Euthyphro Argument and Divine Command Theory

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Euthyphro
In this dialogue, Plato (427-347 B.C.) dramatizes a conversation between Socrates (c. 469-399 B.C.) and Euthyphro. Both are waiting outside the Athenian court, Euthryphro to bring a charge of murder against his father, and Socrates because he is being charged with impiety. They begin a discussion of piety.

• Shocked by the theologian Euthyphro's confidance in his knowledge of piety, Socrates asks Euthyphro to tell him what piety is.
• Euthyphro's first answer is that piety is "doing what I am doing now, to prosecute the wrong-doer...."
• Socrates points out that he wants to know the essence of piety, and since there are other pious acts besides prosecuting wrong-doers, there must be some additional meaning to "piety."
• Euthyphro next defines the pious as "what is dear to the gods"
• But earlier, in defense of his own actions, he adds that Zues punished his own father Chronos. Socrates checks this, and confirms that Euthyphro truly does believe the stories that the gods fight. It then follows that many things are pious and impious, because some gods hate them and some gods love those same things.
• Socrates also asks Euthyphro for evidence that the gods agree that he should punish his father.
• Euthyphro's third definition of piety is that which all the gods love.
• Here Socrates asks what we might call "The Euthyphro Question": is something pious becuase the gods love it, or is it loved by the gods because it is pious?
• Euthyphro struggles with this question. Socrates finally gets him to understand it, and Euthyphro answers that the good is loved by the gods because it is good. Socrates concludes then that being loved by the gods and being god are different things.
• Socrates and Euthyphro next agree that piety is a part of justice, and so we should need to understand what justice is to best understand piety.
• Socrates ends by asking Euthyphro to explain what the gods gain from the service of humans like Euthyphro. Since Euthyphro wants to say the gods need nothing, he is unable to articulate any way that humans can help them. (Here Socrates is hinting that we cannot help the gods, although they can perhaps help us, and therefore we should be focused on being good and not on claiming some special role of service to the gods. Put otherwise, the right way to serve the gods might be to seek justice, not to do sacrifices and other things which are claimed to directly help those gods.)

Divine Command Theory

• William of Ockham (after whom we name "Ockham's razor") (c. 1287-1347) is an example of a later philosopher who advocated what later became known as "divine command theory": the view that the good is what God commands or wills.
• For simplicity sake, consider a simplistic form of the divine command theory (Ockham did not hold this version): A is a good act = God wills that (we do) A.
• The problem here is grave, however. This means that lying, murder, kitten torture, and so on would be good if God willed that we do them. Now, the immediate reaction of divine command theorists is to say that God would never will that we do such acts. But why not? The answer appears to be that such acts are evil. But then, our notion of good and evil must be other than just that what God wills.
• No less a theologian than St. Thomas Aquinas rejected divine command theory. To reject it is not to reject theism, but rather to reject that the good is dependent upon God's current will. (Aquinas would have instead assumed that the good depends upon the way the world is constructed, and he since he believed that God constructed the world, good would be dependent upon God in this sense. But one might still then look at the way the world is constructed to determine what is good, as opposed to -- say -- looking in the Bible.)
• Many philosophers take the very grave problems of divine command theory to mean that, even if you are a theist, ethics can be studied independently of theology.