1) What connection does that Bible story and Dylan\'s song have with ethics and
ID: 1218868 • Letter: 1
Question
1) What connection does that Bible story and Dylan's song have with ethics and the so-called "Divine Command Theory" as espoused by Euthyphro?
2) How might it be possible for a person who is an atheist or an agnostic to live by yet another version of the Divine Command Theory?
3) How might a person be a theist (believing in god), but still not accept Euthyphro's Divine Command Theory for how best to live? It might be helpful to know that the Abraham story that Dylan refers to in his song can be clearly contrasted with another Abraham story where the Patriarch actually argues with God about what justice would require of even the most powerful being; that story is the famous Sodom and Gomorrah one, found in Genesis
Explanation / Answer
Philosophers both past and present have sought to defend theories of ethics that are grounded in a theistic framework. Morality deals with what is right and wrong, good and bad and the standards or norms for understanding these for the sake of evaluating human conduct. Difficulties such as moral relativism and lack of motivation to act morally arise with such a separation of God and ethics, but many philosophers would rather wrestle with these issues than tie religion closely to morality. Divine Command theory (DC) is an exception, because it is an ethical theory that derives from an omnipotent God, and is meaningless without God. The Euthyphro dilemma presents a significant challenge to any view that grounds morality in the will or character of God. The upshot of the Euthyphro dilemma is that morality is either arbitrary or else completely independent of God. Of course, some theistic moral theorists have argued that the consequences of the Euthyphro dilemma are not nearly as counterintuitive as they appear, or that there are alternative ways of grounding morality in God which are immune from such counterintuitive consequences. However, I will not be entering into this particular debate here. My contention is that theism has no more secure metaphysical basis that accounts for objective morality than atheism. If I am right, then despite the philosophical value of Socrates' argument, atheism can be defended against the moral argument quite independently of the concerns that arise from the Euthyphro dilemma. The dilemma takes its name from Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, in which the character Euthyphro gives voice to the view that morality (or more accurately, piety) is dependent on the gods. Euthyphro's view is that pious (virtuous or righteous) acts are those that the gods approve of. The character Socrates responds by posing one of the most brilliant questions in the history of philosophy: "Do the gods love pious acts because they are pious, or are they pious because the gods love them. Like Euthyphro, those influenced by monotheistic religions often find it natural to assume that wrong actions are those that God dislikes or has prohibited, while right actions are those that God approves of or commands. But following Socrates, we ought to ask: Does God command that we refrain from wrong acts because they are wrong, or are they wrong because God commands that we refrain from committing them. However, DC has some gaping holes revealed by the Euthyphro dilemma. Divine Command Theory has been and continues to be highly controversial. It has been criticized by numerous philosophers, including Plato, Kai Nielsen, and J. L. Mackie. The theory also has many defenders, both classic and contemporary, such as Thomas Aquinas, Robert Adams, and Philip Quinn. The question of the possible connections between religion and ethics is of interest to moral philosophers as well as philosophers of religion, but it also leads us to consider the role of religion in society as well as the nature of moral deliberation. Historically, morality has been closely tied to religion. Roughly, Divine Command Theory is the view that morality is somehow dependent upon God, and that moral obligation consists in obedience to God’s commands. The theory suggests that any statement about ethics is actually a statement about the attitudes and desires of God. That is, it claims that God's commands and morality are identical. It is the view of morality in which what is right is what God commands, and what is wrong is what God forbids. This view is one that ties together morality in and religion in a way that is very comfortable for most people, because it provides a solution to pesky arguments like moral relativism and the objectivity of ethics.Moral arguments for God's existence form a diverse family of arguments that reason from some feature of morality or the moral life to the existence of God, usually understood as a morally good creator of the universe. Moral arguments are both important and interesting. They are interesting because evaluating their soundness requires attention to practically every important philosophical issue dealt with in metaethics. They are important because of their prominence in popular apologetic arguments for religious belief. The Euthyphro Argument comes from Plato’s dialogue in which Sokrates asks: Is something is right because God commands it, or does God command it because it is right? The ethical implications of this argument suggest that the relationship between morality and religion might not be as clear-cut as previously thought. What makes this question so effective is that if the interlocutor accepts either part of it he is often logically forced into conclusions that may conflict with other beliefs he has, therefore creating a logical dilemma for him. Later in the same dialogue he suggests that one who does good things serves the gods. I wouldn't think of it as refuting something so particular as divine command theory. Plato could have done that in about three lines. The text is much more far reaching than that. Euthyphro wasn't espousing divine command theory per se so much as trying to cover his ass for doing something in violation of some virtue. Like most Greeks Plato doesn't cite scripture as justification for his definitions, taking the easy (judeo-christian) way out; he looks around the real messy subjective world and hacks it out like a warrior! (I think this is one of the reasons Neitzche loved the Greeks). The atheistic agree that without God there are no objective moral facts. In fact, one-third of philosophers think there are no objective moral facts. People read Euthyphro differently but for me you have to consider why Euthy feels the need to use piety in particular as a justification for his action. I think the obvious answer is that on the face of it he seems to be doing the most impious thing imaginable, indicting ones own FATHER! (Plato has no need to insult the readers intelligence by pointing this out). Euthy's attempt to forget the wordly (relativistic) meaning of piety and re-frame or redefine it, namely through appeal to the realm of the Gods (objective) fails and to me this is the central failure of the story. It fails because he should have called a spade a spade and just admitted he was doing something impious, citing some other virtue as justification. It fails because here, just like in The Republic, ethics (justice in that case rather than piety) is a purely human event and a collective one at that; It's something no one can do by themselves. I went on to say that most philosophers, of course, don’t think that adding a cosmic dictator to reality gets you objective moral facts. Divine command theory, because it grounds moral facts in the attitudes of a person, is by definition a subjective moral theory, not an objective one. Any person with his own perspective and desires grounds a moral fact; what a person feels is good is, simply because he feels it, good. If that person should desire something of another person, the desiring is a demand which constitutes a moral obligation for that other person. The first problem with any DCT is that we have no evidence that there even is the requisite God, much less which God’s commands are the commands of that God. There are hundreds of different ethical systems attributed to “God.” This is so even within the umbrella of Christian theism; all the more so when we consider other theisms. Indeed, even within the Bible there is a vast plethora of not only contradictory moral advice, but many moral commandments that we now all deem fundamentally immoral, such as commandments to make and keep slaves or force women into marriage, or the commandments to execute apostates and blasphemers, as well as rape victims and gay men. History demonstrates that morals change over time, and without special revelations from any god. That it is moral to let women vote and hold office, or that it is immoral to keep slaves, are, for example, not morals we derive from the Bible, or any divine communication at all. The demand of a subject is necessary and sufficient for moral qualities to exist in the universe. It is necessary because “no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply”; moral qualities only exist in “a mind which feels them.”While the world is not limited to mere physical facts,
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