The Euthyphro Dilemma was posed in Plato’s “Euthyphro.” Adapted for our purposes, it asks what God’s role is in determining what is good and what is evil. Is it that God has no say in the matter but only reinforces what is already so, or is it that God determines what is good or evil? Either choice seems to bring undesirable consequences.
In this second video, I explore the option that God determines what is good or evil: that there is no moral law until God chooses what will go into the moral law. This option seems open to the objections that (1) the moral law is arbitrarily chosen, (2) God has made a non-rational choice, and (3) it’s difficult to see how obligation attaches to these commands if there is no prior set of rules about what is right and wrong.
NOTES
- Horn 2
- God decides:
- Saving an innocent person’s life is good
- Torturing babies for fun is evil
- And that’s what makes those things good/evil respectively
- God decides:
- O1: Arbitrary
- O2: Non-rational
- O3: No obligation
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