The Argument Library

The Euthyphro Dilemma

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because the gods love it? Translated into monotheism — is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?

1. Either the good is good because God commands it, or God commands it because it is good.
2. If the good is good because God commands it, then goodness is arbitrary — had God commanded cruelty, cruelty would be good.
3. If God commands it because it is good, then goodness is a standard independent of God’s will.
4. Morality cannot be arbitrary.

∴ Goodness is independent of divine command — so ethics can (and must) be investigated in its own right.

Still the founding argument for the autonomy of ethics; nearly every debate on religion and morality starts here.

The Ring of Gyges

Glaucon’s challenge — if you could act unseen and unpunished, would you still be just? If not, justice is valued only for its consequences.

1. A shepherd finds a ring that makes him invisible; he seduces the queen, kills the king, and seizes the throne.
2. Give one such ring to a just man and one to an unjust man, and they would behave the same.
3. So people are just only because they fear being caught.
4. What is valued only for its consequences is not valued for itself.

∴ Justice is not a good in itself but a compromise among the weak — unless Socrates can show that the just life is better even when no one sees.

The Function Argument

The human good is found by asking what is distinctive of human beings — as the good of a flute-player lies in playing well.

1. The good of anything that has a function lies in performing that function well.
2. Human beings have a function — something they do as human beings.
3. Life is shared with plants and perception with animals; what is distinctive of humans is activity of the soul in accordance with reason.
4. To perform that activity well is to perform it in accordance with virtue.

∴ The human good is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, over a complete life.

The Unmoved Mover

Eternal motion requires an eternal cause that is itself unmoved — pure actuality, which moves the heavens as an object of love.

1. There is motion in the world, and motion is eternal.
2. Whatever is moved is moved by something.
3. An infinite chain of moved movers explains nothing.
4. So there must be a first mover that is not itself moved.
5. Such a mover must be pure actuality, without potentiality, and so immaterial.

∴ There exists an eternal, immaterial, unmoved mover — thought thinking itself — on which the heavens and nature depend.

Death Is Nothing to Us

Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not. So death cannot harm me, and fearing it is irrational.

1. Something is bad for a person only if they can experience it.
2. When death comes, we no longer exist to experience anything.
3. So death is not experienced by the one who dies.

∴ Death is nothing to us, and it is irrational to fear it.

The Symmetry Argument

The eternity after our death is a mirror of the eternity before our birth — and the first never troubled us.

1. We do not regret the infinite time before we were born.
2. The time after our death is relevantly like the time before our birth — in both we do not exist.
3. We should treat relevantly similar things alike.

∴ We should not fear or regret the time after our death.

The Argument for Not-Self

Examine each of the five aggregates that make up a person; none is permanent, none is under our control — so none is a self.

1. A self, if there were one, would be permanent and would be under our control.
2. A person consists of five aggregates — form, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness.
3. Each aggregate is impermanent; and none can be commanded (“let my body be thus”).
4. There is nothing in a person over and above the aggregates.

∴ There is no self — “this is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.”

The longest-running debate in Indian philosophy; Hume and Parfit reached strikingly similar conclusions.

Achilles and the Tortoise

Zeno’s defence of Parmenides — if space is infinitely divisible, swift Achilles can never overtake the slow tortoise.

1. The tortoise starts ahead of Achilles.
2. To overtake it, Achilles must first reach the point where the tortoise was.
3. By then the tortoise has moved a little further; Achilles must reach that point, and so on, infinitely.
4. No one can complete infinitely many tasks in a finite time.

∴ Achilles never overtakes the tortoise — motion is impossible, as Parmenides taught.

Abraham's Dilemma

If the ethical is the highest, Abraham is a murderer; if he is the father of faith, there must be something higher than ethics.

1. Abraham is honoured as the father of faith.
2. Abraham was willing to kill his innocent son at God’s command.
3. If the ethical (the universal) is the highest, such willingness is simply murderous.

∴ Either faith involves a “teleological suspension of the ethical” — or Abraham is lost.

Returning the Ticket

Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion — no future harmony can justify the suffering of innocent children.

1. Innocent children suffer horribly in this world.
2. A future harmony in which all is explained and forgiven might be promised.
3. But no one has the right to forgive the torturer on behalf of the tortured child.
4. A harmony built on unatoned innocent suffering is not worth its price.

∴ Even if God exists and harmony comes, I respectfully return my ticket.

Less an argument against God’s existence than a moral refusal of every theodicy — the strongest form of the problem of evil in literature.

The Grand Inquisitor's Argument

Human beings cannot bear the freedom Christ offered; they want bread, miracle, mystery and authority — so the Church has rightly taken freedom away.

1. Christ refused the devil’s three temptations — bread, miracle, power — to leave humanity free.
2. Most human beings are weak and cannot bear free choice of good and evil.
3. Freedom therefore makes most people miserable.
4. Love for humanity means giving them what they can bear — bread and authority.

∴ “We have corrected your deed” — rulers who relieve people of freedom serve them better than Christ did.

The Slave Revolt in Morality

“Good and evil” is the creation of the resentful weak, who invented values to take imaginary revenge on the strong.

1. Originally “good” meant the noble and powerful, and “bad” meant the common and low.
2. The oppressed, unable to take revenge in deeds, took it in values — calling the strong “evil”.
3. They then called themselves “good” — the meek, the humble, the patient.
4. This revaluation triumphed in Christianity.

∴ Our morality of “good and evil” is born of ressentiment — and its value must be questioned.

The Absurd and Suicide

If life has no ultimate meaning, should we kill ourselves? Camus argues that suicide, like religious hope, evades the absurd rather than answering it.

1. The absurd is the confrontation between our demand for meaning and the world’s silence.
2. The absurd exists only so long as both terms — the human and the world — exist.
3. Suicide abolishes one term; the leap of faith denies the other. Both escape rather than face it.
4. Lucidity requires keeping the contradiction alive.

∴ Live without appeal — in revolt, freedom and passion. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The Paper-Knife (Existence Precedes Essence)

A manufactured object is made according to a prior concept; if there is no God, human beings have no such concept — we exist first and define ourselves after.

1. An artisan makes a paper-knife according to a concept of what it is for; its essence precedes its existence.
2. If God created humans, human nature would be such a concept in God’s mind.
3. There is no God.

∴ For human beings existence precedes essence — we are nothing but what we make of ourselves, and wholly responsible for it.

The Rope and the Snake (Superimposition)

The world appears as many things through superimposition on the one Brahman, as a snake appears in a rope at dusk.

1. In dim light, a rope can be mistaken for a snake — the error is real as an experience, though the snake is not.
2. When the light comes, the snake is sublated; the rope was always there.
3. Likewise we superimpose the body, the ego and the world on the Self, and the Self’s consciousness on them.
4. Knowledge of Brahman, awakened by the Upanishads, sublates the world of multiplicity as light sublates the snake.

∴ Brahman alone is ultimately real; the world is mithyā — neither real nor unreal — and the self is Brahman.

Where Does Ignorance Reside?

Rāmānuja’s central objection to Advaita — the ignorance (avidyā) that supposedly produces the world has no possible location.

1. If the world is produced by ignorance, that ignorance must belong to someone.
2. It cannot belong to Brahman, which is pure knowledge and self-luminous.
3. It cannot belong to the individual soul, since the individual soul is itself supposed to be a product of ignorance.
4. There is nothing else for it to belong to.

∴ The Advaita doctrine of cosmic ignorance is untenable; souls and world are real modes of Brahman.

The Cogito

Whatever else an all-powerful deceiver could make me doubt, he cannot make me doubt that I exist while I am thinking.

1. I can doubt anything that a powerful deceiver could make me falsely believe.
2. If I am deceived, I must exist in order to be deceived.
3. Doubting is a form of thinking.

∴ I think, therefore I am — my existence as a thinking thing is certain.

The Ontological Argument

The idea of a supremely perfect being includes existence, as the idea of a triangle includes three angles — so God exists.

1. I have the idea of a supremely perfect being.
2. Existence is a perfection.
3. A supremely perfect being lacking existence would lack a perfection — a contradiction.

∴ A supremely perfect being — God — necessarily exists.

The Problem of Induction

No argument can justify the inference from past to future without assuming the very thing to be proved.

1. All inferences from experience assume that the future will resemble the past.
2. This assumption cannot be proved demonstratively — its denial is not contradictory.
3. It cannot be proved by experience without circularity — that would use induction to justify induction.

∴ Inductive inference is not founded on reason; we rely on it by custom or habit.

Of Miracles

A miracle violates a law of nature, established by uniform experience; testimony can never outweigh that experience.

1. A wise person proportions belief to the evidence.
2. A miracle is a violation of a law of nature, and the laws of nature rest on uniform, unalterable experience.
3. Testimony for a miracle is evidence of a much weaker kind — and people love wonder, and religious zeal corrupts honesty.
4. It is always more probable that testimony is false than that a law of nature was violated.

∴ No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact it claims.

Hume's Law — No Ought from an Is

From premises that only say what is the case, nothing follows about what ought to be.

1. Valid deductive conclusions contain nothing not already in the premises.
2. Purely factual premises contain only “is” and “is not”.
3. An “ought” expresses a new relation not contained in any “is”.

∴ No set of purely factual premises can entail a moral conclusion.

Epicurus's Old Questions (Problem of Evil)

If God is all-powerful and all-good, why is there evil? Philo restates the ancient argument.

1. If God is willing but not able to prevent evil, he is impotent.
2. If God is able but not willing, he is malevolent.
3. If God is both able and willing, there would be no evil.
4. There is evil.

∴ God is not both all-powerful and all-good.

Philo against the Design Argument

The analogy between the world and a machine is too weak to establish an intelligent, perfect, single designer.

1. The design argument reasons from the order of the universe to a designer, by analogy with human artifacts.
2. Analogies are only as strong as the similarity of the cases, and we have no experience of the making of worlds.
3. The world is as much like an animal or vegetable, which generate order themselves, as like a machine.
4. Even granting a designer, nothing shows it is one, perfect, infinite or still alive.

∴ The design argument establishes at most that the cause of order bears “some remote analogy to human intelligence”.

Darwin’s natural selection (1859) supplied the naturalistic explanation of biological order that Philo could only gesture at.

The False Promise (Categorical Imperative)

A maxim of lying to get money cannot be willed as a universal law without destroying itself.

1. Act only on a maxim you can at the same time will to become a universal law.
2. Maxim — “when I need money, I will borrow it and promise to repay, though I know I never will.”
3. If everyone acted on this maxim, no one would believe promises.
4. Then promising, and so my false promise, would be impossible.

∴ The maxim contradicts itself when universalized; making false promises is wrong.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

A perfect God must have created the best possible world — so the evils in it must be necessary to the best whole.

1. God is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good.
2. God had sufficient reason to create one world rather than another.
3. A perfectly good and wise being chooses the best.

∴ This world, with all its evils, is the best of all possible worlds.