Euthyphro Dilemma

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The euthyphro dilemma is a philosophical and theological problem that was first formulated by the Greek philosopher Plato in his fictional, literary dialogue Euthyphro . In general terms, it is about the question of whether something is ethically correct because it corresponds to the will of a deity, or whether it is correct in and of itself and is willed by the deity for this reason. This question is an expression of the tension between the command structure of religious systems and the demand for the autonomy of morals.

Different answers have been given and justified in the course of European intellectual history. The enlightening moral understanding formulated by Immanuel Kant is based on the principle that the supreme principle of morality must be the autonomous will of the human being, which follows the moral law exclusively from rational insight. The opposite position is that morality is defined in the first place by God's commands. This view is known as the Divine Command Theory . An attempt is often made to resolve the dilemma in order to avoid being forced to choose between two alternatives that appear problematic. In modern discourse, the dilemma is mainly used by critics of religion as an argument against systems of theistic ethics.

Problem

Both answers to the initial question lead to difficulties in theistic systems. If what is ethically correct is defined as what is pleasing to God, terms such as good and right have no content of their own, but only mean that something is willed by a god. Then all ethical statements can be reduced to statements about the divine will and ethics has no decision criteria of its own. In this case there is no ethics as an independent philosophical discipline, and the religious person is determined heteronomously . If, on the other hand, the ethically correct has its own characteristics from which its definition results, then godliness is not part of the definition and therefore not a criterion for ethical judgments. In this case there is an ethical norm to which the deity is also bound, provided that the statement “God is good” or “The gods are good” is to apply. As a result, this norm, which is directly accessible to reason, appears as the highest authority, which is even higher than the divine will. This is incompatible with theological teachings that do not recognize any principle that is independent of God and thus restricts his omnipotence. In addition, divine commandments for morality are superfluous and can be called into question with reference to the autonomy of reason.

The discussion in the Euthyphro

In Plato's dialogue Euthyphron , the interlocutors, the philosopher Socrates and his emphatically religious fellow citizen Euthyphron, try to determine the essence of piety. The term τὸ ὅσιον (to hósion) denotes "the pious", that is, the right or the dutiful. Euthyphron's suggested definition is: “What is dear to the gods is pious; what is not dear, nefarious. ”This definition is checked for its truthfulness and specified to the effect that what all gods love is what is pious. But it turns out to be inadequate. Socrates objects: “Consider this: Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved?” He takes the view that the pious should not be equated with the God-loved; something is loved by God because it is loved by the gods, whereas the pious is loved by them because it is pious. The statement that the gods love the pious is not a statement about the nature of the pious, but only about what happens to the pious. Euthyphron said nothing about what is pious. Euthyphron sees that.

In scholarship, opinions differ about the conclusiveness of individual parts of the argument put forward by Socrates; the majority is of the opinion that it is inconclusive as a whole.

The views that Plato allows his teacher Socrates to represent in his dialogues can - as far as they are not ironic but serious - be regarded as an expression of his own position. Thus Plato was convinced that the ethically correct - the "pious" - could not be defined depending on the attitude of the gods. For Plato there was no “Euthyphron dilemma”, but only a question that he had clearly answered in the dialogue. This did not become a dilemma until much later in Christian theology, when it became clear that the autonomy of ethics is difficult to reconcile with some theological ideas.

The dilemma in philosophical and theological discourse

middle Ages

In the Middle Ages the problem was discussed by theologians, albeit without reference to Plato's dialogue, as this was completely unknown in the Latin-speaking world of scholars at that time.

In the first of his proofs of God, Anselm of Canterbury assumed the human ability to recognize what is good and just, which is shown in gradations in the world. From the existence of moral values ​​one can infer a unified, transcendent source from which they spring, and that is God. This argument would be invalid if morality emerged from an arbitrary decision of God, which could also be different, because then there would be no inner connection between what people consider good and just and a transcendent source of these earthly values. Anselm is convinced that the good in the world is not an arbitrary invention of God, but the expression of his nature. So it is absolutely impossible for God to want something bad and thereby make it good; if he could, he wouldn't be God.

Even Thomas Aquinas tried to solve the dilemma in this way. According to his teaching, there is a "natural law" which contains principles that determine what is right and good for people. According to God's will, this law is laid out in human nature and accessible to human insight. It is not good because God wants it, but it is good and right in itself and therefore wanted by him. God's commandments say that natural law should be obeyed. This is inevitably so, for it is impossible for God to order anything other than what his own good nature requires. The good he wants does not exist outside and independently of him, but is nothing more than an expression of his own being. Thus he has no freedom to want anything other than good, because otherwise he would change his nature and impair his own perfection, and this is in principle excluded according to the theology of Thomas Aquinas.

The late medieval theologian Heinrich von Gent was of the opinion that God's will was free in the sense of groundless. Accordingly, there is no reason for God to want something other than the will itself; the goodness of the will-object is not the reason that it is willed by God. This position is called "theological voluntarism ". The extent to which Johannes Duns Scotus and Wilhelm von Ockham were volunteers is debatable in research.

Early modern age

The discussion of the problem continued in the early modern period . René Descartes strongly advocated the voluntaristic view. Nicolas Malebranche , Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , Benjamin Whichcote and Ralph Cudworth contradicted voluntarism. In their opinion, the moral good as well as mathematical facts are eternal truths that do not depend on God's will, but are necessarily as they are.

Immanuel Kant particularly emphatically and consistently demanded the autonomy of the human will in ethical decisions. According to his philosophy, the will has to submit to moral law, but in such a way that it only regards itself as the author of this law. The moral law follows general principles and claims general validity, but it is never based on anything external, but exclusively on the insight of the acting person, which is owed to pure reason. Only what is recognized as a duty is relevant. The decisions must not be influenced by any own or other interests, thus also not by divine commandments. Otherwise the person is forced to act, and then this is not morally motivated and can therefore not be considered moral. Kant sharply condemned the "statutory belief" based on "statutes", on "ordinances considered divine". Those who consider such a belief to be essential have fallen into a "religious mania". This makes God an idol and his worship becomes a bondage.

Modern

In the early 19th century, the theologian Johann Michael Sailer , influenced by Kant, tried to resolve the dilemma by, following on from the tradition of Platonism, equating God with the absolutely good. Accordingly, God does not choose what is good, but he himself is it according to his essence. According to this approach, the moral good is good not by virtue of an order, but in itself.

In his 1927 published writing Why I am not a Christian ( Why I am not a Christian ) used Bertrand Russell 's dilemma as an argument against a theistic moral justification. According to his argument, under the premise that there is a difference between what is morally wrong and what is right, the question is whether this difference arises from God's commandments or not. In the former case there is no difference between good and bad for God Himself. Then the statement that God is good does not make sense. But if you stick to it, you have to accept that wrong and right have a meaning that is independent of God's commandments. Then God's commandments are to be assessed as good regardless of the fact that he created them. With this assumption one must admit that wrong and right did not arise through God, but logically preceded him in their essence.

In recent debates on the philosophy of religion , theological and critical of religion, the question is whether the moral good is commanded by God because it is the moral good, or whether it is morally good because it is commanded by God. The latter position is known as Divine Command Theory ; the other is called Natural Law Theory . After Philip Quinn published his defense of the Divine Command Theory in 1978, a discussion began that continues.

In such debates, theistic participants in the discourse often fall back on the idea, which was common in the Middle Ages, that the source of the moral good is God, but that morality is not based on God's will and his commandments, but on his unchangeable nature, which is absolutely good. This is a fundamental limitation of what God can command. Positions of this kind are represented by William P. Alston , William Lane Craig , Robert Merrihew Adams and Norman Kretzmann.

Wes Morriston divides the representatives of a Divine Command Theory into three groups according to their approaches. The first group denies the possibility of a morally bad divine command, since God's good nature precludes it. The second group modifies the theory in order to avoid the consequence that such a command must be obeyed. The third group accepts the requirement to obey such a commandment and justifies this with the transcendence of God, whose reasons for his commandments are beyond human judgment. Morriston considers all three approaches to be inadequate.

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski pleads for a different theistic solution to the dilemma. She considers all approaches of the Divine Command Theory type to be inadequate and instead proposes a Divine Motivation Theory. The moral good is not made dependent on God's will, but on his motivation.

In 2005, in a debate with William Lane Craig on the question of the existence of God, Michael Schmidt-Salomon presented the standard arguments critical of religion against a theological moral justification based on the Euthyphro dilemma in order to refute an argument of the theists, the “moral proof of God ”. He dealt with the consequences of claiming that God's commandments are good because they proceed from God. In this case, the question arises as to whether it would be morally justified to torture or murder children if God made such a commandment. According to Schmidt-Salomon's consideration, this question brings the believer into an ethical dilemma: If he gives up the thesis that values ​​are based on God's commandments, he can come into conflict with his faith. If he does not want that, he has to accept that God's commandments are still valid even when they clearly demand inhumanity. If the believer tries to avoid the dilemma by claiming that an all-good God would never issue cruel commandments, he is showing that he has his own moral standards by which he himself judges God's goodness. Then he does not derive his values ​​from God, but projects them onto him. William Lane Craig replied in this debate that the existence of an objective difference between good and evil is evident and can only be explained by assuming the existence of God. The Euthyphron dilemma is "a wrong one" because there is a way out: God's nature is good, and therefore his instructions are not arbitrary, but inevitably good according to his character.

Source collection

  • Janine Idziak (Ed.): Divine Command Morality: Historical and Contemporary Readings. Mellen, New York 1979, ISBN 978-0-8894-6969-3 (collection of statements by defenders and opponents of the theory)

literature

Overview representations

  • Kurt Bayertz : Why be moral at all? Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-52196-7 , pp. 75-93
  • John E. Hare : Divine Command. In: Hugh LaFollette (Ed.): The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Volume 3, Wiley-Blackwell, Malden 2013, ISBN 978-1-4051-8641-4 , pp. 1426-1435
  • Christian Miller: Euthyphro Dilemma. In: Hugh LaFollette (Ed.): The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Volume 3, Wiley-Blackwell, Malden 2013, ISBN 978-1-4051-8641-4 , pp. 1785-1791
  • Peter Vardy: The riddle of evil and suffering . Don Bosco Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-7698-1088-0 , pp. 82-89

Plato's discussion

  • John H. Brown: The Logic of the Euthyphro 10A-11B . In: The Philosophical Quarterly , Vol. 14 No. 54, 1964, pp. 1-14
  • Sheldon Marc Cohen: Socrates on the Definition of Piety: Euthyphro 10A-11B . In: Rachana Kamtekar (Ed.): Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. Critical essays . Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2005, ISBN 0-7425-3324-7 , pp. 35-48
  • Louis-André Dorion: Plato: Lachès, Euthyphron. Traduction inédite, introduction and notes . Flammarion, Paris 1997, ISBN 2-08-070652-7 , pp. 323-334
  • John C. Hall: Plato: Euthyphro 10a1-11a10. In: The Philosophical Quarterly , Vol. 18 No. 70, 1968, pp. 1-11
  • Thomas D. Paxson: Plato's Euthyphro 10 a to 11 b . In: Phronesis 17, 1972, pp. 171-190
  • Laszlo Versényi: Holiness and Justice. An Interpretation of Plato's Euthyphro . University Press of America, Washington DC 1982, ISBN 0-8191-2317-X , pp. 70-77, 86 f.

Modern discourse

  • Paul Helm (Ed.): Divine Commands and Morality . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1981, ISBN 0-19-875049-8
  • Murray Macbeath: The Euthyphro Dilemma. In: Mind 91, 1982, pp. 565–571 (proposed solution based on a utilitarian model)
  • Wes Morriston: What if God commanded something terrible? A worry for divine-command meta-ethics. In: Religious Studies 45, 2009, pp. 249–267
  • Philip L. Quinn: Divine Command Theory. In: Hugh LaFollette (Ed.): The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory. Blackwell, Malden / Oxford 2000, ISBN 0-631-20118-1 , pp. 53-73

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ See the introductory presentation by Kurt Bayertz: Why be moral at all? , Munich 2004, pp. 76-84.
  2. ^ Plato, Euthyphron 6e-7a.
  3. ^ Plato, Euthyphron 9e.
  4. ^ Plato, Euthyphron 10a.
  5. ↑ See also Louis-André Dorion: Plato: Lachès, Euthyphron. Traduction inédite, introduction et notes , Paris 1997, pp. 323–334; Laszlo Versényi: Holiness and Justice. An Interpretation of Plato's Euthyphro , Washington DC 1982, pp. 70-77, 86 f .; Thomas D. Paxson: Plato's Euthyphro 10 a to 11 b . In: Phronesis 17, 1972, pp. 171-190; Robert G. Hoerber: Plato's Euthyphro . In: Phronesis 3, 1958, pp. 95-107, here: 102-104; John H. Brown: The Logic of the Euthyphro 10A-11B . In: The Philosophical Quarterly , Vol. 14 No. 54, 1964, pp. 1-14; John C. Hall: Plato: Euthyphro 10a1-11a10. In: The Philosophical Quarterly , Vol. 18 No. 70, 1968, pp. 1-11.
  6. ↑ See Maximilian Forschner : Plato: Euthyphron. Translation and Commentary , Göttingen 2013, pp. 132–137.
  7. ↑ Katherin A. Rogers: Anselm on Freedom , Oxford 2008, pp. 21-23.
  8. ^ Terence Irwin: The Development of Ethics , Volume 1, Oxford 2007, pp. 553-556.
  9. ↑ See Jan Rohl's medieval discourse : History of Ethics , Tübingen 1991, pp. 166–169; Thomas Williams: The Franciscans. In: Roger Crisp (ed.): The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics , Oxford 2013, pp. 167–183, here: 176–181; on Ockham Thomas M. Osborne: Ockham as a divine-command theorist. In: Religious Studies 41, 2005, pp. 1–22.
  10. ↑ See on Leibniz Ingolf U. Dalferth : Malum , Tübingen 2008, p. 198.
  11. ↑ Michael B. Gill: The Religious Rationalism of Benjamin Whichcote. In: Journal of the History of Philosophy 37, 1999, pp. 271-300, here: 271-273.
  12. ↑ See on Cudworth Terence Irwin: The Development of Ethics , Volume 2, Oxford 2008, pp. 249-252.
  13. ^ Maria Rosa Antognazza: Rationalism. In: Roger Crisp (ed.): The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics , Oxford 2013, pp. 312–336, here: 314–318, 320–324.
  14. ↑ Immanuel Kant: Religion within the limits of mere reason 255 f., 286; see Margit Wasmaier-Sailer: The Euthyphron Dilemma in the Secularism Debate and its Resolution by Johann Michael Sailer. In: Margit Wasmaier-Sailer, Benedikt Paul Gätze (eds.): Idealism and natural theology , Freiburg / Munich 2011, pp. 160–180, here: 162–167.
  15. ↑ Margit Wasmaier-Sailer: The Euthyphron Dilemma in the Secularism Debate and its Resolution with Johann Michael Sailer. In: Margit Wasmaier-Sailer, Benedikt Paul Gätze (eds.): Idealism and natural theology , Freiburg / Munich 2011, pp. 160–180, here: 177–179.
  16. ^ Bertrand Russell: Why I Am Not a Christian , New York 1957, p. 12.
  17. ↑ Philip Quinn: Divine Commands and Moral Requirements , Oxford 1978.
  18. ↑ See the overviews by John E. Hare: Divine Command. In: Hugh LaFollette (ed.): The International Encyclopedia of Ethics , Volume 3, Malden 2013, pp. 1426–1435 and Christian Miller: Euthyphro Dilemma. In: Hugh LaFollette (Ed.): The International Encyclopedia of Ethics , Volume 3, Malden 2013, pp. 1785-1791.
  19. ^ William P. Alston: What Euthyphro Should Have Said. In: William Lane Craig (Ed.): Philosophy of Religion. A Reader and Guide , Edinburgh 2002, pp. 283-298.
  20. ^ William Lane Craig: The Coherence of Theism: Introduction. In: William Lane Craig (Ed.): Philosophy of Religion. A Reader and Guide , Edinburgh 2002, pp. 203-215, here: 213 f.
  21. ^ Robert M. Adams: Finite and Infinite Goods , New York / Oxford 1999, pp. 249-276.
  22. ^ Norman Kretzmann: Abraham, Isaac, and Euthyphro: God and the Basis of Morality. In: Eleonore Stump , Michael J. Murray (eds.): Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions , Malden 1999, pp. 417-427.
  23. ↑ Wes Morriston: What if God commanded something terrible? A worry for divine-command meta-ethics. In: Religious Studies 45, 2009, pp. 249–267.
  24. ↑ Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski: Divine Motivation theory , Cambridge 2004, pp. 258-270.
  25. ↑ Michael Schmidt-Salomon: Does God Exist? , P. 5 f. ( online ).
  26. ^ Answer by William Lane Craig to the contribution by Schmidt-Salomon, Section IV ( online ).