Divine Command Theory And Morality
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Submitted by aiosj000 on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
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Divine Command Theory And Morality
The Divine Command Theory and Morality.
Socrates: “Euthyphero, you think that you have such an accurate knowledge of things divine, and what is holy and unholy, that […] you can [prosecute] your own father?”
Euthyphero: “Why, Socrates, if I did not have an accurate knowledge of all that, I should be good for nothing”.
Thus begins Plato’s “Euthyphero”, a philosophical examination of the relationship between morality and religion – a dilemma that haunts us to this day.
Euthyphero, a young and prominent lawyer is rushing off to court, in order to prosecute his father for the murder of a slave. Sincere, proud and confident in his own righteousness, he is confronted by a question that still hasn’t lost its controversy: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”
This question brilliantly crystallizes the two main perceptions of morality: the autonomy of ethics position (“the pious [is] loved by the gods because it is pious”) and the divine command theory (“[it is] pious because it is loved by the gods”). And it is the plausibility of latter theory that I will attempt to examine.
Though there are several variations of the divine command theory, its basic principle is that all moral (or good) actions correspond to God’s will. Similarly what God forbids is morally wrong (or evil). In essence, something is morally right only if and when God commands it to be. This is explained by the common idea that God is the creator of everything, including goodness, meaning that before God, the concept of good and evil did not exist.
In order to fully understand this concept however, we must attempt to dissect it and review its every element individually.
The first word, “divine”, suggests that the theory is a manifestation of some Superior Being, making his commands indisputable. But in order for that argument to work, we...
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