Relation to others· Morals

Grounded in God

Axis: The source of morality — What gives morality its authority?

The good owes its authority to God: it is because a good God wills, commands, or embodies the good that our duties bind absolutely. Reason can read the moral law, but it does not ground it; without this guarantor, only preferences and calculations would remain, with nothing that truly forbids.

Foundations and implications

↑ What grounds it

A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.

↑ What grounds it

Existence of God

Grounding morality in God first supposes that God exists: theism is the ground on which divine command alone can bind. That is the point of the line Dostoevsky gives Ivan Karamazov: if God does not exist, everything is permitted.

↓ What it implies

A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.

Problems

Descriptive Question
The Euthyphro dilemma
Is the good good because God wills it, or does God will it because it is good? One branch makes morality arbitrary, the other seems to make it independent of God; theologians have been seeking a way between the two ever since.
God's relation to the good
Descriptive Question
Without God, is everything permitted?
If no transcendent guarantor upholds our duties, do they keep their binding force, or do they become choices that can always be undone? Secularized societies put the phrase to the test every day.
morality without a guarantor
Descriptive
Omnipotence and the good
If God is all-powerful, does the good depend on his will to the point that he could have commanded otherwise? Descartes ventures it for the eternal truths, Ockham for certain precepts of the moral law, and arbitrariness looms.
God's will