Overview of Chapter 1
1
Ancient Greek Philosophers
Where does the story of the moral argument begin? Numerous potential candidates present themselves, but we choose to go clear back to ancient Greece. The cast of characters is long, from the likes of Thrasymachus or Alcibiades to Callicles or Glaucon, but we direct your attention most specifically to Socrates (469–399 BC), Plato (ca. 428–347 BC), and Aristotle (384–322 BC). In rudimentary ways, these three luminaries charted much of the subsequent history of Western philosophy. Socrates did not write any of the dialogues in which he was often the key player; his student Plato wrote most of them. The Platonic dialogues are often distinguished between early, middle, and late dialogues. In general, the earliest dialogues are thought to represent best Socrates’s own views.
The Euthyphro Dilemma
One early dialogue in particular deserves our attention, so we will start there: Euthyphro. The dialogue features two characters: Euthyphro and Socrates. Euthyphro is bringing suit against someone, while Socrates has just learned of an indictment against himself. They meet in the Hall of the King, “king” here being an anachronistic title retained by the magistrate who has jurisdiction over crimes affecting the state religion. This context is significant because it immediately introduces a religious element into a discussion of piety. Ancient Athenians believed that homicide creates a religious pollution, which is why the case is before the king rather than the archon within whose jurisdiction family matters fell.1
Religious themes pervade the dialogue from its earliest scene. Euthyphro is there to indict his own father for murder because of religious concerns, whereas Socrates is facing charges of corrupting the youth by inventing new gods and not believing in the old ones. Perhaps tongue-in-cheek, Socrates called Euthyphro a prophet, and it soon becomes clear that Euthyphro prided himself as a religious expert replete with all the credentials of orthodoxy and fully acquainted with and a firm believer in the myths about the Greek pantheon of gods. As for Socrates, he will later admit his own incredulity concerning many of these myths.
Socrates was shocked to find out what Euthyphro was up to. Especially in ancient Greek culture, filial duties should preclude it. Euthyphro, however, defended himself since his father had cruelly mistreated a field laborer (likely a slave) accused of wrongdoing, binding him hand and foot and allowing him to die of neglect and exposure while awaiting religious instructions for what to do with him next. Peter Geach was no doubt right that in quite a number of civilized jurisdictions Euthyphro’s father would be held guilty of a serious crime.2
Euthyphro may well have been motivated by specifically religious considerations conditioned by his being a religious seer with Orphic tendencies. He would have been anxious to deliver himself, his father, and his family from the religious pollution that the homicide was thought to have produced. Euthyphro was likely troubled by the taint thought to cling to the guilty party and his associates until it is removed by legal action. Euthyphro believed that the law called for the suit to be brought against wrongdoers instead of leaving matters to their own arbitration. For according to Attic law, everyone was expected to bring prosecution in cases of death, and that was a context that did not include all the moral, legal, and religious distinctions between intentional murder and accidental homicide that we take for granted today.3
Intertwined with the religious theme is a concern for justice. Perhaps disingenuously, Socrates conceded that Euthyphro must have had a clear conception indeed of what justice and piety are because he was so confident in what he was doing in bringing suit against his own father. Euthyphro quite agreed, standing ready to affirm his own knowledge of what justice involves. For Euthyphro, justice is rooted in divine law. On his view, only fallible and vacillating human law would consider as morally relevant whether the murder was committed by a relative. Divine law is more universal than that, he insisted, applying equally to all instances of injustices irrespective of the identity of the victim or accused. Pollution spreads just the same whether the murderer is a foreigner or kin. On Euthyphro’s analysis, then, the concern for justice is tantamount to a concern for the divine law, and his tenacious determination to proceed with his cause remained resolute despite any resistance he confronted.
As was his wont, Socrates pleaded with Euthyphro to explain what righteousness and sacrilege are regarding murder and such, and to explain what piety’s and impiety’s unchanging and essential natures are. Socrates claimed to be ignorant of such things. Recall that his claims of ignorance were related to the sense in which he conceded that the Oracle of Delphi was right that Socrates was the wisest of all: Whereas he was just as ignorant as anyone else, he at least knew that he was ignorant, while others claimed not to be ignorant. In this way, Socrates knew one more thing than they. Socrates’s query leads to the heart of the dialogue.
At first it may seem that Socrates was simply asking for nothing more than a workable criterion by which to identify certain pious acts. This makes unsurprising Euthyphro’s first answer. He replied that piety means doing what he himself was doing (or as Zeus and Cronos had also done, as legend had it)—namely, prosecuting an unjust individual who had committed murder or sacrilege. This answer is not entirely off track, for definition by example (“ostension,” as it is called) is often a useful way of clarifying a concept. Particularly when a concept’s essential nature is difficult to identify or explicate, adducing relevant examples can help cultivate the habit of and develop facility at recognizing its instances. Ludwig Wittgenstein accentuated this point by reminding us that formal definition is only one way of elucidating a concept and, indeed, that sets of examples can sometimes work just as well. Socrates was notorious for needling his interlocutors for precise definitions of notoriously challenging ideas, but his own modus operandi of using mundane examples from life to clarify, illustrate, or otherwise signify various notions or concepts actually comports with Wittgenstein’s corrective.
Socrates clarified that he was after the distinctive characteristic that makes pious actions pious, leading to Euthyphro’s second formulation of a definition of piety: What is pleasing to the gods is pious, and what is not pleasing to the gods is impious (6E7–8). Socrates was more pleased with this answer, because it has the right form for an answer this time, and he set himself to the task of subjecting it to critical scrutiny. He began by distinguishing between factual and normative matters, arguing that whereas clear decision procedures can be found for adjudicating conflicts over matters of fact, no such procedures apply for normative matters. The former pertains to the way the world is; the latter, to how the world ought to be. Genuine disputes tend to arise over matters of the just and unjust, the good and bad, normative matters more so than factual ones.
Euthyphro allowed this point to go uncontested, but it is not clear that factual questions are always decisively answerable or that issues of morality are not. Conflicting eyewitness accounts of an event illustrate a situation in which no decision procedures are in place to resolve all such disputes. Acrimonious battles can and do arise in the realm of factual or empirical questions. Although moral questions sometimes generate heated contention, often they do not. The rich scope of moral consensus around the world and throughout history on a range of matters might lead us to expect that among, say, ideally rational, ethically imaginative, and epistemically privileged disputants, a great deal of moral convergence may result.
Still, suppose we grant Socrates’s point that the most contentious battles are bound to take place over normative questions. He then deployed this insight against Euthyphro’s second definition of piety. Euthyphro had already affirmed his faith in myths according to which the gods quarrel and battle. Thus, are not such conflicts likely to involve questions of normativity and justice? If so, then appealing to the dictates of the gods and to the objects of their love is sure to be an unreliable guide to the content of ethics. Their conflicts suggest that they disagree about piety and that the objects of their affections diverge. What the gods love cannot provide a stable source of ethical content if they do not all love the same thing.
At the heart of Socrates’s concern is the matter of arbitrariness. Rather than providing an objective standard, Euthyphro had introduced a relativistic element according to which the moral status of an action or attitude can vary depending on which god’s predilections and preferences have primacy. This recurring theme of the caprice of Euthyphro’s gods is arguably the unifying thread of the dialogue dramatically, philosophically, and practically.4 Socrates frankly stated that piety and impiety cannot be defined by appeal to the love of gods admitting of such disagreement (9C4–5). For purposes of continued discussion, Socrates let Euthyphro off the hook on this point, but it is likely that he thought the argument was already over.
This then led to Euthyphro’s third effort to define piety: The pious is what is loved by all the gods, and the impious is what is hated by all the gods. This sets to the side those actions about which the gods are ambivalent. This proposal elicited the famous “Euthyphro Dilemma” (ED): Do the gods love piety because it is pious or is it pious because they love it? The remaining portion of the dialogue finds Socrates considering piety and justice and arguing that justice is the broader category of which piety is just a subclass. This led to Euthyphro’s construal of religious practice as a kind of business transaction featuring capricious gods susceptible to men’s currying their favor. Socrates could not countenance such theology. In the Republic, Plato made clear that of the three dangerous doctrines of (1) atheism, (2) deities unconcerned with human affairs, and (3) deities bribed by sacrifices, the last is the most pernicious (379A–383C).
The Euthyphro Dilemma is of the utmost significance for present purposes because it is often taken to be a decisive refutation of any effort to ground morality in the supernatural realm. If theistic ethics thus fails, so does the moral argument, since the former is an essential element of the latter. The structure of the moral argument requires three pieces: a defense of moral realism, a sturdy critique of secular ethics, and a theistic ethic that provides a better account of moral truth and knowledge. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a protégé of Thomas Nagel and author of Plato at the Googleplex, has confidently written this about the ED:
Socrates proceeds to formulate a line of reasoning that will prove to be of fundamental importance in the history of secularism, one that will be adapted by freethinkers from Spinoza to Bertrand Russell to the so-called new atheists of today, persuasively arguing that a belief in the gods—or God—cannot provide the philosophical grounding for morality. . . . What is still referred to as “the Euthyphro Dilemma” or “the Euthyphro Argument” remains one of the most frequently utilized arguments against the claim that morality can be grounded only in theology, that it is only the belief in God that stands between us and the moral abyss of nihilism. Dostoevsky may have declared that “without God all is permissible,” but Plato’s preemptive riposte, sent out to us across the millennia, is that any act morally impermissible with God is morally impermissible without him, making clear how little the addition of God helps to clarify the ethical situation. The argument Plato has Socrates make in the Euthyphro is one of the most important in the history of moral philosophy. . . . We humans must reason our way to morality or we will not get there at all. Relying on fiats, even should they emanate from on high, will not allow us to achieve an understanding of virtue.5
Goldstein is right about the importance of the Dilemma, even if she ends up overstating or misconstruing its significance. Antony Flew once wrote that a good test of a person’s aptitude for philosophy is whether one can feel the Dilemma’s force and point. It has stood the test of time, posing a stiff challenge to various versions of theistic ethics. Neither of its horns offers an attractive option for most theists. Before laying out those two horns, let us make three observations about Goldstein’s analysis.
First, notice that, at one point at least, she casts Euthyphro’s position in terms of belief in God or the gods rather than the existential matter of God’s or the gods’ existence. Second, she seems to consider irrelevant any distinctions to be drawn between Euthyphro’s pantheon of fickle deities, on the one hand, and God understood as (say) the greatest possible being, on the other. Third, she smuggles into her analysis that Euthyphro’s position is that a theistic picture is the only or perhaps even the only possible workable account of moral foundations. All three of these points will be eventually addressed.
Regarding the distinction between polytheism and monotheism, Homer and Hesiod had fired the Greek imagination, populating it with an array of capricious and contentious gods. Interesting to note that, a few centuries after Plato, the apostle Paul would visit Athens. There, where Socrates had claimed ignorance, Paul argued at Mars Hill that the hour of ignorance was over because God had raised Jesus from the dead (anastasis). In a sort of epic clash of Hebraic and Hellenistic worldviews in Acts 17, Paul confidently distinguished between God and the gods (idols). We readily concede that Euthyphro’s gods are not an adequate foundation for morality, but the import of that concession may be quite different from what Goldstein infers.
Why do Goldstein and plenty of others think that the ED poses an intractable objection to theistic ethics? Because it provides two possibilities, neither of which bodes well for grounding morality in the divine. Either something is moral (just, pious, etc.) as a function of divine caprice, or what the gods identify as moral is already moral apart from God or the gods. If morality is a function of what the gods love, or what God commands, then morality is just arbitrary. So much the worse for theistic ethics! Rather, God at most clues us in about the content of morality that does not need a theistic foundation, but in that case God is rendered superfluous (save for performing an epistemic function). So, Goldstein concludes, the addition of God adds little to no clarity to the moral situation.
We will return to such Euthyphro-inspired objections later on, but for now let us identify another strand of Platonic thought that may point in a different direction.
The Platonic Man
Here we need to shift our attention to later Platonic dialogues, where the salient voice is more Plato’s than that of Socrates. Before leaving Socrates behind, though, something is worth noting. It is easy to come away from the Euthyphro thinking Socrates a religious skeptic, and of course he was skeptical of the Greek lore that Euthyphro believed. However, Socrates in fact saw himself as on a divine mission. Some early Christian apologists identified resonances between Socrates and Jesus, and others have noted the similar structure of Paul’s address at Mars Hill and that of Socrates in the Apology (another Socratic dialogue): dialogue, accusation, explanation. Socrates and Paul were both quite skeptical of the gods worshiped all around them.
In their introduction to the Apology, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns describe Socrates as a servant of divine power living in obedience to God.6 Throughout the dialogue Socrates expressed his submission to the will and command of God. Facing charges of impiety, he left the outcome in the hands of providence, recognizing that his highest goal was to serve God and search out his truth and commands. He saw his philosophical mission of teaching and exhortation as direct service to God.7
Let us turn now to his protégé Plato, especially some of his later work, where we see a most interesting development.8 Alfred North Whitehead once said that all of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato, and arguably the reasoning at the heart of the moral argument goes all the way back to Plato. As Plato increasingly found his own voice, he articulated a rather ambitious metaphysical picture. Plato argued that things have goodness insofar as they stand in some relation to the Good, which subsists in itself as an Idea, an abstract object endowed, however, with causal power to affect the world. What Plato has to say about Goodness is quite remarkable and prescient, especially in the Symposium and Republic. The Forms for Plato were these perfect archetypes, exemplars that provide the foundation for what we find in our physical world. For Plato, the Form of the Good was the most important Form of all—the foundation of all the other Forms for Plato, and is constitutive of ultimate reality, subsisting in itself and the ultimate standard in all evaluations of goodness.
Christian philosopher George Mavrodes wrote, “A Platonic man . . . who sets himself to live in accordance with the Good aligns himself with what is deepest and most basic in existence. . . . To put it another way, we might say that whatever values a Platonic world imposes on a man are values to which the Platonic world itself is committed, through and through.”9 Suffice it to say when one studies the history of the moral argument, thinker after thinker harks back to what Plato had to say about the Good. It is natural to ask what it suggests about ultimate reality if indeed moral truths are such deep truths about the universe.
Some contemporary Platonists think of morality as independently existing brute facts admitting of and requiring no further explanation, perhaps akin to mathematical facts. We will have occasion in a later chapter to consider such theories in more detail, but an interesting observation is that this script can be flipped. If, say, authoritative moral obligations exist, then they would be strange sorts of entities in a naturalistic world, as J. L. Mackie would later argue. In contrast, they would fit rather comfortably in a theistic world created and sustained by a loving Creator. This is the central import of the Mavrodes article just adduced, and Mavrodes is not alone in this regard. John Rist writes the following about Platonism:
Plato’s account of the “Forms” (including the Good) as moral exemplars leaves them in metaphysical limbo. They would exist as essentially intelligible ideas even if there were no mind, human or divine, to recognize them: as objects of thought, not mere constructs or concepts. But, as Augustine learned, and as the Greek Neoplatonists had asserted, the notion of an eternal object of thought (and thus for Plato a cause of thought) without a ceaseless thinking subject is unintelligible. Intelligible Forms, never proposed as mere concepts, cannot be proposed as Plato originally proposed them, as free-floating metaphysical items.10
Whether realism generally, and moral realism particularly, requires mind-independence is an important question. Moral realism is a topic we will take up in part 2 of this book, but for now we just introduce it as an important question to consider. If there are, say, moral truths that are invariant, necessary, universal, and the like, but depend on God’s mind, does that mean that moral realism is false, or rather that realism is consistent with mind-dependence after all, as long as the mind in question is God’s? That different answers to this question are possible accounts for why theistic ethics is sometimes described as realist and at other times as constructivist. We will argue that the former designation is the more apt.
The Philosopher
The third and last major figure we wish to discuss from ancient Greece is Aristotle, “the Philosopher,” as he was affectionately known. Socrates had taught Plato, and then Plato taught Aristotle. A common practice is to contrast the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. In ethics, for example, whereas Plato emphasized the Forms, Aristotle’s focus was on a life well lived. In Raphael’s famous fresco The School of Athens, the two most central figures are Plato and Aristotle. Plato is pointing upward while holding the Timaeus, which describes the causal influence of the eternal Forms. The younger Aristotle, in contrast, holds his arm and the book he is carrying horizontally; the book is his Nicomachean Ethics that describes the best earthly life for human beings. It was not that Aristotle did not believe in the Forms, but unlike Plato, who thought they were beyond us, Aristotle thought that they inhere in the substances we experience. This distinction has led no small number of later adherents to interpret Plato’s ethics in more transcendent terms, Aristotle’s in more immanent terms.
Aristotle himself was wont to characterize his ethical convictions as naturalistic. Whereas contemporary Platonists are inclined to point to nonnatural properties or relations, like abstract objects, most contemporary Aristotelian ethicists are more likely to point to naturalistic properties. Secular ethicists nowadays tend to choose one or the other: something like moral facts existing as brute facts that merely supervene on natural facts, or moral facts that are in some sense the same as natural properties. Speaking quite generally, the former is in the spirit of Plato, and the latter, in the spirit of Aristotle.
This makes Aristotle sound as though he were uninterested in religion. Larry Arnhart writes this: “Aristotle says so little about religion in the Nicomachean Ethics that one could easily infer that it contributes nothing essential to the ethical life of human beings.”11 The historical picture, however, is a fair bit messier than that. Aristotle’s naturalism was not contrasted with supernaturalism but with the artificial. Aristotle contrasted the merely human and the divine in humanity and also contrasted this human-divine element and the God who attracts us from outside the human sphere.12
Aristotle had a tendency to point to garden-variety “goods” that we experience in life—meaningful labor, friendship, and the like. Perhaps for such reasons, when asked what Aristotle thought was the highest good, many would think the right answer is this: fulfilling our telos and becoming people of reason and virtue. In truth, however, what Aristotle considered the highest good of all involved something quite transcendent indeed—namely, fellowship with the divine. Again, the “vertical” plays an important part in his approach.
Relatedly, Aristotle was inclined to cash out the notion of goodness by reference to the purpose of a thing. This is “goodness of a kind.” A knife’s goodness depends on the effectiveness with which it serves its purpose. Likewise with human beings; we, too, he thought, have a purpose and goal (or telos). How effectively do we serve our purpose? That will determine our goodness, he would say. This naturally raises an important question: What is our purpose? Much of the Judeo-Christian tradition would share with Aristotle a strong sense of human and moral teleology. For example, both Aristotelian and theistic ethicists would agree that a life of virtue fits our nature. As mentioned, for Aristotle the highest activity of which we are capable is contemplation of the divine.
This suggests that the comparison between Plato and Aristotle might be just as important as the contrast. At least this is the argument John Hare offers when discussing Raphael’s famous painting. Hare doesn’t consider the overall impression to be one of tension so much as harmony and collaboration, “each emphasizing a complementary and necessary part of the whole truth.” Hare writes, “It is as though they are together generating the forces (upward and inward) that keep the whole circle of thinkers rotating in their prescribed orbits.” On this view, the fresco is an expression of synthesis, which various thinkers have discussed through the centuries, including Egidio da Viterbo, who aimed to recast the Sentences of Peter Lombard according to the mind of Plato.13
Particularly relevant for present purposes is this primacy Aristotle assigned to teleology. We mentioned the purpose of a knife, but even better examples come from organic life. A plant, for example, reaches for the sun. Aristotle was a first-rate empirical researcher, but his observations of the physical world were not guided by a framework of inert bodies acted on by external forces. He saw the world as more dynamic than that. He was more the biologist and thought in terms of organisms, like plants. The material is alive, beginning with a seed or an embryo and then, if all goes to plan, developing until it reaches maturity and reproduces itself. As Ben Lipscomb puts it, “Everything in nature . . . is somewhere along an arc of self-directed development from immaturity to maturity to senescence to death.”14
This strong sense of teleology shaped Aristotle’s ethics. The ethical ideal for human life is to realize our natural potential, and the task of ethics is to describe this ideal. Having grasped the ideal, rational animals can direct themselves toward it. This is an interesting realist picture of the world and of ethics, one in which teleology plays a critical role. More mechanistic pictures of reality in the Western world would eventually resist such Aristotelian pictures, but a strongly teleological picture would resonate well with such classical theistic paradigms as Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
One more quick observation for now: If we think of a thing’s being good in terms of doing well what it was designed for, another crucial question seems to be this: Is what it was designed for good? Suppose you raise someone to be the ideal serial killer. He might end up a good serial killer, but that is hardly good. Of course, some might say this is consistent with Aristotle, because being a serial killer does not fit our nature, which is a useful reminder that answering certain ethical questions isn’t easy without giving serious thought to issues of anthropology—What is it that we are as human beings? This is something that must be borne in mind when one talks about, say, rival conceptions of the good. G. K. Chesterton is often quoted as saying that the word “good” has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, we should call him a good shot but not necessarily a good man.
This mention of goodness leads to an important point by way of a brief preview of coming attractions. In very general terms, a Platonist approach tends to speak of goodness simpliciter, or goodness per se. A more Aristotelian approach, again in most general terms, indexes goodness to particular things and speaks of what it means for, say, a person to be good or a tomato to be good. What it takes for a person to be good is closely related to what is good for a person. This rough distinction between Platonic and Aristotelian emphases regarding the good proves to be relevant as we later discuss objective moral values. Sometimes such discussions will gravitate toward treatment of thick ethical concepts like justice or holiness or moral goodness per se, while at other times they will move in the direction of asking what is good for human beings—like friendship or meaningful work. Both sets of questions strike us as eminently important and worthwhile, and, in the spirit of seeing Raphael’s fresco as an expression of synthesis, we will push for a rapprochement of both concerns. For example, following Robert Adams, we will be inclined to adopt and defend the view that what is good for us as human beings is also what is good in and of itself.
Finally, questions concerning moral goodness (and moral values generally) are axiological questions. Questions about moral duties or obligations are called deontic questions. Rightness and wrongness pertain to the deontic matter of moral duties and are called substantive ethical questions, but so are issues concerning virtue and vice.15 Aristotle had a good deal to say about virtue theory. To his thinking, the virtues are achieved through practice as people are appropriately moderate, hitting the golden mean between extremes of excess and deficiency. A virtue like courage, for example, avoids both rashness and cowardice. This means that moral errors come in pairs, on his view. There are other theories of virtue, but we mention them here at the end of discussing Aristotle because theistic ethics, besides discussing goodness and rightness, also tends to say quite a bit about issues of virtue.
Moreover, what ethical frameworks have to say on these various matters are not necessarily at odds, because it may be that these varied dimensions of morality concern different matters. This is not to suggest that they are not related; surely they are. Nevertheless, a theory of moral duties that appeals, say, to God’s will or nature or commands or desires need not be in tension with a strong emphasis on the virtues as well. Developing a virtuous character may, as C. Stephen Evans puts it, be the purpose of the moral life: a transformation of character that enables people to love what is appropriate to love and hate what ought to be hated. The role played by a theory of virtue is likely different from the role played by a theory of the good or a theory of the right. In light of the importance of the quality of moral character, surely there should be ample room for a substantive theory of the virtues.
Overview of Chapter 1
We have intentionally limited our focus in this first chapter on the history of the moral argument to three snapshots from ancient Greece, roughly corresponding to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. First we looked at the Euthyphro Dilemma that arose in an early Platonic dialogue, Euthyphro, that is usually associated with Socrates’s own views. There Socrates challenged Euthyphro’s attempt to ground the pious or just in the loves of the gods. Put in contemporary terms, the Dilemma might ask if something is moral because God commands it or if God commands something because it is moral. Both horns are thought problematic for the theistic ethicist, which does not bode well for the moral argument for God’s existence. One horn suggests that morality is arbitrary; the other, that God is irrelevant to what is moral.
The “Platonic Man,” as George Mavrodes calls him, follows Plato in thinking that whatever values a Platonic world imposes on a man are values to which the Platonic world itself is committed, through and through. Moral truths are an ineliminable feature of such a world, and they possess authoritative power. Contemporary followers of Plato tend to believe in moral realities as brute facts that exist without any need for further explanation.
Aristotle is often contrasted with Plato because of his this-worldly empirical emphasis, but we argued that the comparison and complementarity with Plato is just as important as, if not more important than, the differences. In particular, Aristotle’s strong teleological emphasis would prove to be quite congenial to robustly supernaturalist pictures of the world. Even so, most contemporary Aristotelians have accorded less importance to the theistic elements in his moral system while retaining his emphasis on normative behaviors that somehow fit our nature. A prospect we find especially exciting is effecting a synthesis of aspects of Platonic and Aristotelian thought about ethics in particular.
1 Roslyn Weiss, “Euthyphro’s Failure,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 24 (1986): 438.
2 Peter Geach, “Plato’s ‘Euthyphro’: An Analysis and Commentary,” Monist 50 (1966): 370.
3 See R. G. Hoerber, “Plato’s ‘Euthyphro,’” Phronesis 3 (1958): 97–98.
4 See Weiss, “Euthyphro’s Failure,” 437.
5 Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away (Pantheon, 2014), 306–7.
6 Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., Plato: The Collected Dialogues (Princeton University Press, 1961), 3. The tenth book of Plato’s Laws has also proven to be important to aspects of moral apologetics discussed in A. E. Taylor, Clement Webb, and others, as we will see.
7 See, for example, 19a, 23b, 28e, 29d, 30a, 30d, 31d, 33c, and 42a. C. Stephen Evans points out that Socrates seemed to have thought of moral obligations, like his own duty to fulfill his divine mission, much as contemporaries do: Their four salient features are that they (1) provide a verdict on our actions, (2) bring reflection to closure, (3) involve accountability or responsibility, and (4) hold for persons as persons. See C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (Oxford University Press, 2013), 12–15. Elizabeth Anscombe argued that the notion of moral obligations as law-like verdicts on our actions was a result of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which certainly has wielded a formidable influence on ethical thought in the Western world. What Evans points out challenges this view, though, showing that moral obligations have a longer history, however much Christianity may have accentuated their importance. Perhaps what John Henry Newman cast as the amplifying role of special revelation is what is at play here: Special revelation extends and augments the truths that natural religion had already hinted at.
8 By the way, starting a discussion of ethics with Socrates and Plato would appall Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche had something of a love/hate relationship with Socrates, but at least generally speaking, especially in his Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche made clear that he saw Socrates and Plato as much more Apollonian figures than Dionysian, and Nietzsche himself gravitated more toward the Dionysian. Apollo represents beauty and structure and order and the notion that knowledge can solve all the world’s problems. Dionysus, the other art god of the Greek world, represents wildness and disorder and chaos—and the way the world in many ways is outside our grasp, unable to be made full sense of or categorized in a neat and orderly way. Reality isn’t rational; it’s actually irremediably tragic, and only art can enable us to face this and still emerge victorious. Nietzsche knew that Socrates and Plato are perceived as coming out on top, but he lamented this and in certain ways saw Socrates as the villain.
9 George Mavrodes, “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” in Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 2nd ed., ed. Louis P. Pojman (Wadsworth, 1995), 587.
10 John M. Rist, Real Ethics: Rethinking the Foundations of Morality (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 40. Alvin Plantinga echoes a similar but even more expansive sentiment in his famous APA Presidential Address “How to Be an Anti-Realist,” concluding in this way: “The thesis, then, is that truth cannot be independent of noetic activity on the part of persons. The antithesis is that it must be independent of our noetic activity. And the synthesis is that truth is independent of our intellectual activity but not of God’s.” See Alvin Plantinga, “How to Be an Anti-Realist,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 56, no. 1 (September 1982): 52. The potential rapprochement of Platonism and theism is also showcased in Robert Adams’s seminal Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford University Press, 1999).
11 Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (State University of New York Press, 1998), 251.
12 John E. Hare, God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 67.
13 Hare, God and Morality, 8–9. Hare goes on to argue that excising the theistic elements from Aristotle’s ethics, as many contemporary ethicists attempt to do, invariably changes the substance of the ethical content.
14 Benjamin Lipscomb, The Women Are Up to Something (Oxford University Press, 2022), 10.
15 Deontic questions, in addition to pertaining to moral obligation, also include treatments of moral forbiddenness and permissibility. Our focus will be moral obligations.