Euthyphro dilemma

[Angrboda]

Does morality require a foundation outside itself?

Why are love and justice and generosity and kindness and faithfulness good? What is there in the depths of reality to make them good? My own preferred answer is: Nothing further. If you like, you may say that they are the ultimate standard of goodness. What makes them the standard? Nothing further. Possessing these characteristics just is good-making. Full stop. Is there some problem with this? Some reason to press on, looking for a ‘deeper’ answer that only theism can provide?

It’s not obvious that there is. No matter what story you tell about the ontological ground of moral value, you must at some point come to your own full stop. If you say that love is necessarily good because God necessarily exists and loves and because God’s moral nature is the ultimate standard of goodness, then we can ask what makes God’s moral nature the ultimate standard. It would be unwise to respond, ‘because it includes love and justice and the rest’, since that would confine us to a small and entirely unenlightening circle of ‘explanations’. 22 At some point, you are simply going to have to bite the bullet and say, ‘That’s just how it is’. 23

So which is the correct stopping point? The non-theological one, according to which goodness supervenes directly on love and justice and the rest, rendering the detour through theology entirely unnecessary, has at least the virtue of simplicity. However, Craig gives what he takes to be a decisive reason for rejecting such a view in the following passage.

Atheistic moral realists affirm that moral values and duties do exist in reality …, but they insist that they are not grounded in God. Indeed, moral values have no further foundation. They just exist.

I must confess that this alternative strikes me as incomprehensible, an example of trying to have your cake and eat it too. What does it mean to say, for example, that the moral value Justice simply exists? I don’t know what that means. I understand what it is for a person to be just; but I draw a complete blank when it is said that, in the absence of any people, Justice itself exists. Moral values seem to exist as properties of persons, not as abstractions – or at any rate, I don’t know what it is for a moral value to exist as an abstraction. Atheistic moral realists seem to lack any adequate foundation in reality for moral values, but just leave them floating in an unintelligible way. (Craig & Sinnott-Armstrong (2004), 19)

Let’s get one small point out of the way quickly. There is nothing ‘atheistic’ about the view to which I am attracted – it is available to atheists, but it is equally available to theists. A theist can say that God is good because, among other things, he possesses the good-making property of being loving. Indeed, I believe this is what theists should say. It is by far the simplest and most straightforward way to give content and significance to the claim – central to traditional theism – that God is good.

So what is Craig’s argument against ‘atheistic moral realism’? In the passage just quoted, he makes it clear that there is no room in his ontology for abstract moral properties. Values like love or justice can exist only as properties of individual persons. Otherwise, Craig says, they would be groundless, ‘floating in an unintelligible way’. It seems clear to me that this objection misses its intended target. The pertinent issue here isn’t whether uninstantiated moral properties can exist. It is whether – in a Godless universe – goodness is present in whatever instances of love and justice might exist in that universe. So far, then, Craig has done nothing to show either (a) that love and justice could not be instantiated in a Godless universe or (b) that goodness would not be present if they were.

That’s not quite the end of the matter, however. While pressing his ‘speciesist’ charge (critically discussed above), Craig asks, ‘How do these strange non-natural moral properties come to supervene on the members and actions of our species?’ (Craig & Antony (2008) ). Craig here appears to be gesturing in the direction of a ‘queerness argument’ specifically directed against the view that moral properties supervene upon, without being reducible to, non-moral ones. Unfortunately, Craig does not elaborate the point; so my response will be brief.

However the natural/non-natural distinction gets made, it’s clear that on Craig’s own view the goodness of creatures is non-natural. It consists in resemblance (in relevant respects) to God, who is himself a paradigmatically non-natural being. Which respects are relevant is fixed by God’s moral attributes, which themselves must be non-natural. So the problem Craig means to be raising here can hardly be that he objects to the non-natural. Instead it has to do with the way in which goodness ‘supervenes’ on non-moral properties. The moral realist has failed to tell us how goodness supervenes on love and justice and the rest.

It may be said that God’s moral attributes just are the ultimate standard of goodness. But how is this is any more satisfying than saying that love (for example) just is good-making? As far as I can see, building God and God’s attributes into the account of moral values merely complicates things and replaces one set of puzzles with another. 24

Even if I am right in thinking that we don’t need to ground moral values in God, it may still be thought that we need God to account for moral duty. Moral duties (it may be said) must be constituted by commands in order to have imperative force, and a perfectly good God is the only adequate source of such commands. However, it seems to me that a non-theist who embraces moral realism is not without resources at this point. There are many options, of which I’ll mention just two.

The first is simply to deny that duties must be constituted by commands in order to have imperative force. There are, after all, lots of normative laws that do not require a lawmaker. If, for example, you know that two propositions are inconsistent with one another, and you also know that one of them is true, then you should not accept the other. 25 Nobody thinks we need a ‘divine command’ to back up this rule. I see no reason why it should be different for moral rules. If this is right, then the way is open for the non-theist to say that basic moral duties are fundamental moral facts and (like moral values) require no further foundation or ground.

But suppose something further is desired. Here is another option. It is a variant of the ideal spectator theory. Even an atheist might consistently identify duties with commands that would be given by a perfect being. That might not settle every question we’d like have settled; but it would certainly make it a duty not to kill or steal or practise cruelty. Interestingly, such an account fits nicely with Craig’s claim that God’s commands ‘flow necessarily from’ his perfect moral nature. Even by his lights, there must be a fact of the matter about what a being possessing a perfect moral nature would command if there were such a being. Once again, it turns out that the actual existence of God makes no difference to the ontological foundation of morality.

"God and the ontological foundation of morality."    Wes Morriston.