Euthyphro dilemma

As German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz presented this version of the dilemma: "It is generally agreed that whatever God wills is good and just.

According to scholar Terence Irwin, the issue and its connection with Plato was revived by Ralph Cudworth and Samuel Clarke in the 17th and 18th centuries.

[3] More recently, it has received a great deal of attention from contemporary philosophers working in metaethics and the philosophy of religion.

Contemporary philosophers of religion who embrace this horn of the Euthyphro dilemma include Richard Swinburne[17][18] and T. J. Mawson[19] (though see below for complications).

[30] They accept a theory of morality on which, "right and wrong, good and bad, are in a sense independent of what anyone believes, wants, or prefers.

[35] This parallel offers a solution to the aforementioned problems of God's sovereignty, omnipotence, and freedom: namely, that these necessary truths of morality pose no more of a threat than the laws of logic.

[39] Notably, not even these commands, for which Swinburne and Mawson take the second horn of the dilemma, have ultimate, underived authority.

This view was partially defended by Duns Scotus, who argued that not all Ten Commandments belong to the Natural Law in the strictest sense.

"[56] Thomas Hobbes notoriously reduced the justice of God to "irresistible power"[57] (drawing the complaint of Bishop Bramhall that this "overturns... all law").

[58] And William Paley held that all moral obligations bottom out in the self-interested "urge" to avoid Hell and enter Heaven by acting in accord with God's commands.

This response is found in Francisco Suárez's discussion of natural law and voluntarism in De legibus[85] and has been prominent in contemporary philosophy of religion, appearing in the work of Robert M. Adams,[86] Philip L. Quinn,[87] and William P.

[88] A significant attraction of such a view is that, since it allows for a non-voluntarist treatment of goodness and badness, and therefore of God's own moral attributes, some of the aforementioned problems with voluntarism can perhaps be answered.

Here the restricted divine command theory is commonly combined with a view reminiscent of Plato: God is identical to the ultimate standard for goodness.

"[100] Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas all wrote about the problems raised by the Euthyphro dilemma, although, like William James[101] and Wittgenstein[62] later, they did not mention it by name.

[102] "The classical tradition," Rogers notes, "also steers clear of the other horn of the Euthyphro dilemma, divine command theory.

"[107] As Snaith observes, tsedeq, the Hebrew word for righteousness, "actually stands for the establishment of God's will in the land."

On the contrary, he thought of a particular righteous act, an action, concrete, capable of exact description, fixed in time and space....

"[112] Jewish philosophers Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman criticized the Euthyphro dilemma as "misleading" because "it is not exhaustive": it leaves out a third option, namely that God "acts only out of His nature.

[114] In his view, to speak of abstractions not only as existent, but as more perfect exemplars than fully designated particulars, is to put a premium on generality and vagueness.

[120] Aquinas's discussion of sin provides a good point of entry to his philosophical explanation of why the nature of God is the standard for value.

"[123] God, however, has full knowledge (omniscience) and therefore by definition (that of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as well as Aquinas) can never will anything other than what is good.

[129] Consequently, writes Pieper, "the inability to sin should be looked on as the very signature of a higher freedom – contrary to the usual way of conceiving the issue.

That means that what is objectively good and what God wills for us as morally obligatory are really the same thing considered under different descriptions, and that neither could have been other than they are.

Again, the Euthyphro dilemma is a false one; the third option that it fails to consider is that what is morally obligatory is what God commands in accordance with a non-arbitrary and unchanging standard of goodness that is not independent of Him...

He writes: "Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true 'in themselves,' is ... either an out-and-out superstition, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real Thinker ... to whom the existence of the universe is due.

"[135] In a purely human moral system, it is hard to rise above the easy-going mood, since the thinker's "various ideals, known to him to be mere preferences of his own, are too nearly of the same denominational value;[136] he can play fast and loose with them at will.

This too is why, in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to our moral energy falls short of its maximum stimulating power."

Even though "exactly what the thought of this infinite thinker may be is hidden from us", our postulation of him serves "to let loose in us the strenuous mood"[135] and confront us with an existential[137] "challenge" in which "our total character and personal genius ... are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or incapacity for moral life.

"[135] In the words of Richard M. Gale, "God inspires us to lead the morally strenuous life in virtue of our conceiving of him as unsurpassably good.

Secular humanism takes the positive stance that morality is not dependent on religion or theology, and that ethical rules should be developed based on reason, science, experience, debate, and democracy.