Headache: The Euthypro Argument

Capricious and whimsical?



By virtue of my claim that I am a frustrated philosopher (or better yet, an advocate of philosophy), I managed to read Topics on Introductions to Issues and Isms, not without feeling snooze-y, and found myself distressed with an entry. (Warning: Thinking too hard might cause vertigo. Hah.)

Definition: Divine Command Theory is defined by two necessary conditions:

A. The extensional equivalence thesis: An action is morally right if, and only if, God wills it and morally wrong if, and only if, God forbids it.

B. The Dependency Thesis: God's willing an action is the reason that a morally right action is morally right and God's forbidding an action is the reason that a morally wrong action is morally wrong.

The Euthypro Argument

1.Euthypro's Thesis: An act is pious if and only if, it is loved by the gods.

Socrates' Question: Are pious actions (i) loved by the gods because they are pious or are they (ii) pious actions because they are loved by the gods?

2.Socrates' Argument: a. If (i), then the piety of the action explains the fact that it is loved by the gods; being loved by the gods does not explain why an act is pious. (If it did, the pair of explanations would be circular.) On this alternative, Euthypro is not giving a view analogous to a divine command theory because he does not accept a dependency thesis.

b. If (ii), we must ask for an explanation of why the gods love certain actions (those that turn out to be pious because of gods' love of them). Either there is an explanation for the gods' love of pious actions that is not based on their being pious or there is no explanation at all for the gods' love of pious actions.

1.If there is such an explanation, then whatever explains the gods' love for these action's is the explanation of an action's being pious.

2.If there is no explanation of why the gods love certain acts, then the gods' love is capricious and whimsical.

c. Therefore, either the gods are capricious or whimsical or their love is not the explanation of why a pious action is pious.


Inhale that. I don't know why, but i just like Socrates' conclusion. No wonder he died the way he died.

Congratulations, you made it to the end of this post.