Meet Joey. Every day, Joey’s mom drives him and his sister to kindergarten. As Joey jumps out of the car, his extremely religious mother tells Joey and his sister to “be good people.” Joey takes his mom’s advice: he says his pleases and thank-yous, avoids conflicts, and manages his time well. His mother continues to remind Joey of this every morning, all the way through high school. At this point, Joey enters a philosophy class where they talk about Plato’s fundamental texts. Thinking the name sounds cool, Joey chooses to do a project on Euthyphro. As he reads more, he discovers the book’s central dilemma: is an action good because it is commanded by the gods, or do the gods command it because it is good? The next day, he asks his mom, who is stumped. Joey is unsurprised. After all, people have only been wrestling with the question for the last 2,000 years.

As Joey quickly explained, the Euthyphro dilemma deals with the question of righteousness. Like many of the books by Plato, Euthyphro stars his mentor, Socrates, engaging in conversation with the namesake of the book, the religious prophet Euthyphro. Euthyphro is prosecuting his father for murder, believing that to be the righteous thing to do. As they talk, Socrates and Euthyphro attempt to find a definition for piety, or virtuous behavior. Euthyphro initially responds that the pious is what the gods love. Yet there is a clear problem with the answer that Socrates points out: gods often disagree about what is pleasing to themselves. This would lead to a contradiction, where actions are virtuous to some and sinful to others. In response to this, Euthyphro shifts his definition of piety to something that all the gods love.

Here, Socrates’ response brings us to the famous Euthyphro dilemma, which we hinted at above: Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? Euthyphro initially responds with the latter: that an action is deemed pious, or beloved, when it is loved by the gods. Yet, a Socrates reveals, if an action is pious simply because the gods love it, then piety becomes arbitrary, depending solely on divine favor. On the other hand, if the gods love an action because it is pious, then piety must have a standard independent of the gods’ will. Either way, Euthyphro fails to give a definition that explains the true essence of piety.

Divine Command Theory (DCT) attempts to remedy the dilemma by insisting that moral facts are grounded in God’s commands. Therefore, what God wills defines the good in life. The problem with this is that it seemingly renders morality arbitrary. If God willed killing others to be good, would that make it good? If virtue is solely dependent on God’s will, it subjects us to a system of morality that could possibly be made without reason.

Theologians attempt to remedy this by insisting morality does not stem from God’s will, but from His inner nature. This evades the problem of arbitrary moral systems. While it is possible that God’s willing of morality could be perceived as arbitrary, God’s nature is essentially good. Therefore, everything that God does must be rooted in goodness. In other words, God doesn’t make things good; He commands them because He is good. Of course, this solution completely begs the question by assuming that God exists as a perfect being. That can’t really be proven, but it is a cornerstone of faith, which gives DCT some credibility. Proving that God is perfect/all-good, of course, runs headfirst into the problem of evil. But that’s a post for another day.

Alternatively, atheists attempt to use Euthyphro’s dilemma as a way to argue two things. If morality is independent of God, then God must be unnecessary for ethics. On the other hand, if morality does depend on God’s commands, then ethics becomes arbitrary or authoritarian. The second point is strengthened by the fact that, as Socrates pointed out 2,000 years ago, gods don’t agree! What is ethical in one religion could be heavily condemned in another. For example, killing a cow is very unethical in Hinduism. Yet Christians kill cows all the time. If the supposedly all-good and all-knowing gods can’t agree on what good actions truly are, then it seems good actions are rendered arbitrary. Of course, theologians can insist that their sect or beliefs are the superior ones. However, because people from all religions can make that claim, I don’t give it much credibility. Due to the aforementioned problems, an atheist could also argue that we should strive to find morality through reason and harm reduction, leaving out God altogether. If God can’t provide a coherent moral system, then the duty falls on mankind to do so. But this is not a golden solution: utilitarianism and other God-independent philosophies certainly have their own problems.

Ultimately, the Euthyphro dilemma shows that grounding morality is far from straightforward. Whether one ties the good to divine nature or to independent moral truths, each path faces serious challenges: arbitrary objectiveness on one side, and complete subjectivity on the other. The lasting power of the dilemma is that it forces us to examine the foundations of our moral claims rather than accepting them without a second thought.