Now back to Euthyphro! (Sorry it took so long.)
Analogy time. @Faizal_Ali brought up the prototype meter in the other thread, so I’ll run with that. (There’s an obvious point of disanalogy that I’ll discuss shortly, so please don’t start responding before reading the whole thing. Also, you’ll have to pretend this is a world where they haven’t updated the SI unit of length to be based on c yet.)
Let’s say we have a few metal bars in various metrology labs in whatever society we are a part of, and we use them to make meter sticks. Problem is, they don’t agree with each other. Realizing the very concept of a meter requires that it is something that everyone has to agree on, we go about trying to find the correct standard for the meter. We trace down calibration certificates (or whatever), and eventually we find the bar that was used as the original prototype meter, locked in a vault somewhere.
The metrologists now say: aha! This is the correct standard for the meter! (We had forgotten about, haha, oops.) Anything that has the length of this bar is one meter long. Some of the bars that we have match it more closely and others less closely, and we set about adjusting the ones that are out of spec.
But no, someone comes along to say. A bar whose very length constitutes one meter, just isn’t coherent. It renders the concept of a meter circular. We know it’s a meter long because it because it is the prototype meter, and the prototype meter is a meter long. How do we know? Because it is the prototype meter.
And again, he says. What you have there is just an arbitrary rule. It’s just defining a meter as “the length of that bar”. But how can we say that bar is one meter long, unless we have a standard by which to judge its length?
Okay, first: the obvious disanalogy. The prototype meter is arbitrary. We could have just as easily picked any other length of dimensionally-stable metal and called it our unit of length instead.
God, on the other hand, is not arbitrary. He is the center of reality and the cause of existence of everything beside himself. Moreover, his character is not contingent, and thus, it is not possible for the objective standard of morality grounded in his character to be different than it actually is.
Now, it doesn’t actually matter at this point if the person raising the Euthyphro objection thinks there’s no reason to believe that God exists, or that his character is necessary, or any of that. Euthyphro is supposed to demonstrate an internal incoherence in the way the theist proposes grounding objective morality in God. So what matters is how the theist is proposing to do so.
And the way the theist proposes to do so is to say that goodness is grounded in God’s character. The horns of the original Euthyphro dilemma are either:
- What is good is so because God wills it, or
- God wills what he does because it is good.
The problem with (1) is that it makes goodness arbitrary, since God could will whatever. The problem with (2) is that it means goodness is something independent from God, so that God is not the ultimate reality after all. But by saying that goodness is grounded in God’s character, the theist avoids both these problems. Goodness is not independent of God, but neither is it arbitrary because his character is what it is necessarily.
Here is the point of analogy that I want to emphasize:
The discovery of the prototype meter in this little story did not suddenly remove everyone’s knowledge of what a meter is. It did not make the concept of a meter circular or vacuous. The man on the street still knows what a meter is: it’s roughly yea long, he might say, and he’d be right. His knowledge of a meter comes from the meter sticks he’s used, manufactured using the imperfect (but still approximately correct) bars that were in use at the start of the story. At the same time, it would be silly to say that he needs to grab one of his meters sticks to go measure the prototype meter before he can accept that a meter really is the length of that particular bar. If he does that, and finds they don’t match, what needs correcting is his meter stick.
In the same way, a philosopher or theologian claiming (perhaps because of an argument like the moral argument I laid out in this thread) that what actually defines goodness is what God would do, doesn’t make the concept of goodness circular or vacuous. We still have our moral intuitions to give us imperfect knowledge of what goodness is. (And our moral intuitions are approximately correct - at least in the broad strokes, because God put them there, yet they can go wrong because of sin or faulty reasoning, etc.) Yet, we don’t need to verify that God would only do good (as determined by our moral intuitions) as a precondition for accepting this theistic metaethical theory. And if we do compare our moral intuitions to God’s character - assuming we have the correct information about God’s character - it is our moral intuitions that need adjustment when they don’t agree.
(There are, of course, nuances here. Such as God is not a human being, which is why in an earlier post I said something to the effect of “goodness is what a person with God’s character would do” rather than merely “goodness is what God would do”. But I digress.)
TL;DR I have here a perfectly good resolution to the Euthyphro dilemma. 