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On Making Actions Morally Wrong
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
According to R.G. Swinburne in his ingenious discussion of the Euthyphro Dilemma, God, by which he means ‘the unconstrained, omnipotent, omniscient creator and sustainer of the universe’ can make actions morally obligatory, right, wrong, good and bad.
In response to this claim I shall concentrate on two issues. The first is whether Swinburne establishes that God is capable of making actions morally wrong. Admittedly much of Swinburne's discussion is couched in terms of whether God can make actions morally obligatory but his remarks about terminology make it abundantly clear that he thinks the same arguments show that God can make actions morally wrong; so in fixing on the latter — less equivocal — notion I shall still be dealing with the substance of his argument. My second concern is the more general one of drawing out and examining some of the implications of Swinburne's account of religious morality.
Swinburne does not hold that God, if he exists, makes all morally wrong actions morally wrong; on the contrary, he maintains that some actions are necessarily wrong, such as torturing innocent children for the fun of it.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1976
References
1 ‘Duty and the Will of God,’ Canadian journal of Philosophy, vol.IV, number 2, Dec. 1974, pp 213-227.
2 p 15.
3 This is because he seems to hesitate about saying that human beings can make actions morally wrong. Later I argue that he is committed to the view that human beings can have this power.
4 pp 222-223.
5 The Euthyphro Dilemma is usually understood as comprising this pair of questions although the original Platonic formulation concerns piety rather than moral wrongness/obligatoriness. For an interesting examination of the original see Frederick Rosen's ‘Piety and justice: Plato's Euthyphro’ in Philosophy, April 1968.
6 Quoting Hugo Meynell, Swinburne says that this latter response ‘may well seem to the theist to be blasphemous. It appears to imply that there is some objective standard of goodness and badness, prior to God's will and commandment, to which God's will and commandment are morally obliged to conform. But it is of the essence of ‘God’ as most people understand the meaning of the term, that, if he exists at all the moral law is dependent on his decrees and not vice versa.’
In contrast to which Butler, in the Analogy:
‘Thus I have argued upon the principles of the Fatalists, which I do not believe; and have omitted a thing of the utmost importance which I do believe, the moral fitness and unfitness of actions, prior to all will whatever; which I apprehend as certainly to determine the divine conduct, as speculative truth and falsehood necessarily determine the Divine judment’ (Everyman edition P 242).
7 Which prompts the question of what doing God's will can amount to on Swinburne's account.
8 Swinburne seems to confuse the question of whether human beings can make actions wrong with questions about the circumstances under which we might exercise such a power. To say that we could only make things wrong if God allowed us to go on existing is surely not a reason for saying that we do not have that power, unless of course Swinburne is prepared to say that we do not have any powers whatsoever ― after all the exercise of any of them (including that of doing God's will!) is going to depend on God's preserving us.
9 Which will include those who are bothered about the Euthyphro Dilemma in the first place.