enquiriesalevelphilosophycouk The question Is morality whatever God wills it to be or is morality something independent of God Can God make right be wrong or good be bad The first option ID: 661872
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Slide1
The Euthyphro dilemma
Michael Lacewing
enquiries@alevelphilosophy.co.ukSlide2
The question
Is morality whatever God wills it to be or is morality something independent of God
?
Can
God make right be wrong, or good be bad
?Slide3
The first option
Morality is independent of what God wills. To be good, God’s will must conform to something independent of God.
God
wills what is morally right because it is right.
If correct, God is not omnipotent, because God cannot change morality.Slide4
The second option
M
orality
is whatever God
wills.
What is morally right is right because God wills it.
If this is right,
if
murdering babies were commanded by God, then it would be morally right of us to murder babies.
This
violates our sense of morality
. It would not be right to murder babies
even if God commanded it
.Slide5
Dilemma
The answer must be one or other of these options.
But both face objections.
So is our concept of God, e.g. as both good and omnipotent, coherent?
(Assumption: morality is not subjective. It
is
wrong to murder babies… If God exists, it is highly unlikely that morality is subjective.)Slide6
Is morality independent of God?
Can what is good change? Or
must
what is good be good?
If it is logically impossible to change morality, then morality is no limitation on God’s omnipotence.
But why think moral truths are necessarily true?
‘Murdering babies is right’ isn’t a contradiction
So what could make it impossible for an omnipotent being to change morality?Slide7
Morality is arbitrary
If morality is dependent on God, whatever God willed would be morally right
Killing babies? If God willed it?
There are no reasons for God to will what he
does: if God invents morality, there are no moral reasons for actions before God wills an action
Reply: God’s will is guided by God’s love
Obj: this makes love the standard of morality
Reply: no, God’s love – so nothing independent of God
But is God’s love arbitrary
? Could God love something different?Slide8
Properties and concepts
It is not an analytic truth that God is good.
‘
God’ and ‘morally good’ are different concepts.
However
, goodness is the same property as what God wills
.
Compare: It is not an analytic truth that water is
H
2
O
.
‘Water’ and ‘H
2
O’ are different concepts
But water is identical to H
2
O
.
Good = what God wills, not conceptually but metaphysicallySlide9
Knowledge and reality
But
unless we have an
independent
standard of goodness, we cannot claim that God’s will and what is good are the same
thing.
True, just as we
can only judge that water is H
2
O if we have some independent idea of what water is.
But this doesn’t show that water is not H
2
O.
So we need some reason to think that morality is what God wills, but that doesn’t show that they are distinct.