Euthyphro On Twitter
Or, "The Joys and Frustrations of Arguing About Philosophy on the Internet"
Three years ago, I debated Charlie Kirk in Phoenix. As you’d expect, most of the debate was about politics. But we wandered into deeper philosophical waters in the last twenty minutes or so of the two-hour conversation. I’d frequently heard Charlie say that “there’s no social contract” but rather “our rights come from God.” This sounded to me like a straightforward expression of Divine Command Ethics (DCE), so I brought up the most unoriginal possible objection.
In Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, the title character takes his own father to court for murder. Socrates finds this shocking. Euthyphro assures him that his behavior is “pious.” Socrates presses him for a definition of piety, and Euthyphro says the pious is that which the gods love. Socrates asks whether the gods love pious things because they are pious or whether pious things are pious because the gods love them.
Tweaking this, the traditional dilemma for defenders of monotheistic DCE is, “Does God command morally good things because they’re morally good or are they morally good because God commands them?
Half of the problem is that if you pick Option #1, you’ve just abandoned DCE—because the morally good things must be morally good for some reason other than God commanding them. The other half is that, if you pick option #2, then if God had commanded Thou shalt torture and kill whosoever thou findest annoying, Thou shalt rape whosoever thou desirest and Thou shalt not under any circumstances be kind or charitable or help little old ladies cross the street, then murder and rape would be morally good and charity, kindness and helping little old ladies cross the street would be morally bad. And if your instinctive response is that God wouldn’t command these horrible things because God is good and these things are very very bad, you’ve actually chosen Option #1.
To put an even finer point on all this, would God have a reason not to command those things? If not, God’s commands are arbitrary. Perhaps He flipped a celestial coin and arrived at don’t kill and don’t rape and do help little old ladies cross the street but it could just as easily have been the other way around. But if He did have a reason, why wouldn’t whatever that reason is give us a reason to not to treat each other this way whether or not there’s a God?
Adapting all this for Kirk’s claim about rights, I asked him, “Is it morally just that these rights be recognized because that’s what God wants, or does God want them to be recognized because it would be morally unjust to deny them?”
His confusing but memorable answer was, “Both.”
I’ve been thinking back to that conversation because I keep running into online expressions of DCE. Some of them have come from surprising sources. Take Dave Smith—a libertarian podcaster I debated a couple of times in 2019 and 2020. As it happens, Dave is one of the libertarians I have the most positive feelings about these days, since while we disagree on probably about 97% of domestic policy issues he’s generally good on foreign policy and he’s been a particularly strong voice in defense of Palestinian human rights in the last eight months.
In a recent clip from his podcast Part of the Problem, Dave answers a viewer’s question about objective morality.
He says:
I always thought, before I was a believer in God, that it was kind of a silly argument that theists made, when they say you can’t have morality without a divine power, and the more…since I found God, I agree that, yeah, you probably can’t.
Many libertarians are (a) atheists and (b) obsessive philosophy nerds, so it’s unsurprising that this answer ruffled some feathers among Smith’s fans. He followed up on Twitter, clarifying that he doesn’t deny that atheists can “know right from wrong,” but insisting on DCE as the only way to make sense of moral objectivity.
My point is that if you believe there is no God and we just evolved from single cell organisms, how do you get to objective morality? I have never heard a satisfactory answer to this.
And then there’s this, from Drago Dimitrov, who describes himself in his Twitter bio as, among other things, a “tech creator” and “chess expert.”
There’s a range here. Kirk’s view is too confused to be merit further commentary. Dimitrov we’ll get to in a moment. Smith, at least, is putting his finger on a real philosophical problem—even if he misidentifies it.
He thinks the problem is:
If God doesn’t exist and we evolved from single-celled organisms, how can there be objective morality?
But what the Euthyphro Objection to DCE establishes is that that, however big or small of a problem you think that is, you should regard this one:
If God does exist and He created everything that walks or crawls, how can there be objective morality?
…as being exactly that big or small, because neither antecedent is relevant in any way to the actual issue. The existence or non-existence of God has nothing to do with whether morality is objective.
“Moral realism” is the position that, first, moral claims are like any other claims. People who make them are attempting to describe a certain set of facts (in this case moral facts), and their statements are true if they line up with the facts and not if not. The moral realist further says that at least some moral claims are true.
Moral realism comes in “naturalistic” and “non-naturalistic” variants. Naturalistic moral realists think that moral facts ultimately reduce to ordinary non-moral facts—for example, facts about happiness and suffering. Non-naturalistic moral realists think moral facts are facts of some other type.
On the other end of the spectrum of “meta-ethical” views, there’s moral error theory. The moral error theorist thinks that there aren’t any moral facts, and so all statements of the form “such-and-such action is morally right” or “such-and-such action is morally wrong” are false—the same way that, since there’s no such thing as witchcraft, all statements of the form “such-and-such person is a witch” are false.
And there are certainly other views in between these poles. Moral non-cognitivists, for example, think we’re doing something other than trying to describe external reality when we make moral judgments. Perhaps we’re expressing attitudes, or we’re trying to coordinate our behavior. On this view, the absence of moral “facts” wouldn’t make moral statements false.
There’s a vast and sprawling literature on these topics and I’m not going to even try to say anything interesting about it all here. My supremely unoriginal point (again: Plato beat me to it!) is just that accepting the premise “God exists” does exactly nothing to strengthen your case for moral realism and accepting the premise “God does not exist” does a very similar nothing to strengthen your case against it. The subjects are entirely unrelated.
Dimitrov at least knows the Euthyphro objection to DCE exists, even if he seems to think it was invented by contemporary internet atheists. And he tries to respond.
Let’s see how he does.
He writes:
Many atheists are confused about Divine Command Theory.
Everything that is Good, is so, because God declared it as such—that's the essence of DCT. Here's the formula for 99% of atheist objections to DCT:
Step 1) Choose an action that you intuitively find morally repulsive right now.
Step 2) Propose a hypothetical universe where God says that this morally repulsive action is "good".
Step 3) Pound your first on the table and insist that the violation of your current moral intuition is proof that the hypothetical is absurd, and consequently, that God declaring something "good" is insufficient for establishing that thing as being ontologically Good.
This is an accurate if deeply unsympathetic description of Euthyphro-based objections to DCE.
Of course, just about any moral argument could be described in exactly the same unsympathetic manner with exactly as much or as little justice. A hardcore utilitarian, for example, could describe a classical objection to utilitarianism like this:
The anti-utilitarian then pounds his fist on the table and insists that his intuition that it would be “wrong” to kill a healthy patient to harvest their organs to save five others “proves” that utilitarianism is implausible.
Or a cultural relativist could describe one of the classical objections to cultural relativism like this:
The critic of cultural relativism then pounds her fist on the table and insists that her intuition that “slavery is wrong even in societies where there’s a widespread consensus in favor of it” disproves the claim that morality is relative to time, place, and culture.
In any case, Dimitrov continues:
Given the narcissism that atheism implicitly promotes (i.e. "no one is above me"), it's understandable why Divine Command Theory is a hard pill to swallow, for some.
So then, are you ready for the assumption that so many critics miss?Let there be light.
There's a BIG difference between when you or I say something and when God "says" something.
When you or I say something, we simply share an idea. We transfer information. Sound waves vibrate. . .A gust of wind passes.
When God speaks, it shapes the fundamental composition of reality itself.
The Cosmic Order gets rearranged. The flow of relationship between all created things gets redirected.
There's a cascading butterfly effect that reverberates throughout the entire universe.
This means that the atheist critic fails to utilize sufficient imagination in their proposed hypothetical (Step 2).
For example, let's say that in the hypothetical universe, God were to declare that "Killing puppies is a Good, beautiful thing".
Once executed, that metaphysical "declaration" would spill into your moral conscience and reshape your intuitions (as well as any other aspect of the created order that is related to this puppy-killing act...) such that the version of you that lives in that hypothetical universe would NOT find this action problematic, despite the fact that the version of you reading this post right now, does.
We’ll put aside his uncharitable speculation about why atheists disagree with him. That’s a complete irrelevance, just like the standard uncharitable speculations in the other direction—that theists are just afraid of death, for example, or that they long for the emotional comforts of a celestial father figure.
And all that stuff he says after this, in which he tries to evoke a sense of awe and wonder at the power of God, is just off-topic. The East German secret police were very powerful—not infinitely powerful like God, of course, but certainly far more powerful than Dimitrov or myself. Their decisions to approve or disapprove of particular opinions had consequences that went far beyond a few sound waves vibrating through the air. But I don’t think they had the slightest bit more power than Dimitrov or I do to make the things they disapproved of morally wrong.
Why would having even infinite power give you this ability?
Dimitrov says the version of the arrogant atheist living in the God-approves-puppy-murder timeline would be untroubled by puppy-murder. This isn’t necessarily true. After all, assuming that there’s a God, He seems to have decided in our timeline to let us humans frequently and vehemently disagree with on another about moral issues.
But let’s go ahead and grant Dimitrov’s assumption about the timeline with Divinely-Sanctioned Puppy-Killing, if only for the sake of argument. Certainly, an all-powerful demon interested in promoting as much puppy-killing as possible could choose to wire everyone’s brains to want puppies dead.
But how and why is this supposed to be relevant?
If I was born in a slave-holding family in the antebellum South, it’s quite unlikely that I would find my own way to the conclusion that slavery was wrong. But Dimitrov is no cultural relativist, and presumably he would agree that the likely truth of this counterfactual is 100% consistent with slavery being (universally!) wrong.
A bit over a decade ago, prominent theistic philosopher William Lane Craig did a public debate with Shelly Kagan on the question, “Is God Necessary for Morality?”
Craig’s position was “yes.” Like Dave Smith, he worried that atheists won’t be able to make sense of moral objectivity.
And here’s how Craig tried to demonstrate the absurdity of denying moral objectivity:
To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or evil independently of whether anybody believes it to be. So to say, for example, that the Holocaust was objectively evil is to say that it was evil even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was good and it would still have been evil even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everybody who disagreed with them so that everyone believed the Holocaust was good.
This is just a secularized version of Dimitrov’s point about God willing the murder of puppies. Everything Dimitrov says about the God-approves-puppy-murder timeline in defense of DCE could equally be said of Craig’s scenario by a defender of cultural relativism. Sure, you think the Holocaust was bad, and you want to use that to discredit cultural relativism, but the version of you that lives in the Nazis-kill-or-brainwash-everyone-who-disagrees universe would NOT find this action problematic, despite the fact that the version of you reading this post right now, does.
It can be a good defense in both cases, or a bad one in both cases.
But those are the options.
Dimitrov finishes:
The version of you in this universe, with your current set of moral intuitions, is different than the version of you that would exist in the hypothetical universe (which would be grounded in an alternative set of moral intuitions).
God declaring something Good (a causative act) would change your fundamental perceptions of what Good is (the effect of the act).
By virtue of being created in the Image of God, you would be changed.
Given the notion of humans coming from God, a change within the nature of God would necessarily result in a change within the nature of humanity.
When God speaks, stuff happens.
I encourage you to think more robustly and humbly about your hypotheticals.
And remember that you are not God.
Since Dimitrov is a guy arguing about philosophy on Twitter, he throws in a meme to show how Based his position is. (You are, apparently, legally obligated to do this part.)
But again:
Someone defending cultural relativism against Craig could make all the same moves. They could point out that when Hitler orders people to be exterminated or brainwashed, stuff happens. (It does!)
And they could end with the same meme. First guy: “So you believe that the Holocaust becomes good if your whole culture tells you it’s good?” Chad: “Yes.”
Plenty of theists far more thoughtful than Dimitrov exist, although they’re more likely to be found in university philosophy departments than on Twitter. Lots of them agree that Euthyphro-style arguments defeat DCE, though they note that it’s entirely possible to (a) believe in God and (b) believe that God is morally perfect without (c) believing that God’s will produces morality. Some others acknowledge the problem but try to split the difference with “Modified DCE,” which holds that morality is defined by God’s unchanging nature rather than the things He chooses to will.
I have to admit that I’ve never quite understood how this is supposed to help. Doesn’t it just push back the question? If God is by His nature deeply kind and loving, is such a nature morally good because that’s the unchanging nature that the creator of our universe happens to have, so that if instead His unchanging nature was petty and cruel, that would be morally good?
But at least once we’re arguing about that, the discussion has gone somewhere new.
Here’s the larger issue:
As I think this example makes vivid, you tend to get more interesting philosophical discussions in environments where people worry less about being Based and more about being plausible—a goal that tends to pull in exactly the opposite direction!—and everyone makes at least some effort to learn each others’ positions.
I really hope university philosophy departments aren’t the only kind of environments where those virtues can flourish. These are innately interesting subjects, and as I said last week, I think there’s real human value in thinking hard about them. I absolutely don’t want academics to have a monopoly on that activity. Which, I suppose, means that I do want people to talk about philosophy on Twitter.
I’d just prefer for them to do it in a slightly less asinine way.
Very well said as always, Ben. Seeing something new from you always brightens my day, even if I don't agree with everything you say. You always make me think more about things I want to think about.