Is Something Good Because the Gods Approve, or Do They Approve Because It Is Good?

In Plato's dialogue, Socrates meets a man on his way to prosecute his own father and asks him what piety is. The answer offered is that the pious is what the gods love, and Socrates then asks whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or is pious because they love it. The two readings sound nearly identical and are opposite in structure. One makes divine approval a response to something already good. The other makes divine approval the thing that creates the goodness.

Each branch costs something that defenders would rather keep:

• •If approval responds to goodness, goodness is independent
• •So there is a standard the divine consults rather than sets
• •If approval creates goodness, the content is arbitrary
• •Cruelty would have been good had it been commanded
• •Calling the divine good then says only that it approves of itself
• •Neither branch leaves divine command as the source of morality

The argument has been answered for two and a half thousand years and the most serious reply denies that the two options exhaust the possibilities. On that view, goodness is neither a standard above the divine nor an arbitrary decree, but is identical with the divine nature itself, so the question of whether approval tracks or creates goodness does not arise. Critics press on whether that merely relocates the problem, since one can ask whether that nature is good by some further standard or is called good by definition, which reproduces the original fork one level up.

The setting of the dialogue is doing work that a summary of the argument leaves out. The man Socrates questions is prosecuting his own father for the death of a labourer, and is certain that this is pious because he knows what the gods want. The conversation never reaches a definition, and it ends with him making an excuse and leaving, which is the standard ending of the early dialogues. The point being made is as much about the confidence of somebody who has never examined the concept he is acting on as it is about the logical fork itself.

The structure of the argument applies to any attempt to ground values in the say-so of an authority, which is why it appears in discussions with no theological content at all. Substitute the law, the community, a majority vote or a person's own choices for the gods and the same fork opens, asking whether the authority endorses something because it is good or makes it good by endorsing it. Legal positivism, cultural relativism and several accounts of value all have to answer the same question, and the dialogue is therefore taught less as a point about piety than as a template for testing any such claim.

Asking whether the divine approves of good things or makes them good by approving splits any command-based account of morality. The first branch puts goodness beyond divine control, the second makes it arbitrary and empties the praise of meaning. The commonest reply identifies goodness with the divine nature. The same fork tests any authority-based account, including law and majority opinion.