Euthyphro Dilemma
"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"
- Socrates, in Plato's Euthyphro (c. 380 BC), 10a
Overview
The Euthyphro dilemma asks whether something is good because God commands it, or whether God commands it because it is good. If the first, morality is arbitrary: God could have commanded cruelty and it would have been good, and "God is good" says only that God does what God does. If the second, goodness is a standard independent of God, to which God himself conforms, and God is not needed to explain it.
Notes
- It is the standard reply to the moral argument for God, and to the claim that morality requires a lawgiver. The apologist's answer, that goodness is neither commanded nor external but is God's own nature, relocates the question rather than answering it: is God's nature good because it is his, or for some reason we could state without him?
- It also explains why believers can recognise the atrocities in their own scriptures as atrocities (Biblical Morality). If divine command were the standard, the genocide of the Amalekites would be good by definition. That almost no believer accepts this shows that they, like everyone else, judge the commands by a standard that is not the commands.
- My own position is the second horn without the god: moral claims are grounded in human interests (Morality), and a command, divine or otherwise, is good or bad according to what it does to them.