Authored by: Mitchell LeBlanc.

Almost everyone who is conversant on the topic of God and/or morality has heard of the famous Euthyphro dilemma. On both the theistic and atheistic sides of the debate the force of the dilemma is often misunderstood. It is either attributed too much force, or too little. In this article I will present the dilemma and offer some discussion as to its potential consequences with regard to our idea of God.

The Dilemma

A formulation of the dilemma reads as follows:

(A) Is what is good commanded by God because it is good, or is it good because it is commanded by God?

The dilemma presents two ‘horns’ which each yield potentially undesirable consequences for the opponent. If the theist is to say that God commands certain things because they are good, this seems to imply that moral values are independent of God’s will. This assertion would entail a conflict with God’s sovereignty. If there are such independent moral truths, they would clearly restrict God’s choices insofar as he is said to be a good being. It also seems to entail that God is powerless to change the good. Perhaps more troubling, one could make the case from this assertion that if there were no God, there would still be objective moral truths.

If the theist chooses, rather, to say that things are good because God wills them, the implication is that God creates moral values. This has severe moral and epistemological consequences. If moral truths are merely determined by the will of God it follows that if God were to will that child molestation be morally good, this would be the case. Aside from this rather obvious consequence, there might also be epistemological consequences. Imagine that child molestation is a morally good action and we are part of a state of affairs in which deception about important things is also a morally good action. It follows from this that if God is morally good, then God is deceiving us about the fact that child molestation is actually a good action! Clearly, an acceptance of either horn of the dilemma is not without undesirable consequences.

A General Response

Perhaps the most heard response to the Euthyphro dilemma is to claim that it is indeed a false dilemma. The theist might want to suggest that there is a third option which has gone unmentioned in the original formulation:

(B) God’s goodness is grounded in his moral character and expressed through his moral commands.

Under this view, it is proposed that the good is not external, nor are God’s commands arbitrary as they flow out of his nature, which is necessarily good. It states that since God is essentially morally good, God could not be bad and thereby would never command that child molestation be morally good. To quote Christian apologist Greg Bahnsen from his Theonomy in Christian Ethics (pg. 284):

“The truth of the matter is that good is not independent of God. Certain behavior is good because God approves of it, and God approves of it because it is the creaturely expression of His holiness — in other words, it is good. To be good is to be like God, and we can only know what behavior is good if God reveals and approves of it. The important point is that good is what God approves and cannot be ascertained independent of Him…”

Surely this is an incoherent notion. It entails that something is good because God approves of it and that God approves of this something because it is good. How can these propositions be maintained simultaneously? In our previous example, if child molestation is bad because God disapproves of it, how can it be likewise true that child molestation being bad is the reason for God’s disapproval?

The attempt to evade the dilemma by moving away from God’s commands and towards his nature does not appear successful. One might reformulate the dilemma to read:

(C) Is God’s character the way it is because it is good or is God’s character good simply because it is God’s character?

Similarly to (A), we have the same horns. Is there an independent standard of good or is it the case that God’s character sets the standard? Again, consider: if God’s character is such because it is good then we still have an independent standard of goodness by which we are evaluating God’s character. Where God might condemn child molestation because of his just and merciful character, it would be the case that his nature is just and merciful because these things are good and God’s nature is necessarily good. Given this independent standard, however, if God did not exist it is still true that a character which is merciful and just is a good character.

What of the other horn of the dilemma? If God’s character is good merely because it is God’s character then God’s character, if cruel and unjust, would render cruelty and unjustness good. From this, it follows that he might condone child molestation. Perhaps one might reply that God can’t be cruel and unjust because he must necessarily be good. Unfortunately, without some independent standard of goodness it follows that whatever attributes God has are good by their very definition. If one wants to commit to the idea that God cannot be cruel and unjust, they must appeal to some external standard less they face the possibility that cruelty and unjustness are good in light of God’s possession of these attributes.

But perhaps God isn’t cruel and unjust, and we know this as it has been revealed to us. An appeal to revelation also does not seem to assist in any manner, for recall my previous example. If God’s character is good merely because it is God’s character and God’s character entails that deception about important things is morally good we might very well be in a state of affairs wherein God has lied to us in his proposed revealed knowledge. But surely, the theist might respond, God cannot lie for it is not good to do so. Such a statement, however, simply appeals to a standard of goodness that is external to God.

It seems, then, that any attempt to evade the dilemma by choosing to speak of God’s character rather than his commands is insufficient. How then might one respond to the dilemma?

A Better Response

It seems that the theist should attempt to answer the dilemma in a manner that suggests that some things God wills because they are good and other things are good because God wills them. This doesn’t seem too crazy of an idea since most philosophers of religion do accept that there are some things which God cannot alter, such as the truths of logic. So why can’t there be necessary moral truths in the same manner as there are necessary logical truths?

T.J  Mawson (in an article found in Think, Winter 2008 p. 25-33)  provides the following example:

Sometimes we pick something out using a concept that entails of logical necessity that the thing picked out is bad. Agonizing pain would be one such concept. Wherever there is agonizing pain, whether in people or animals, it cannot – of logical necessity – be anything other than bad. We wouldn’t call it ‘agonizing pain’ if it wasn’t bad. Of course if someone would benefit greatly from some agonizingly painful medical treatment to which they have consented, then giving them that treatment might be the best thing for us to do, but the fact that this treatment would involved the patient suffering agonizing pain would in itself be a bad feature of what it was that it would then be best for us to do.

Now consider that God’s omnipotence is such that it does not require that he be able to bring about logically impossible states of affairs. God cannot be required to be able to make agonizing pain refer to something, and yet the thing to which it refers be a good thing. Since torture, necessarily involves the inducing of agonizing pain, how can God bring about a state of affairs in which torture is good? So, it seems that we might have a class of things such that their being good entails a logical contradiction, that is to say, just as some propositions may be necessarily false (such as ’2+2=5′) some may also be necessarily evil or bad (such as ‘agonizing pain is exemplified’). In this regard, the theist can maintain there idea that God cannot make torture a good thing (an intuition I assume many theists would have) without falling victim to some horn of the Euthyphro dilemma.

T.J Mawson provides another example:

Some things are good or bad for people as a conceptual necessity arising from the fact that they are people. It is plausibly of the essence of personhood that it involves the having of beliefs and the concept of belief necessitates that person want true beliefs. Of conceptual necessity, one cannot go about acquiring beliefs save by thinking that one is acquiring them in a way which makes them more likely to be true than false because beliefs just are those mental occurrences one takes to be true representations of the world. If that is right, then it is not a logically contingent feature of people that people aim at true beliefs and thus we cannot but think that true beliefs are good for people. If this is right, then we cannot but think that it is of necessity always in itself bad to lie to people, i.e. try to get people to have false beliefs. Lying to someone might not always be the worst thing possible. If someone comes to your door asking after the whereabouts of a person whom you know they intend to murder and whom you also know is hiding in your attic, lying to this would-be murder might well be the best of the options available to you. But lying to someone even in this case, is in itself bad… Again, not even God could make lying to a person good, but again that is no more of a restriction on His power than that He could not make bachelors married whilst they nevertheless remained bachelors.

So, it seems that we are able to establish objective moral values and reconcile them with the existence of God only if they are treated as necessary truths. This has an interesting implication however, namely that there are objective moral truths which atheists can affirm and be consistent in affirming while denying the existence of God. Some concepts are necessarily bad, or evil things. Things such as torture are bad out of logical necessity in such a way that not even God could make it good. As Mawson states, “…anything which might be able to pick out under the concept of torture is a bad thing, just as anything which one can successfully pick our under the concept of bachelor must be a single person…”

Does this mean that God has absolutely no role in morality? Not quite. While it is true that God cannot affect or be the basis of any necessary truths (see a previous post of mine for a discussion of this idea as pertaining to logical truths) that is not to say that God doesn’t determine which contingent moral truths there are. As such, we have seen examples of situations which embrace (rather than reject) the first horn of the Euthyphro dilemma where God commands against certain things (such as torture) because these things are objectively bad. It is also true, however, that some things could be bad because God wills them to be so.

Take the example of passing a high voltage of electric current (an amount that would normally cause a lot of pain) through a person’s body. This action could have been made good by God. God could have made this action good if he created human beings with a biological structure that would prevent them from feeling the possible pain associated with this act. That is to say, while torture is necessarily wrong, shocking someone with high voltage is only contingently wrong in that shocking someone with high voltage is only considered torture if it causes agonizing pain, which needs not necessarily be the case.

To tie all of this together, I will quote at length one last example given by T.J Mawson:

Let us imagine that we are creating a board game. If in creating our game we are starting from scratch, with no pieces or board as yet, then the only principles ‘constraining’ us are conceptual necessities – for example that cheating cannot be an acceptable way to win the game – and these are, it is easy to see, not properly thought of as constraints at all. They don’t restrict in any sense our sovereignty, freedom or power over what sort of game to create, what it is that will count as cheating and what as winning fair and square. Once we have made the pieces and the board, there will still be decisions to be made about the rules. The same pieces and board might be used for several different games. However, the rules open for us to choose between will have been to some extent constrained by the natures of the pieces and the board we have by then created. For example, supposing us to have made only four pieces, we would not then be able to choose the rule, ‘The game must have at least six players, of whom each should start with an unshared piece’. This is a logical consequence of the number of pieces we have contingently made, not a contingent one. It is logically necessary that if there are only four pieces, then six people cannot have one unshared piece each. It is contingent whether there are only four pieces.

Thus it was with God’s creation of morality. Prior to the creation of humans and the universe, the pieces and the board if we assume for the sake of simplicity (what is false) that there are no non-human people or animals that count morally, the only principles which ‘constrained’ Him in what morality He could create were conceptual necessities, i.e. He was under no constraint at all. He couldn’t create a world where agonizing pain or torture was good, but that was just because it is logically impossible that agonizing pain or torture be good. He had complete freedom over what, if anything, in the universe He was about to create would instantiate the concepts of agonizing pain and torture and hence over what, if anything, would be bad in virtue of doing so. Having created the pieces, people, this entailed that certain things would, of logical necessity, be bad – lying, for example. Having created people as humans, with the contingent physiology that humans happen to have, this entailed that passing a certain electric current through their bodies would always in itself be bad as it would always produce agonizing pain (natural law-violating miracles aside), which is something which is in itself of conceptual necessity bad. This is analogous to the maker of a game who has created a certain number of pieces or a style of board that constrains the rules he or she might then choose in that it is a logically necessary consequence of a contingent fact. (It is logically necessary that if passing a certain electric current through persons’ bodies produces agonizing pain, then it is in itself bad to pass that amount of electricity through persons’ bodies.) These then are the things which have the value they do solely as a result of God’s will in creation; had God’s will been different, they would have been different. But there is nothing counterintuitive about this. Obviously if people’s physiology had been different, then things which are as a matter of fact universally bad for people might have been good and things which are universally good might have been bad. Obviously on theism people having the physiology that they do is a result of God’s entirely unconstrained will in His act of creation.

Conclusion

So, the Euthyphro dilemma can be ‘solved’, but not in the manner which is usually attempted. The negative implications of the dilemma can be avoided only if the theist accepts the necessary existence of some moral truths. In doing this, however, it seems they lose all ability to make any arguments for the existence of God from morality. It also follows that the atheist who affirms that objective moral values exist is not only correct, but that the theist attempts to deny them this liberty at their own peril.