The Euthyphro Dilemma

Last year I started a conversation on an Amazon blog under the topic “Religion” called God and Morality. At the end of a brief introduction I asked, "is the nature of morality purely subjective, or is it objective in some sense?" It was my intention to give my answer along with a demonstration in a follow-up post. One particular atheist, however, who had dealt with plenty of people like me, ehem, insisted that we must ask the same question of God, supposing He exists, and kept referring to the "Euthyphro dilemma" (Is something good because God says it is, or does he say it is because it is good; or, God must either create or obey the good); I therefore took the opportunity of this debate to demonstrate my point.

I said, first of all, that we have to be clear about the nature of the God we're supposing to exist. On the one hand, if we're to conceive "God" as like the things of our experience -- finite, mutable, corporeal, and imperfect -- then clearly "God adds nothing to" morality. On the other hand, if we're to conceive "God" as theists and deists have traditionally conceived of Him, as unlike the things of our experience -- not finite, not sensible, not mutable, and not imperfect -- with the positive exception that He's like the things of our experience in so far that He has existence, and is the source and goal of all other, limited existences; that I was then in a better position to answer his point.

Surprisingly, he agreed on supposing the second view of God's nature, said he assumed it all along, but that it made no difference. Now, I say "surprisingly" because it makes all the difference in the world, and anyone familiar with the central observation of Lewis' Argument from Desire ("the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given--nay, cannot even be imagined as given--in our present mode of spatiotemporal experience") is in perfect position to understand why.

If God contains all perfections, as my atheist friend and I agreed in our hypothetical, then that certainly includes eternal joy. Therefore, if participating in God's eternal joy IS the reward, the means to which includes morality, then we can say, with C.S. Lewis, "that God neither obeys nor creates the moral law. The good is uncreated; it could never have been otherwise; it has in it no shadow of contingency; it lies, as Plato said, on the other side of existence. God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God."

The fellow I was debating continued to insist that even if God gave us eternal joy this wouldn't tell us why we ought to seek it, why it wouldn't be mere preference to call it good. Our arguments, therefore, would conversely rise and fall depending on what he termed the "optional character" of goodness; that is, depending on whether oughts can only be hypothetical, or whether some can be, in fact, categorical. I had only, then, to reiterate a point from Aristotle: it is happiness alone which no one chooses for the sake of anything other than itself. There is no "optional character" to the fact that we seek happiness as THE end in itself. This fact is a fact of our will, of our own first person experience. It is, however, general -- as are all first principles.

My friend then said this had no more significance than one's preference for one alcoholic drink over another, to which I responded there's a difference in kind. One is (a) a perceived means, desired for the sake of something else; one is (b) the end, desired only for the sake of itself. Yet, I said, there's a further distinction in (a): some means flow from the essence of the end and are necessary, and some are merely accidental -- that is, some are needs, some are wants (preferences).
When it comes to choosing necessary means to that end we can therefore say, in some cases, that, as properties of happiness, we ought to choose them; to say otherwise is literally irrational.

For the Good is that which gives us the one thing we seek for itself and nothing else, which is happiness, and the necessary means to that end are therefore good. To go on and ask why we call that Good which gives us happiness, would be to ask why we desire happiness as the end in itself; that is akin to asking why something exists instead of nothing, or why the principle of non-contradiction is a principle, in other words, it’s irrelevant because it’s an undeniable, brute fact. By a brute fact of our first person experience, then, we can literally say -- So much for the Euthyphro dilemma!

If you take the fact that we ought to seek what is really good for us (what is part of happiness), and at the same time keep before your mind that God’s existence is understood from the standpoint of the via negative (which my friend agreed to “for sake of discussion”), then we’ve merely added one more negative, "that God neither obeys nor creates the moral law,” and the argument boils down to saying “we can’t understand God’s nature”, of which no one professes to have a *positive* understanding anyway – yet, nor do we of our own existence!

Objective Morality and the Categorical "ought"

Here's another example of misunderstanding objective morality: The Is-Ought False Dichotomy, by Francois Tremblay .

Mr. Tremblay writes:

In short, we can refute the is-ought false dichotomy in this way: (1) Actions have consequences.
(2) These consequences are within the province of causality, since they are material.
(3) Therefore, the relation between actions and consequences is objective.

To be sure, this doesn’t refute anything, it leaves it hypothetical and begs the question: given that certain actions lead to certain consequences, why ought I to desire a given consequence, and thus choose to perform a given action? For instance, Mr. Tremblay says, “If we eat and drink proper foods and in moderate quantity, we will survive”, but why ought we want to survive? Survival is not an end in itself (people die for higher ends, so survival is a means), thus, as it stands, we are confined to the subjunctive mood, and must begin, “*if* we want to survive, then we ought to ‘eat and drink in moderate quantity.’” As C.S. Lewis said, you cannot go from, “this will preserve society… to [you ought to] do this,”; as I said, you can only say *if*, which is hypothetical.

Objective morality, however, must be premised on a categorical *since*, thus leading to a categorical ought, not a hypothetical *if* producing a hypothetical ought. To be imperative it must be indicative, and since we cannot find anything in “observation attached from desire” to make it so, then we must find it in desire itself – or bust. This means, therefore, that there must be an end in itself that we desire, to which certain actions and consequences are then a necessary means. But where is this end in itself to be found? It is found in the intuition of the good. Since this is an intuition, it is therefore the basis of demonstration; it cannot itself directly be demonstrated. However, like any other intuition (for instance, the law of contradiction) we can indirectly demonstrate its truth; in this case we can do so by noting, as Mortimer Adler put it, our inability to finish the proposition, we want happiness because… The fact is, we simply do, and for no other reason than itself, so that that which really, as opposed to apparently, leads to it is what we’d call the really good. That being the case we can go on to say, *since* I desire happiness for the sake of itself alone therefore I ought to choose only what is really good, that is, really the means to happiness.

Once this categorical ought is established, which requires the inclusion of our subjective point of view (as does knowledge), then we can go on to include objective facts about human nature that can give us a “moral system,” that is, a system of consequences based on given actions. Now, precisely because this ought is categorical - as I cannot think it’s opposite - then I know it applies, universally, to all rational beings; because it applies to all rational beings then I must include all rational human beings as ends in themselves (a Kingdom of ends, as Kant called it), meaning our ends include each other. This interrelation between myself and all other rational beings forms the relation called justice, and answers the Ring of Gyges dilemma posed by Plato so long ago - A magic ring cannot erase your rational and personal relationship to others, the infringement of which frustrates the fulfillment of a potential our nature needs as a means to the attainment of happiness.

How does God relate to all of this? In two ways. First, he meets a transcendent desire (described so well by C.S. Lewis), which is a descriptive property inherent to happiness (the fulfillment of all desire). Second, He serves as the Ground “saving the appearances” by preventing a contradiction for the scientific method. In other words, the self-evident fact of first person experience that, as subjects, we cannot deny we desire an end for the sake of itself and nothing else is contradicted by a third person account of those same subjects which views them apart from an eternal Ground (as the cause of that unchanging end). Moreover, a pure third person account is a pure fiction, for it's always the subject in the first person using the third person; that is, you cannot escape the rational "I", with it's basic intuitions (including goodness), to view it "from nowhere", it is a precondition, it is logically prior, to any and all perspectives.

Check Mate

There are a multitude of reasons why I converted to Catholicism (from many forms of Protestantism). Incidentally, the reasons I would use presently to defend Catholicism aren't necessarily the reasons I found it convincing, so I was thinking to myself how I would best sum up the reasons that personally swayed me. Keeping in mind that for me the big move was not from Protestantism to Catholicism, but "clear" Christianity to "thick" -- and from there I followed what I saw to be the natural progression into Catholicism --, the general reason was put best by C.S. Lewis:

"There isn't really... this infinite variety of religions to consider. We may divide... religions... into 'thick' and 'clear'... If there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear ['Clear' practices involving intellect, reason, and conscience vs. 'Thick,' being imaginative and sensual]: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly... Christianity... takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth century academic prig...and tells [him] to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be clear: [the academic has to be] Thick. That is how one knows one has come to the true religion."

What else dies with Christ?

Several years back, I overheard a fellow making light of the Easter event. Speaking on the phone to another, he rhetorically asked, “isn’t that [Easter] the day you celebrate when your god popped out of the ground?” Now, I’m sure the person on the other end was no learned theologian, and I have no idea what he thought or how he responded, but in my mind was almost instantly conceived the other side of my irreverent friends’ logic, which a-priori allows for no such miracle. For I immediately thought, well, then, what else has just popped out of the ground, so to speak, which my friend would have us bury beneath the dirt of trivialization? If a God does not exist - who, in principle, is able to do such a thing - then what of worth and value is there left not to shovel into meaninglessness?

Indeed, the choices seem simple to me. Either, (1) God exists, therefore purpose exists, or (2) God does not exist, and therefore life is meaningless. If the first option is the case, then why would we restrict God’s right possibly to act in such a way as Christians believe He has through Christ? But let me not stray too far from the main point, which must be a defense of what I said are the two simple choices; for all too often the reaction to this black and white statement is that the reader thinks it’s too black and white. Here, then is my reply.

As rational beings, our first-person perspective is governed by the laws of logic, which are universal. We know, therefore, that another person, who violates logic, is wrong – we can thus, at times, speak universally. If there are two apples on the table, two on the chair, and two on the floor, we know there are six apples in the room, and that anyone and everyone who says there are five is wrong. Well, we can likewise speak universally about the connection between moral acts, universally, but only if the object, or goal, is the same for all people. For moral acts are always made with some end in mind; as Aristotle said,

[W]e call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more final than the things that are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.

He then goes on,

Now such a thing happiness, above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for itself and never for the sake of something else, but honour, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from them we should still choose each of them), but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that by means of them we shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor, in general, for anything other than itself.

But if there is no actual, eternal end, or goal, which is the cause of our desire for happiness, and which will grant us happiness once we’ve attained it, then this moral relationship to others, which is a perception of a logical connection based on this goal of our rational existence, is all meaningless illusion.

If choices, and courses of action, cannot be judged by reason according to an actual standard to which all are bound, and are, instead, a matter of individual taste, or what we call preference, then no one can say a choice or a course of action is really right or wrong, only that, based on feelings, one prefers this or that choice or course of action. This would mean, in real terms, that a sick-o child molester is no more wrong in his acts than you are for not wanting the child molested, or, put conversely, that you are no more right in not wanting the child molested than he is in his acts.

It seems, therefore, that my friend would bury more than just a belief in Christ, and that meaning itself depends upon his rising from death – and from the dirt of trivialization.

Who killed Christ?

When watching a movie like the Passion of Christ, or reading the gospel stories of the Passion, some people miss the personal dimension, thus the personal impact, and instead blame the Jews. Be we have to remember Aristotle's four causes here. The four causes are the material cause, the efficient cause, the formal cause, and the final cause. In short, the matter involved, the performers involved, the plan involved, and the purpose involved. Related to our subject, the material cause of Jesus' death is things like the cross, nails, and such. The efficient cause of Jesus death were, indeed, the Jews involved (whom Christ forgave as he died) -- and the Romans. The plan involved was God's plan. However, every single individual being is the final cause, for the purpose was to enable Christ to save us from sin; since we engage in sin, then WE are the very purpose for all the rest. We, therefore, have crucified Christ. I weep as I watch the Passion of Christ because I am doing those things to Jesus.