An Alternative to the Divine Command Theory
The Euthyphro dilemma has been mentioned a few times already on this blog, but I’ll summarize it once more for those who don’t remember. The basic question is this: Are morally good acts commanded by God because they are good, or are they good because they are commanded by God? It is a dilemma because neither option looks very attractive to the theist. If God commands acts because they are already good, then morality is something that exists independently from God to which even he is accountable. If they are good because God commands them, then they seem arbitrary, and he could, for example, command the torturing of children for fun and it would become good. (Feel free to substitute “willed by” for “commanded by” if you prefer…the same problem remains).
The typical Christian response, although usually claiming to be a third route, is to say that good acts are good because they are rooted in God’s will, but that this isn’t bad or arbitrary because God’s benevolent nature is such that he would not command anything like the torturing of children for fun. This is a form of divine command theory, or theological voluntarism. On this view, a moral duty just is something that is commanded or willed by God. When we use the word “right,” we are referring to “a thing that is (or would be) commanded by a good God.” (For more detail on this, see R.M. Adams - A New Divine Command Theory).
This is about the only response that you will see given by evangelical theologians and philosophers, but my eyes were opened the other day to the alternative approach, one advocated by my teacher David McNaughton, and Richard Swinburne. On this view, there are a few necessary and a priori knowable moral truths, such as ‘cruelty is wrong’ and ‘gratitude is due to benefactors’, to which even God is bound, much the way he is bound by mathematical and logical truths. He therefore cannot make it true that the torturing of children for fun is right (since it is cruel) anymore than he can make it true that 2+2=5 or create a square circle. On this view, moral duties such as not being cruel or showing gratitude are good in and of themselves, necessarily. On the other hand, some of the other things that are commanded by God, such as the dietary laws of the Old Testament, or duties such as tithing, are not moral duties in and of themselves, but they are moral duties for us because God has commanded them and we stand to him in the relationship of someone who receives blessings to a benefactor and we therefore have a moral duty to follow his commands. This is similar to the father who asks something of his son. What the father asks the son to do may not be a moral duty in itself, but it is a duty for the son to show gratitude and respect to his father by doing things he asks (assuming of course that the father has been a good father in general and is not asking for something that contradicts another moral duty the son is bound to…for a helpful discussion of these sorts of situations, see Ross’ distinction between prima facie duties and duties proper in the excerpt What Makes Right Acts Right?)
As I said, I am new to this view so I may have not expressed it very clearly, but hopefully you can get the general idea. This is definitely an area I want to do more serious thinking about, and I welcome any comments.