Euthyphro Dilemma

January 7, 2025

1. Do the gods love good actions because they are good?
2. Or, are good actions good because they are loved by the gods?

One could restate these questions as:

1. Are actions good independent of God?
2. Or, are actions good because God decided that they are good?

If the first statement is true, one would deny divine command theory—the theory that what is good, and what one should do, is determined by what God commands.

On the other hand, if the second statement is true, then God could have commanded that torture and killing are good, which doesn’t seem compatible with our strong intuition that these things are wrong.

Most theists argue for the second case but reconcile it with our moral intuitions by placing restrictions on God. They assert that God is infinitely good, and as such, he can only do good things. In other words, he couldn’t have commanded torture to be good because it would go against his own nature.

I have a problem with this assessment. By placing restrictions on God and claiming he couldn’t have chosen to command a particular action as good, this implies that his agency is compromised. First, this seems at odds with the common understanding of God as all-powerful. Second, if God, as Protestant theology teaches, is a god who desires a personal relationship with us, it feels strange to have a relationship with something that lacks true agency. Agency is fundamentally built into every meaningful relationship.