Monday 3 October 2011

The Euthyphro Dilemma (Part 2)


Last week, our focus was on Divine Command Theory, which claims:
Divine Command Theory (DCT): an action is right if God commands it, wrong if God forbids it.
     We considered further a critical question Socrates (in Plato's Euthyphro dialogue) raised toward this sort of view. Call this critical question the Euthyphro Dilemma:
Euthyphro Dilemma: Is conduct right because God commands it, or does God command it because it is right?
     I alluded to the fact that this question frames a dilemma for proponents of DCT. Let's explore now the substance of the dilemma. It is, to stress, a 'dilemma' for the DCT proponent because--as we'll see--accepting either of the two options appears to make an endorsement of DCT problematic (for different reasons).
     Suppose a defender of DCT takes the first 'horn' of the dilemma and claims that conduct is right because God commands it. The problem with taking this horn is that it commits one to what appears to be an absurdity, the absurdity of recognizing that anything would be right, so long as God commanded it. As Peter Singer has put the point in his Practical Ethics, "if the gods had happened to approve of torture and disapprove of helping our neighbours, torture would be good and helping our neighbours bad" (Singer 1993: 3) But, as the argument goes, surely torture would not be right, whether God commanded it or otherwise.
     Given that, strictly speaking, the first horn of the dilemma allows for any conduct to be right so long as God commanded it, endorsing the first horn of the dilemma would have the problematic effect of making God's commandments morally arbitrary: anything he happened to command would be right, no matter what it was. Can proponents of DCT fare any better by taking the second horn and saying of right conduct that God commands it because it is right? This move dodges the arbitrariness objection that faces an endorsement of the first horn, but at a cost. The cost is that DCT, in taking the second horn, is at the same time admitting that what makes right conduct right is something other than God's will, a concession endorsers of DCT are typically unwilling to make. Peter Singer puts the two horns of the dilemma together nicely: 
     Some theists say that ethics cannot do without religion because the very meaning of “good” is nothing other than “what God approves”. Plato refuted a similar view more than two thousand years ago by arguing that if the gods approve of some actions it must be because those actions are good, in which case it cannot be the gods’ approval that makes them good. The alternative view makes God’s approval entirely arbitrary: if the gods had happened to approve of torture and disapprove of helping our neighbours, torture would be good and helping our neighbours bad. (Ibid., 3)
     Question: What is the best way for DCT to respond to the objections posed by the Euthyphro dilemma? Should DCT, on the basis of the Euthyphro dilemma, be rejected? If so, why? If not, why not? Another question for discussion: if the Euthyphro dilemma shows DCT to be untenable, how might a different sort of attempt to base morality on divine dictates avoid the problems the Euthyphro dilemma poses to endorsers of DCT?



2 comments:

  1. First I want to note that an interpretation of Divine Command Theory (DCT) embracing the first horn isn't as bad as you think. I'd call this interpretation the 'voluntarist' interpretation. First of all, it is remarkably consistent. One would be hard-pressed to prove any logical contradiction from it. Maybe we have an intuition that this just seems wrong that God could command us to torture innocent children or something of that sort. But the voluntarist DCTist can explain quite well why we have this. We have this intuition because in the actual case God declared that it was wrong, and hence it is wrong. So naturally we are repelled by what is actually wrong. But if God were to declare it good, then so the voluntarist would argue, we would ultimately not find ourselves objecting.

    Now, I reject this version for various other reasons, so if I were a DCTist I would go for the second horn of the dilemma. I will explain this soon enough, though this is related to the point I'm going to make. Now, the problem with the Euthyphro dilemma is that it can be accused of being a *false* dilemmma. It would work only if the interpretation of DCT which I've called 'voluntarist' were our only option. According to this definition of DCT, x is good because God declares/wills it to be the case.

    But this leaves out a huge strand of thought which can be labeled as the 'essentialist' interpretation of DCT. According to the essentialist DCTist, what is good is whatever is in accordance with God's fundamental and immutable *nature*. It's good that this problem was first written about by Plato, because we can use his own thought to illustrate the point. Just as for Plato what is good is defined as that which is in accordance with the fundamental and immutable nature of the Form of the Good, so for the essentialist DCTist what is good is defined as that which is in accordance with the divine nature. Under this interpretation the DCTist can avoid the objection from arbitrariness of the first horn of the dilemma. God's nature is unchanging and the same in all possible worlds, so there is no arbitrariness on God's part involved. God, being perfectly good, could not will us to do something evil, because that would be to not act in accordance with his own nature; God would both be immutably good and at some time not-good. God cannot change what is good because he cannot change his own nature, or else he would cease to be God.

    This brings me back to my first point though, that the DCTist should accept the second horn. Ultimately, the way we receive the morality is through God's commands. He commands what is good because it is good independently of his commands. But this does *not* imply that what is good is independent of *him*. It is only independent of his will. (Moreover, if we accept divine simplicity, we can come up with some other interesting results about this, but that's another discussion.) So ultimately God commands what is good because it is good and what is good still depends on God though it doesn't depend on his arbitrary will.

    I think the reason Socrates/Plato didn't accommodate this view into his dilemma is because at their point in time such a concept of the divine was not standard. The gods (all of them) for Plato and Socrates were more like grand human beings who could undergo change all the time and will one thing at one point and another later. The closest Plato comes to our view is by positing the immutable Form of the Good. So with our concept of divinity explicated we can take it a step further and offer a plausible solution to the dilemma.

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  2. I think that the underlying problem with the view that something is right/wrong because God commands it is not so much that God could command just any old thing. The problem is simply that it makes God out to be arbitrary. He has no independent reason for commanding what He does because he is "acting" antecedent to reasons (being that He is the creator of them). However, a picture of God whereby He is arbitrary, and not acting for reasons when He creates reasons is, in my opinion, not very compelling. I might be impressed with His power to create reasons, but I would be very unimpressed with His reasonableness in so doing. It seems rather dictatorial of Him to be binding us to moral norms if there were no reason to do so.

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