That is a self-contradiction. If you genuinely want to be dissatisfied, then being dissatisfied is what satisfies you. And that’s again another goal, and goals are always statistically best served by being rational. And being rational leads to the conclusion that that you don’t genuinely want to be dissatisfied, that in fact that is self-defeating and exactly what no rational person actually prefers when aware of the alternative.

That last point brings us all the way to The Objective Value Cascade.

The rest is just science.

But every step is grounded the same way: it always comes back to “It’s better for everyone, in all possible preference cases, to be rational and informed” and that always ends in the same place, with “what follows without fallacy from true premises about people and the world,” which is therefore always the standard of morality in all possible worlds, whether a God exists or not.

Indeed, even if God exists, that has to be his standard of morality, and thus when God doesn’t exist, it remains our standard. God cannot make “what follows without fallacy from true premises about people and the world” different than it is. That’s literally logically impossible. And therefore that has to be the same standard God uses to determine the standard of morality. But that standard exists even when God does not. And so we do not need God to determine what is moral.

When the God-grounder asks, ‘What is your standard of morality?’

Is that same as asking, say, what my standard is for ‘car’ or ‘tree’ ?

ie identifying wrongness or rightness is tantamount to declaring I’ve got access to an objective standard that allows me to do so.

Simlarly, being able to identify a car would also mean I’ve got an objective standard of car-ness and non-car-ness.

But since I haven’t got access to any objective ruler, I can still identify wrongness, carness, treeness etc.

Is that the correct way of responding to one who asks me about standards?

I actually have a whole line on “why” any agent ought to care about rationality. That’s in the peer reviewed paper, along with citations to further discussion.

So, this is another example of armchair apologetics: they don’t even know what I argued, but lie to you and claim I “didn’t” argue something that in fact I did, and even made a point of.

That tells you these are not reliable critics. They are defending the wall, not engaging with the peer reviewed literature.

That is also shown by their obviously not even having thought this through themselves, as I am sure if faced with someone arguing they should be irrational or that true conclusions (such as about morality) can be reached irrationally, they would readily refute them (with exactly the same arguments I did).

Moral facts are, as I argue, the properties of rational agents. That is a true fact. It cannot work to say “but irrational agents won’t know what is true of rational behavior” because that simply points out that irrational agents don’t know the truth that rational agents do. Which is ironically exactly how Christians themselves always argue: that people committed to irrationality just don’t know the truth because they need to be rational to ascertain it.

Hence my paper says “This is also why it is imperative to be rational: because irrationality is always inevitably counter to self-interest (Carrier 2011, pp. 426–27, n. 36). It therefore can never be imperative in any possible world.”

If anyone checks the cited source (as a competent person actually interested in engaging the argument would), they get:

Someone may object that perhaps we ought to be irrational and uninformed, but still the conclusion would follow that when we are rational and informed we would want x. Only if x were then “to be irrational and/or uninformed in circumstance z” would it then be true that we ought to be irrational and uninformed, and yet even that conclusion can only follow if we are rational and informed when we arrive at it. Because for an imperative to pursue x to be true, whatever we want most must in fact be best achieved by obeying x, yet it’s unlikely that we will arrive at that conclusion by being irrational and uninformed. Such an approach is very unlikely to light upon the truth of what best achieves our desires (as if it could do so by accident). Therefore, any conclusion arrived at regarding what x is must be either rational and informed or probably false. Ergo, to achieve anything we desire, we ought to endeavor to be rational and informed.

Carrier commits a classic begging-the-question fallacy by assuming without justification that rationality has overriding force. He never explains why any agent ought to care about rationality, or why its imperatives are binding beyond mere tautology

Is that a comment that misses the mark, Dr Carrier?

That’s a defect of academic (ivory tower) philosophy now, yes. Its purpose has become corrupted by incentives unrelated to real progress in the field. This is one of many reasons philosophy peer-review has high rates of false positives and false negatives (even more than science, and science is experiencing a crisis in this same area). It’s better than nothing. But it’s not 100% reliable and it could do better.

Thanks for the good information! I read somewhere, don’t remember where–that professional philosophical journals exist, in part, to provide avenues for professors to become full tenured professors by critiquing one another’s published works and thus fulfilling a university department’s requirements for tenure.

Not yet. My article only just came out. But it underwent professional peer review. So it has already benefitted from professional attempts to critique it. If there is anything more to say against it, you’ll have to wait for someone to go through the inordinately long process of finding the article, writing a reply, going through review (which can take six months to a year) and finally being placed in an issue (which can take months more). So assuming anyone has a counter-argument that can pass review, you might not see it for a year or two. And possibly longer, as it can take years for an article to even get noticed by anyone with a counterargument, starting the clock then.

You can try to jump start this process by asking some real philosophers to consider publishing peer reviewed replies. Although you then have to still wait out the process even if they take interest, and then still have to evaluate whether what they publish even succeeds as a response (since passing peer review is no guarantee of being right). See my article on Doing Your Own Research.

On organization: go fully digital. Label every filename with distinctive keywords and organize into subject folders. File name search then becomes useful. As does looking in the right folder. Use distinctive keywords in any note files, too, so full-content searches can find where you have annotated something to a particular subject. And keep a lot of electronic note files. For example, if I do any research to answer a question, I label the question or answer in Notes and put all my research in that note, so I can go back and remind myself of what I found and where it is.

I also maintain my own library catalog (using now the BookBuddy app which is the best one so far). I have about a thousand physical books (not counting digital books, which is more). So my catalog helps me find what bookshelf and shelf each one is on when I need them. The rest I keep in two places: kindle (which has its own category filing system and search function) and a folder on my Desktop called “PDF File Cabinet” where every file name starts with author’s last name and then all or part of the title. I can also do full content search by distinctive keywords I know will show up in any book about a given subject so as to quickly generate a list of pertinent PDF books and articles.

On another note–I would appreciate some pro tips on how you organize your research. As a layman I usually wind up with scattered notebooks, papers, and files everywhere–a big mess–when I am looking into something.

Thanks!
Danny

Indeed.

In fact Paulogia is IMO one of the world’s leading experts on resurrection apologetics and is generally spot on. Everything he produces is methodologically sound and well researched. Which is why Christians are so freaked out about him and so all-hands-on-deck to misrepresent and attack him.