#Euthyphro dilemma

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" -- Euthyphro dilemma

The typical way theists attempt to rationalize this problem away is to claim that the divine will and wisdom of a god cannot be reduced down to mere human reasoning and logic. This, of course, means they can't claim that it is good or that what it wants can be known, much less that they do know what it wants.

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of the Euthyphro Dilemma

The Euthyphro Dilemma, originating from Plato's dialogue "Euthyphro," presents a significant philosophical problem regarding the nature of morality and its relationship to divine command. This dilemma poses a fundamental question about whether moral values are commanded by gods because they are inherently good, or whether they are good because they are commanded by gods. This issue remains relevant in contemporary discussions about the foundations of ethics and the intersection of religion and morality.

The Dilemma Explained

In Plato's dialogue, Socrates encounters Euthyphro, who claims to have a deep understanding of piety and impiety. Socrates asks Euthyphro to define piety, leading to the famous question: "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

This question can be reformulated as:

Divine Command Theory: Are moral actions good because they are commanded by the gods?

Moral Realism: Are moral actions commanded by the gods because they are inherently good?

Each horn of the dilemma presents challenges:

If moral actions are good because they are commanded by the gods (Divine Command Theory), then morality appears arbitrary. Anything could be deemed morally right or wrong based solely on divine will, potentially leading to morally questionable commands being seen as good.

If moral actions are commanded by the gods because they are inherently good (Moral Realism), then morality exists independently of the gods. This implies that there is a standard of goodness that even the gods must adhere to, challenging the notion of their omnipotence and moral authority.

Implications of the Euthyphro Dilemma

The Nature of Morality: The dilemma forces a reconsideration of the origins and nature of moral values. If morality is independent of divine command, then ethical principles must be grounded in something other than religious authority, such as reason, human nature, or societal consensus.

Divine Omnipotence and Omnibenevolence: The dilemma raises questions about the attributes of gods, particularly their omnipotence and omnibenevolence. If gods are bound by an external standard of goodness, their power and moral perfection might be seen as limited.

Secular Ethics: The Euthyphro Dilemma supports the development of secular ethical theories that do not rely on divine command. Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill have proposed ethical systems based on reason, human well-being, and utilitarian principles.

Theological Responses: The dilemma has prompted various theological responses. Some theologians argue for a modified Divine Command Theory, suggesting that God's nature is inherently good and that divine commands naturally align with this goodness. Others propose that God's will and moral truths are identical, thus avoiding the arbitrariness problem.

The Euthyphro Dilemma remains a cornerstone in the study of moral philosophy and theology, provoking ongoing debate about the foundations of ethical principles and the role of divine authority in determining what is right and wrong. By challenging both Divine Command Theory and the independence of morality from divine will, the dilemma encourages deeper exploration of the sources and nature of moral values.

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

Me: I hate Greco-Roman influence on Christian theology and philosophy.

Also Me: Anyway so Plato's Euthyphro dilemma is actually not a problem for Christians because of John the Platonist Theologian and Plato's Theory of Forms, in this essay marrying Abrahamic and Platonic philosophy I will-

[pauladroege]

Does God determine right and wrong?

Many people say that without religion there would be no morality. Dostoyevsky put it succinctly: If God is dead, everything is permitted. That claim is patently false. Religious belief and practice obviously do not make people moral (pedophile priests), and many moral people lack religious belief. (This is harder to prove, but you probably know some moral people who are not religious. I certainly…

[lboomsky]

Euthyphro Dilemma:

Morality is an aspect of god and the reason that's ok is because god is all knowing and thus from him is the totality of understanding to the point that no being could be more informed, making him an objective framework. You can't really disagree with god and be on equal level because god knows all you know and he knows where the fault in your logic lies.

This is my issue with subjective morality as well, because from the nature of understanding we know that there can always be information we lack which is why we don't know everything and can be wrong. Until one reaches the totality of knowledge in the universe and snuffs out all misconceptions, which would make objective morality a real thing.

Because god is the being from which nothing can be greater, his opinion is quite literally correct. This is why doing the wrong thing is an act against god. Also, God is omniscient and all knowing - so God does not have a subjective experience, he has an OBJECTIVE experience 🤯

[sufficientlylargen]

Mickey mouse chemicals meme has grown stale. Bring me my bath salts and a fresh meme based on the Euthyphro dilemma

[sigmaleph]

the thing about dnd-like alignment systems is that, if you told me "in this fantasy setting, whether someone is evil or not is an objective fact about the world and there are spells to detect it" all the plot ideas I'd have around that worldbuilding element would be about, like, the debate around the local equivalent of the euthyphro dilemma, or experimental ethicists putting people in trolley problems and recording their alignment shifts, or a civil rights campaign trying to give evil people the vote.

instead i think they mostly exist for things like 'the paladin is a warrior of Good and so is empowered to fight against the forces of Evil'. and there's nothing wrong with that plot beat in a ttrpg. but uh. you left all the societal implications dangling there. are you gonna do anything about them...?

[gayleviticus]

i finished reading 'the widening of God's mercy' by richard b. hays and his son, which for anyone unfamiliar is basically by a guy who used to be non-affirming but changed his mind and thinks the trajectory of the Bible shows God's gradually expansive mercy towards the excluded (gentiles, eunuchs, women etc) that is analogous to lgbt inclusion today.

it's an interesting take that gets away from the grind of just beating away clobber passages, and i think it's a valuable resource in the repertoire of works that try to articulate positive reasons why lgbt affirmation is consistent w the Christian story. but i think one of the most baffling parts is the way the book flirts with the idea of God changing his mind without fully committing.

i dont think you need to appeal at all to some kind of idea of God changing his mind to make the point the book is making; that the overall trajectory/arc of the Bible is towards inclusion, overruling laws/interpretations of laws that undermine human flourishing, and re-examining what we take to be the Word of God.

and at no point does the book take this suggestion that God changes his mind to the obvious conclusion that God used to think gay people should be stoned and will be excluded from heaven, but now has actively repudiated the clobber verses. in fact it's decidedly uninterested in them in any way.

but it flirts with the idea enough to feel unsatisfyingly un-thought-through to me (and probably downright heretical to a potential evangelical it's trying to sway). and i suspect it's because the authors are very much biblical scholars rather than theologians, because the book could definitely use with a good dose of theology. the book acknowledges there are narratives in the Bible where God is depicted as changing his mind, and then sort of just suggests that well, we've inherited lots of theological bias against God changing his mind but if we read the Bible it's clear and obvious that he does that.

but i'm not sure the authors actually believe this is true of God as an entity we worship and interact with, because at other times they write in ways as if God's will was always a certain way and just revealed piecemeal, or distorted by culture, or deliberately responds to human action. i don't think, for instance, that the authors believe God was ever genuinely homophobic, but rather that they're trying to maintain a certain dynamic freedom in God; God is free to act as he wants and we should not feel trapped by our interpretation of scripture into straining a gnat and swallowing a camel.

but i feel like casually dropping the idea of God as changing his mind is like dropping a nuke on america to kill a single cockroach. it raises huge questions that the book doesn't seem interested in answering, or even acknowledging the significance of. does this mean God genuinely was homophobic and thought homosexuals should be executed? how did God learn not to be homophobic? is true morality then some kind of standard superior to God that exists beyond him? have we stumbled our way back into the Euthyphro dilemma just to advocate for lgbt inclusion?

i know process theology etc exists and is well thought out (even if i vehemently disagree with it), but i dont even know if this book is trying to advocate process theology. i dont even have a problem with using language about God changing his mind - it's biblical, and inasmuch as we understand all language about God having emotions etc is analogical it makes sense of the way God seems to act towards us. but the book seems like it's happy to suggest radical ruptures in the way we view God to achieve rhetorical victories when it's not even unnecessary. it just feels distracting.

and i wonder if it almost comes from a place of being so evangelical you veer into being more radical than a lot of outright progressive christians. like, i would just happily say large chunks of the Bible reflect developing theology about God and divine inspiration intermingled with human brokenness. it's a complex work of narrative with layers not a simple didactic instructional text. and so when i think the genocide narrative in Joshua is not reflective of who God is I don't feel a need to suggest maybe God has changed his mind, but rather than people's understanding of God changed.

and i think perhaps the authors (who admittedly i dont know a ton about) still have a sense of needing to respect inerrancy (or at least, appear that way for their target audience, because there are hints in the text of a deeper understanding of historical critical scholarship etc) that rather than interpret scripture metaphorically on the topic, theyd take it so literally they introduce something that is unequivocally more 'heretical' than just rejecting inerrancy.

i have seen a few times this attitude of 'well, if we read the Bible again, we see clearly that God gets angry, changes his mind, is not omniscient etc, so why did we allow all this greek philosophical baggage of immutability etc to infect christianity?'. and i can respect that position when properly developed, but i feel as if it often comes from an overly reductive sense of sola scriptura that ignores the fact these philosophical ideas are trying to make sense of the very concept of God through reason.

and even if not everybody needs to know that philosophical undergirding, it's important that it exists within the christian tradition; a concept of God that is just based on bible stories with no further reflection or thought is going to be shallow. it's like if science stopped at 'when we drop things they fall down' and was decidedly uninterested in developing a theory of gravity

similarly w the trinity; you're not going to get it from just a straightforward reading of the bible. but it is a very effective framework for making sense of scripture. it gives the confusing and seemingly contradictory perspectives on God in the Bible a coherency that is necessary for Christianity to be a coherent theology.

and so i guess approaches to faith that are just like 'let's just follow what the Bible says' miss the fact that theology/philosophy arent just bolted on to make Christianity more respectable, but just inevitably what develops from deeper reflection on the faith. and rejecting that is like saying 'we dont need case law or precedent; we just need to follow the constitution to the letter'.

anyway ive gotten a bit sidetracked on my rant. overall, book with a good overall point that is undermined by flirting with ideas about God that are severely under-served by just casually throwing them in to defend gay marriage

[theunsleepinghimbo]

titan takedown is cool because it’s solved the euthyphro dilemma in a way that no one in-universe is happy about. this version of ancient greece is a world where right actions are right because the gods decide what’s right and wrong and everybody pretty unanimously agrees it sucks ass

[theblogof-rassilon]

That cannot be because everything I do is good because I *created* the good. Now piss off.

I'M BANTHONY.

🖕

[ardbar]

Omfg I was in a philosophy class today learning about the euthyphro dilemma which is, "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

And I couldn’t stop fucking thinking about those stupid gay men in my phone , "Are you the strongest because you're Satoru Gojo? Or are you Satoru Gojo because you're the strongest?"

Amongst heaven and earth he alone is the one fucking with me during class 😭

Plato would have had a field day with Gojo I’m sure of it

[straynoahide]

re: misotheism

reposted with permission from @richardsphere

I genuinely asked this to know what you meant, so this post is not meant to be either a exposition of my own worldview, nor a polemic against those ideas. I instead wanted to make points about misotheism that are meant to be thought provoking, exploratory, or challenging assumptions that I notice.

mean technically, im an agnostic misotheist. There is probably really no way to put my complicated feelings on the matter of the universe, existence and/or divinity in truly simple terms. So this is gonna be a confusing ramble, but im gonna do my best. To start with the Agnostic part: I dont know wether a god (or multiple gods) exists for sure. They might exist or they might not, and if they exist its none of my business. If somehow, you proved to me definitively the existence of a creator, I would worship them no more then I would thank my Father for fucking my mom and bringing me into being as a product thereoff. He did that for his own reasons and I dont have to thank him for making me without my consent. (I know the analogy is somewhat crude, but its the best way I can put it into words).

I think you've done very well and this has many of the intuitions I share regarding misotheism and misotheists. When theists speak of "faith crises", sometimes they face similar philosophical questions, potential answers, doubts, etc., because these have plagued human beings forever. So I think theism and dystheism are closer in terms of a worldview and epistemology than non-theism.

In fact, historical misotheistic thinkers or polemicists against misotheism have been religious figures. These are sometimes incorporated into scripture (I'll get to it later), with one very salient example, that is in fact one of my favorite parts of the BIble.

I think most people who are real-world misotheists are always strongly agnostic. The emotionally crushing realization of misotheism with also a certainty in a monotheistic god would probably be too much of a 'heavy burden', too, well, maddening. A bit like cosmicism or Lovecraftian horror.

There seems to be an antinatalist undercurrent, the mere mention of consent to be born suggests it is a meaningful category, but that is not obvious. It's like when you speak of determinism and free will in philosophy and you posit the idea will is not meaningfully free because our brains are subject to natural laws (an anti-compatibilist view of the free will problem). What is it like to consent to be born, to consent to exist? "Consent" is defined already within a particular type of material, biological, mental and even developmental existence when there is enough complexity. So from that follows also that the idea of gratitude or thanklessness to sources of origination (parents, gods, etc) are not inherently absurd. You can be thankful even if you did not consent to be born. Do you however feel that existence is not something to be thankful for? That's the antinatalist undercurrent.

I also believe that, if they were to exist, all evidence in the reality of the world we can observe is that the nett sum of any such divinities (allowing for polytheism) is not only "unworthy of worship" but probably outright deserving of scorn. That is not to say I disallow for the existence of some degree of "benevolent divinity", but i think of that more like you'd think of the Hellenistic Hestia then the Catholic notion of an All-powerfull god. A single shred of genuine goodness surrounded by indifference, cruelty and outright malice so outnumbered that they're rendered largely irrelevant? That i can believe in. But the notion of a "Benevolent nett-sum-divinity" was disproven long before i was even born.

Mhm. Yeah. You praise a good god and you indict a bad god, from a system of moral values. What are those ethics based on? Ancient Greek thought already proposed a paradox called the Euthyphro Dilemma which goes like this: "Is 'Good' good because the gods declare it, or are the gods good because they have properties that are already ontologically good?" Though they phrased it more abstractly with "gods love good bla bla".

The paradox's purpose is to illustrate that if the divine declares morality into being, then it is arbitrary; if morality is already primordial to the divine, that merely acknowledges or follows it, then the divine is superfluous. You seem to follow here the part of the paradox that goes, "Gods are good [or bad] bc they have certain properties". So in your view, divinity is superfluous altogether. It's like a government's relation to morality, a 'cosmic government', they can be either good or bad 'rulers', but they don't create nor define moral goodness, and instead are merely subjected to it.

This way of thinking is incompatible with Abrahamic monotheism and so cannot represent a fruitful polemic against it, however. While it can in fact represent polemics against polytheism. Monotheistic ideology, imo a true revolution in the history of ideas, which began within the Ancient Israelite religion (in the form of yahwism growing apart from Canaanite polytheism), identifies goodness with divinity. Divinity is goodness.

Therefore, goodness is the ultimate reality. Misotheism is its most pessimistic therefore within the monotheistic framework: divinity is evil. Evil is the ultimate first-order value. Why, though?

If someone made this universe, best case scenario (to me) is that they did it by accident. Because only malice or incompetence could explain the reality that we inhabit, and the manner in which the fundamental observable laws that govern it seem to me, to be almost tailor-made to cause, inspire and incentivise cruelty and suffering. So I dont know wether gods exist (and even believe that on some level, something must). But if a (colletcitve of) creator/spirit/god(s) existed. I neither trust nor like them. #i really hope that makes sense#im not the best at words#The universe is cruel and uncaring#Darwins laws thrive on predation and cruelty#And Newton demands nothing but a slown drawn-out and inevitable loss#So why should a creator of said universe be trusted loved or worshipped?

Okay, so this is the observation. Because there is evil and suffering in the world, the problem of evil. One thing I notice also though, is the constant conflation between indifference and cruelty. These are fundamentally not the same. Indifference is mindless. Cruelty is either mindful (sadistic) or careless (neglectful).

For instance, a volcano or wild animals behaving as wild animals are amoral and therefore I don't think you can say they're cruel. You can feel them as cruel, but most of the world is not filled with 'cruelty' in that sense; most of the natural world is inert, mindless matter.

It is true most of the universe seems barren of successful life and civilization, but I don't think we can actually have a frame of comparison to say whether 'existence' in general (cosmos, multiverse) is fine-attuned towards life or towards lifelessness. What are we comparing to, in proportion, we cannot make percentages when we don't even know the possible range of existence, when science and our intellective limits still place a barrier for us to compare the "known unknowns" with the "unknown unknowns".

Maybe all the cosmological constants need to be at very precise ranges so that things like the curvature, age, etc, of the universe at least has old-enough, hot-enough stars, for one (1) planet with water and carbon-based life, and it is in fact, fine-attuned towards Earth. Maybe there are millions of civilizations and we just haven't realized yet (Fermi Paradox), and millions of types of abiogenesis. Maybe we are a cosmic colony through panspermia.

But, misotheism often has psychological and not philosophical explanations. You're speaking of the universe when probably most of these perceptions, negative emotions, feeling of disproportion, etc, are about the human world, i.e., societies, and human history. People are cruel instead of kind. But are they also not kind, or whatever your ethics place as opposed to the negativity of cruelty and suffering?

And do you really have a conviction that history will not play out in a way in which one defeats the other? How? Is the fact one act of evil has occurred enough to prove misotheism? Could a world without evil even exist at the same time as free will, if you believe in that? Is evil to be declared triumphant already? Can we avert it?

Misotheism would entail a world where cruelty is divine. Actually, I've been exploring this concept in speculative fiction. It's quite twisted. One thing is whether the divine is good or evil, or both, but another thing seems a different question- can we defy the divine? Is this part of free will? Is this an intentional part of free will if the creator exists?

The thing I was mentioning about Scripture dealing with misotheism- providence or 'theodicy', the justness of the cosmos from its creators' governance and morality; and misotheism, are explored in the Book of Job. It is a narrative framed in a way that makes a man lose every reason to believe in goodness, and offers him choices, and others make predictions about those choices based on their idea of what goodness and theodicy are. Have you read it? Total rec.

[sunglassesbot]

For one of my philosophy classes I have to write a paper about the meaning of life. If I choose to write that God makes it meaningful, I am tasked with coming up with an answer for the Euthyphro dilemma. 

I hope that the professor does not sincerely believe that the Euthyphro dilemma is an impediment to theism, but, judging from the quality of professors I've had at similar institutions, that just might be the case.

Anyway, I'll probably find some roundabout way to answer it in order to fill my word count.

[insanity-laughs-under-pressure]

RIP Plato, Crowley and Aziraphale would have loved to argue about Euthyphro's dilemma with you.

[roselilyg]

the EUTHYPHRO DILEMMA

So what makes a butcher knife more butch than other knives?