Modality, Morality, and God

Abstract

Does God love what is right because it is right, or is what is right right because God loves it? Socrates's question, first asked in the Euthyphro, has received no completely satisfactory answer. It is, in fact, the beginning of an unpleasant dilemma for theists. For if a theist says that God loves right actions because they are right, then it seems to follow that they are right independently of God's loving them. Were he not to exist, right actions would still be right (and wrong actions would still be wrong). In that case the foundations of ethics do not lie in God but elsewhere. But if they lie elsewhere, why not eliminate the middleman and go directly to the source? On the other hand, if a theist says that right actions are right because God loves them, then it seems as though he believes that just anything that God loves is right, in virtue solely of God's loving it. Theists who grasp the first horn of the dilemma are fond of heaping abuse on those who choose the second. On the second alternative it is alleged to follow that if God were to love injustice, then his loving it would make the practice of injustice morally obligatory. That consequence is scarcely credible, but no more incredible than the further assertion, also an integral part of the second alternative, that God's loving something is supposed to provide sufficient moral reason for our loving it. Defenders of the second horn are quick to repay the compliment. They accuse their opposite numbers of reducing God to the role of dispensable moral mouthpiece, at best a vade mecum in our quest for moral truth. There is a position from which a theist can slip between the horns of the dilemma, preserving what should be preserved on both sides and discarding what should be discarded. It is useful to consider the dilemma in tandem with another theistic conundrum-