 So so far this semester, we've looked at a pretty wide variety of moral theories Now at this point, we're gonna ask the question of you know, does morality depend upon religion? One way of thinking about whether morality depends upon religion is whether the truth of some ethical theory depends upon the truth of Some religion. All right, that's one way to try to understand dependence. Another way is does our knowledge of morality Depend upon our knowledge of a particular religion. That's another way to think about dependence Another way to think about it is does the existence of morality depend upon the existence of a religion But the question we're dealing with here is trying to figure out what if any kind of dependence morality has upon a religion So one of the classic arguments and dealing with this kind of dependence or one of what this kind of dependence is Is something called the Euthyphro Dilemma and it's called Euthyphro named after the person with whom Socrates is having a conversation about this so The Euthyphro Dilemma starts off really simple. You know he's asking the question is what is moral moral Because the gods command it or we could just simply say the divine if you don't want to talk about the existence of God You could simply say it this way say is what is moral moral because the divine commands it or Does the divine command it because it's moral So if it's the first one Right, so the two possibilities either it's moral because the divine commands it or the divine commands it because it's moral So let's try the first one. It's moral because the divine commands it. Okay, so what is this supposed to mean? Well, there's a couple of different ways of trying to understand this right one way that is that You know the you know, we have existence all right, we have the world we have what's real We have all these physical properties and then the gods come along the divine comes along and then kind of adds morality on top of that So, you know what the divine commands makes this morality Another way of understanding this is that You know, you have you have you know, what is natural we have what is existence There is just no morality at all and the gods simply just command something or the divine simply command something. Okay So this whole idea is that there is some kind of disconnect between What is real was true and then what the what the divine says Well, not if it's this option it looks looks like a bad situation here If this is the case that if the divine makes true You know independently of what's real makes true. What is moral? Because it looks like there's just absolutely no reason for deciding one thing or another Sure the divine, you know with a lot of faith traditions that the divine commands say something like murder that murder is immoral But if there's no reason for that Then we say well, you know, the divine could have commanded just anything could have committed murder or killing random killing to be moral The divine could have meant could have commanded, you know a variety things regarding life The divine could have commanded that it's absolutely wrong in all situations to take life, right any life whatsoever the divine could have commanded that You know to take every life All right, now you might be thinking like well that that's just kind of nonsensical because there's good reasons To take life or not take life and this is exactly the point Yeah, if there's nothing that existed or is responsible for divine command Then it could have just been completely arbitrary But you are gut instinct is that well, there's really good reasons for what is moral, right? There's really good reasons for why you know This or that is more than more we've seen lots of varieties of how to explain that with these different ethical theories And so this is exactly the point is that we don't think morality is arbitrary. We think that there is good reason But if there's already good reason and depending on what the divine commands Then it can't be that option. There has to be reason for why the demand the divine commands with the divine commands Okay Good But then this is the second option that the divine commands it because it is good But if the divine commands it because it is good, it looks like it's good regardless of what the divine commands So randomly killing strangers really good reason not to do them But that doesn't necessarily mean that some divinity wouldn't command it You know if divinities or anything like people, you know, there are many times when people have commanded Killing others for no good reason, but that doesn't mean it's moral, right? It looks like the standard of what is moral is independent of what the divine command is So either way you go here I mean either you say that what is moral is moral because the divine commands that then you get this weird notion of the morality is Arbitrary and we don't want to accept that the other way that we can go is to say that the divine commands because it is moral It's like, okay We you know we would like to go that way, but then it looks like what is moral is independent of divine command