RedbeardUH

Here is a famous question posed by Plato:

Are things morally just because God willed it?

OR

Did God will it because they're morally just?

Coppertop

It has been a long time since I've taken any classes, but doesn't it go something like:

It is not in my hand because it is held, it is held because it is in my hand.

At least that's how I remember it. Was it from The Republic? Like I said, it has been quite some time since I've read it.

asaris

Well, my answer to this is almost certainly the most controversial, and likely the most complex. Because an internet forum lends itself to oversimplification, let me just note that my position is largely the same as that of John Duns Scotus, so if it seems interesting to you, but overly simple, I assure you that its oversimplification is because of the medium (not to mention my own inadequacies next to the Subtle Doctor), not because the view itself is overly simple.

The view is this: God, being free, did not have to create. But given that he chose to create, he had to create beings that had their end (telos, not eschaton) in him. So, while he was free to choose whatever system of morality he liked, he had to choose a system whose goal was union with him. To put it another way, any system of morality that met these conditions was going to be one that revealed God's own attributes. But He had the choice as to which attributes of his he chose to reveal. So while the system of morality was up to God, he had to will a just system as opposed to an unjust system.

To put it another way, there's both an ontological claim and an epistemological claim here. The ontological claim is that some commands of morality could have been otherwise. There's a pretty clear analogy here; within the system of particular morality, we have traffic laws which are binding, but obviously could have been otherwise without being unjust (speed limits, what side of the road we drive on, etc.) The epistemological claim is that we don't know that morality couldn't have been different.

But note that none of this should be taken to mean that we can in fact act in a way otherwise than what was in fact commanded. That's why He's God.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

RedbeardUH

God may have freely chose to create, but his act of creation was not free. Some power for it to be that he "had to create beings that had their own telos in him." (Plus, if you want to talk about telos, then you allow for Hume's argument that "can doesn't imply ought").
In other words, he is forced to create beings in a "just system," which implies that there is a higher morality than God. Or if he creates the system then all morality is arbitrary.


There has been one argument that, in a sense, works: God is both the system and commander. Having just written this, it seems to me that perhaps that is what John Scotus is arguing and what you wrote; I confess I'm not entirely positive as I know nothing about Scotus and his apologetics.

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He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you

-Friedrich Nietzsche

hrandani

I don't believe in God.

Or morals.

So I'm going to have to completely object to this question.

RedbeardUH

Thus the other/neither option.

Plus if you don't believe in morals, why do you pay your bills to use the internet/wear clothes/etc etc.

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He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you

-Friedrich Nietzsche

asaris

Probably because if he doesn't, he'll get into trouble.

I disagree with some of what you say in your first post, but I think some of that is just our ways of putting things, so I won't linger on that. But you talk about Hume's argument that you can't derive an ought from an is, and that's as good a place as any. Simply put, I think Hume was both right and wrong. You can't derive the right from what is, just because what is doesn't entail anything specific about what is good for us. But he's wrong in that you can say that what is good is grounded in what is.

Let me put this another way. Essentially the position boils down to "good is good because God says so". But this seems entirely arbitrary, and we like to think that to some extent good is good just because. So Scotus wants to ground morality in human nature, while still also grounding it in God. That is to say, Scotus's system has the advantage that Thomas's system has of making the good something grounded in what is (and so not based on God's mere whim like later divine command theories), while also having the advantage of grounding morality in God's will.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

zen_tom

I don't believe in God or morals either (because as concepts, they throw out obviously erroneous consequences such as the need to ask this question), but I pay my bills because if I don't they will cut off my electricity. It's nothing more than common sense.

A system has rules, whether they are the laws of physics, a set of mathematical axioms, or the social etiquette conducted whilst having tea with the Queen. The rules are what make a system work, they define it, and the interactions that occur within it.

One thing that the rules have to do is not contradict one another. When rules contradict, we have a paradox. To solve the paradox, we have to either find a new rule, or reappraise our understanding of the rules. A paradox is the point at which a system fails to operate, the point at which it shrugs and starts hinting at infinities, or asks us mysteriously how many angels might dance on the head of a pin. If a system has too many of these paradoxes, it can be deemed to be false. Or rather, the premises on which the system is based can be deemed to be false.

The problem with this question as posed is that it helps prove the non existence of God. It creates a paradox. Did God create Morality, or is Morality something higher than God? Is Morality one of Plato's 'Forms'?

I'd argue for none of the above. Instead, morality (small m) can be best described as a set of behaviours and attitudes that allows a person to function within a society with the optimum ratio of success to effort, and individual vs societical gains. It is a construct of inter-personal interactions that simply did not exist before we did.

Poof. The contradictions disappear.

politicophile

If God said that torturing small children for the fun of it was morally acceptable, he would clearly be wrong. I can't really offer any arguments as to why this is true, but it certainly seems to be from my perspective.

Two further points:

The discussion of morality and God occurs in Plato's dialogue Meno. The question is actually about "the pious", but Socrates uses this word to mean "loved by the gods", so this discussion is in the Platonic spirit.

Morality most certainly is one of Plato's Forms: it is called "the Good".

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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Lebell

I don't accept either as a premise.

IMO, morality is a part of what God is. In otherwords, God's actions are inherently moral, being in the best intentions for His creation.

That is not to say that God could not choose to do something not in the best interest of His creation, but that He won't.

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"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

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1010011010

That works as a good explanation for why enduring sustainable societies share what have been called "universal moral laws" (e.g. don't steal, don't murder, etc). It's not because of any inherent Rightness or Goodness to such rules... merely that societies that do not have such rules tend to fail (through asimillation, destruction, or instability).

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Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

Nimetic

Neither. If there is a god - he/she is not giving us clear instructions or generally being helpful on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis.

We've got to decide for ourselves.

In a nutshell, for me a moral decisions is one that is consistent with living in a community in which people help each other, or failing that - are able to trust each other and work together without external safegaurds/enforcement.

Some people choose to play the game of life by another set of rules.

adysav

If morals are universal and determined by God, it's odd that he set different moral standards for different religions and different parts of the world.

Lebell

That depends on your point of view.

If you are a Christian, Jesus' instructions were actually pretty clear.

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"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

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pig

I'm going with the position, if you accept the confinement of talking in terms of personified dieties, that it is a false contradiction. I do not see that the positions are necessarily mutually exclusive. I think it's an academically interesting thought experiment, but I fail to find that the points are actually divergent or distinct.

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mrklixx

Really? Curious then why there are so many different denominations teaching different versions of those instructions. Also curious why Jesus never actually wrote any instructions at all.

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