Not only does Socrates not answer the question, he is the one depicted by Plato as having asked it. He doesn’t think there is a good answer. He thinks that you are stuck either way and that the way out is to drop the idea that morality has anything to do with God.
I know. And I saw - after I posted - that many people had already brought Socrates into the discussion. My point in bringing up the
Euthyphro was to remind everyone that this is a very old philosophical problem for ethics, and also that it is not a problem only for Christians (the
Euthyphro proves that because it was written before Christianity even existed).
What is the “standard answer”?
I meant the standard Christian answer. As you pointed out, there are other views on the subject as well. I’m sure it has already been brought up in this thread (as I admitted before, I have not read the thread), so I apologize if what I say has already been covered, responded to, etc. Thank you for trying to bring me into the discussion, Leela, and if I backtrack annoyingly to what has already been covered, don’t feel obligated to bring me up to speed with the rest of the thread.
Anyway, before I give my explanation of the Christian view on this ethical problem, let me begin by presenting two more obvious solutions to contrast it with.
Plato actually does have an answer to this question elsewhere. He essentially says that yes, God (the “Demiurge”) says something is good
because it really is.
For Plato the highest thing there can be is the Form of the Good (the sun in the allegory of the cave), as you probably already know. Plato also believed in a creator God (the Demiurge), but this creator God - according to him - is
separate from the Form of the Good. The standards of right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice, etc. are not arbitrarily determined by God/Demiurge, but are actually dictated to this Creator God from a higher source - the Form of the Good. So Plato
does believe there is something higher than the being which created the world (“God”).
Some Islamic philosophies take the opposite view - that something is good
because God says it is. In this view, God - we can continue calling God the “Demiurge” to keep the parallel clear - is the highest authority and good and evil are
divinely subjective. In this view God is above “the good”, which He fully determines. Good and evil are, in a sense, arbitrarily dictated and could be changed by God, Who is absolutely supreme.
Christianity takes a more nuanced view that is less obvious and took longer to develop - and which built on the insights first offered by thinkers like Plato. Christianity essentially denies that there are only two options: we
don’t have to say that good is either determined by God’s subjective decisions or determines God from outside.
Christian philosophers say that
God (the Creator, the Demiurge) is that which Plato called “the Form of the Good.” They are one and the same. Objective standards of goodness and righteousness are a part of God’s very nature - they are
not arbitrary, because He can no more change what is good to what is evil than He could eliminate His own existence, create a square circle, commit evil, or do anything else that contradicts His nature.
So morality is
not divinely subjective. But nor is it objectively determined by something outside of God, because - as I mentioned above - the moral dictates of divine practical reason are necessarily determined by His divine nature itself, which is a part of the being of God.
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