The dialogue asks: "Is something pious because the gods love it, or do they love it because it's pious?" By concluding the latter, Socrates shows that morality has an independent nature. Appealing to gods only identifies what is moral; it doesn't explain what makes it so, thus sidelining their authority.
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Deontological (rule-based) ethics are often implicitly justified by the good outcomes their rules are presumed to create. If a moral rule was known to produce the worst possible results, its proponents would likely abandon it, revealing a hidden consequentialist foundation for their beliefs.
Socrates' sarcastic and aggressive questioning isn't just his standard method. It's interpreted as the behavior of a man under immense stress, annoyed by a "cocksure" priest who claims to understand piety—the very concept central to the "bullshit" charges Socrates himself is facing.
Unlike ancient Greek philosophy where ethics, metaphysics, and logic were deeply interconnected, modern philosophy is largely separated into distinct, specialized fields. For example, the Stoics believed their ethics were a direct consequence of their understanding of the world's nature (metaphysics), a link often lost in modern discourse.
The dialogue ends without progress and a confused Euthyphro. This lack of a constructive outcome suggests Plato might be subtly critiquing Socrates. His method unmasks ignorance but offers no replacement, potentially validating the charge that he "corrupts the youth" by creating cynical "debate me bros."
The project of creating AI that 'learns to be good' presupposes that morality is a real, discoverable feature of the world, not just a social construct. This moral realist stance posits that moral progress is possible (e.g., abolition of slavery) and that arrogance—the belief one has already perfected morality—is a primary moral error to be avoided in AI design.
The widespread and instinctual revulsion toward incest provides a strong case for emotivism. When pressed for a logical reason why it's wrong (beyond pragmatic concerns like birth defects), most people fall back on emotional expressions like 'it's just gross.' This suggests the moral judgment is rooted in a fundamental emotion, not a rational principle.
Critics argue moral thought experiments are too unrealistic to be useful. However, their artificiality is a deliberate design choice. By stripping away real-world complexities and extraneous factors, philosophers can focus on whether a single, specific variable is the one making a moral difference in our judgment.
The famous Trolley Problem isn't just one scenario. Philosophers create subtle variations, like replacing the act of pushing a person with flipping a switch to drop them through a trapdoor. This isolates variables and reveals that our moral objection isn't just about physical contact, but about intentionally using a person as an instrument to achieve a goal.
We operate with two belief modes. For our immediate lives, we demand factual truth. For abstract domains like mythology or ideology, we prioritize morally uplifting or dramatically compelling narratives over facts. The Enlightenment was a push to apply the first mode to everything.
Even if one rejects hedonism—the idea that happiness is the only thing that matters—any viable ethical framework must still consider happiness and suffering as central. To argue otherwise is to claim that human misery is morally irrelevant in and of itself, a deeply peculiar and counter-intuitive position.