What Is the Euthyphro Dilemma?

What Is the Dilemma?

The Euthyphro dilemma is a challenge to divine command theory—the view that moral rightness and wrongness depend on God's commands. The dilemma asks: is an action right because God commands it, or does God command it because it's right? The two options are the two horns of the dilemma, and each threatens a different aspect of divine command theory. The dilemma is named for Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, in which Socrates presses the question on Euthyphro, and it's one of the oldest and most influential challenges in philosophy of religion.

The dilemma's force comes from the way the two horns squeeze the divine command theorist. If you take the first horn—actions are right because God commands them—then morality seems arbitrary: God could have commanded cruelty, and it would be right. The goodness of mercy and the wrongness of murder would be products of divine fiat, not reasons God responds to. If you take the second horn—God commands actions because they're right—then morality is independent of God, and God isn't the source of moral value but only its recognizer. God becomes a messenger, not the ground. Either way, the claim that morality depends on God looks threatened. The IEP entry on divine command theory treats the dilemma as the central challenge to the view.

The Platonic Origin

The dilemma appears in Plato's Euthyphro, a short dialogue in which Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the courthouse and asks him about his prosecution of his father for murder. Euthyphro claims to know what piety is, and Socrates presses him for a definition. Euthyphro offers that piety is what the gods love. Socrates then asks the famous question: is the pious loved by the gods because it's pious, or is it pious because it's loved by the gods? The dilemma is born.

Plato's version involves the Greek gods, who disagreed among themselves, which complicates the discussion. The modern version, applied to the God of classical theism, drops the disagreement but keeps the structure: is the good good because God wills it, or does God will it because it's good? The modern version is sharper because the God of classical theism is supposed to be perfectly good, which makes the arbitrariness worry more pressing and the independence worry more theologically troubling. The dilemma has been discussed for 2400 years and shows no sign of being settled.

The First Horn: Arbitrariness

The first horn holds that actions are right because God commands them. The consequence is arbitrariness: if God had commanded murder and forbidden mercy, murder would be right and mercy wrong. The goodness of love and the badness of cruelty would be products of divine fiat, not reasons God recognizes. This seems to undermine the praise we give God for being good—God isn't good in the sense of responding to moral reasons, but only in the sense of being the source of them. And it makes moral knowledge dependent on revelation: we'd have to know what God commands to know what's right, which would make morality inaccessible to those without revelation.

Divine command theorists have tried to blunt the arbitrariness worry. The most common move is to say that God's commands aren't arbitrary because they express God's nature, which is essentially good. God couldn't command cruelty, because cruelty is contrary to God's character. This is the "modified divine command theory" developed by Robert Adams and others. The modification softens the arbitrariness, but it risks sliding into the second horn: if God commands what's good because God's nature is good, then goodness seems to be independent of God's commands, grounded in God's character, which raises the question of whether God's character is good by an independent standard.

The Second Horn: Independence

The second horn holds that God commands actions because they're right. The consequence is independence: morality is prior to God's commands, and God recognizes rather than constitutes moral value. God is the messenger of morality, not its source. This threatens the claim that morality depends on God, which is what divine command theory wanted to establish. If the good is independent of God, then the moral argument for God (which moves from moral value to a divine ground) is weakened, and God's goodness becomes a matter of God's conformity to a standard God didn't set.

The independence horn is uncomfortable for theists who want to say that God is the source of all value, including moral value. It makes morality a constraint on God, or a feature of reality that God discovers rather than creates. Some theists accept this and argue that moral truths are necessary truths, like logical truths, and that God, as a rational being, recognizes them. This "God as recognizer" view is compatible with theism but gives up the strong claim that morality depends on God. Other theists try to find a middle path that avoids both horns.

The Middle Path: God's Nature as the Good

The main theistic reply is to locate the good in God's nature rather than in God's commands or in an external standard. On this view, God's commands express God's character, which is essentially good; goodness is constituted by God's nature, not commanded by God externally or recognized by God as independent. Robert Adams's modified divine command theory develops this: moral wrongness is the property of being contrary to the commands of a loving God, and God's commands are loving because God is essentially loving. The commands aren't arbitrary (they express God's nature), and the good isn't independent of God (it's grounded in God's character).

This middle path has its own difficulties. The critic can ask whether God's nature is good by an independent standard. If God's nature is good because it conforms to the good, then the good is independent and we're on the second horn. If God's nature is good simply because it's God's nature, then "good" seems to mean "God-like," which makes the claim "God is good" trivial ("God is God-like"). The theist's reply is that "good" picks out a property that's constituted by God's nature, not defined as conformity to an external standard—the good is what God is, and the question "is God's nature good?" is like asking "is a meter stick one meter long?" The reply is sophisticated, and philosophers continue to debate whether it fully escapes the dilemma. The IEP entry treats it as the most promising contemporary reply, with remaining difficulties.

Why It Matters

The Euthyphro dilemma matters because it structures the debate between theism and moral realism. If you think moral value is objective, you have to decide whether it depends on God or stands on its own. The dilemma makes the question visible and forces both sides to clarify. Theists who hold divine command theory face the dilemma directly; theists who hold that morality is grounded in God's nature face a modified version; naturalists who hold moral realism face the question of what grounds moral value if not God. The dilemma is, in effect, a map of the options.

The dilemma also matters because it connects the philosophy of religion to metaethics. Questions about whether moral value is objective, what grounds it, and how we know it are central to contemporary philosophy, and the Euthyphro dilemma is one of the oldest ways of pressing them. Working through the dilemma is a good way to see what's at stake in metaethics, because the options are made vivid. The IEP and SEP entries treat it as a foundational challenge that any divine command theorist must address.

Sources

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Divine Command Theory" — https://iep.utm.edu/divine-command-theory/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Philosophy of Religion" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-religion/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Moral Arguments for the Existence of God" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-arguments-god/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Aquinas" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/

Related Topics

• What Is the Moral Argument for God? — the argument the dilemma challenges.
• What Is the Problem of Evil? — the value-based challenge.
• What Is a Theodicy? — the project of justifying God.
• What Is Divine Hiddenness? — a related challenge to God's goodness.
• Philosophy of God — the wider framework.