Euthyphro dilemma
Encyclopedia
The Euthyphro dilemma is found in Plato's
dialogue Euthyphro
, in which Socrates
asks Euthyphro: "Is the pious (τὸ ὅσιον) loved by the gods
because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" (10a
)
The dilemma
has had a major effect on the philosophical theism (faith) of the monotheistic religions, but in a modified form: "Is what is morally good commanded by God because it is morally good, or is it morally good because it is commanded by God?" Ever since Plato's original discussion, this question has presented a problem for some theists (believers), though others have thought it a false dilemma, and it continues to be an object of theological and philosophical discussion today.
At this point the dilemma surfaces. Socrates asks whether gods love the pious, because it is the pious, or the pious is the pious, because it is loved by the gods (10a)? In other words: do the gods love something because it is pious, or is something pious because the gods love it? Socrates and Euthyphro both accept the first option: surely the gods love the pious because it is the pious. But this means, Socrates argues, that we are forced to reject the second option: the fact that the gods love (something) cannot explain why the pious is the pious (10d). This is because, if both options were true, they together would yield a vicious circle, with the gods loving the pious because it is the pious, and the pious being the pious because the gods love it. And this in turn means, Socrates argues, that the pious is not the same as the god-beloved, for what makes the pious the pious is not what makes the god-beloved the god-beloved. After all, what makes the god-beloved the god-beloved is the fact that the gods love it, whereas what makes the pious the pious is something else (9d-11a). Thus Euthyphro's theory does not give us the very nature of the pious, but at most a quality of the pious (11ab).
presents this version of the dilemma: "It is generally agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just; in other words, whether justice and goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things."
, realism
, naturalism
, and/or objectivism
. Roughly, it is the view that there are independent moral standards: some actions are right or wrong in themselves, independently of God's commands. As seen above, this is the view accepted by Socrates and Euthyphro in Plato's dialogue. The Mu'tazilah school of Islamic theology
also defended the view (with, for example, Nazzam
maintaining that God is powerless to engage in injustice or lying), as did the Islamic philosopher
Averroes
. Though Aquinas never explicitly addresses the Euthyphro dilemma, interpreters often put him on this side of the issue. Aquinas draws a distinction between what is good or evil in itself and what is good or evil because of God's commands, with unchangeable moral standards forming the bulk of natural law
. Thus he contends that not even God can change the Ten Commandments
(adding that God can change what individuals deserve in particular cases, in what might look like special dispensations to murder or steal). Among later Scholastics, Vásquez
is particularly clear-cut about obligations coming prior to anyone's will, even God's. Modern
natural law theory saw Grotius and Leibniz also putting morality prior to God's will
, comparing moral truths to unchangeable mathematical truths, and engaging voluntarists like Pufendorf in philosophical controversy. Cambridge Platonists
like Benjamin Whichcote
and Ralph Cudworth
mounted seminal attacks on voluntarist theories, paving the way for the later rationalist metaethics of Samuel Clarke
and Richard Price
: what emerged was a view on which eternal moral standards (though dependent on God in some way) exist independently of God's will and prior to God's commands. Contemporary philosophers of religion
who take this horn of the Euthyphro dilemma include Richard Swinburne
and T. J. Mawson (though see below for complications).
This horn of the dilemma presents a significant challenge to the attributes Christians define for their concept of a God, indicating that their concept of a God does not sit on this horn:
or voluntarism. Roughly, it is the view that there are no moral standards other than God's will: without God's commands, nothing would be right or wrong. This view was partially defended by Duns Scotus
, in arguing that not all Ten Commandments belong to the natural law. Scotus held that while our duties to God (found on the first tablet) are self-evident
, true by definition, and unchangeable even by God, our duties to others (found on the second tablet) were arbitrarily willed by God and are within his power to revoke and replace (which is why God was able to command the murder of Isaac
, the spoiling of the Egyptians, and the adulterous marriage of Hosea
). William of Ockham
went further, contending that (since there is no contradiction in it) God could command us not to love God and even to hate God. Later Scholastics like Pierre D'Ailly
and his student Jean de Gerson
explicitly confronted the Euthyphro dilemma, taking the voluntarist position that God does not "command good actions because they are good or prohibit evil ones because they are evil; but... these are therefore good because they are commanded and evil because prohibited." Protestant reformers Martin Luther
and John Calvin
both stressed the absolute sovereignty of God's will, with Luther writing that "for [God's] will there is no cause or reason that can be laid down as a rule or measure for it", and Calvin writing that "everything which [God] wills must be held to be righteous by the mere fact of his willing it." The voluntarist emphasis on God's absolute power was carried further by Descartes, who notoriously held that God had freely created the eternal truths of logic
and mathematics
, and that God was therefore capable of giving circles unequal radii, giving triangles other than 180 internal degrees, and even making contradictions true. Descartes explicitly seconded Ockham on hating God: "why should [God] not have been able to give this command [i.e., the command to hate God] to one of his creatures?" Thomas Hobbes
notoriously reduced the justice of God to "irresistible power" (drawing the complaint of Bishop Bramhall
that this "overturns... all law"). And William Paley
held that all moral obligations bottom out in the self-interested "urge" to avoid hell and enter heaven by acting in accord with God's commands. Islam's Ash'arite theologians
, al-Ghazali
foremost among them, embraced voluntarism: scholar George Hourani writes that the view "was probably more prominent and widespread in Islam than in any other civilization." Wittgenstein said that of "the two interpretations of the Essence of the Good", that which holds that "the Good is good, in virtue of the fact that God wills it" is "the deeper", while that which holds that "God wills the good, because it is good" is "the shallow, rationalistic one, in that it behaves 'as though' that which is good could be given some further foundation". Today divine command theory is defended by many philosophers of religion, though typically in a restricted form (see below).
This horn of the dilemma also faces several problems:
, the issue and its connection with Plato was revived by Ralph Cudworth and Samuel Clarke in the 17th and 18th centuries. More recently, it has received a great deal of attention from contemporary philosophers working in metaethics and the philosophy of religion
. Philosophers and theologians aiming to defend theism against the threat of the dilemma have developed a variety of responses.
and Gary S. Rosenkrantz take the first horn of the dilemma, branding divine command theory a "subjective theory of value" that makes morality arbitrary. Instead, they accept a theory of morality on which "right and wrong, good and bad, are in a sense independent of what anyone believes, wants or prefers." They do not address the aforementioned problems with the first horn, but do consider a related problem concerning God's omnipotence: namely, that it might be handicapped by his inability to bring about what is independently evil. To this they reply that God is omnipotent even though there are states of affairs he cannot bring about. For, on their account, omnipotence is a matter of "maximal power", not an ability to bring about all possible states of affairs. And supposing that it is impossible for God not to exist, then since there cannot be more than one omnipotent being, it is therefore impossible for any being to have more power than God (e.g., a being who is omnipotent but not omnibenevolent). Thus God's omnipotence remains intact.
Richard Swinburne
and T. J. Mawson have a slightly more complicated view. They both take the first horn of the dilemma when it comes to necessary moral truths. But divine commands are not totally irrelevant, for God and his will can still have an impact on contingent moral truths. On the one hand, the most fundamental moral truths hold true regardless of whether God exists or what God has commanded: "Genocide and torturing children are wrong and would remain so whatever commands any person issued." This is because, according to Swinburne, such truths are true as a matter of logical necessity: i.e. like the laws of logic, one cannot deny them without contradiction. And this parallel offers a solution to the aforementioned problems of God's sovereignty, omnipotence, and freedom: namely, that these necessary truths of morality pose no more of a threat than the laws of logic. On the other hand, there is still an important role for God's will. First, there are some divine commands that can directly create moral obligations: e.g., the command to worship on Sundays instead of on Tuesdays. Notably, not even these commands, for which Swinburne and Mawson take the second horn of the dilemma, have ultimate, underived authority. Rather, they create obligations only because of God's role as creator and sustainer and indeed owner of the universe, together with the necessary moral truth that we owe some limited consideration to benefactors and owners. Second, God can make an indirect moral difference by deciding what sort of universe to create, i.e. deciding which contingent facts will be in place for the necessary moral truths to apply to. For example, whether a public policy is morally good might indirectly depend on God's creative acts: the policy's goodness or badness might depend on its effects, and those effects would in turn depend on the sort of universe God has decided to create.
's discussion of natural law and voluntarism in De legibus, and has been very prominent in contemporary philosophy of religion, appearing in the work of Robert M. Adams, Philip L. Quinn
, and William P. Alston.
A significant attraction of such a view is that, since it allows for a non-voluntarist treatment of goodness and badness, and therefore of God's own moral attributes, some of the aforementioned problems for voluntarism can perhaps be answered. God's commands are not arbitrary: there are reasons which guide his commands based ultimately on this goodness and badness. God could not issue horrible commands: God's own essential goodness or loving character would keep him from issuing any unsuitable commands. Our obligation to obey God's commands does not bottom out in a circle: it might be based on a gratitude whose appropriateness is itself independent of divine commands. These proposed solutions are controversial, and some steer the view back into problems associated with the first horn. But by freeing up a realm of value independent of God's will, this view might have the resources needed for a satisfactory form of divine command theory.
One problem remains for such views: if God's own essential goodness doesn't depend on divine commands, then what does it depend on? Something other than God? Here the restricted divine command theory is commonly combined with a view reminiscent of Plato: God is identical to the ultimate standard for goodness. Alston offers the analogy of the standard meter bar in France. Something is a meter long inasmuch as it is the same length as the standard meter bar, and likewise, something is good inasmuch as it approximates God. If one asks why God is identified as the ultimate standard for goodness, Alston replies that this is "the end of the line", with no further explanation available, but adds that this is no more arbitrary than a view which invokes some fundamental moral standard. On this view, then, even though goodness is independent of God's will, it still depends on God: thus God's sovereignty remains intact.
This solution has been criticized by Wes Morriston. If we identify the ultimate standard for goodness with God's nature, then it seems we are identifying it with certain of God's properties (e.g., being loving, being just). If so, then the dilemma resurfaces: is God good because he has those properties, or are those properties good because God has them? Nevertheless, Morriston concludes that the appeal to God's essential goodness is the divine-command theorist's best bet. To produce a satisying result, however, it would have to give an account of God's goodness that does not trivialize it and does not make God subject to an independent standard of goodness.
, Anselm
and Aquinas all wrote about the issues raised by the Euthyphro dilemma. (They did not mention it by name, but that is not unusual. William James
and Wittgenstein also discussed what is basically the Euthyphro dilemma, but they did not name it either.) As philosopher and Anselm scholar Katherin A. Rogers observes, many contemporary philosophers of religion suppose that there are true propositions which exist as platonic abstracta
independently of God. Among these are propositions constituting a moral order, to which God must conform in order to be good. Classical Judaeo-Christian theism, however, rejects such a view as inconsistent with God's omnipotence, which requires that all that there is is God and what he has made. "The classical tradition," Rogers notes, "also steers clear of the other horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, divine command theory." From a classical theistic perspective, therefore, the Euthyphro dilemma is false. As Rogers puts it, "Anselm, like Augustine before him and Aquinas later, rejects both horns of the Euthyphro dilemma. God neither conforms to nor invents the moral order. Rather His very nature is the standard for value."
This notion predates both Christianity and the Greek philosophers, appearing first in the eighth-century BC Hebrew
prophet
s, Amos
, Hosea
, Micah
and Isaiah
. (Amos lived some three centuries before Socrates and two before Thales
.) Their message marks a considerable advance on all previous ideas, not least in its special consideration for the poor and downtrodden — something conspicuously lacking in the Greek philosophers. As British scholar Norman H. Snaith observes, tsedeq, the Hebrew word for righteousness
, "actually stands for the establishment of God's will in the land". This includes justice, but goes beyond it, "because God's will is wider than justice. He has a particular regard for the helpless ones on earth". Tsedeq "is the norm by which all must be judged" and it "depends entirely upon the Nature of God".
Hebrew has very few abstract nouns, and they are mostly late. What the Greeks thought of as ideas or abstractions, the Hebrews thought of as activities. In contrast to the Greek dikaiosune (justice) of the philosophers, tsedeq is not an idea abstracted from this world of affairs. As Snaith writes:
The Hebrew stance on what came to be called the problem of universals
, as on much else, was very different from that of Plato and precluded anything like the Euthyphro dilemma. This has not changed. In 2005, Jonathan Sacks
wrote, "In Judaism, the Euthyphro dilemma does not exist." Jewish philosophers Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman criticized the Euthyphro dilemma as "misleading" because "it is not exhaustive": it leaves out a third option, namely that God "acts only out of His nature".
Like Aristotle
, Aquinas rejected Platonism. In his view, to speak of abstractions not only as existent but indeed as more perfect exemplars than fully designated particulars is to put a premium on generality and vagueness. On this analysis, the abstract "good" in the first horn of the Euthyphro dilemma is an unnecessary obfuscation.
Aquinas frequently quoted with approval Aristotle's definition, "Good is what all desire." As he clarified, "When we say that good is what all desire, it is not to be understood that every kind of good thing is desired by all, but that whatever is desired has the nature of good." In other words, even those who desire evil desire it "only under the aspect of good", i.e. of what is desirable. "Evil, be thou my good," says Milton
's Satan
. A major difference between desiring good and desiring evil is that in the former, will and reason are in harmony, whereas in the latter, they are in discord.
Aquinas's discussion of sin
provides a good point of entry to his philosophical explanation of why the nature of God is the standard for value. "Every sin," he writes, "consists in the longing for a passing [i.e. ultimately unreal or false] good." Thus, "In a certain sense it is true what Socrates says, namely that no one sins with full knowledge." "No sin in the will happens without an ignorance of the understanding." God, however, has full knowledge (omniscience
) and therefore by definition (that of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as well as Aquinas) can never will anything other than what is good. It has been claimed — for instance, by Nicolai Hartmann
, who wrote: "There is no freedom for the good that would not be at the same time freedom for evil" — that this would limit God's freedom, and therefore his omnipotence. Josef Pieper
, however, replies that such arguments rest upon an impermissibly anthropomorphic conception of God. In the case of humans, as Aquinas says, to be able to sin is indeed a consequence, or even a sign of freedom (quodam libertatis signum). Humans, in other words, are not puppets manipulated by God so that they always will what is right. However, "it does not belong to the essence of the free will to be able to decide for evil." "To will evil is neither freedom nor a part of freedom." It is precisely humans' creatureliness — that is, their not being God and therefore omniscient — that makes them capable of sinning. Consequently, writes Pieper, "the inability to sin should be looked on as the very signature of a higher freedom — contrary to the usual way of conceiving the issue". Pieper concludes: "Only the will [i.e. God's] can be the right standard of its own willing and must will what is right necessarily, from within itself, and always. A deviation from the norm would not even be thinkable. And obviously only the absolute divine will is the right standard of its own act" — and consequently of all human acts. Thus the second horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, divine command theory, is also disposed of.
William James, in his essay "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life
", dismisses the first horn of the Euthyphro dilemma and stays clear of the second. He writes: "Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true 'in themselves,' is ... either an out-and-out superstition, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real Thinker ... to whom the existence of the universe is due". Moral obligations are created by "personal demands", whether these demands come from the weakest creatures or most insignificant persons or from God. It follows that "ethics have as genuine a foothold in a universe where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there is a God as well". However, whether "the purely human system" works "as well as the other is a different question".
For James, the deepest practical difference in the moral life is between what he calls "the easy-going and the strenuous mood". In a purely human moral system, it is hard to rise above the easy-going mood, since the thinker's "various ideals, known to him to be mere preferences of his own, are too nearly of the same denominational value; he can play fast and loose with them at will. This too is why, in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximum stimulating power." Our attitude, James writes, is "entirely different" in a world where there are none but "finite demanders" from what it is in one where there is also "an infinite demander". He concludes that "the stable and systematic moral universe for which the ethical philosopher asks is fully possible only in a world where there is a divine thinker with all-enveloping demands", for in that case, "actualized in his thought already must be that ethical philosophy which we seek as the pattern which our own must evermore approach". Even though "exactly what the thought of this infinite thinker may be is hidden from us", our postulation of him serves "to let loose in us the strenuous mood" and confront us with an existential "challenge" in which "our total character and personal genius ... are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or incapacity for moral life. From this unsparing practical ordeal no professor's lectures and no array of books can save us." In the words of Richard M. Gale, "God inspires us to lead the morally strenuous life in virtue of our conceiving of him as unsurpassably good. This supplies James with an adequate answer to the underlying question of the Euthyphro".
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
dialogue Euthyphro
Euthyphro
Euthyphro is one of Plato's early dialogues, dated to after 399 BC. Taking place during the weeks leading up to Socrates' trial, the dialogue features Socrates and Euthyphro, a man known for claiming to be a religious expert. They attempt to pinpoint a definition for piety.-Background:The dialogue...
, in which Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
asks Euthyphro: "Is the pious (τὸ ὅσιον) loved by the gods
Deity
A deity is a recognized preternatural or supernatural immortal being, who may be thought of as holy, divine, or sacred, held in high regard, and respected by believers....
because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" (10a
Stephanus pagination
Stephanus pagination is the system of reference and organization used in modern editions and translations of Plato . Plato's works are divided into numbers, and each number will be divided into equal sections a, b, c, d and e...
)
The dilemma
Dilemma
A dilemma |proposition]]") is a problem offering two possibilities, neither of which is practically acceptable. One in this position has been traditionally described as "being on the horns of a dilemma", neither horn being comfortable...
has had a major effect on the philosophical theism (faith) of the monotheistic religions, but in a modified form: "Is what is morally good commanded by God because it is morally good, or is it morally good because it is commanded by God?" Ever since Plato's original discussion, this question has presented a problem for some theists (believers), though others have thought it a false dilemma, and it continues to be an object of theological and philosophical discussion today.
The dilemma
Socrates and Euthyphro are discussing the nature of piety in Euthyphro. Euthyphro proposes (6e) that the pious (τὸ ὅσιον) is the same thing as what is loved by the gods (τὸ θεοφιλές), but Socrates finds a problem with this proposal: the gods may disagree among themselves (7e). Euthyphro then revises his definition, so that piety is only what is loved by all the gods unanimously (9e).At this point the dilemma surfaces. Socrates asks whether gods love the pious, because it is the pious, or the pious is the pious, because it is loved by the gods (10a)? In other words: do the gods love something because it is pious, or is something pious because the gods love it? Socrates and Euthyphro both accept the first option: surely the gods love the pious because it is the pious. But this means, Socrates argues, that we are forced to reject the second option: the fact that the gods love (something) cannot explain why the pious is the pious (10d). This is because, if both options were true, they together would yield a vicious circle, with the gods loving the pious because it is the pious, and the pious being the pious because the gods love it. And this in turn means, Socrates argues, that the pious is not the same as the god-beloved, for what makes the pious the pious is not what makes the god-beloved the god-beloved. After all, what makes the god-beloved the god-beloved is the fact that the gods love it, whereas what makes the pious the pious is something else (9d-11a). Thus Euthyphro's theory does not give us the very nature of the pious, but at most a quality of the pious (11ab).
In philosophical theism
The dilemma can be modified to apply to philosophical theism, where it is still the object of theological and philosophical discussion, largely within the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. As LeibnizGottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher and mathematician. He wrote in different languages, primarily in Latin , French and German ....
presents this version of the dilemma: "It is generally agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just; in other words, whether justice and goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things."
The first horn
The first horn of the dilemma (i.e. that which is right is commanded by God because it is right) goes under a variety of names: intellectualism, rationalismRationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
, realism
Moral realism
Moral realism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true.# Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of subjective opinion....
, naturalism
Natural law
Natural law, or the law of nature , is any system of law which is purportedly determined by nature, and thus universal. Classically, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. Natural law is contrasted with the positive law Natural...
, and/or objectivism
Moral objectivism
Moral objectivism may refer to:* Robust moral realism, the meta-ethical position that ethical sentences express factual propositions about robust or mind-independent features of the world, and that some such propositions are true....
. Roughly, it is the view that there are independent moral standards: some actions are right or wrong in themselves, independently of God's commands. As seen above, this is the view accepted by Socrates and Euthyphro in Plato's dialogue. The Mu'tazilah school of Islamic theology
Islamic theology
Islamic theology is a branch of Islamic studies regarding the beliefs associated with the Islamic faith. Any religious belief system, or creed, can be considered an example of aqidah. However, this term has taken a significant technical usage in Islamic history and theology, denoting those...
also defended the view (with, for example, Nazzam
Ibrahim an-Nazzam
Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm Ibn Sayyār Ibn Hāni‘ an-Naẓẓam was a Mu'tazilite theologian and poet. He was the nephew of Abu al-Hudhayl, the first systematic Mu'tazilite theologian; al-Jahiz was one of his students. His theological doctrines were not accepted by his contemporaries and his works are lost...
maintaining that God is powerless to engage in injustice or lying), as did the Islamic philosopher
Islamic philosophy
Islamic philosophy is a branch of Islamic studies. It is the continuous search for Hekma in the light of Islamic view of life, universe, ethics, society, and so on...
Averroes
Averroes
' , better known just as Ibn Rushd , and in European literature as Averroes , was a Muslim polymath; a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy,...
. Though Aquinas never explicitly addresses the Euthyphro dilemma, interpreters often put him on this side of the issue. Aquinas draws a distinction between what is good or evil in itself and what is good or evil because of God's commands, with unchangeable moral standards forming the bulk of natural law
Natural law
Natural law, or the law of nature , is any system of law which is purportedly determined by nature, and thus universal. Classically, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. Natural law is contrasted with the positive law Natural...
. Thus he contends that not even God can change the Ten Commandments
Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments, also known as the Decalogue , are a set of biblical principles relating to ethics and worship, which play a fundamental role in Judaism and most forms of Christianity. They include instructions to worship only God and to keep the Sabbath, and prohibitions against idolatry,...
(adding that God can change what individuals deserve in particular cases, in what might look like special dispensations to murder or steal). Among later Scholastics, Vásquez
Gabriel Vásquez
Gabriel Vasquez was a Spanish Jesuit theologian....
is particularly clear-cut about obligations coming prior to anyone's will, even God's. Modern
Early modern period
In history, the early modern period of modern history follows the late Middle Ages. Although the chronological limits of the period are open to debate, the timeframe spans the period after the late portion of the Middle Ages through the beginning of the Age of Revolutions...
natural law theory saw Grotius and Leibniz also putting morality prior to God's will
Will of God
The will of God or divine will refers to the concept of God as having a plan for humanity, and as such desires to see such a plan fulfilled...
, comparing moral truths to unchangeable mathematical truths, and engaging voluntarists like Pufendorf in philosophical controversy. Cambridge Platonists
Cambridge Platonists
The Cambridge Platonists were a group of philosophers at Cambridge University in the middle of the 17th century .- Programme :...
like Benjamin Whichcote
Benjamin Whichcote
Benjamin Whichcote was a British Establishment and Puritan divine, Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and leader of the Cambridge Platonists.-Life:...
and Ralph Cudworth
Ralph Cudworth
Ralph Cudworth was an English philosopher, the leader of the Cambridge Platonists.-Life:Born at Aller, Somerset, he was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, gaining his MA and becoming a Fellow of Emmanuel in 1639. In 1645, he became master of Clare Hall and professor of Hebrew...
mounted seminal attacks on voluntarist theories, paving the way for the later rationalist metaethics of Samuel Clarke
Samuel Clarke
thumb|right|200px|Samuel ClarkeSamuel Clarke was an English philosopher and Anglican clergyman.-Early life and studies:...
and Richard Price
Richard Price
Richard Price was a British moral philosopher and preacher in the tradition of English Dissenters, and a political pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the American Revolution. He fostered connections between a large number of people, including writers of the...
: what emerged was a view on which eternal moral standards (though dependent on God in some way) exist independently of God's will and prior to God's commands. Contemporary philosophers of religion
Philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion is a branch of philosophy concerned with questions regarding religion, including the nature and existence of God, the examination of religious experience, analysis of religious language and texts, and the relationship of religion and science...
who take this horn of the Euthyphro dilemma include Richard Swinburne
Richard Swinburne
Richard G. Swinburne is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a very influential proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in philosophy of religion and...
and T. J. Mawson (though see below for complications).
Problems
This horn of the dilemma presents a significant challenge to the attributes Christians define for their concept of a God, indicating that their concept of a God does not sit on this horn:
- SovereigntySovereigntySovereignty is the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a geographic area, such as a territory. It can be found in a power to rule and make law that rests on a political fact for which no purely legal explanation can be provided...
: If there are moral standards independent of God's will, then "[t]here is something over which God is not sovereign. God is bound by the laws of morality instead of being their establisher. Moreover, God depends for his goodness on the extent to which he conforms to an independent moral standard. Thus, God is not absolutely independent." 18th-century philosopher Richard PriceRichard PriceRichard Price was a British moral philosopher and preacher in the tradition of English Dissenters, and a political pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the American Revolution. He fostered connections between a large number of people, including writers of the...
, who takes the first horn and thus sees morality as "necessary and immutable", sets out the objection as follows: "It may seem that this is setting up something distinct from God, which is independent of him, and equally eternal and necessary."
- OmnipotenceOmnipotenceOmnipotence is unlimited power. Monotheistic religions generally attribute omnipotence to only the deity of whichever faith is being addressed...
: These moral standards would limit God's power: not even God could oppose them by commanding what is evil and thereby making it good. As Richard SwinburneRichard SwinburneRichard G. Swinburne is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a very influential proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in philosophy of religion and...
puts the point, this horn "seems to place a restriction on God's power if he cannot make any action which he chooses obligatory... [and also] it seems to limit what God can command us to do. God, if he is to be God, cannot command us to do what, independently of his will, is wrong." This point was very influential in Islamic theology: "In relation to God, objective values appeared as a limiting factor to His power to do as He wills... Ash'ariAbu al-Hasan al-Ash'ariAbū al-Hasan Alī ibn Ismā'īl al-Ash'arī was a Muslim Arab theologian and the founder of the Ash'ari school of early Islamic philosophy and Islamic theology.-Biography:...
got rid of the whole embarrassing problem by denying the existence of objective values which might act as a standard for God’s action." Similar concerns drove the medieval voluntarists Duns ScotusDuns ScotusBlessed John Duns Scotus, O.F.M. was one of the more important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages. He was nicknamed Doctor Subtilis for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought....
and William of OckhamWilliam of OckhamWilliam of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of...
.
- Freedom of the willFree will"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
: Moreover, these moral standards would limit God's freedom of will: God could not command anything opposed to them, and perhaps would have no choice but to command in accordance with them. As Mark Murphy puts the point, "if moral requirements existed prior to God's willing them, requirements that an impeccable God could not violate, God's liberty would be compromised."
- Morality without God: If there are moral standards independent of God, then morality would retain its authority even if God did not exist. This conclusion was explicitly (and notoriously) drawn by early modern political theorist Hugo GrotiusHugo GrotiusHugo Grotius , also known as Huig de Groot, Hugo Grocio or Hugo de Groot, was a jurist in the Dutch Republic. With Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili he laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law...
: "What we have been saying [about the natural law] would have a degree of validity even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to him" On such a view, God is no longer a "law-giver" but at most a "law-transmitter" who plays no vital role in the foundations of morality. NontheistsNontheismNontheism is a term that covers a range of both religious and nonreligious attitudes characterized by the absence of — or the rejection of — theism or any belief in a personal god or gods...
have capitalized on this point, largely as a way of disarming moral arguments for God's existenceArgument from moralityThe argument from morality is one of many arguments for the existence of God. It comes in different forms, all aiming to support the claim that God exists with observations about morality...
: if morality does not depend on God in the first place, such arguments stumble at the starting gate.
The second horn
The second horn of the dilemma (i.e. that which is right is right because it is commanded by God) is sometimes known as divine command theoryDivine command theory
Divine command theory is the meta-ethical view about the semantics or meaning of ethical sentences, which claims that ethical sentences express propositions, some of which are true, about the attitudes of God...
or voluntarism. Roughly, it is the view that there are no moral standards other than God's will: without God's commands, nothing would be right or wrong. This view was partially defended by Duns Scotus
Duns Scotus
Blessed John Duns Scotus, O.F.M. was one of the more important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages. He was nicknamed Doctor Subtilis for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought....
, in arguing that not all Ten Commandments belong to the natural law. Scotus held that while our duties to God (found on the first tablet) are self-evident
Self-evidence
In epistemology , a self-evident proposition is one that is known to be true by understanding its meaning without proof....
, true by definition, and unchangeable even by God, our duties to others (found on the second tablet) were arbitrarily willed by God and are within his power to revoke and replace (which is why God was able to command the murder of Isaac
Binding of Isaac
The Binding of Isaac Akedah or Akeidat Yitzchak in Hebrew and Dhabih in Arabic, is a story from the Hebrew Bible in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on Mount Moriah...
, the spoiling of the Egyptians, and the adulterous marriage of Hosea
Book of Hosea
The Book of Hosea is one of the books of the Hebrew Bible. It stands first in order among what are known as the twelve Minor Prophets.-Background and Content:...
). William of Ockham
William of Ockham
William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of...
went further, contending that (since there is no contradiction in it) God could command us not to love God and even to hate God. Later Scholastics like Pierre D'Ailly
Pierre d'Ailly
Pierre d'Ailly was a French theologian, astrologer, and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church....
and his student Jean de Gerson
Jean Gerson
Jean Charlier de Gerson , French scholar, educator, reformer, and poet, Chancellor of the University of Paris, a guiding light of the conciliar movement and one of the most prominent theologians at the Council of Constance, was born at the village of Gerson, in the bishopric of Reims in...
explicitly confronted the Euthyphro dilemma, taking the voluntarist position that God does not "command good actions because they are good or prohibit evil ones because they are evil; but... these are therefore good because they are commanded and evil because prohibited." Protestant reformers Martin Luther
Martin Luther
Martin Luther was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517...
and John Calvin
John Calvin
John Calvin was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530...
both stressed the absolute sovereignty of God's will, with Luther writing that "for [God's] will there is no cause or reason that can be laid down as a rule or measure for it", and Calvin writing that "everything which [God] wills must be held to be righteous by the mere fact of his willing it." The voluntarist emphasis on God's absolute power was carried further by Descartes, who notoriously held that God had freely created the eternal truths of logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
and mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
, and that God was therefore capable of giving circles unequal radii, giving triangles other than 180 internal degrees, and even making contradictions true. Descartes explicitly seconded Ockham on hating God: "why should [God] not have been able to give this command [i.e., the command to hate God] to one of his creatures?" Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury , in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy...
notoriously reduced the justice of God to "irresistible power" (drawing the complaint of Bishop Bramhall
John Bramhall
John Bramhall was an Archbishop of Armagh, and an Anglican theologian and apologist. He was a noted controversialist who doggedly defended the English Church from both Puritan and Roman Catholic accusations, as well as the materialism of Thomas Hobbes.-Early life:Bramhall was born in Pontefract,...
that this "overturns... all law"). And William Paley
William Paley
William Paley was a British Christian apologist, philosopher, and utilitarian. He is best known for his exposition of the teleological argument for the existence of God in his work Natural Theology, which made use of the watchmaker analogy .-Life:Paley was Born in Peterborough, England, and was...
held that all moral obligations bottom out in the self-interested "urge" to avoid hell and enter heaven by acting in accord with God's commands. Islam's Ash'arite theologians
Ash'ari
The Ashʿari theology is a school of early Muslim speculative theology founded by the theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari...
, al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali
Abu Hāmed Mohammad ibn Mohammad al-Ghazzālī , known as Algazel to the western medieval world, born and died in Tus, in the Khorasan province of Persia was a Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic....
foremost among them, embraced voluntarism: scholar George Hourani writes that the view "was probably more prominent and widespread in Islam than in any other civilization." Wittgenstein said that of "the two interpretations of the Essence of the Good", that which holds that "the Good is good, in virtue of the fact that God wills it" is "the deeper", while that which holds that "God wills the good, because it is good" is "the shallow, rationalistic one, in that it behaves 'as though' that which is good could be given some further foundation". Today divine command theory is defended by many philosophers of religion, though typically in a restricted form (see below).
Problems
This horn of the dilemma also faces several problems:
- No reasons for morality: If there is no moral standard other than God's will, then God's commands are arbitrary (i.e., based on pure whimsy or caprice). This would mean that morality is ultimately not based on reasons: "if theological voluntarism is true, then God's commands/intentions must be arbitrary; [but] it cannot be that morality could wholly depend on something arbitrary... [for] when we say that some moral state of affairs obtains, we take it that there is a reason for that moral state of affairs obtaining rather than another." And as Michael J. Murray and Michael Rea put it, this would also "cas[t] doubt on the notion that morality is genuinely objective." An additional problem is that it is difficult to explain how true moral actions can exist, if one only acts out of fear for God, or in an attempt to be rewarded by him.
- No reasons for God: This arbitrariness would also jeopardize God's status as a wiseWisdomWisdom is a deep understanding and realization of people, things, events or situations, resulting in the ability to apply perceptions, judgements and actions in keeping with this understanding. It often requires control of one's emotional reactions so that universal principles, reason and...
and rationalRationalityIn philosophy, rationality is the exercise of reason. It is the manner in which people derive conclusions when considering things deliberately. It also refers to the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons for belief, or with one's actions with one's reasons for action...
being, one who always acts on good reasons only. As Leibniz writes: "Where will be his justice and his wisdom if he has only a certain despotic power, if arbitrary will takes the place of reasonableness, and if in accord with the definition of tyrants, justice consists in that which is pleasing to the most powerful? Besides it seems that every act of willing supposes some reason for the willing and this reason, of course, must precede the act."
- Anything goes: This arbitrariness would also mean that anything could become good, and anything could become bad, merely upon God's command. Thus if God commanded us "to gratuitously inflict pain on each other" or to engage in "cruelty for its own sake" or to hold an "annual sacrifice of randomly selected ten-year-olds in a particularly gruesome ritual that involves excruciating and prolonged suffering for its victims", then we would be morally obligated to do so. As 17th-century philosopher Ralph CudworthRalph CudworthRalph Cudworth was an English philosopher, the leader of the Cambridge Platonists.-Life:Born at Aller, Somerset, he was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, gaining his MA and becoming a Fellow of Emmanuel in 1639. In 1645, he became master of Clare Hall and professor of Hebrew...
put it: "nothing can be imagined so grossly wicked, or so foully unjust or dishonest, but if it were supposed to be commanded by this omnipotent Deity, must needs upon that hypothesis forthwith become holy, just, and righteous."
- Moral contingencyContingency (philosophy)In philosophy and logic, contingency is the status of propositions that are neither true under every possible valuation nor false under every possible valuation . A contingent proposition is neither necessarily true nor necessarily false...
: If morality depends on the perfectly free willFree will"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
of God, morality would lose its necessityNecessaryNecessary may refer to:help* Something that is a required condition for something else to be the case, see necessary and sufficient condition.* A necessary truth, something that cannot fail to be true, see logical possibility....
: "If nothing prevents God from loving things that are different from what God actually loves, then goodness can change from world to worldPossible worldIn philosophy and logic, the concept of a possible world is used to express modal claims. The concept of possible worlds is common in contemporary philosophical discourse and has also been disputed.- Possibility, necessity, and contingency :...
or time to time. This is obviously objectionable to those who believe that claims about morality are, if true, necessarily true." In other words, no action has its moral status necessarily: any right action could have easily been wrong, if God had so decided, and an action which is right today could easily become wrong tomorrow, if God so decides. Indeed, some have argued that divine command theory is incompatible with ordinary conceptions of moral supervenienceSupervenienceIn philosophy, supervenience is a kind of dependency relationship. For example, mental states might depend on physical brain states. This dependency is typically held to obtain between sets of properties. A classic example is that mental states of pain supervene on 'C-fibers firing'...
.
- Why do God's commands obligate?: Mere commands do not create obligations unless the commander has some commanding authority. But this commanding authority cannot itself be based on those very commands (i.e., a command to obey one's own commands), otherwise a vicious circle results. So, in order for God's commands to obligate us, he must derive commanding authority from some source other than his own will. As Cudworth put it: "For it was never heard of, that any one founded all his authority of commanding others, and others (sic) obligation or duty to obey his commands, in a law of his own making, that men should be required, obliged, or bound to obey him. Wherefore since the thing willed in all laws is not that men should be bound or obliged to obey; this thing cannot be the product of the meer (sic) will of the commander, but it must proceed from something else; namely, the right or authority of the commander". To avoid the circle, one might say our obligation comes from gratitude to God for creating us. But this presupposes some sort of independent moral standard obligating us to be grateful to our benefactors. As 18th-century philosopher Francis HutchesonFrancis Hutcheson (philosopher)Francis Hutcheson was a philosopher born in Ireland to a family of Scottish Presbyterians who became one of the founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment....
writes: "Is the Reason exciting to concur with the Deity this, 'The Deity is our Benefactor?' Then what Reason excites to concur with Benefactors?" Or finally, one might resort to HobbesThomas HobbesThomas Hobbes of Malmesbury , in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy...
's view: "The right of nature whereby God reigneth over men, and punisheth those that break his laws, is to be derived, not from his creating them (as if he required obedience, as of gratitude for his benefits), but from his irresistible power." In other words, might makes rightMight makes rightMight makes right is an aphorism with several potential meanings :* In English, the phrase is most often used in negative assessments of expressions of power....
.
- God's goodness: If all goodness is a matter of God's will, then what shall become of God's goodness? Thus William P. Alston writes, "since the standards of moral goodness are set by divine commands, to say that God is morally good is just to say that he obeys his own commands... that God practises what he preaches, whatever that might be", and Hutcheson deems such a view "an insignificant TautologyTautology (logic)In logic, a tautology is a formula which is true in every possible interpretation. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein first applied the term to redundancies of propositional logic in 1921; it had been used earlier to refer to rhetorical tautologies, and continues to be used in that alternate sense...
, amounting to no more than this, 'That God wills what he wills.'" Alternatively, as Leibniz puts it, divine command theorists "deprive God of the designation good: for what cause could one have to praise him for what he does, if in doing something quite different he would have done equally well?" A related point is raised by C. S. LewisC. S. LewisClive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
: "if good is to be defined as what God commands, then the goodness of God Himself is emptied of meaning and the commands of an omnipotent fiend would have the same claim on us as those of the 'righteous Lord.'" Or again Leibniz: "this opinion would hardly distinguish God from the devil." That is, since divine command theory trivializes God's goodness, it is incapable of explaining the difference between God and an all-powerful demon.
- The is-ought problemIs-ought problemThe is–ought problem in meta-ethics as articulated by Scottish philosopher and historian, David Hume , is that many writers make claims about what ought to be on the basis of statements about what is...
and the naturalistic fallacyNaturalistic fallacyThe naturalistic fallacy is often claimed to be a formal fallacy. It was described and named by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica...
: According to David HumeDavid HumeDavid Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
, it is hard to see how moral propositions featuring the relation ought could ever be deduced from ordinary is propositions, such as "the being of a God". Divine command theory is thus guilty of deducing moral oughts from ordinary ises about God's commands. In a similar vein, G. E. Moore argued (with his open question argumentOpen Question ArgumentThe Open Question Argument is a philosophical argument put forward by British philosopher G. E. Moore in , to refute the equating of the property good with some non-moral property, whether naturalistic or meta-physical...
) that the notion good is indefinable, and any attempts to analyze it in naturalisticNaturalism (philosophy)Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...
or metaphysicalMetaphysicsMetaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
terms are guilty of the so-called "naturalistic fallacy". This would block any theory which analyzes morality in terms of God's will: and indeed, in a later discussion of divine command theory, Moore concluded that "when we assert any action to be right or wrong, we are not merely making an assertion about the attitude of mind towards it of any being or set of beings whatever".
- No morality without God: If all morality is a matter of God's will, then if God does not exist, there is no morality. This is the thought captured in the slogan (often attributed to Dostoevsky) "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." Divine command theorists disagree over whether this is a problem for their view or a virtue of their view. Many would argueArgument from moralityThe argument from morality is one of many arguments for the existence of God. It comes in different forms, all aiming to support the claim that God exists with observations about morality...
that morality does indeed require God's existence, and that this is in fact a problem for atheism. But divine command theorist Robert Merrihew Adams contends that this idea ("that no actions would be ethically wrong if there were not a loving God") is one that "will seem (at least initially) implausible to many", and that his theory must "dispel [an] air of paradox."
Responses to the dilemma
The Euthyphro dilemma has been addressed by many philosophers and theologians since the time of Plato, though not always with reference to the Platonic dialogue. According to scholar Terence IrwinTerence Irwin
Terence Irwin is a scholar and philosopher specializing in ancient Greek philosophy and the history of ethics Terence Irwin (born 21 April 1947, in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland) is a scholar and philosopher specializing in ancient Greek philosophy and the history of ethics Terence Irwin (born 21...
, the issue and its connection with Plato was revived by Ralph Cudworth and Samuel Clarke in the 17th and 18th centuries. More recently, it has received a great deal of attention from contemporary philosophers working in metaethics and the philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion is a branch of philosophy concerned with questions regarding religion, including the nature and existence of God, the examination of religious experience, analysis of religious language and texts, and the relationship of religion and science...
. Philosophers and theologians aiming to defend theism against the threat of the dilemma have developed a variety of responses.
Independent moral standards
Contemporary philosophers Joshua HoffmanJoshua Hoffman
Dr. Joshua Hoffman is a tenured American author and philosopher at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dr. Hoffman's primary contributions to the fields of philosophy and rational theology include a number of written works exploring the history of philosophy, metaphysics, and the divine...
and Gary S. Rosenkrantz take the first horn of the dilemma, branding divine command theory a "subjective theory of value" that makes morality arbitrary. Instead, they accept a theory of morality on which "right and wrong, good and bad, are in a sense independent of what anyone believes, wants or prefers." They do not address the aforementioned problems with the first horn, but do consider a related problem concerning God's omnipotence: namely, that it might be handicapped by his inability to bring about what is independently evil. To this they reply that God is omnipotent even though there are states of affairs he cannot bring about. For, on their account, omnipotence is a matter of "maximal power", not an ability to bring about all possible states of affairs. And supposing that it is impossible for God not to exist, then since there cannot be more than one omnipotent being, it is therefore impossible for any being to have more power than God (e.g., a being who is omnipotent but not omnibenevolent). Thus God's omnipotence remains intact.
Richard Swinburne
Richard Swinburne
Richard G. Swinburne is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a very influential proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in philosophy of religion and...
and T. J. Mawson have a slightly more complicated view. They both take the first horn of the dilemma when it comes to necessary moral truths. But divine commands are not totally irrelevant, for God and his will can still have an impact on contingent moral truths. On the one hand, the most fundamental moral truths hold true regardless of whether God exists or what God has commanded: "Genocide and torturing children are wrong and would remain so whatever commands any person issued." This is because, according to Swinburne, such truths are true as a matter of logical necessity: i.e. like the laws of logic, one cannot deny them without contradiction. And this parallel offers a solution to the aforementioned problems of God's sovereignty, omnipotence, and freedom: namely, that these necessary truths of morality pose no more of a threat than the laws of logic. On the other hand, there is still an important role for God's will. First, there are some divine commands that can directly create moral obligations: e.g., the command to worship on Sundays instead of on Tuesdays. Notably, not even these commands, for which Swinburne and Mawson take the second horn of the dilemma, have ultimate, underived authority. Rather, they create obligations only because of God's role as creator and sustainer and indeed owner of the universe, together with the necessary moral truth that we owe some limited consideration to benefactors and owners. Second, God can make an indirect moral difference by deciding what sort of universe to create, i.e. deciding which contingent facts will be in place for the necessary moral truths to apply to. For example, whether a public policy is morally good might indirectly depend on God's creative acts: the policy's goodness or badness might depend on its effects, and those effects would in turn depend on the sort of universe God has decided to create.
Restricted divine command theory
One common response to the Euthyphro dilemma centers on a distinction between value and obligation. Obligation, which concerns rightness and wrongness (or what is required or forbidden or permissible), is given a voluntarist treatment. But value, which concerns goodness and badness, is treated as independent of divine commands. The result is a restricted divine command theory that applies only to a specific region of morality: the deontic region of obligation. This response is found in Francisco SuárezFrancisco Suárez
Francisco Suárez was a Spanish Jesuit priest, philosopher and theologian, one of the leading figures of the School of Salamanca movement, and generally regarded among the greatest scholastics after Thomas Aquinas....
's discussion of natural law and voluntarism in De legibus, and has been very prominent in contemporary philosophy of religion, appearing in the work of Robert M. Adams, Philip L. Quinn
Philip L. Quinn
Philip L. Quinn was a philosopher and theologian. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1962, and went on to earn a master's degree in physics from the University of Delaware in 1966. He then attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he received his master's and doctoral degrees in...
, and William P. Alston.
A significant attraction of such a view is that, since it allows for a non-voluntarist treatment of goodness and badness, and therefore of God's own moral attributes, some of the aforementioned problems for voluntarism can perhaps be answered. God's commands are not arbitrary: there are reasons which guide his commands based ultimately on this goodness and badness. God could not issue horrible commands: God's own essential goodness or loving character would keep him from issuing any unsuitable commands. Our obligation to obey God's commands does not bottom out in a circle: it might be based on a gratitude whose appropriateness is itself independent of divine commands. These proposed solutions are controversial, and some steer the view back into problems associated with the first horn. But by freeing up a realm of value independent of God's will, this view might have the resources needed for a satisfactory form of divine command theory.
One problem remains for such views: if God's own essential goodness doesn't depend on divine commands, then what does it depend on? Something other than God? Here the restricted divine command theory is commonly combined with a view reminiscent of Plato: God is identical to the ultimate standard for goodness. Alston offers the analogy of the standard meter bar in France. Something is a meter long inasmuch as it is the same length as the standard meter bar, and likewise, something is good inasmuch as it approximates God. If one asks why God is identified as the ultimate standard for goodness, Alston replies that this is "the end of the line", with no further explanation available, but adds that this is no more arbitrary than a view which invokes some fundamental moral standard. On this view, then, even though goodness is independent of God's will, it still depends on God: thus God's sovereignty remains intact.
This solution has been criticized by Wes Morriston. If we identify the ultimate standard for goodness with God's nature, then it seems we are identifying it with certain of God's properties (e.g., being loving, being just). If so, then the dilemma resurfaces: is God good because he has those properties, or are those properties good because God has them? Nevertheless, Morriston concludes that the appeal to God's essential goodness is the divine-command theorist's best bet. To produce a satisying result, however, it would have to give an account of God's goodness that does not trivialize it and does not make God subject to an independent standard of goodness.
False-dilemma response
AugustineAugustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province...
, Anselm
Anselm of Canterbury
Anselm of Canterbury , also called of Aosta for his birthplace, and of Bec for his home monastery, was a Benedictine monk, a philosopher, and a prelate of the church who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109...
and Aquinas all wrote about the issues raised by the Euthyphro dilemma. (They did not mention it by name, but that is not unusual. William James
William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
and Wittgenstein also discussed what is basically the Euthyphro dilemma, but they did not name it either.) As philosopher and Anselm scholar Katherin A. Rogers observes, many contemporary philosophers of religion suppose that there are true propositions which exist as platonic abstracta
Abstract object
An abstract object is an object which does not exist at any particular time or place, but rather exists as a type of thing . In philosophy, an important distinction is whether an object is considered abstract or concrete. Abstract objects are sometimes called abstracta An abstract object is an...
independently of God. Among these are propositions constituting a moral order, to which God must conform in order to be good. Classical Judaeo-Christian theism, however, rejects such a view as inconsistent with God's omnipotence, which requires that all that there is is God and what he has made. "The classical tradition," Rogers notes, "also steers clear of the other horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, divine command theory." From a classical theistic perspective, therefore, the Euthyphro dilemma is false. As Rogers puts it, "Anselm, like Augustine before him and Aquinas later, rejects both horns of the Euthyphro dilemma. God neither conforms to nor invents the moral order. Rather His very nature is the standard for value."
Jewish thought
This notion predates both Christianity and the Greek philosophers, appearing first in the eighth-century BC Hebrew
Hebrews
Hebrews is an ethnonym used in the Hebrew Bible...
prophet
Prophet
In religion, a prophet, from the Greek word προφήτης profitis meaning "foreteller", is an individual who is claimed to have been contacted by the supernatural or the divine, and serves as an intermediary with humanity, delivering this newfound knowledge from the supernatural entity to other people...
s, Amos
Amos
-First name:* Amos , one of the twelve minor prophets in the Hebrew Bible**Book of Amos, his writings* Amos, son of Nephi and his son Amos, two minor figures in the Book of Mormon...
, Hosea
Hosea
Hosea was the son of Beeri and a prophet in Israel in the 8th century BC. He is one of the Twelve Prophets of the Jewish Hebrew Bible, also known as the Minor Prophets of the Christian Old Testament. Hosea is often seen as a "prophet of doom", but underneath his message of destruction is a promise...
, Micah
Micah (prophet)
Micah, meaning “who is like Yahweh," was a prophet who prophesied from approximately 737-690 BC in Judah and is the author of the Book of Micah. He was a contemporary of the prophets Isaiah, Amos and Hosea and is considered one of the twelve minor prophets of the Tanakh . Micah was from...
and Isaiah
Isaiah
Isaiah ; Greek: ', Ēsaïās ; "Yahu is salvation") was a prophet in the 8th-century BC Kingdom of Judah.Jews and Christians consider the Book of Isaiah a part of their Biblical canon; he is the first listed of the neviim akharonim, the later prophets. Many of the New Testament teachings of Jesus...
. (Amos lived some three centuries before Socrates and two before Thales
Thales
Thales of Miletus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition...
.) Their message marks a considerable advance on all previous ideas, not least in its special consideration for the poor and downtrodden — something conspicuously lacking in the Greek philosophers. As British scholar Norman H. Snaith observes, tsedeq, the Hebrew word for righteousness
Righteousness
Righteousness is an important theological concept in Zoroastrianism, Hinduism , Judaism, Christianity and Islam...
, "actually stands for the establishment of God's will in the land". This includes justice, but goes beyond it, "because God's will is wider than justice. He has a particular regard for the helpless ones on earth". Tsedeq "is the norm by which all must be judged" and it "depends entirely upon the Nature of God".
Hebrew has very few abstract nouns, and they are mostly late. What the Greeks thought of as ideas or abstractions, the Hebrews thought of as activities. In contrast to the Greek dikaiosune (justice) of the philosophers, tsedeq is not an idea abstracted from this world of affairs. As Snaith writes:
The Hebrew stance on what came to be called the problem of universals
Problem of universals
The problem of universals is an ancient problem in metaphysics about whether universals exist. Universals are general or abstract qualities, characteristics, properties, kinds or relations, such as being male/female, solid/liquid/gas or a certain colour, that can be predicated of individuals or...
, as on much else, was very different from that of Plato and precluded anything like the Euthyphro dilemma. This has not changed. In 2005, Jonathan Sacks
Jonathan Sacks
Jonathan Henry Sacks, Baron Sacks, Kt is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. His Hebrew name is Yaakov Zvi...
wrote, "In Judaism, the Euthyphro dilemma does not exist." Jewish philosophers Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman criticized the Euthyphro dilemma as "misleading" because "it is not exhaustive": it leaves out a third option, namely that God "acts only out of His nature".
Aquinas
Like Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, Aquinas rejected Platonism. In his view, to speak of abstractions not only as existent but indeed as more perfect exemplars than fully designated particulars is to put a premium on generality and vagueness. On this analysis, the abstract "good" in the first horn of the Euthyphro dilemma is an unnecessary obfuscation.
Aquinas frequently quoted with approval Aristotle's definition, "Good is what all desire." As he clarified, "When we say that good is what all desire, it is not to be understood that every kind of good thing is desired by all, but that whatever is desired has the nature of good." In other words, even those who desire evil desire it "only under the aspect of good", i.e. of what is desirable. "Evil, be thou my good," says Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
's Satan
Satan
Satan , "the opposer", is the title of various entities, both human and divine, who challenge the faith of humans in the Hebrew Bible...
. A major difference between desiring good and desiring evil is that in the former, will and reason are in harmony, whereas in the latter, they are in discord.
Aquinas's discussion of sin
Sin
In religion, sin is the violation or deviation of an eternal divine law or standard. The term sin may also refer to the state of having committed such a violation. Christians believe the moral code of conduct is decreed by God In religion, sin (also called peccancy) is the violation or deviation...
provides a good point of entry to his philosophical explanation of why the nature of God is the standard for value. "Every sin," he writes, "consists in the longing for a passing [i.e. ultimately unreal or false] good." Thus, "In a certain sense it is true what Socrates says, namely that no one sins with full knowledge." "No sin in the will happens without an ignorance of the understanding." God, however, has full knowledge (omniscience
Omniscience
Omniscience omniscient point-of-view in writing) is the capacity to know everything infinitely, or at least everything that can be known about a character including thoughts, feelings, life and the universe, etc. In Latin, omnis means "all" and sciens means "knowing"...
) and therefore by definition (that of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as well as Aquinas) can never will anything other than what is good. It has been claimed — for instance, by Nicolai Hartmann
Nicolai Hartmann
-Biography:Hartmann was born of German descent in Riga, which was then the capital of the Russian province of Livonia, and which is now in Latvia. He studied Medicine at the University of Tartu , then Philosophy in St. Petersburg and at the University of Marburg in Germany, where he took his Ph.D....
, who wrote: "There is no freedom for the good that would not be at the same time freedom for evil" — that this would limit God's freedom, and therefore his omnipotence. Josef Pieper
Josef Pieper
Josef Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher, at the forefront of the Neo-Thomistic wave in twentieth century Catholic philosophy. Among his most notable works are The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance; Leisure: the Basis of Culture; The Philosophical Act and Guide...
, however, replies that such arguments rest upon an impermissibly anthropomorphic conception of God. In the case of humans, as Aquinas says, to be able to sin is indeed a consequence, or even a sign of freedom (quodam libertatis signum). Humans, in other words, are not puppets manipulated by God so that they always will what is right. However, "it does not belong to the essence of the free will to be able to decide for evil." "To will evil is neither freedom nor a part of freedom." It is precisely humans' creatureliness — that is, their not being God and therefore omniscient — that makes them capable of sinning. Consequently, writes Pieper, "the inability to sin should be looked on as the very signature of a higher freedom — contrary to the usual way of conceiving the issue". Pieper concludes: "Only the will [i.e. God's] can be the right standard of its own willing and must will what is right necessarily, from within itself, and always. A deviation from the norm would not even be thinkable. And obviously only the absolute divine will is the right standard of its own act" — and consequently of all human acts. Thus the second horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, divine command theory, is also disposed of.
William James
William James, in his essay "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life
The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life
"The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" was an essay by the philosopher William James, which he first delivered as a lecture to the Yale Philosophical Club, in 1891. It was later included in the collection, The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy.James' essay anticipated...
", dismisses the first horn of the Euthyphro dilemma and stays clear of the second. He writes: "Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true 'in themselves,' is ... either an out-and-out superstition, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real Thinker ... to whom the existence of the universe is due". Moral obligations are created by "personal demands", whether these demands come from the weakest creatures or most insignificant persons or from God. It follows that "ethics have as genuine a foothold in a universe where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there is a God as well". However, whether "the purely human system" works "as well as the other is a different question".
For James, the deepest practical difference in the moral life is between what he calls "the easy-going and the strenuous mood". In a purely human moral system, it is hard to rise above the easy-going mood, since the thinker's "various ideals, known to him to be mere preferences of his own, are too nearly of the same denominational value; he can play fast and loose with them at will. This too is why, in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximum stimulating power." Our attitude, James writes, is "entirely different" in a world where there are none but "finite demanders" from what it is in one where there is also "an infinite demander". He concludes that "the stable and systematic moral universe for which the ethical philosopher asks is fully possible only in a world where there is a divine thinker with all-enveloping demands", for in that case, "actualized in his thought already must be that ethical philosophy which we seek as the pattern which our own must evermore approach". Even though "exactly what the thought of this infinite thinker may be is hidden from us", our postulation of him serves "to let loose in us the strenuous mood" and confront us with an existential "challenge" in which "our total character and personal genius ... are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or incapacity for moral life. From this unsparing practical ordeal no professor's lectures and no array of books can save us." In the words of Richard M. Gale, "God inspires us to lead the morally strenuous life in virtue of our conceiving of him as unsurpassably good. This supplies James with an adequate answer to the underlying question of the Euthyphro".
Further reading
- Robert Merrihew Adams Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (2002: New York, Oxford University Press) ISBN 0-19-515371-5
- Jan Aertsen Medieval philosophy and the transcendentals: the case of Thomas Aquinas (2004: New York, Brill) ISBN 90-04-10585-9
- John M. FrameJohn FrameJohn M. Frame is an American philosopher and Calvinist theologian especially noted for his work in epistemology and presuppositional apologetics, systematic theology, and ethics...
Euthyphro, Hume, and the Biblical God retrieved February 13, 2007 - Plato Euthyphro (any edition; the Penguin version can be found in The Last Days of Socrates ISBN 0-14-044037-2) or
- Paul Helm [ed.] Divine Commands and Morality (1981: Oxford, Oxford University Press) ISBN 0-19-875049-8
- Peter J. King, Morality & religion I (PDF file)
- Greg Koukl, Euthyphro's Dilemma, Stand to Reason commentary, 2002
- Norman KretzmannNorman KretzmannNorman J. Kretzmann was a Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University who specialised in the history of medieval philosophy and the philosophy of religion.Kretzmann joined Cornell's Department of Philosophy in 1966...
“Abraham, Isaac, and Euthyphro: God and the basis of morality” (in Eleonore Stump & Michael J. Murray[edd] Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions (1999: Oxford: Blackwell) ISBN 0-631-20604-3