The Euthyphro Dilemma: Is Something Good Because God Wills It, or Does God Will It Because It Is Good?

Jane Orton
Jul 21
5 min read

Updated: Oct 27

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In this post, discover Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma and the story of Abraham and Isaac and find out what this tells us about the attributes of God - part one of our Good and Evil series!

*Plato, from Raphael's School of Athens*

In Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, he considers the question, “Is something good because god wills it, or does god will it because it is good?” Plato is writing in The fifth century B.C. in the context of Ancient Greek pagan religion, but philosophers of religion and theologians of monotheistic religion today are still debating the question.

In Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma, there are two “horns” to consider. The first assumes that God is the source and standard of moral goodness (so whatever God commands will automatically be good). The second assumes that God’s commands are good because they conform to an external source of moral goodness.

According to Plato’s own theory of Forms, set out in passages like the Allegory of the Sun in Plato’s Republic, “good” is objective and discoverable by reason. This means that objective morality does not need God.

The Story of Abraham and Isaac

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, reactions to the story of Abraham and Isaac is a good illustration of this debate. In the story, God asks Abraham to take his son Isaac to a mountain and sacrifice him there as a burnt offering.

This was an incredible thing to ask, particularly as God had promised Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation. The fact that Isaac had been born at all seemed like a miracle, since his mother Sarah was ninety when he was born, and Abraham was 100. Sarah initially doubted that God’s promise. would come true because of her age. Why would God ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac after all that?

Nonetheless, Abraham takes Isaac to the mountain and places him on an altar on the wood for the burnt offering. Just as he is about to slay his son, Abraham hears a voice commanding him to stop. Instead of sacrificing Isaac, he sacrifices a ram that is caught in one of the bushes. God is pleased that Abraham was willing to go through with his initial command and blesses him for his obedience.

Luther and Divine Command Theory

One response to the story is that Abraham was right to follow God’s command. Writing in the sixteenth century, Martin Luther praised Abraham for his uncritical obedience in his lectures on the Book of Genesis.

The idea that God’s authority takes precedence over human reason and morality is known as Divine Command Theory. Many people struggle with the idea because it seems like humans are subject to the arbitrary whims of an all-powerful God.

Actually, Luther sees this as a safeguard against imitating the actions of men. He points out that “it is plainly dangerous to take the acts of the fathers as models. As individuals differ, so also do their duties differ, and God requires diverse works according to the diversity of our calling…Abraham was commanded to slay his son. Afterward his descendants most wickedly believed they should follow his example, and they filled the earth with innocent blood.”

Luther thinks that it is a mistake is to establish practices without the Word of God: “…we must look, not upon the works, but upon the faith of individuals…Follow Abraham, not in slaying your son, but in believing the promises of God, and in obeying his commandments.”

Kant’s Deontological Approach

Writing in the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant argued that Abraham did the wring thing. Like Divine Command Theory, Kant’s own ethical theory was deontological: he thought that we are duty-bound to follow certain moral rules. However, unlike Divine Command Theory, Kant argued in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, that morality comes from reason.

In his Conflict of the Faculties, Kant points out the dangers of thinking that God is giving us a direct command, saying: “. . . if God should really speak to man, man could still never know that it was God speaking. It is quite impossible for man to apprehend the infinite by his senses, distinguish it from sensible beings, and recognize it as such. But in some cases man can be sure that the voice he hears is not God’s; for if the voice commands him to do something contrary to the moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be, and no matter how it may seem to surpass the whole of nature, he must consider it an illusion.”

Kant criticises Abraham, saying, “Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: ‘That I ought not kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God — of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even [if] this voice rings down to me from (visible) heaven.’”

Alternative Responses

Søren Kierkegaard agrees with Kant that Abraham’s decision morally disgusting, but worries that we do not need to believe in God if human reason is the highest authority. Writing in the nineteenth century under a pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard considers the problem of faith itself.

In his Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard suggests that God sometimes asks people to act in a way that requires the suspension of ethical beliefs. In this way, Abraham is a “knight of faith,” having undergone a kind of “double movement” of “infinite resignation” and a “leap of faith.”

Alternatively, some theologians have responded to the problem by appealing to a third option that what God commands is good because God’s nature is good and this nature sets the standard of goodness. According to the Confessions of St. Augustine, God is “goodness itself.” This makes the Euthyphro dilemma a false dilemma.

In our next post, discover the Problem of Evil and how theologians try to justify God!

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