The Euthyphro Dilemma: Where Does Morality Come From?

A few videos to tide us over until the final decision is made.

A Quick Defense From Plato

Euthyphro is a Socratic dialogue by Plato and an entertaining read. In this book, Socrates is about to head off to defend his life against those who want to claim that his teaching is “impious.” Before this, Socrates has a discussion with Euthyphro about what “piety” means. What does it mean to be a good religious person. Euthyphro basically says that a good religious person does what God commands. Socrates, however, shows that “goodness” or morality is something that even the gods obey, and this means that to be “good” isn’t just about obeying God, but is about finding that standard that even God obeys. This means that morality isn’t tied to religion at all.

Epydemic2020 summarizes this dilemma and then says that it isn’t really a dilemma because there is another option. He is doing this in order to defend his position that the common morality all humans hold—do not murder, do not rape—is proof of God’s existence. So he says that because there is a third option—that God’s nature holds the seed of morality—means that the Euthyphro dilemma is no dilemma at all. There are other options.

Okay, that’s true. But it doesn’t really answer the basic question that the Euthyphro dilemma poses—is God the source of morality or is morality the source of God’s justice? The fact that God has a nature of morality doesn’t mean that there isn’t a source that pre-exists God, unless we take the existence of God as being apriori—a basic unquestioned assumption (which I hate). But let’s just talk about morality and God.

There are two kinds of morality. One is circumstantial ethics, and the other intrinsic ethics. Intrinsic ethics are foundational principles of ethics that cannot be changed. Some hold to the value of life—all life—as an intrinsic ethic—that would be a foundational principle on which they base their ethical actions. Circumstantial ethics, however, is the action that one does based on two things—one’s intrinsic ethic and the context that one finds oneself in. For instance, since there are small bugs one may swallow, one who holds to the intrinsic value of all life would put a mask over their face in order to prevent this from happening. However, one who lived in a “clean room”, where no outside life existed, then the mask would not be necessary. The mask is only a correct moral act given the circumstances and the intrinsic morality—it is not a good in and of itself.

In Christian theology, we must acknowledge that God’s nature would only determine intrinsic morality, not circumstantial morality. First of all, God’s creation has changed radically from the beginning. First of all, sin has infected human life significantly, changing the circumstance. We respond to a sinful humanity, not an innocent one. Thus, since creation has changed, circumstantial morality has changed.

But what about intrinsic ethics? Is that based in God’s nature? It is possible that, say, “love” is the most base intrinsic ethic. If that is the bass of God’s nature, then why is God not always “loving”? Why does He kill innocent women and children? Why does he allow Job to suffer the death of his children? The difficulty of morality as the nature of God is that morality is clearly not the same for God as for humanity. Humans are not supposed to kill other innocent humans—that is God’s command. But God can do this, because the circumstances for being God is different than being human. God is Creator and humans are creation, as special as they are.

Why is obeying God’s will so important? Not because the nature of God requires a certain morality to be done, but because God is wiser than we are. He can see how certain moral decisions can either help us or hurt us. He has an objective perspective outside of our hormones and emotions and so can communicate to us what is right and wrong given the broader circumstance, not according to our own limited perspective.

I would not say that there is no intrinsic morality. And I would even go so far as to say that “love” is an intrinsic moral standard. However, how “love” looks when God is acting it out could be very different from how humans live it out. When we talk about morality and when we look at God’s commands about morality, we must realize that the commands and the morality is for the human context only. We cannot ask animals to engage in our morality—they have their own morality according to their circumstance. We cannot ask God to follow our morality, because His circumstance differs greatly. God and we may have similar goals, but the actual actions may differ.