The Euthyphro Dilemma: Is Good Whatever God Commands?

The Euthyphro dilemma is the question Socrates put to Euthyphro: is the holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because the gods love it? Asked of the God of Scripture, it becomes the question whether something is good because God commands it, or God commands it because it is good. The classical Christian answer takes neither horn: God's own nature is the standard of goodness, and His commands express that nature. Below we set out the dilemma at its strongest, the best Christian answers and where they strain, and why the dilemma dissolves once we ask what "good" means when it is said of God, a question that sits at the center of the attributes of God.

Key takeaways

• The Euthyphro dilemma offers two horns. Either goodness is whatever God commands, which seems arbitrary, or God commands by a standard outside Himself.
• The classical answer takes neither horn. Augustine, Aquinas and William Lane Craig make God's nature the standard of goodness and His commands its expression.
• Two objections remain. Critics say it only pushes the dilemma back, and that it empties "God is good" of meaning.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) answers both. Where pure voluntarism makes goodness a decree and Platonist realism a law above God, FICT shows that both horns use "good" in one sense of God and of creatures.
• Goodness and obligation differ. God's nature grounds what is good, and His revealed commands bind the creature.

What is the Euthyphro dilemma?

The Euthyphro dilemma asks whether the good is good because God wills it, or willed because it is good, and it takes its name from Plato's dialogue Euthyphro. Its title character is a confident religious expert who has come to court on an unusual errand. Asked whom he is prosecuting, he answers, "My father." Asked the charge, he says, "Of murder, Socrates." He is sure the gods approve. Socrates, who claims he wants to learn what piety is, asks him to define it, and Euthyphro's first serious answer is this: "Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them."

Socrates then asks the question that has outlived the dialogue. In Benjamin Jowett's translation, he wants to know "whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods." Either the gods' love makes a thing holy, or the gods love what is already holy for reasons of its own.

Put to a single God who commands, the question takes its modern form. Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy states it the same way: "Does God command this particular action because it is morally right, or is it morally right because God commands it?"

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Each answer is a horn, and each has a cost. If an act is right because God commands it, goodness looks like whatever God happens to decree. This is the view usually called voluntarism, and the dilemma is most often aimed at divine command theory, the family of views that ground moral duty in God's will. If God commands an act because it is right, rightness seems to stand on its own, and God becomes a reporter of a moral order He did not make.

If the Euthyphro dilemma holds, morality cannot be grounded in God at all, and the moral argument for God's existence loses its premise before it begins. Any serious account of God's goodness has to face the Euthyphro dilemma for that reason.

The Euthyphro dilemma at its strongest

The dilemma's most famous modern statement comes from Bertrand Russell's 1927 lecture "Why I Am Not a Christian." Russell presses both horns at once:

"if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for God Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat"

Russell's conclusion is that right and wrong are then "in their essence logically anterior to God."

On this argument the first horn fails twice. The first failure is arbitrariness. William Lane Craig, who rejects the dilemma, states the worry as sharply as any critic: "God could have willed that hatred is good; then we would be morally obligated to hate one another, which seems crazy." Some moral truths look necessary, and a morality resting on decree makes them contingent.

The second failure is emptiness. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports the objection that such a view "makes it impossible to say that, in any substantive sense, God is good." If good means commanded by God, praising God for His goodness praises Him for obeying Himself.

The second horn fails for a different reason. If God commands what is good by a standard independent of Him, then, in the encyclopedia's words, "God is not the source of ethics and is subject to an external moral law." A Christian who holds that God exists from Himself alone, owing His being to nothing outside Him, cannot accept a moral law that God did not ground and must consult. That would cost the doctrine of aseity.

Many Christian philosophers answer that the dilemma is false, because God's own nature is the standard. The strongest critics anticipate that reply. They ask whether God's nature is good because it is God's, in which case the first horn returns, or because it meets some measure of goodness, in which case the second does. The IEP puts the worry in one line: "it seems that it is arbitrary to take a particular individual as the standard of goodness." This is the form of Euthyphro's dilemma that any answer must meet. A reply that stops at "God's nature" has only named the place where the question will be asked again.

How do Christians answer the Euthyphro dilemma?

Christian philosophers have given two main answers, and both deny that the two horns exhaust the options. The older answer, that God's own nature is the standard of goodness, is still the stronger.

The classical answer says that God neither obeys a standard nor invents one. He is the standard. Katherin Rogers, summarizing Anselm, Augustine and Aquinas, puts it in a sentence that Wikipedia's survey quotes: "God neither conforms to nor invents the moral order." Anselm's account of God as the greatest conceivable being is weighed in Volume One.

Aquinas gives the thesis its classical statement. In the Summa Theologiae he writes that "God alone is good essentially. For everything is called good according to its perfection." Creatures have goodness, but God is goodness, and everything else "is therefore called good from the divine goodness, as from the first exemplary" principle of all goodness. On this Thomist view, finite goods are good by reference to God, and the reference never runs the other way.

Scripture joins God's goodness and His commands without letting either swallow the other. The psalmist prays:

"You are good, and what you do is good; teach me your decrees." (Psalm 119:68, NIV)

He asks for the decrees because the One who gives them is good. The holiness code of Leviticus grounds its commands in God's own character, and Peter carries the pattern into the church:

"But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: 'Be holy, because I am holy.'" (1 Peter 1:15-16, NIV)

The command does not create the holiness, and it does not answer to a holiness beyond God. It calls the creature to resemble the One who commands.

William Lane Craig gives the classical answer its modern form. "I think it is clearly a false dilemma," he says, because there is a third option: "God wills something because he is good. That is to say, God himself is the paradigm of goodness, and his will reflects his character." It follows that "God's commands to us are not arbitrary, but neither are they based upon something independent of God." The commands, Craig adds, "constitute our moral obligations and prohibitions."

To the regress charge he replies, with William Alston, that explanation has to end somewhere: "When you get to God you have reached the moral stopping point."

The second answer, modified divine command theory, keeps a qualified form of the first horn. Robert Adams holds that "the property being wrong is identical to the property being contrary to the commands of (a loving) God," while goodness is rooted, as the IEP summarizes him, "in the unchanging omnibenevolent nature of God." C. Stephen Evans narrows the theory further. As Terence Cuneo's review of Evans's 2013 book on divine commands and moral obligation in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews explains, the theory is "a thesis about not the nature of moral goodness, reasons, virtues, or rights, but only moral obligation." On Evans's account, goods supply reasons and commands supply duties.

Both answers succeed on the main points. Neither makes goodness arbitrary, and neither sets a law above God. Each also strains.

The classical answer, as usually defended, meets the regress charge by naming a stopping point, and to the critic a stopping point chosen by the theist looks like the "particular individual" the IEP complained of. It meets the emptiness charge only in part. Alston rejected the view that "to say that God is morally good is just to say that he obeys his own commands," but a reply that calls God good because God is the standard of good can sound circular. And it meets the hardest question, whether God could have commanded hatred, with the bare reply that He would not.

The modified theorists see something the classical answer often blurs: goodness and duty are distinct. Their split raises its own question, though. How are the two related, if not by one word said twice?

The classical answer is right. What its defenders have rarely shown is why the regress charge misdescribes God in the first place.

Volume Two, Resolving the Problem of Evil, makes the full case for God's goodness against its strongest critics.

How Frame-Indexed Classical Theism dissolves the Euthyphro dilemma

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error: one term carried across two frames as though it meant the same thing in each. Pure voluntarism makes the good whatever God decrees. Platonist realism makes it a law God reads. The classical nature answer and modified divine command theory both refuse those horns, and FICT agrees with them, then shows why the horns of the Euthyphro dilemma were never the only options.

Look at what both horns assume. Each treats "good" as one predicate, said in the same sense of God and of the things God commands, and then asks which way the dependence runs. Does God's will stand over the good, or the good over God's will? The picture is of two items on one level, God and goodness, and the only question is which leans on which. But a being's nature fixes how it perceives, and God's nature and ours differ in kind, as the series' opening chapters argue. Value terms are exactly the terms that do not carry unchanged between Creator and creature. Said of God and said of a creature, "good" is used in two senses, and the dilemma works only by using it in one sense.

Said of God, good names what He is, not a rule He meets. Volume Two states it directly: "God does not consult an external moral standard; He is the standard." Morality in its absolute sense is "a perfect, eternal expression of His own immutable nature." The psalmist says the same of God's rule:

"Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; love and faithfulness go before you." (Psalm 89:14, NIV)

There is no gap between God's will and God's goodness for a dilemma to open. By divine simplicity, His will is not a second thing beside His nature.

Said of us, good names something real but derived. Volume Two describes finite goodness as the capacity to make genuine choices "that align with God's revealed moral law," and calls our good acts "real and commendable within our creaturely context." Finite creatures cannot read God's nature directly, so God speaks it. Through the Law, the Prophets and supremely Christ, the book says, God "translates His absolute moral nature into principles and commands that are intelligible within our finite frame." His commands are His goodness, put into terms a creature can obey. James says where every good comes from:

"Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows." (James 1:17, NIV)

With the two senses kept apart, neither horn holds. The commands are not arbitrary, because they translate a nature and not a preference. Nor is there a standard above God, because in God's own frame the standard is God. Is something good because God commands it? In our frame an act is required of us because God commands it, and what He commands is good because it expresses who He is.

The regress charge fails for the same reason. "A particular individual" taken as "the standard of goodness" is the creaturely picture: one being among many, measured against a type it happens to fit. God is not one more good thing awaiting measurement. He is the ground of being from which every finite good takes its measure, and He has His goodness from no one. To ask whether His nature is good because it measures up is to ask for a measure in the one place where there is nothing further to measure by. That is not a stipulated stopping point. It is what "good" means when it is said of the Creator.

The counterfactual dissolves as well. "Could God have commanded hatred?" asks what goodness would be if God's nature were otherwise. Yet the finite goods we imagine changing exist only as expressions of that nature. Had God not created, there would be no finite goods to differ, and in any creation He made they would express the same nature. The question has no answer because it has no subject.

Then emptiness. "God is good" does not mean that God obeys His own commands. It means that He is the Good every finite good comes from, and that is no tautology, because we learn what goodness is from His gifts before we learn whose gifts they are. The modified divine command theorists Adams and Evans were right that goodness and obligation differ, where pure voluntarism folds the two into one decree. Volume Two keeps both: God's nature grounds the good, and His revealed commands bind the creature. The statement of FICT sets the position out in one place.

Volume One shows the same method at work on freedom and sovereignty, and it is free to download.

Has this answer to the Euthyphro dilemma been tested?

We have run thousands of simulated attacks against Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, drawn from academic and peer-reviewed sources. The two below bear directly on the Euthyphro dilemma. One comes from modified divine command theory and the other from Calvinist compatibilism, and each presses the nature answer at a point its usual defenders seldom reach.

Does grounding morality in God's nature blur goodness and duty?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

C. Stephen Evans, in his 2013 account of divine command theory, separates two kinds of moral fact. Goodness is grounded in God's nature and gives us reasons. Obligation, what is actually required of a particular creature, is constituted by God's commands. As Cuneo reconstructs the view, no good or evil "generates moral obligations apart from God's commands."

The attack turns this on Volume Two. The book says that "An action, thought, or motive is either in perfect alignment with His holy character or it is not," and that what falls short is imperfection. If that perfect standard is the one that binds creatures, every finite good act becomes a moral failure, since no creature's act matches God's perfection. The book would then have confused the ground of goodness with the source of duty.

The defense is that the book already draws Evans's line. The perfect-alignment test is stated explicitly from God's own vantage, and it judges goodness, not duty.

Creaturely obligation comes another way: God "translates His absolute moral nature into principles and commands that are intelligible within our finite frame." Elsewhere the book says God is "under no ontological obligation … to compel or demand the perfect and consistent enactment of finite good as if it were Absolute Goodness," and that "Both perspectives, God's absolute assessment and humanity's finite experience, are true within their respective frames." The relative morality the book calls imperfection is self-made, a choice that is "good for me" or "acceptable in our culture," not a duty God has given. The split between the ground of goodness and the source of obligation is already in the book's structure, and it is the same split that dissolves the dilemma.

If God is praised though He cannot do evil, must anyone else be able to?

Here's one of those attacks and how the Many Beings framework would address it.

Guillaume Bignon's argument starts from the very answer the dilemma pushes Christians toward. If God's nature is the standard of good, God cannot act against it. As Aku Visala summarizes Bignon in the Journal of Analytic Theology, "Christians believe that God is morally perfect and praiseworthy but at the same time He lacks the categorical ability to do otherwise." Bignon concludes that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise.

The attack applies this to Volume Two's account of heaven. The book holds that the glorified saints keep a real capacity for disobedience, because "The glorified believers are not automata; they are morally serious agents." God has no such capacity and is no automaton, so the reason seems to fail.

The defense is that the attack carries terms from God to creatures unchanged. "Praiseworthy" and "morally serious" are terms of agency and value, the very kind whose meaning depends on the nature of the one they describe. God's inability to sin is the necessity of a nature that is Goodness itself. A creature's goodness is received and sustained: "Only God is Absolute Goodness Itself; the saints' agency is participated and sustained by God's sovereignty."

What holds of the One whose nature is the Good does not transfer to a finite will answering to a Good it is not. The book keeps impeccability by nature for God alone, which is why God cannot sin while the saints freely keep righteousness. The same distinction answers Euthyphro's dilemma, since God's goodness is not a larger case of ours.

Each volume of the series tests its own dilemma the same way.

Frequently asked questions

Who came up with the Euthyphro dilemma?

Plato did. The question comes from his dialogue Euthyphro, in which Socrates asks Euthyphro whether the holy is loved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because the gods love it. Euthyphro had defined piety as what is dear to the gods. Later philosophers, Bertrand Russell among them, recast the question for monotheism as one about God's commands and the good.

What are the two horns of the Euthyphro dilemma?

The first horn says an act is good because God commands it, which seems to make morality arbitrary and the praise of God's goodness empty. The second says God commands an act because it is good, which seems to make goodness a standard independent of God. The dilemma claims every theist must take one of the two.

Is the Euthyphro dilemma a false dilemma?

Many Christian philosophers say yes. William Lane Craig argues that "the alternatives are not of the form 'A or not-A'," so a third option is open: God wills the good because He is good, and His nature is the standard. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism sides with that classical answer against pure voluntarism and Platonist realism, and adds why it works: "good" is said in two senses of God and of creatures.

Is something good because God commands it?

Not in the sense the first horn of the Euthyphro dilemma means. God's commands do make acts obligatory for us, so an act is our duty because God has commanded it. But what He commands is good because it expresses His nature, not because the command creates its goodness. Goodness is grounded in who God is, and obligation in what He has revealed.

Could God command something evil?

No. God's commands express His nature, and God does not act against His nature. As Craig puts it, "he could not have willed that, for example, hatred be good." The question also assumes a goodness that could vary while God stays the same. The finite goods it imagines exist only as expressions of His nature, so there is no world in which His commands and goodness part ways. The same reasoning explains why the omnipotent God cannot sin.

Where to go from here

The Euthyphro dilemma has lasted because it hides its assumption in its grammar. "Good" sits in the question as though it meant one thing wherever it went. Let it mean what it means of God and what it means of us, and the two horns turn out to be two half-truths. Our duties do come from God's commands, and those commands answer to the goodness that God is. Two questions follow. Whether morality points to God at all is the work of the moral argument, and what it means to call God all good is the question of omnibenevolence.

Volume One sets out the method from first premises, and it is yours free. The series carries it into evil, time and change.