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Duty and the Will of God1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

R. G. Swinburne
R. G. Swinburne*
Affiliation:
University of Keele
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Extract

For a theist, a man's duty is to conform to the announced will of God. Yet a theist who makes this claim about duty is faced with a traditional dilemma first stated in Plato's Euthyphro—are actions which are obligatory, obligatory because God makes them so (e.g. by commanding men to do them), or does God urge us to do them because they are obligatory anyway? To take the first horn of this dilemma is to claim that God can of his free choice make any action obligatory or non-obligatory (or make it obligatory not to do some action). The critic claims that the theist cannot take this horn, for God cannot make bad actions good.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , December 1974 , pp. 213 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1974

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Footnotes

1

I am most grateful to Mr. D. A. McNaughton and other colleagues at Keele and to Dr. C. J. F. Williams for their helpful criticisms of an earlier version of this paper.

References

2 Euthyphro, 9e.

3 Nowell-Smith, P. H. “Morality: Religious and Secular,” in Rationalist Annual (1961)Google Scholar; republished in Ramsey, Ian T. (ed.), Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy (London, 1966), pp. 93–112Google Scholar; see p. 97.

4 Meynell, Hugo “The Euthyphro Dilemma,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume (1972), pp. 223–234Google Scholar; seep. 224.

5 I have attempted to provide a coherent account of the concept of omnipotence in my “Omnipotence” (American Philosophical Quarterly, X [1973], 231-237). In his “Omnipotence” (Philosophy, XLVIII [1973], 7-20) P. T. Geach claims (pp. 7f) that “no graspable sense has ever been given to the sentence [viz., ‘God can do everything,’ which he equates with ‘God is omnipotent’] that did not lead to self-contradiction or at least to conclusions manifestly untenable from a Christian point of view.” Geach sketches four accounts of omnipotence and brings objections against each of them. The objections to the first three accounts seem to tell against the coherence of the concept of omnipotence. I would claim in the cited article to have given an account of omnipotence immune from such objections. The objections to the fourth account seem to tell only against claiming that God is omnipotent. They suggest the need for modifying the claim that God is omnipotent in the way which I pursue in this paper. I must withdraw the claim of my earlier article to have given an account of omnipotence which allowed the theist to say that God is omnipotent, but continue to claim that I have given a coherent account of the concept of omnipotence such that it makes sense to say that there is an omnipotent being (although it is not coherent to say that that being is God).

6 For this distinction see Cooper, Neil “Morality and Importance,” in Wallace, G. and Walker, A. D. M. (eds.), The Definition of Morality (London, 1970).Google Scholar

7 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, la.25.3. See my “Omnipotence,“ American Philosophical Quarterly, X (1973), 231-237.

8 See Hare, R. M. The Language of Morals (Oxford, 1952), pp. 80 et seq.Google Scholar

9 “A man cannot be sincere in accepting the conclusion that some course of action is entirely mistaken, if he at the same time deliberately commits himself to this course of action” (Hampshire, Stuart Freedom of the Individual [London, 1965], p. 7)Google Scholar.

10 The extreme position on this issue of R. M. Hare as represented in Chapter 5 of Freedom and Reason seems to be that necessarily if a man believes that B is the better action, he will do B unless it is psychologically impossible for him to do B. Many writers have opposed this position. Steven Lukes has pointed out that ordinarily we describe men as tempted and yielding to temptation when there is no irresistable temptation for them to yield to. Irving Thaiberg points out that ‘ought implies might not.’ In Hare's account of moral action it would never be appropriate to blame a man for not living up to his principles. See the contributions of Hare, Lukes, Thaiberg and others published in Mortimore, Geoffrey (ed.), Weakness of Will (London, 1971).Google Scholar

11 Nothing which I have written implies that the outcome of a struggle with temptation is predetermined.

12 This general view that necessarily God can only will the good, and that necessarily his freedom is only a freedom to choose between equally good alternatives, is that of Aquinas. Thus: “The will never aims at evil without some error existing in the reason, at least with respect to a particular object of choice. For, since the object of the will is the apprehended good, the will cannot aim at evil unless in some way it is proposed to it as a good; and this cannot take place without error. But in the divine knowledge there cannot be error. God's will cannot, therefore, tend towards evil“ (Summa Contra Gentiles, 1.95.3; translated by Pegis, Anton C. under the title, On the truth of The Catholic Faith, Book I [New York, 1955]Google Scholar).

13 Meynell, op. cit., p. 232Google Scholar.

14 Geach, Peter God and the Soul (London, 1969), p. 127Google Scholar. For criticism of this see Phillips, D. Z. Death and Immortality (London, 1971)Google Scholar, Chapter 2.

15 Summa Theologiae, la.2ae.94.5., ad. 2, New Blackfriars ed., trans. O.P., Thomas Gilby Vol. XXVIII (London, 1966)Google Scholar.

16 See Copleston, F. A History of Philosophy, Vol. II (London, 1950), p. 547.Google Scholar

17 Philosophy, XXXIII (1958), 1-19.

18 As Ockham seems to have held. See Copleston, F. A History of Philosophy, Vol. III (London, 1953), pp. 104f.Google Scholar