In Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates poses the following question to a young man of the same name, who is heading to the courthouse in order to indict his own father: is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? If the former alternative is correct, then the study of philosophy is more worthwhile than learning stories about the gods. If the latter, then it is appropriate to study the stories of the gods in order to learn how to act so as to win their approval. Euthyphro believes that the latter is correct, but the way he withers under Socrates' questions suggests that the that the gods are not our guide: if we want to understand piety, we are wise to study philosophy rather than be concerned about whether it is approved of by the gods.
If we turn our attention from ancient Greece to the monotheistic cultures of the Abrahamic faiths, we can ask a similar question, but this time keeping in mind that God, as understood in monotheism, is the very source of the existence and intelligibility of the things and persons about us and hence of moral principles. That changes the nature of the question. The two options originally being considered in the Euthyphro question are, on the one hand, the gods declaring what actions are to be viewed favorably and be rewarded, and the intelligible, unchanging but impersonal forms on the other hand determining which actions are right: neither of these includes a personal being freely determining whether or not finite beings shall exist or what their very natures shall be. To a medieval monotheist, for example, the question doesn't quite make sense. It is hard to imagine a Medieval or any monotheist asking, with any seriousness, whether there are personal beings who are finite but vastly superior to us get to decree which actions are good or bad, or whether impersonal but eternal forms are the ground of the intelligibility of everything, including moral principles. But we can still imagine a monotheist asking a modified version of the Euthyphro question, one regarding how moral principles are to be understood in relation to God.
So we ask the new Euthyphro question: does God declare an action good because it is good or is the action good because God has declared that it is so? The Medieval near-equivalent of Euthyphro will say that actions are good because God says they are good, adopting a position we now call "divine command ethics." According to this way of thinking, anyone who looks philosophically at moral principles (statements telling us what we ought to do or ought not to do) will find no necessary relation between the subjects of those statements that name an action and the predicates that characterize those actions as obligatory or the contrary. That is because, maintains the divine command theorist, there is no intrinsic goodness or evil that we can find in the actions themselves (considered in abstraction from divine command or prohibition); hence these statements of moral principals are not necessarily true. Experience and reason, without the help of divine revelation, cannot tell us what we ought to do or avoid doing. We can learn what we must do or avoid doing only by listening to God's freely given commands, and revelation is our sole access to these commands.
Key to this way of looking at morality is the premise that moral principles (apart from divine commands) are contingent. One good reason for thinking that they are contingent is the threat that the contrary belief regarding them would pose to divine sovereignty. That is, if moral principles could be known to be necessarily true apart from their having been freely decreed by God, then the nature of a finite thing would be dictating how God shall command. Such dictation by a creature to God would violate divine sovereignty, or so says William of Ockham, the most famous proponent of divine command ethics. Whatever necessity attaches to truths about how we are to act comes from our knowing God's having willed that we obey them. Strict obligation and prohibition are unintelligible apart from knowing what God has commanded. Divine command ethics has sometimes been called voluntarism, because it characterizes morality as hinging upon the arbitrary divine will. We could, however, also call it ethical fideism, for it also implies that the only reliable source for an understanding of right and wrong is our faith in divine revelation.
The other horn of the theistic version of the Euthyphro dilemma is to maintain that God approves and even commands certain actions because God knows that they are good. In contrast to voluntarism, this alternative gives a certain primacy to divine reason inasmuch as God wills only what divine Reason has can understands as being good.
The voluntarist will object that this theory undermines divine sovereignty, for it makes the Divine Will subject to the goodness of finite natures. But no such subjection of the Creator to the created is to be found, at least not in Thomas Aquinas's natural law theory. One reason why no such subjection occurs is because God need not make created natures exist at all: just as it is true that the necessity of 2+3 equals 5 does not violate divine sovereignty, even though God cannot make 2+3 equal to 7, nor does it require that God make 2 or 3 or 5 of anything. Created natures are contingent: that they exist at all with their natures and natural inclination is, an expression of divine freedom--albeit not an utterly arbitrary freedom.
This subjection of all to the divine is even more apparent if we examine the role of desire in Aquinas's natural law theory. According to Aquinas, the natural law consists of general truths that we rational creatures formulate regarding how to obtain that which we naturally desire (with our ultimate desire being union with God). These inclinations are ultimately inclinations toward God, inclinations that flow from the very natures of creatures. So natural law is, at the end of the day, nothing other than the fruit of God's having called the rational creature into existence. The more closely we connect natural law with God's freely calling creatures into existence, the less reasonable seem the objection (made by the divine command theorist) that natural law theory puts God in subjection to finite natures.
Thomas Aquinas identifies the promulgation of the natural law with God's giving us natural inclinations, i.e., with God's causing us to exist with specific natures, from which those inclinations derive. In this version of monotheism, one need not choose between the alternatives of moral principles being the expression of an arbitrary divine will and the divine will's being subordinated to creatures. To a monotheist who relates moral principles to the divine in the manner that St. Thomas proposes in his natural law theory, the monotheistic version of the Euthyphro dilemma is a false dilemma. The third alternative is that God freely calls us into being and to seek union with Him and the moral principles that we formulate are a part of how we discover and respond to that call.
If we turn our attention from ancient Greece to the monotheistic cultures of the Abrahamic faiths, we can ask a similar question, but this time keeping in mind that God, as understood in monotheism, is the very source of the existence and intelligibility of the things and persons about us and hence of moral principles. That changes the nature of the question. The two options originally being considered in the Euthyphro question are, on the one hand, the gods declaring what actions are to be viewed favorably and be rewarded, and the intelligible, unchanging but impersonal forms on the other hand determining which actions are right: neither of these includes a personal being freely determining whether or not finite beings shall exist or what their very natures shall be. To a medieval monotheist, for example, the question doesn't quite make sense. It is hard to imagine a Medieval or any monotheist asking, with any seriousness, whether there are personal beings who are finite but vastly superior to us get to decree which actions are good or bad, or whether impersonal but eternal forms are the ground of the intelligibility of everything, including moral principles. But we can still imagine a monotheist asking a modified version of the Euthyphro question, one regarding how moral principles are to be understood in relation to God.
So we ask the new Euthyphro question: does God declare an action good because it is good or is the action good because God has declared that it is so? The Medieval near-equivalent of Euthyphro will say that actions are good because God says they are good, adopting a position we now call "divine command ethics." According to this way of thinking, anyone who looks philosophically at moral principles (statements telling us what we ought to do or ought not to do) will find no necessary relation between the subjects of those statements that name an action and the predicates that characterize those actions as obligatory or the contrary. That is because, maintains the divine command theorist, there is no intrinsic goodness or evil that we can find in the actions themselves (considered in abstraction from divine command or prohibition); hence these statements of moral principals are not necessarily true. Experience and reason, without the help of divine revelation, cannot tell us what we ought to do or avoid doing. We can learn what we must do or avoid doing only by listening to God's freely given commands, and revelation is our sole access to these commands.
Key to this way of looking at morality is the premise that moral principles (apart from divine commands) are contingent. One good reason for thinking that they are contingent is the threat that the contrary belief regarding them would pose to divine sovereignty. That is, if moral principles could be known to be necessarily true apart from their having been freely decreed by God, then the nature of a finite thing would be dictating how God shall command. Such dictation by a creature to God would violate divine sovereignty, or so says William of Ockham, the most famous proponent of divine command ethics. Whatever necessity attaches to truths about how we are to act comes from our knowing God's having willed that we obey them. Strict obligation and prohibition are unintelligible apart from knowing what God has commanded. Divine command ethics has sometimes been called voluntarism, because it characterizes morality as hinging upon the arbitrary divine will. We could, however, also call it ethical fideism, for it also implies that the only reliable source for an understanding of right and wrong is our faith in divine revelation.
The other horn of the theistic version of the Euthyphro dilemma is to maintain that God approves and even commands certain actions because God knows that they are good. In contrast to voluntarism, this alternative gives a certain primacy to divine reason inasmuch as God wills only what divine Reason has can understands as being good.
The voluntarist will object that this theory undermines divine sovereignty, for it makes the Divine Will subject to the goodness of finite natures. But no such subjection of the Creator to the created is to be found, at least not in Thomas Aquinas's natural law theory. One reason why no such subjection occurs is because God need not make created natures exist at all: just as it is true that the necessity of 2+3 equals 5 does not violate divine sovereignty, even though God cannot make 2+3 equal to 7, nor does it require that God make 2 or 3 or 5 of anything. Created natures are contingent: that they exist at all with their natures and natural inclination is, an expression of divine freedom--albeit not an utterly arbitrary freedom.
This subjection of all to the divine is even more apparent if we examine the role of desire in Aquinas's natural law theory. According to Aquinas, the natural law consists of general truths that we rational creatures formulate regarding how to obtain that which we naturally desire (with our ultimate desire being union with God). These inclinations are ultimately inclinations toward God, inclinations that flow from the very natures of creatures. So natural law is, at the end of the day, nothing other than the fruit of God's having called the rational creature into existence. The more closely we connect natural law with God's freely calling creatures into existence, the less reasonable seem the objection (made by the divine command theorist) that natural law theory puts God in subjection to finite natures.
Thomas Aquinas identifies the promulgation of the natural law with God's giving us natural inclinations, i.e., with God's causing us to exist with specific natures, from which those inclinations derive. In this version of monotheism, one need not choose between the alternatives of moral principles being the expression of an arbitrary divine will and the divine will's being subordinated to creatures. To a monotheist who relates moral principles to the divine in the manner that St. Thomas proposes in his natural law theory, the monotheistic version of the Euthyphro dilemma is a false dilemma. The third alternative is that God freely calls us into being and to seek union with Him and the moral principles that we formulate are a part of how we discover and respond to that call.
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