 |
 |
In this month’s installment, I said I would share a few observations about each chapter in my dissertation on the Euthyphro Dilemma. The dissertation was an early version of the book Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Ethics that Jerry Walls and I published with OUP in 2011. So what we find in the dissertation is a precursor to the first book in the tetralogy Jerry and I would end up writing.
The first chapter of the dissertation was about what we meant by “God.” This is an important question because, obviously, references to God need to be clear and consistent. God can be thought of in quite different ways. We saw this with the Euthyphro. The character Euthyphro believed in the pantheon of Greek gods and all the lore associated with them. The divine understood in such a polytheistic context is quite different from God as understood in the great monotheistic traditions. For one, Euthyphro’s gods were fallible and fickle and morally deficient in all sorts of ways. Little wonder that Socrates, on hearing Euthyphro’s efforts to tie the nature of piety or holiness to the loves of the gods, would entertain more than a little skepticism.
I didn’t immediately want to say that the operative conception of God in the dissertation was the Christian depiction. Since the theology I was planning to do in the dissertation, if any, was more natural theology than anything like revealed theology, there was an advantage to going with a more generic monotheistic tradition. So I went with the “God of Anselm,” the God thought of in the classical sense as omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and the like. My hunch was that such a rich, robust theistic tradition could muster the resources to answer challenges posed by the Euthyphro Dilemma. Another advantage is that it is a conception of God arguably consistent with the Christian view of God. Anselm himself was, after all, a Christian. (Of course some have argued that the God of Anselm is inconsistent with the God of the Bible, which the chapter briefly touches on as well.)
The chapter on goodness especially explored questions of intrinsic value. At that stage of my work, I had become more steeped in Platonic notions of the good than in Aristotelian ones. Plato referred to the ultimate Good as a sort of abstract entity: Goodness itself. What struck me at the time, and still does, is how similar was Plato’s description of the good with how monotheists typically think about God. Of course, theists don’t think of God as an abstract entity, but the sorts of features that the ultimate good is supposed to have were just the sorts of features it made good sense to think that God has. This makes unsurprising that, later on, Christian thinkers would use concepts of neo-Platonism to equate God and the good.
Since I’ve worked on those issues years ago, I have grown in my appreciation of Aristotelian ideas of the good. Aristotle was more likely to speak in terms of how various goods are “good for” something or other. For example, friendship is good because it conduces to human flourishing. Likewise with, say, meaningful work. I have come to think that this is a very useful way to think about an aspect of goodness (moral and otherwise). I have also harbored the suspicion that key central aspects of Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the good can be reconciled and, ultimately, find their locus in God himself.
Then came the chapter on moral rightness, or more specifically moral duties. At that stage of the game, influenced as I was by Robert Adams, I was strongly drawn to divine command theory as an account of moral duties. Of course, this is the idea that God’s commands render something morally obligatory. This is only one of many ways in which one might try to locate the authority of moral duties in God. Beyond divine command theory, for example, one might be a natural lawyer, or a divine desire theorist, or a divine will theorist, or a divine motivation theorist, or something else.
Among divine command theorists, one might be a causal divine command theorist (DCT’ist), one who thinks that God’s command causes a duty to result. Or one might be a constitutive DCT’ist, one who thinks that God’s command constitutes a moral duty. (John Hare gives another option: a prescriptive DCT’ist.) I’ll have more occasion to discuss divine command theory later, but in the dissertation I wanted to lay out such a theory and defend it against some objections.
The last chapter delved into such challenges to theistic ethics as can be found in the Bible. In particular, the binding of Isaac or the conquest narratives seemed to pose a challenge to the idea that morality somehow finds its locus in God. The specter of arbitrariness hangs over theories that make morality a function of God’s nature of commands. This is especially so in the case of something like a divine command theory of moral duties. In Genesis, God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. But surely, many reason, this is horrific. It would be child sacrifice, and simply being told to do it by God wouldn’t render it morally okay, and certainly not obligatory.
Of course, one option is to sidestep the question and stick with a narrow Anselmian reading, disregarding this story held in common by Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Another is to interpret the passage in such a strongly figurative way that it poses little challenge. But at the time I wanted to think about how one might engage such a challenge without making it easier than it is. Again, I will have more occasion to discuss these matters in greater detail later on. Next time, I will talk about how the dissertation, over the course of several years, turned into a book, a more expansive treatment than the dissertation had been.
— David Baggett is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Christian University. He is the author or editor of about fifteen books, most recently Ted Lasso and Philosophy: No Question Is Into Touch edited with Marybeth Baggett.
image: Anselm of Canterbury
