They require interpretation
Right?
Also, if god is so great, why couldn’t god have delivered a decent morality then? Why is all this nervous updating necessary? Hmmmmmm?
We know why. Plato (or Socrates, or both) knew why. It’s obvious why.
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What’s the Plato reference? (I think one of my projects for next summer will be to read through all of Plato that I haven’t yet, which is most of him).
At the very least, all the sources we have on Socrates come through Plato, so Plato had to have known everything we know Socrates knew. Of course, there’s the hypothesis that Plato invented Socrates, which is a bit fitting considering that Socrates invented a lot of characters to have conversations out of which he developed his methods.
Steve – the Euthyphro, which is the source of the “do we love the good [the “holy” or “pious”] because it is good, or is the good the good only because the gods love it?” dilemma.
Actually not all the sources we have on Socrates do come through Plato – there are also Aristophanes and Xenophon, and there are other more obscure people who wrote dialogues, of which I think some fragments exist.
But also of course Plato took liberties, and there’s much scholarly debate on how we can (and if we can) separate Sock from Plato. The mainstream view is that Plato moved farther and farther away from Sock over time, and that The Laws is pretty much all Plato (and horrible with it).
Section 2 on this page discusses the Euthyphro problem:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/
Thank you, I have read the Euthyphro, I just I didn’t recognize your allusion to it. In addition to the religious issue, I think Euthyphro can be read in a modernized and secularized way as asking whether the Good or the Right is prior. (I’m doing a course in normative ethical theory this term. It’s fun, but I think it’s going to confirm my leanings towards moral non-realism).
Tangentially and serendipitously (if those are words) I happened to stumble across this blog piece, a little bit connected with inverse dunning-kruger perhaps:
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/inside-atlassian/impostor-syndrome-as-an-asset
Also today: “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.” – Socrates — quoted in a post with a nice graph:
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/posts/2368706/
But that’s about all I know. ;)