One of the great philosophical dilemmas

One of the oldest philosophical dilemmas is called the ‘Euthyphro’ [you-thi-fro] problem. It was first raised by Plato in the dialogue titled ‘Euthyphro,’ and it is actually pretty simple. In the course of the dialogue between Euthyphro and Socrates the question is raised, ‘what is it to be pious?’ What they really seem to mean when they use the word ‘pious’ is ‘moral.’ So they are really asking the question ‘what is it to be moral?’ or ‘what makes something the moral thing to do?’ And since they are asking the question in a polytheistic context, I usually have to update it for a more modern, monotheistic context for my students.

Socrates and Euthyphro focus in particular on two answers. Euthyphro first says that ‘To be moral is to be loved by all the gods.’ But Socrates asks him why that is, and he further says, somewhat unsettlingly, “Are moral things loved by God because they are moral, or are they moral because they are loved by God?” The first horn of this sentence – are moral things loved by God because they are moral – is the other possible answer to the Euthyphro problem.

When Socrates asks whether what is loved by God is moral because it is loved by Him, or loved by Him because it is moral, he is formulating the core of an important contemporary debate about what moral philosophers call “Divine Command Theory.”  According to Divine Command Theory, morally good actions are good because they are commanded by God. But to this we must ask the further question, “why does God command those particular actions?”

One answer is to say that God commands them precisely because they are good. But if this is so, then Divine Command Theory must be wrong, because then there would have to be an independent standard of goodness that God uses to decide which actions are good and which are not. We can avoid the problem of the independent standard if we instead say that there is no such independent standard and that it is God’s will that determines which actions are good. The good actions are good precisely because He has commanded them.

But this last answer raises three further problems, which I will call the problem of arbitrariness, the problem of triviality, and the problem of abominable commands, which are all perplexing and which I will discuss in tomorrow’s blog post.