Theological Voluntarism and the Euthyphro Problem Today

Plato posed it in 380 BCE, but the Euthyphro dilemma has never been answered to general satisfaction, and the versions circulating in contemporary theology are considerably more sophisticated than the original. It deserves a careful look.

What the dilemma actually says

Socrates asks Euthyphro: is something holy because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is holy? Strip the polytheism and the question becomes: is an act morally good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is morally good? Neither horn is comfortable for a theist. The first option — divine command theory, or more precisely theological voluntarism — makes morality arbitrary: if God had commanded cruelty for its own sake, cruelty would have been good. The second option implies that goodness exists independently of God, which seems to constrain divine authority and raises the question of why God is needed at all as a moral foundation.

Many atheists treat this as a clean refutation. It is not quite that, and being honest about why makes the real disagreement clearer.

The modified divine nature response

The most serious contemporary reply comes from philosophers like William Alston and Robert Adams. Their move is to deny that the dilemma presents a genuine exhaustive choice. God, on this account, does not issue commands arbitrarily, nor does God consult an external moral standard. Instead, God's nature just is the standard. Goodness is not a property God conforms to; it is what God essentially is. Commands flow necessarily from that nature, so they are neither arbitrary nor externally constrained.

This is a real improvement over naive voluntarism. It avoids the conclusion that God could have made torture obligatory on a whim. Adams's version in Finite and Infinite Goods (1999) develops it with genuine rigor, grounding moral facts in God's necessary being rather than contingent divine decrees.

The skeptic's response is fair, though: this move changes the subject rather than solving the problem. If goodness just is God's nature, we still need to know what that nature contains and why. When theologians cash out divine goodness in terms like love, justice, and care for persons, those terms carry content that we recognize and evaluate independently. We know roughly what love and justice mean, and we could in principle check whether the God described in a given tradition actually exemplifies them. That implies we are using a moral standard that operates at least partly outside the definition of God — which is exactly what the dilemma predicted.

Where the stakes become practical

This might look like abstract philosophy, but it has direct consequences for how religious moral authority functions in public argument. If theological voluntarism is correct in any strong form, then the basis for a moral claim is ultimately "God said so," and non-believers have no foothold. That structure makes interfaith and secular moral dialogue nearly impossible, because the foundation is not shared. Even many believing philosophers reject this outcome.

The natural law tradition within Catholicism, for instance, has always insisted that moral truths are accessible to reason independent of revelation. Aquinas held that the natural law is the rational creature's participation in eternal law — something that any reasoning person can in principle grasp. That position sits closer to the second horn of Euthyphro: there is a moral order that God recognizes rather than invents. It opens the door to genuine cross-worldview argument but concedes the point that morality does not logically require a divine commander.

Conversely, some Reformed theologians embrace voluntarism with open eyes, arguing that human moral intuitions are too corrupted by sin to serve as reliable independent guides. On this view, the apparent arbitrariness of divine command is a feature, not a bug: it keeps humans from substituting their own judgment for God's. This is at least internally consistent, but it makes external moral criticism of religious commands structurally impossible — a consequence that should be named clearly.

What this means for moral criticism of religion

The Euthyphro problem matters beyond academic theology because it clarifies what kind of argument is available when critics challenge religiously motivated moral positions. If a tradition implicitly relies on natural law or moral realism — and most popular religious ethics does, whether or not it labels itself that way — then it has already granted that moral reasoning operates with some independence from scripture and authority. Pointing to suffering, fairness, and human dignity as moral reasons is then legitimate on the tradition's own terms.

If a tradition adopts strong voluntarism, the honest implication is that moral disagreement with an outsider has no common ground, and the tradition should not expect its ethical positions to persuade anyone who does not already accept the divine authority in question. Most religious communities do not actually want to accept that isolation.

The dilemma does not refute theism. What it does is force a choice between two uncomfortable positions, and watching which horn a tradition chooses — or how it tries to avoid choosing — reveals a great deal about how that tradition actually understands the relationship between God and morality.