Euthyphro and Dicta

Euthyphro, The Argument from Moral Truth, and the Theory of Dicta

Andrew Jeffery

Read at the 64^th Annual Northwest Conference on Philosophy, Oregon State University, November, 2012.

This paper explores the relationships between (1) the tacit dilemma Plato posed for theocentric accounts of right and wrong in the Euthyphro, (2) arguments that propose theism as an inference to the best explanation for the moral order; and (3) an objection A. N. Prior once offered against standard modal logics with implications for what makes statements “truth apt.” The connection between the first two will perhaps seem obvious; I hope the connection of these two to the third will turn out to be somewhat innovative.

It is commonly held that when Socrates asks Euthyphro, “Is the holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?”, Plato is pointing out that theories that base moral truth on divine preferences suffer from the defect of making moral truth appear to be arbitrary; if the fundamental reason why something is morally right is that the gods (or God) approves or commands it, then the reasons for such divine attitudes or commands cannot, on pain of circularity, be likewise given in moral terms. Herrick nicely summarizes the dilemma this creates for Divine Command Theorists as follows:

1. Either God has reasons that justify his commands, or his commands have no reason behind them at all.

2. If God has reasons backing his commands, then those reasons, and not God‘s commands, are the real basis of morality. The reasons, independent of God, are what really make things right or wrong, and the divine command view is false.

3. If God has no reasons behind his commands, then God is arbitrary.

4. If God is arbitrary, then God is imperfect.

5. But if God is imperfect in any way, then God cannot be the supreme moral authority.

6. Either way, it follows that God is not the foundation of morality.[1]

It is not always fully appreciated that if this difficulty for the Divine Command Theory goes unmet, it also undermines the so-called “Argument from Moral Truth” for the existence of God. If it is already established that God cannot be the foundation of morality, then arguments that begin from a premise of moral realism can hardly arrive at God via inference to the best explanation. One person who does appreciate the anticipatory contribution Plato made to this latter discussion is novelist and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who summarizes both the theistic argument and the criticism of it in an appendix at the end of her novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God:

1. There exist objective moral truths. (Slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)

2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world is but, rather, in the way the world ought to be. (Consider: should white supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all who don’t meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, in this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way that they have made it.)

3. The world itself—the way it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way—cannot account for the way the world ought to be.

4. The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3).

5. God exists.

. . . The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument that Plato made famous in the Euthyphro. Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is, why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, whereas genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn’t. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn’t have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument, then, The Argument from Moral Truth is another example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck.[2]

Thomists attempt to get around this difficulty, while preserving a theocentric account of morality, by grounding moral truth in God’s Intellect rather than in His Will. Moral truths, so the Thomistic doctrine goes, are eternal ideas in the Mind of God, with which His Will necessarily coincides.[3] But it can be objected that this solution still reduces God to an explanatory “fifth wheel.” After all, while God, being omniscient, would know all true propositions-- including moral propositions, God’s knowing them would not be what makes them true—their being’ true would be what makes it the case that God knows them.

But what if the theist stops to question the tacit ontology of propositions themselves? Propositions are typically conceived of as eternal, mind-independent abstract objects, true or false regardless, not only of what we think, but of whether anyone is there to think of them at all. What if one instead took the view that the fundamental bearers of truth are not these Platonic entities, but rather something more akin to what the Medievals called dicta, literally “things (that are) said”? Unlike mind-independent propositions, for something to be a dictum, there must be someone capable of saying it. For an example of the contrast with the theory of (eternal, mind-independent) propositions, consider Kenneth Konyndyk’s analysis of an objection A. N. Prior once offered against modal logic. Prior’s criticism was intended to apply to all systems that might hold “àp ﬤ à(p v q)” as a theorem:

. . . let p be ‘Only God exists’ and suppose this possible, and let q be ‘I don’t exist.’ Here p is possible ex hypothesi, but could the disjunction ‘Either p or q,’ i.e.,

‘Either only God exists or I don’t exist.’

possibly be true? The peculiarity of it is that the disjunction is unstatable unless I exist, and is therefore only statable if both parts of it, ‘I don’t exist’ and ‘Only God exists,’ are false. In this case, then, ‘Possibly either p or q’ is false although ‘Possibly p’ is true. [4]

Konyndyk continues,

Prior’s contention, notice, is that the proposition in question is statable (by anyone other than God) only if it is false, so it is not possible for it both to be stated and true. Well, you might say, what does it matter whether anyone can state the proposition truly? After all there is such a proposition, and if there is, then it is possibly true even if I cannot state it. But this reply assumes just what Prior wishes to reject—that there is such a proposition whether statable or not.[5]

Thus we have two distinct views on the fundamental bearers truth. Both views assume the inadequacy of purely conventionalist or empiricist views. Of the two, the theory of propositions offers the more radically realist account, for propositions are mind-independent objects, possessing their truth or falsity independently of whether or not there is anyone to think of or discover them. The theory of dicta is inherently more anti-realist: in order for anything to be a dictum, there must be at least be a mind capable of asserting it.[6] The moral realist who holds both that there are necessary or timeless moral truths, and also that what can be said entails the existence of someone in a position to say it, then seems to be in a strong position to hold that there must be a necessary or timeless Mind to assert these truths. In this way, it might be supposed that, at least for moral realists, theism could hold an explanatory advantage over naturalism, even granting that the difficulties of what Goldstein calls “the Euthyphro problem.” The basic argument would look something like this:

1. A statement can be true (or false) only if it can be truly (or falsely) asserted. (Note assertibilty is a necessary condition here, not for truth, but simply for having any truth-value, viz., a necessary condition for a dictum’s existing even as an abstract object.)

2. A statement is assertible only if there is an agent in a position to assert it.

3. Some basic moral statements are true.

4. Basic moral statements are true necessarily and eternally.

5. Something is assertible necessarily and eternally only if there is a mind in a position to assert it necessarily and eternally.

6. Therefore, there is at least one necessary and eternal mind who is the asserter of moral truths.

Again, unlike the case with the Divine Command Theory, there is no implication on this argument that God could have willed radically different moral truths from the ones we know. God’s will plays no role in explaining why any particular moral proposition is true rather than false. Rather, it is God’s existence as a Necessary Being eternally in a position to assert necessary truths that explains why there can be necessary Truths at all.

It further follows that a formally similar argument could be supplied, mutatis mutandis, to argue from mathematical truths to the existence of an Eternal, Necessary Mind. In fact, it might be a stronger argument than the Argument from Moral Truth. In philosophical circles, mathematical realism is embraced by many who reject moral realism, and the status of mathematical truths as necessary truths is widely accepted both within and outside of philosophy.

It might have been thought, even more than with morality, that mathematical truths were not appropriate causal explanada at all. Explanation, at least in the sense that the modern sciences practice it, typically involves accounting for states of affairs in terms of previous states of affairs.[7] Thus, to suppose that such things as mathematical truths could be explanada, might seem to commit one to supposing that mathematical truths must have an origin. Yet one cannot imagine or give a coherent description of a time when basic mathematical truths either did not exist or were other than what they now are. One might imagine a time before sibling incest began to be morally wrong (Who, the rabbis once pondered, could Cain have married but his own sister?[8]), but a time before it began to be the case that “(1 + 1) = 2” is surely not even a conceivable state of affairs.

But just because an explanation is not to be given in terms of prior events does not mean that no explanation is called for, nor does it mean that none can be given.[9]

Although the proposal here may seem extravagantly Berkeleyan, it is worth rehearsing its advantages. On the one hand, on this view propositions turn out not to be utterly mind-independent abstract objects floating out there all by themselves; instead, what may asserted presupposes an asserter. On the other hand, the view also does justice to the moral (and mathematical) realists’ intuitions that fundamental truths in both areas of discourse are necessary and eternal. Of course, antirealists of either stripe may see these as disadvantages. Indeed, they might see this entire argument as a reductio against its premises. And even theistic philosophers may find the price-tag to be too high. A theory of dicta, as compared to the theory of propositions, may have disadvantages in the philosophies of language and logic so great as to make abandoning this aforesaid family of theistic arguments a preferable option. To return to A. N. Prior’s counterexample to àp ﬤ à(p v q) , if this holds, then that would rule out some of the most powerful systems of modal logic, including S5, which include àp ﬤ à(p v q) as a theorem; and certain theists are rather fond of S5 in particular.[10] To turn this around, it is interesting that the classical theory of propositions turns out to have some entailments for the philosophy of religion that have not previously been counted. And of course there is the further surprising implication that embracing the soundness of certain familiar systems of modal logic, even on the most innocent-seeming formal grounds, seems to have rather substantive implications for our views concerning the fundamental bearers of truth.

Andrew V. Jeffery

Green River Community College

[1] Paul Herrick, Think With Socrates, forthcoming.

[2] Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (Random House, 2010), 371-2.

[3] Stump and Kretzmann make an even stronger claim Thomistic claim, that absolute Goodness is identical with God’s essence. I have difficulty knowing how to assess this claim. Outside of Platonism, monotheism usually conceives of God as a particular, whereas Absolute Goodness is an abstract object. See Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Being and Goodness,” in Thomas V. Morris, ed., Divine& Human Action, Cornell University Press, 1988; 281-312.

[4] Quoted in Konyndyk, Kenneth, Introductory Modal Logic (U. of Notre Dame, 1986), 61. The original comes from A.N. Prior, Time and Modality (Oxford, 1957), 49.

[5] Ibid. Konyndyk goes on (62-63) to sketch a brief outline of what a modal logic of dicta might look like, which necessitates a fourfold distinction between “strong” and “weak” necessity and possibility.

[6] Regrettably, I cannot claim for the pedigree of the notion I am suggesting the Stoic “assertible,” or lekton. The Stoic notion of a lekton as a bearer of truth, bears more resemblance to a the modern proposition than to the Medievals’ dicta. As Barnes, Borzien and Mignuccie explain in their contribution to The Cambridge history of Hellenistic philosophy:

. . . But what then is the function of the remaining part of definition (1), the phrase (ii) ‘as far as itself is concerned’? In fact it does not serve to narrow down the class of assertibles any further. Rather, it is meant to pre-empt a misinterpretation: the locution ‘can be asserted’ could have been understood as too strict a requirement, that is, as potentially throwing out some things which for the Stoics were assertibles. For there are two things that are needed for a statement of an assertible: first the assertible of the itself, secondly someone who can state it. According to Stoic doctrine, that someone would have to have a rational presentation in accordance with which the assertible subsists. But there are any number of assertibles that subsist even though no one has a suitable presentation. In such cases, one the necessary conditions for the ‘assertibility’ of an assertible is unfulfilled. Here the qualification ‘as far as the assertible itself is concerned’ comes in. It cuts out this external, additional condition. For something’s being an assertible it is irrelevant whether there actually is someone who could state the assertible.

Jonathan Barnes, Susanne Borzien, and Mario Mignucci, “Logic”, in Keimpe Algra, ed., The Cambridge history of Hellenistic philosophy (CUP, 2005), 94

[7] “A scientific explanation is an adequate description of underlying causes helping to bring about the phenomenon to be explained.” Richard Miller, Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and Social Sciences (Princeton, 1987); 60.

[8] See for instance, http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/960277/jewish/Whom-did-Cain-and-Abel-marry.htm.

[9] The appendix to Goldstein’s novel mentioned earlier also includes an “Argument from Mathematical Reality” (387-388). While space considerations preclude a full discussion of that argument here, it is not clear to me how the flaws she finds in that argument would apply to argument I am suggesting in this paper, unless, perhaps, she would say that I am committing the “Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Explain Another.”

[10] Alvin Plantinga comes to mind, but there are many others.