دیدگاهی که بیان میکند به طور کلی در اساس و بنیاد اخلاق وابسته به خدا - یا بنیاد گرفته از خدا- یا تبیین شده از سمت خداست- به دیدگاه فرمان الهی در ادبیات فلسفی مشهور است.
Roughly, Divine Command Theory is the view that morality is somehow dependent upon God, and that moral obligation consists in obedience to God’s commands. Divine Command Theory includes the claim that morality is ultimately based on the commands or character of God, and that the morally right action is the one that God commands or requires. The specific content of these divine commands varies according to the particular religion and the particular views of the individual divine command theorist, but all versions of the theory hold in common the claim that morality and moral obligations ultimately depend on God.
[Baggett Good God]
A big contributor to the resurgence of divine command theory in the last few decades is Robert Adams, whose 1973 groundbreaking article “A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness” drew great attention. (p. 112 ) Subsequent work by such philosophers as Quinn, Idziak, Wierenga
was Adams, though, who got the ball rolling, and his is an important example of both the importance of the role of semantics as well as its limitations that we mentioned earlier. The evolution of his own thought after writing that first essay, later penning its sequel “Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again,” and a whole book on theistic ethics
[Ethics: Atheism companian to atheism and philosphy]
مثال زلزله بم در بخش پایین وارد شود
A young child is suffering from malnutrition caused by a severe famine, itself caused by political conflict in her home country. Her suffering is extremely severe, as is that of her parents, who, in
addition to their own physical suffering, are also suffering emotionally because of their reasonable fears that their daughter will die. A group of kind people who work for a humanitarian organization locate the family and bring them the water, food, and medical supplies needed to nurse them back to health. The group also provides them with transportation to a refugee camp in a neighboring country and help the family emigrate out of the conflict zone.
We can make the following moral claims about this sce- nario: The child’s suffering and that of her parents is bad. It is good that the child’s suffering has been relieved. It is good that her parents’ anguish has been relieved. The aid workers who helped the family acted with virtue. They had strong rea- sons to provide such assistance. Those responsible for the conflict ought to do everything they can to end the conflict. People who are in a position to help ought to provide other famine victims with lifesaving assistance.The first paragraph of this section lists only natural facts
about the child, her family, and their predicament. The second paragraph lists moral facts about them.
It is possible that God does not exist but that all the natural facts in the first paragraph are true. If moral facts depend on the exis-
tence of God, then, if God does not exist, the natural facts listed in the first paragraph are true but the moral facts in the second paragraph are false. An atheist moral realist will find this claim to be implausible. For such an atheist, the natural facts in the first paragraph are sufficient to make the moral facts in the second para-
graph true.
All moral realists agree that the moral facts are dependent on the natural facts in the following sense: if there are changes in the moral facts, there must be corresponding changes in the natural facts. If the child’s situation is morally better, then her suffering must have
been relieved. If there is no longer an obligation to render aid, then the natural facts must have changed—for example, the family is no longer suffering from malnutrition. Furthermore, the right kind of changes in the natural facts will result in changes to the moral facts. If the child is not suffering from malnutrition, then her situation is better. Philosophers call this kind of dependence relation supervenience. An atheist moral realist will say that this superveni-
ence can be explained on the premise that the natural facts are sufficient to make the moral facts true.
برای خداباوری این فرارویدادگی برای اینکه خوبی ها چرا خوب هستند و بدی ها چرا بد- توسط خدا انجام میشه
برای مثال - کریگ اینطور مینویسه که:ب
“The claim that moral values and duties are rooted in God is a metaethical claimabout moral ontology. It is not fundamentally a claim about moral linguistics or aboutmoral epistemology. It is fundamentally a claim about the metaphysical status ofmoral properties, not a claim about the meaning of moral sentences or about the justification or knowledge of moral principles... the theist will agree quite readily...that we do not need to know or even believe that God exists in order to discern objective moral values or to recognize our moral duties.” [reference]
دوراهی اوتیفرون
به طور خلاصه از لحاظ احلاقی مستلزم به انجام برخی کارها هستی- احکام اخلاقی هست که باید انجام بدی و دستورات خداست که بیان میکنه باید چه کاری رو انجام بدی...ت
یکی از مهمترین اعتراض ها به نظریه فرمان الهی- دوراهی اوتیفرون هست
the course of their conversation, Socrates is surprised to discover that Euthyphro is prosecuting his own father for the murder of a servant. Euthyphro’s family is upset with him because of this, and they believe that what he is doing—prosecuting his own father—is impious. Euthyphro maintains that his family fails to understand the divine attitude to his action. This then sets the stage for a discussion of the nature of piety between Socrates and Euthyphro. In this discussion, Socrates asks Euthyphro the now philosophically famous question that he and any divine command theorist must consider: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” (p. 14).
Does God command this particular action because it is morally right, or is it morally right because God commands it?” It is in answering this question that the divine command theorist encounters a difficulty. درواقع دو راهی اینجا وارد میشود
A defender of Divine Command Theory might respond that an action is morally right because God commands it. However, the implication of this response is that if God commanded that we inflict suffering on others for fun, then doing so would be morally right. We would be obligated to do so, because God commanded it. This is because, on Divine Command Theory, the reason that inflicting such suffering is wrong is that God commands us not to do it. However, if God commanded us to inflict such suffering, doing so would become the morally right thing to do. The problem for this response to Socrates’ question, then, is that God’s commands and therefore the foundations of morality become arbitrary,
most advocates of Divine Command Theory do not want to be stuck with the implication that cruelty could possibly be morally right, nor do they want to accept the implication that the foundations of morality are arbitrary. So, a divine command theorist might avoid this problem of arbitrariness by opting for a different answer to Socrates’ question, and say that for any particular action that God commands, He commands it because it is morally right.
By taking this route, the divine command theorist avoids having to accept that inflicting suffering on others for fun could be a morally right action. More generally, she avoids the arbitrariness that plagues any Divine Command Theory which includes the claim that an action is right solely because God commands it. However, two new problems now arise. If God commands a particular action because it is morally right, then ethics no longer depends on God in the way that Divine Command Theorists maintain. God is no longer the author of ethics, but rather a mere recognizer of right and wrong. As such, God no longer serves as the foundation of ethics. Moreover, it now seems that God has become subject to an external moral law, and is no longer sovereign.
Attempt to present another option for answering the dillemma
modified command theory
Robert Adams (1987) has offered a modified version of the Divine Command Theory, which a defender of the theory can appropriate in response to the Euthyphro Dilemma. Adams argues that a modified divine command theorist “wants to say…that an act is wrong if and only if it is contrary to God’s will or commands (assuming God loves us)” (121). Moreover, Adams claims that the following is a necessary truth: “Any action is ethically wrong if and only if it is contrary to the commands of a loving God” (132). On this modification of Divine Command Theory, actions, and perhaps intentions and individuals, possess the property of ethical wrongness, and this property is an objective property. That is, an action such as torturing someone for fun is ethically wrong, irrespective of whether anyone actually believes that it is wrong, and it is wrong because it is contrary to the commands of a loving God.
At any rate, whichever option a modified divine command theorist chooses, the modification at issue is aimed at avoiding both horns of the Euthyphro Dilemma. The first horn of the dilemma posed by Socrates to Euthyphro is that if an act is morally right because God commands it, then morality becomes arbitrary. Given this, we could be morally obligated to inflict cruelty upon others. The Modified Divine Command Theory avoids this problem, because morality is not based on the mere commands of God, but is rooted in the unchanging omnibenevolent nature of God. Hence, morality is not arbitrary nor would God command cruelty for its own sake.
The Modified Divine Command Theory is also thought to avoid the second horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma. God is the source of morality, because morality is grounded in the character of God. Moreover, God is not subject to a moral law that exists external to him. On the Modified Divine Command Theory, the moral law is a feature of God’s nature. Given that the moral law exists internal to God, in this sense, God is not subject to an external moral law, but rather is that moral law. God therefore retains his supreme moral and metaphysical status. Morality, for the modified divine command theorist, is ultimately grounded in the perfect nature of God.
بنابراین - به طور خلاصه
Since the first horn of the dilemma represents moral obligations as
being independent of God’s commands, a divine command theorist
must somehow tackle the second horn of the dilemma and find a way that morality is not arbitrary under god.
برای اینکه نشاند دهد دستورات خدا دلبخواهی نیست میتواند چنان که گفته شد بیان کند که
while torturing an innocent child to death would be obligatory if God commanded this, God would never command such a thing because such a command would be contrary to His good and loving nature. However, such a move seems incompatible with divine command theory: it suggests that God is bound by moral requirements (He cannot command torturing an innocent child to death because such a command would beimmoral), whereas divine command theory claims that God is the source of all moral requirements.1 و این مارو صرفا مجبور به برگشت به بخش اول دوراهی میکنه
انگار که چیزی مستقل از خدا وجود داره که خدا هم باید اون رو در نظر بگیره و دیگر منبع اخلاق نیست
حل مشکل بار دیگر
خداباور بار دیگه اصلاح میکنه
مشکل دیدگاه قبلی اینه که خوبی اون چیزی چیزیست که خدا باید انجام بده- یعنی ما میخوایم بگیم که باید ها از خدا بر آمده است نه اینکه برآمده از خوبی هاست
مشکل رو میشه به این شکل حل کرد که بگیم
These theorists argue that divine command theory is not a theory of all moral values; it is merely a theory of moral obligation.2 We can still say that God is good, as long as we do not construe this goodness in terms of God doing what He ought to do [koons]
باید ها را باید اینطور دید که این باید ها
( apply to finite beings such as us humans) are in turn
constituted by the commands of God. And since He is good, He would never command torturing an innocent child to death, and so the second horn of our euthyphro dilemma is defused.
دیگه باید ها جهتش از سمت خدا به انسان های محدود هست و به واسطه ماهیت خوب خدا هم دیگر مشکل بخش دوم دوراهی اوتیفرون هم حل شد رفت
hese are essential features of God’s character, they preclude his commanding that someone bring about S in any possible world.”3 Further, God’s nature provides God with adequate reason to issue the particular commands He does, alleviating the arbitrariness worry about divine command theory:
ظهور دوباره اوتیفرون
راه حل مطرح شده اما کاری نیست چرا که بار دیگر دوراهی اوتیفرون در سطح دیگری ظاهر میشود
and claims this move allows DCT to evade the traditional Euthyphro objections: “So far from being arbitrary, God’s commands to us are an expression of his perfect good- ness. Since he is perfectly good by nature, it is impossible that God should command us to act in ways that are not for the best” (Alston 2002, p. 290).
The critic of DCT will not be impressed and will argue that modified
DCT merely recreates the Euthyphro dilemma at a new level. Thus, the critic asks, are various traits (kindness, justice, mercy, etc.) good because they are traits of God, or is God good because he possesses these traits? I will call this the God’s Nature Euthyphro Dilemma (GNED).
This is not simply another iteration because the horns of this dilemma have somewhat different outcomes. In the original euthyphro dilemma, the worry about the second horn of the dilemma was that if right acts were right because God commanded them, then that made morality arbitrary – torture for fun is immoral, but God did not have a good (i.e., moral) reason for forbidding such torture, and there would have been nothing immoral about his commanding torture for fun. but the divine command theorist is not saying that the relation between the goodness of being loving and the fact of God’s lovingness is so arbitrary as that: it is not the mere fact of God’s being loving that makes it good to be loving. rather, it is the fact that God is loving, combined with the fact that God is supremely good that makes being loving good. As Alston puts the point,
We can think of God himself, the individual being, as the supreme
standard of goodness...lovingness is good (a good-making feature, that on which goodness is supervenient) not because of the Platonic existence of a general principle or fact to the effect that lovingness is good, but because God, the supreme standard of goodness, is loving. Goodness supervenes on every feature of God, not because some general principles are true but just because they are features of God.5
So God is good (indeed, He is the supreme standard of goodness), and that is why His being loving makes being loving good. So it seems initially that the second option involves no arbitrariness: being loving is good because it is a trait of God, who is supremely good. (We will revisit this initial conclusion later, though.)
داریم میگیم که مشکل دلبخواهی بودن رو حل کردیم با ماهیت خدا و از اون گذشتیم و از دو ارهی اوتیفرون هم گذشتیم.
Notice, however, the order of explanation here. God is not good
because He is loving. That would imply a standard of goodness
independent of God, which divine command theorists like Alston and Adams must deny. They claim that God is the standard of goodness, that whatever properties (such as being loving) God has are good in virtue of God’s essential goodness. Thus, God’s goodness must be logically prior to the goodness of God’s mercy, justice, lovingness, and so on. Indeed, Adams speculates that in a possible world with no God, nothing would be excellent or good, not even character traits we normally consider good (like being loving). Adams writes,
If there is a God that satisfies [the] conditions imposed by our concepts [of the Good], we might say, then excellence is the property of faithfully imaging such a God...In worlds where no such God exists, nothing would have that property, and therefore nothing would be excellent. but beings like us in such a world might have a concept subjectively indistinguishable from our concept of excellence, and there might be an objective property that corresponded to it well enough, and in a sufficiently salient way, to
be the property signified by it, though it would not be the property that we in fact signify by ‘excellent’.6
Wainwright notes that an apparent consequence of Adams’s theory is that if there is a possible world where there is no God, and no plausible alternative candidate for the role of the Supreme Good, then assuming that “Adams’s account of the semantics of ‘good’ is more or less correct, then the term ‘good’ doesn’t pick out a real property in those worlds; the concept of good will be as empty in those worlds as the concept of phlogiston is in ours”.7 In those worlds, being (e.g.) loving is not good. God’s goodness is logically prior to the goodness of such traits, and their goodness depends on and is parasitic on the prior goodness of God.8
Adams writes, If there is a God that satisfies [the] conditions imposed by our concepts [of the Good], we might say, then excellence is the property of faithfully imaging such a God…In worlds where no such God exists, nothing would have that property, and therefore nothing would be excellent. But beings like us in such a world might have a concept subjectively indistinguishable from our concept of excellence, and there might be an objective property that corresponded to it well enough, and in a sufficiently salient way, to be the property signified by it, though it would not be the property that we in fact signify by ‘excellent’.6
دقیقا همون منطق ان دو پاراگرافی که داشتیم رو درواع بیان میکنه
بنابراین چطوری خدا در رابطه با خوبی قرار میگیره و مشکل رو حل میکنه با ماهیت خودش اونچه باید بهش توجه کنیم اینه که Notice, however, the order of explanation here. God is not good because He is loving. That would imply a standard of goodness independent of God, which divine command theorists like Alston and Adams must deny. They claim that God is the standard of goodness, that whatever properties (such as being loving) God has are good in virtue of God’s essential goodness. Thus, God’s goodness must be logically prior to the goodness of God’s mercy, justice, lovingness, and so on. Indeed, Adams speculates that in a possible world with no God, nothing would be excellent or good, not even character traits we normally consider good (like being loving).
if there is a possible world where there is no God, and no plausible alternative candidate for the role of the Supreme Good, then assuming that “Adams’s account of the semantics of ‘good’ is more or less correct, then the term ‘good’ doesn’t pick out a real property in those worlds; the concept of good will be as empty in those worlds as the concept of phlogiston is in ours”.7 In those worlds, being (e.g.) loving is not good. God’s goodness is logically prior to the goodness of such traits, and their goodness depends on and is parasitic on the prior goodness of God
گفتیم که the order of explanation here. God is not good because He is loving
Alston’s particularism requires that God’s goodness be logically prior to the goodness of the moral virtues.
این عدم تقارن در پایه به این معناست که In order to avoid grounding God’s goodness, as the Platonist would, in truths that do not depend on God, it seems that God must somehow serve as the supreme standard of goodness apart from the properties He in fact possesses. It thus seems that God, qua bare particular, serves as the ultimate standard for moral goodness
. خب به جهت استدلال فکر کنید که گفتیم جهتش از سمت خدا به ویژگی های خوب و بد هست. با این اوضاع How should we understand God, a particular concrete being, serving as the standard of goodness? In virtue of what does God so serve?
in the above order of explanation, they are debarred from pointing to any feature in virtue of which God is good. (Alston denies this, but I will argue that he cannot do so coherently; we will return to this point later.) Rather, those features themselves are good in virtue of belonging to God (who is good). Then what does it mean to say that God is good? It doesn’t mean that He is just, or loving – His goodness is prior to the goodness of these features. Alston and Adams must say this, else admit that there is a standard of goodness independent of God.
اولین مشکل جهت استدلال برای ویژگی های اخلاقی و ما به این برمیگردم The problem is this: actions and agents instantiate morally thin properties (rightness, goodness, etc.) in virtue of the morally thick properties these actions and agents instantiate. An action is not good simpliciter; it is good because it represents an act of charity, or a repaying of a debt, or something else. It is good in virtue of something else. Similar comments apply to the goodness of agents.
[Modified DCT upends this relation, in that it denies that God is good because of His instantiation of any morally thick properties. Rather, these thick properties have the valence they do because they are instantiated by a being who is good—reversing the standard order of explanation. This, in itself, is a puzzle. But it is a puzzle that signals a deeper incoherence—for it bars us from saying anything about what God’s goodness consists in.]
خب با توجه به این عدم تقارن در چهارچوب بالا- دیگه اصلا خوبی خدا قابل فهم نیست -دیدگاه ما دیگه منطقی نمیتونه منسجم باشه-چون نمیتونیم به هیچ چیزی اشاره کنیم که محتوی خوبی خدا باشه So the property of goodness, as it applies to God, is undifferentiated, a ‘featureless property’.
آلستون یک دیدگاه خاصی رو مطرح میکنه که تصور میکنه این مشکل رو هم حل میکنه
Alston writes: Note that on this view we are not debarred from saying what is supremely good about God. God is not good, qua bare particular or undifferentiated thisness. God is good by virtue of being loving, just, merciful and so on.13 Does this answer the objection?
It is unclear. For mark how the passage continues: Where this view differs from its alternative is in the answer to the question, ‘By virtue of what are these features of God good-making features?’ The answer given by this view is: ‘By virtue of being features of God.’14
So Alston is explicit here that these features are only good because God possesses them. As Alston writes earlier in his essay,
Lovingness is good (is a good-making feature, that on which goodness is supervenient) not because of the Platonic existence of a general principle or fact to the effect that lovingness is good, but because God, the supreme standard of goodness, is loving. Goodness supervenes on every feature of God, not because some general principles are true but just because they are features of God. 15
So we have a puzzle. The first passage indicates that God is good because of these good-making traits (such as lovingness, mercy, and so on). But the second and third quotes reverse the order of explanation: they say not that God is good because He possesses these traits, but that these traits are good-making because God possesses them. What is the correct order of explanation?
میشه هم کیکش رو داشته باشه هم بخوره در دوجهت خوبی رو تبیین کنه/؟
Alston’s particularism requires that God’s goodness be logically prior to the goodness of the moral virtues.
بین دو دیدگاه تمایز قائل میشه:ـ
(a) ‘Platonic’ predicates, the criterion for the application of which is a general ‘essence’ or ‘Idea’ that can be specified in purely general terms, and (b) ‘particularist’ predicates, the criterion for the application of which makes essential reference to one or more individuals.16 Alston suggests ‘triangle’ as a good paradigm of the former kind. Alston’s theory of the good is particularist: a particular individual (God) is the standard of goodness. Alston suggests an illuminating analogy:
مثال مثلش شبیه اخلاق افلاطونی
Alston suggests an illuminating analogy: A sub-type closer to our present concern is the much-discussed ‘meter’. Let’s say that what makes a certain length a meter is its equality to a standard meter stick kept in Paris. What makes this table a meter in length is not its conformity to a Platonic essence but its conformity to a concretely existing individual. Similarly, on my present suggestion, what most ultimately makes an act of love a good thing is not its conformity to some general principle but its conformity to, or imitation of, God, who is both the ultimate source of the existence of things and the supreme standard by which they are to be assessed.17
توضیح اینکه این میله یک متری بار اول میشه معیار هر اندازه گیری دیگه ای خوده میله به طور فردی هست the length of the meter was determined only by reference to this particular entity, the meter bar
it is truly accurate to say that anything that is (or approximates) a meter is so purely in virtue of resembling the meter bar, and not in virtue of matching any pre-existing standard independent of the meter bar.
خب حالا میرسیم به مشکل Now consider an object – say, a piece of wood. This piece of wood has a particular length, L. Suppose this length, L, is the same length as that of the Paris meter bar. Thus, L is 1 meter. Which of the following claims is true? (1) This particular length, L, is 1 meter because the Paris meter bar has this particular length. (2) The Paris meter bar is 1 meter because it is this particular length, L
If the Paris meter bar is a genuine particularist standard, (1) is true and (2) is false. As Alston writes, “What makes a certain length a meter is its equality to a standard meter stick kept in Paris.”18 (2) must be rejected for multiple reasons, not the least because it smacks of the Platonism rejected by Alston – “What makes this table a meter in length is not its conformity to a Platonic essence but its conformity to a concretely existing individual.”19 But more importantly, (2) reverses the order of explanation – the measurement of the meter bar isn’t fixed by comparison with some abstract length, or by comparison with some external standard. Rather, the meter bar is the standard which determines the unit of measure for L and other lengths. That is how a particularist model works. So understanding the Paris meter bar as a particularist example, (1) is true and (2) is false
خب حالا بیایم سراغ خدا
For sentences precisely parallel to (1) and (2) can also be constructed with respect to God, goodness, and the virtues: (3) These particular virtues (lovingness, mercy, etc.) are good because God possesses these particular virtues. (4) God is good because God possesses these particular virtues (lovingness, mercy, etc.)
-3) and (4) are precisely parallel in structure to (1) and (2)20; and with the particularist example of the Paris meter bar, (1) is true and (2) is false. (2) is false because with particularism, the order of explanation goes in a particular direction: from the exemplar toward the traits the exemplar is established to exemplify. The order of explanation does not reverse; if it does, you are not a particularist. This strongly suggests that if we construe God as a particularist paradigm, as Alston intends, we should likewise find (3) to be true and (4) to be false.
The meter bar confers meter-hood on its specific length; that is its job as the particularist model of the meter. The order of explanation does not reverse: meter-ness, as a Platonic entity or independently-defined length, does not define the meter bar as being a meter long. Similarly, God defines the virtues as good, by being the particularist model of goodness. The virtues do not confer goodness on God, any more than a meter length confers meter-hood on the meter bar.
Similarly, if God is to serve as a particularist exemplar, He must confer goodness on the virtues. The virtues cannot confer goodness on him, cannot explain wherein God’s goodness consists. For to say that God is good because he possesses these virtues, or that God’s goodness supervenes on these virtues, is to reject particularism in favour of some theory that locates the source of moral value outside of God.
[Morriston] Is God good because He has these good-making properties?...If this is the right way to look at the matter, then moral goodness supervenes directly on the good-making properties, and it makes not the slightest difference to their good-makingness who has them. A person is morally good to the degree that she possesses these properties. That goes for God as much as for anyone else. But then we are right back in the box we were trying to get out of. God is subject to an independent standard of goodness…21
خب اومدیم ما هیت خدا به جای فلان و فلان و فلان این بود- خب اینا میشدن خوب - یعنی باز دوراهی اوتیفرون توی این مرحله مجددا ظهور میکنه خدا خوبه چون ویژ"گی هایی که داره خوبه یا چو خدا این ویژگی ها رو داره خوبه؟
Alston cannot consistently maintain that “God is good by virtue of being loving, just, merciful and so on”22 and be a particularist. If he wants to be a particularist, the order of explanation can only go in one direction: the character traits like being loving, just and merciful are virtues – are good – just because they are possessed by God.
Morriston writes, Alston’s point…is that explanation must come to an end somewhere. Whatever our ultimate standard is – whether it is an individual paradigm or a general principle of the sort favored by Platonists – that is as far as we can go. If Alston cannot say what makes goodness supervene on God’s characteristics, neither can the Platonist say what makes it supervene on a bunch of properties. In either case, it just does supervene, and that is all there is to say. But even if this is right, we can still ask which stopping point is preferable. If we have to stop somewhere, why not stop with the special combination of love and justice that make up God’s moral character? Why go further and insist that goodness supervenes on these characteristics only because they are characteristics of the particular individual who is God? From the point of view of moral theory, it is hard to see any real advantage in doing this; it complicates things considerably, and the theological window-dressing seems quite superfluous.23
Of course, Adams’ and Alston’s answer to Morriston’s hypothetical question (“Why not stop with the special combination of love and justice…?”) must be that if these were not characteristics of God, they wouldn’t be virtues – they wouldn’t be good.
Alston, as we have seen, seems to make a similar claim, writing, Lovingness is good (is a good-making feature, that on which goodness is supervenient) not because of the Platonic existence of a general principle or fact to the effect that lovingness is good, but because God, the supreme standard of goodness, is loving. Goodness supervenes on every feature of God, not because some general principles are true but just because they are features of God.
If there were no God, and someone were loving, merciful, and so forth, then that person (on the Adams/Alston view) would not be good. Thus, God’s goodness is logically prior to the goodness of these traits – these traits are not intrinsically good (for without God, they are not good). God is good, and in virtue of God’s possession of these traits, they too are good. We see, then, that God cannot be good in virtue of these traits, because God’s goodness must be logically prior to the goodness of these traits.
حالا برمیگردم به راه حل آلستون
Note that on this view we are not debarred from saying what is supremely good about God. God is not good, qua bare particular or undifferentiated thisness. God is good by virtue of being loving, just, merciful and so on.26
This cannot be right. God cannot be good by virtue of possessing these traits, because these traits don’t have the power to confer goodness upon God. God’s goodness is logically prior to the goodness of these traits, so logically speaking God’s goodness comes first, and then comes the goodness of these traits. You cannot explain God’s goodness in terms of His being “loving, just, merciful, and so on,” because the goodness of these traits is logically subsequent to God’s goodness, and is to be explained in terms of the latter property.
The essential problem in the Adams/Alston view can be brought into sharp relief by discussing another objection addressed by Alston. Speaking for his opponent, Alston writes, “Isn’t it arbitrary to take some particular individual, even the supreme individual, as the standard of goodness, regardless of whether this individual conforms to general principles of goodness or not?”
و این مار ومیرسونه به مشکل آنچه در فلسفه خود بدوی یا ابتدایی میگیریم
In response to this objection, Alston writes,
An answer to the question, ‘What is good about?’ will, sooner or later, cite certain good-making characteristics. We can then ask why we should suppose that good supervenes on those characteristics. In answer either a general principle or an individual paradigm is cited. But whichever it is, that is the end of the line…On both views something is taken to be ultimate, behind which we cannot go, in the sense of finding some explanation of the fact that it is constitutive of goodness
There are a few comments that need to be made at this point. First, Alston is making a familiar point about explanatory regress, and solving it in a familiar way: eventually, you reach a stopping point in the regress of explanations, and some principle or exemplar must be taken as ultimate. While this may, in some instances, be an acceptable move, it is not acceptable in all cases. One’s stopping point must be intelligible as a stopping point.
as we have already seen, God is not morally good in virtue of any of the familiar characteristics (such as being just or loving). God’s moral goodness is utterly blank, without any features that make it intelligible as a stopping place in an inquiry into the ultimate foundation of goodness. Since Alston and Adams make God’s goodness prior to any of God’s concrete moral virtues, the person of God is not intelligible as a stopping place in the quest for the ultimate source of good. God’s supposed goodness, as I said above, is a complete blank, lacking any features whatsoever that would make it intuitively appealing why the object in question should be regarded as the ultimate exemplar of moral goodness[as morriston pointed out:if we have to stop somewhere, why not stop with the special combination of love and justice that make up God’s moral character? Why go further and insist that goodness supervenes on these characteristics only because they are characteristics of the particular individual who is God?]
is self-evident or known via intuition. Once again, our question must be, ‘Is this plausible?’ Alston implies that one who is sufficiently acquainted with God and who has given the matter adequate, impartial thought will come to see (with justification or warrant) that God is the standard of moral perfection. But we can now see why this is wrong. For when one imagines acquaintance with God, and contemplation of the divine, one naturally imagines contemplating God given his attributes – such as being perfectly loving, just, merciful, and so forth. And of course someone who contemplated God as so presented might well come to believe in God’s moral perfection. But Alston must claim that God is the standard of moral perfection independently of his possession of these characteristics. He is not morally perfect because he possesses these characteristics; these characteristics are features of moral perfection only because they are possessed by God. Thus, what Alston should exhort us to do is this: imagine God, stripped of every moral perfection – His lovingness, His justice, His caring. Now is it self-evident that God as so conceived is morally perfect, the ultimate standard of good? Intuition is not a magical power; it needs something to work with. If intuition is a genuine mental power (and presumably, if it is, it is the power of forming non-inferential beliefs in response to some stimulus or mental input), then intuition requires inputs to generate an output
When Alston tells us that God’s moral perfection is self-evident, he is imagining God’s moral virtues as cognitive inputs, in which case we should expect as an output the belief “God is the standard of goodness”. But the question must be reconceived: ‘Does it make sense to say of God, independent of these virtues, that He is good?’ I have argued this is not coherent; it is certainly not self-evident that God so conceived is the ultimate standard of moral perfection
Anyhow, this discussion of self-evidence may mislead us: the problem we are dealing with is metaphysical, not epistemological. Alston presents the regress problem almost as an epistemological problem: how do we identify the ultimate source of good? If we have some knowledge of what traits (such as being loving and just) are good, then (plausibly) we need only find the being who exemplifies these traits to the maximal degree to find the exemplar of the good. But the problem we are grappling with is metaphysical, not epistemological: we are not (merely) trying to identify the source of good; we are trying to explain how it confers goodness on all things. So we cannot help ourselves to these virtuous traits (even if we know they are virtuous), because our problem is to explain how they are virtuous, not merely to identify which being is most virtuous.
we want to see what is the ontological foundation not how we come to know it.
We must consider the source of these traits’ goodness (God), and ask, “How is it that this being confers goodness on these traits?” Alston, Adams, Craig and others answer, “In virtue of being supremely good.” But once we confine ourselves to a strictly metaphysical investigation, we see that this statement is meaningless, because we are debarred from appealing to any features of God which might make His goodness coherent, or explain why His goodness is worthy of admiration or capable of conferring praiseworthiness on the traits (such as lovingness and justice) that He possesses.
پس برگردیم به نکته اصلی یعنی نقطه پایانی در تبیین
we must distinguish between explanations-why and explanations-what. Even if explanationswhy come to an end, and no further reasons can be given at this point, it does not follow that at this point there can be no further explanationwhat. For we should still be able to explain what something is even if we can give no further explanation for why it is the way that it is. For example: suppose (contrary to fact) that the electron’s negative charge were simply a brute fact, and that no explanation could be given for why electrons have a negative charge. This would be an example of running to the end of explanations for why things are the way they are. But we could still give an explanation of what a negative charge is: how it interacts with positively-charged items (like protons), what the strength of its electrical charge is, and so forth. So even if we can say nothing about why the electron has this charge, we can say quite a lot about what this charge is.
To deny this with respect to God’s goodness is to conflate the two types of explanation, explanations why and explanations what. (This confusion is, I think, a natural consequence of confusing the epistemological and the metaphysical.) The particularist says, in explaining why certain things are good, that at some point these why-explanations run out when we arrive at the exemplar of God’s character. But this does not entail the absence of any what-explanations, and we should still be able to say what God’s moral goodness consists in. But the particularist has debarred us from doing this: since God’s goodness is prior to any feature we could cite in an explanation (what) of God’s goodness, we cannot say what God’s goodness is. It is, again, a featureless property. The particularist is not just saying that there is an end to why-explanations; she is saying that no what-explanation can be given either. And that is simply not plausible, since this makes God’s goodness completely unintelligible.
Perhaps one could say that God’s goodness consisted of God always doing what was right. This won’t work, though, as theological voluntarists have specifically bifurcated their moral theory to respond to the original Euthyphro problem for divine command theory: there is a theory of the good for God, and a theory of obligation for finite beings like humans. More importantly, though, good must be definable antecedent to right (since it is God’s goodness that gives God reason to issue the particular commands that He does). Thus, on this view, good is logically prior to the right, and so it must be possible to give a definition of ‘good’ that makes no reference to rightness, obligation, or other cognate notions.
One cannot say that God’s goodness consists in that He always does the good, for not only is that definition circular, but it uses a predicate (good) that we are already complaining is undefined
Consider again Aquinas’ suggestion: “the essence of goodness consists in this, that it is in some way desirable.”32 However, as Scanlon33 and Quinn34 have argued, something is desirable not because you desire it, but because it has features that render it desirable – that is, in some way good. Now, there is a clear risk of circularity here – “the essence of goodness consists in this, that it is in some way good” – so to render our formulation non-circular, we must specify the precise ways in which God is good: we must specify the features of God that render Him desirable, good.
if there were specific features of God, in virtue of which He was good, then we would be thrown back on the first horn of our dilemma: God is good in virtue of certain features (and hence there is a standard of goodness independent of God) and if he is desireable somply becuase he has some vitues then no matter what virtues he has it will be arbitray
Indeed, the whole problem of trying to move the explanations-what up to the level of thin virtues must fail. As I have repeatedly emphasized, agents instantiate morally thin properties (such as goodness) in virtue of the morally thick properties these agents instantiate. Alston’s particularism cannot countenance this fact, and so must fail as a supplement to the divine command theory.
in the end: The critic of DCT will not be impressed and will argue that modified DCT merely recreates the Euthyphro dilemma at a new level. Thus, the critic asks, are various traits (kindness, justice, mercy, etc.) good because they are traits of God, or is God good because he possesses these traits? I will call this the God’s Nature Euthyphro Dilemma (GNED)
در پایان What is it about God’s nature that has the power to confer upon mercy, justice, loving-kindness, and so on, goodness and pursuit-worthiness—in a way that (for example) Satan’s nature does not confer these properties upon the traits that Satan possesses?
راه حل های احتمالی دیگه؟
We must distinguish between explanations-why and explanations-what. Even if explanations-why come to an end [you reach some explanatory ultimate; in the theist’s case God…], and no further reasons can be given at this point, it does not follow that at this point there can be no further explanation-what. For we should still be able to explain what something is even if we can give no further explanation for why it is the way that it is. I am amazed that he doesn’t apply this to Alston’s view of God! That seems to me perfectly correct. When you get to God you have reached the moral stopping point—the moral ultimate. There is no further reason why something is good. When you get to God you’ve reached the metaphysical and moral ultimate, the explanatory stopping point. But that doesn’t mean you can’t explain what goodness is or wherein the goodness of God consists. As Alston says, you can still explain to people that God is loving, kind, merciful, generous, and so forth. That would be an explanation-what, but not an explanation-why. (Craig 2015)
I think, however, that Craig’s response misreads the original objection. As I originally argued, “Suppose (contrary to fact) that the electron’s negative charge were simply a brute fact, and that no explanation could be given for why electrons have a negative charge. This would be an example of running to the end of explanations for why things are the way they are. But we could still give an explanation of what a negative charge is: how it interacts with positively-charged items (like protons), what the strength of its electrical charge is, and so forth. So even if we can say nothing about why the electron has this charge, we can say quite a lot about what this charge is” (Koons 2012, p. 191). We are to imagine, on the modified DCT, that God’s nature ends the ‘why’-regress. That is, there is no further question to be asked about why certain traits or properties are good—they are good because they are traits or properties of God, who is the exemplar of goodness. But, as I argued, we should still be able to say what this goodness is, just as we should be able to say something about what the electron’s negative charge consists in. Now Craig is correct—we can say many things about what God is, on the modified DCT. We can say that God is loving, just, kind, and so on. But these cannot be answers to questions concerning what God’s goodness consists in. God’s goodness is logically prior to these virtues, and so one cannot cite these virtues in an explanation-what of God’s goodness
I am willing to grant to the modified DCT that we can attribute many traits to God—but none of these can constitute an explanation or account of what God’s goodness consists in, since again God’s goodness is prior in the order of explanation to any of these traits God may possess. Thus, the original problem remains: We can talk about what traits God has, but the notion of God’s goodness remains incoherent, on the modified DCT, since God’s goodness is logically prior to any of these traits God possesses (and indeed, confers goodness on them in virtue of God’s possession of these traits)
Finally, it has been suggested8 that the GNED can be avoided if we regard the relation between God (the perfect being) and the person who exemplifies the virtues (loving-kindness, justice, etc.) to a maximal degree as a relation of identity. The reply can be fleshed out as follows:
Consider an analogy. Suppose water is identical to H2 0, implying that something is water if and only if it is H2 0. If you ask what makes this stuff water, it’s sensible for me to respond that it’s H2 0. No bare particular required. Similarly, now, suppose a perfect being is identical to a person who exhibits lovingness, justice, and related virtues to a maximally compossible degree. Now, if you ask me what makes this being perfect, it’s sensible for me to respond that it’s a person who exhibits lovingness, justice, and related virtues to a maximally compossible degree. No bare particular required.9
However, the analogy with water allows us to see precisely what is wrong with this response. Divine particularists insist on a particular relation—a particular order of explanation—between God’s goodness and the specific virtues and traits that he exhibits. This relation is such that (as indicated in the quote from Adams at the end of section III above) if there were no God, these traits might exist, but they wouldn’t be good—there would be no goodness in such a world. The whole point of evaluative particularism is that the specific particular (namely, God) confers goodness on the various traits (just as the Paris meter bar confers ‘meterhood’ on specific lengths).
It is not clear what it would mean to say (in the case of water) that there is no particular that confers water-hood on H2 0. But to follow the modified DCT as closely as possible, we would have to say that in such a possible world, there might be H2 0, but no H2 0 is water. Thus, there must be some criterion for counting as water outside of being identical with H2 0. In other words, we should be able to identify possible worlds where there is H2 0 but no water, but also identify possible worlds where there is H2 0 and water. Thus, we must have independent criteria for the existence of H2 0 and for the existence of water.
For starters, this intermediate conclusion will come as a shock to all of the fans of the Earth-Twin Earth/water-twater/H2 0-XYZ saga, who take it absolutely for granted that it is an essential property of water that it is identical to H2 0.10 But let us set aside this (quite deep) problem, and let us assume that there are criteria for water-hood independent of chemical constitution: Perhaps a substance is water iff it is clear, drinkable, freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C, etc. Thus, either H2 0 or XYZ could be water (on this account)—Horgan and Timmons be damned! You may be willing to bite this particular bullet, in the case of water; but an analogous move is not obviously available to the modified divine command theorist
For while we may have independent criteria for water-hood, the whole point of the GNED is that we don’t have independent criteria of goodness—apart from the morally thick virtues, such as justice, loving-kindness, and so on (which, again, we may not appeal to as an explanation of God’s goodness). And so the modified divine command theorist who wants to say that God is identical to the being who maximally exemplifies the virtues, but also that God has an independently intelligible property of goodness—such that his exemplification of these virtues confers goodness on them, and they wouldn’t be good if God didn’t exemplify them—is again embroiled in a contradiction