Philosophy of Religion 25:83-97 (1989) �9 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands

Understanding the Euthyphro problem

MICHAEL LEVIN Department of Philosophy, City College of New York, 138th St. & Convent Avenue, New York, NY 10031

1. The problem

The relation of God's will to the value of its objects presents a classic dilemma. It is assumed within the western philosophical and theologi- cal tradition that "what God hath done is rightly done," and in par- ticular that human beings are obligated to obey God's commands. But w h y is God's handiwork good, and obedience to his commands obligatory? Only two answers seem possible. Either what God wills is right because he wills it, or God wills what he wills because it is right. The rightness of what God wills is a consequence of his willing it, or his willing it is a consequence of its rightness. 1

Either alternative produces profound intellectual, and perhaps spiritual, discomfort. The unappealing implications of the first horn of the dilemma, which we may call the "pure will" theory, were power- fully articulated by Leibniz:

... one unthinkingly destroys all love of God and all his glory. For why praise him for what he has done, if he would be equally praise- worthy in doing just the contrary? Where then will be his justice and his wisdom, if there only remains a certain despotic power, if will takes the place of reason, and according to the definition of tyrants, what pleases the most powerful is just by that alone? 2

The unattractiveness of the second horn of the dilemma (which I will call the "guided will" theory) is more difficult to capture, but it can perhaps be formulated in terms of God's independence. God is sup- posed to be the ultimate ground o f everything. Everything that exists

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does so because of him, whereas God himself is as completely self- sufficient and self-actuating as it is logically possible to be. Yet if God wills what he does because it is antecedently right, moral standards become independent of God and in this instance God's will becomes a function of something beyond itself. If moral standards are as ulti- mate as God, God loses his unique independence. It is this perceived consequence, I believe, which prompts the resistance almost everyone feels to the guided will horn of the Euthyphro dilemma.

The approved way with a philosophical dilemma is to unearth a hidden false assumption which misrepresents the alternatives as op- posed or exhaustive. To some extent my analysis will fit this form. The discomfort produced by the Euthyphro problem stems, or so I argue, from confusion about God's "dependence" on standards of value; the sort of dependence on norms that must be attributed to God under the guided will theory does not rule out omnipotence and self- sufficiency. This is a dissolution of the problem insofar as it reduces the " trapped" feeling characteristic of the Euthyphro and other philo- sophical dilemmas. At the same time, the guided will theory is measur- ably supported by a showing of its consistency with tenets it is often thought to contradict. Perhaps, then, my argument is closer to being a defense of the guided will theory. No matter. What counts is clarity, not the best characterization of such clarity as is achieved.

A final preliminary point. If there is to be a Euthyphro problem, there must be right and wrong and good and bad. Things must be as- sumed to possess value in an entirely objective sense, for it is pointless to ask what makes things valuable unless value is a trait things them- selves have. Put in the formal mode, the Euthyphro problem requires that moral language be taken to describe the intrinsic character of actions, objects and persons. Thus, it must be assumed that "X is right" is more than a linguistic device for expressing approval of X or soliciting the hearer's approval of X, and that "X is right" does not mean - indeed is not even coextensive with - "[The speaker's] society approves of X." Whether anything actually is valuable in this strong sense is highly controversial, as is the question of whether acceptable clear sense can be given to the very idea of 'ethical objectivity.' Yet formidable as moral scepticism is, it permits a too speedy dissolution of the Euthyphro problem: it says that nothing is good because God wills it and that nothing is willed by God because it is good, since nothing is good or bad, period. Such a dissolution leaves God an amoral

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force whose activities excite a variety of human emotions perhaps understandable in terms of, but in no way justified by, the character of the acts themselves. Anyone prepared to take this view of God is prepared to repudiate theism altogether, and thereby dispense with the Euthyphro problem even more speedily. Those who see a Euthyphro problem must therefore deny with Leibniz that " the goodness which we attribute to the works of God are only chimeras of men." They can concede the social role of morality and the efficacy of moral language in shaping behavior, but they must also assume some ob- jective reality underlying these social practices.

2. The tenacity of the Euthyphro problem

A survey of unsuccessful solutions to a problem may helpfully point up some feature of the problem that a successful solution must ad- dress. I want to look briefly at three recent approaches to the Eu- thyphro problem which point up the admittedly rather vague moral that the Euthyphro problem is very tenacious, and that any solution is likely to have to recur to basics. As all three of these ap- proaches are attempts to rehabilitate the pure will theory, their collec- tive failure also invites renewed attention to the guided will theory.

2.1 Leibniz deploys a counterfactual against the pure will theory. According to the pure will theory, he argues, ritual murder (say) would have been obligatory, and certainly acceptable, had God com- manded it. But, he invites the reader to conclude, ritual murder would surely have been wrong even i f God had commanded it. Since the pure will theory entails incorrect answers about obligation in hypo- thetical situations, the theory is incorrect.

Two replies to Leibniz are possible. The more daring reply, a form of which I consider in 2.2 below, is that it is not clear that ritual murder would be wrong if God commanded it. The other reply is that Leibniz's counterfactual is incoherent. God could not have commanded ritual murder, for it is against his nature to do so. Therefore, any counterfactual beginning "I f God had commanded ritual murder ..." is a counterfactual with a logically impossible antecedent. Since counter- essentials entail anything, nothing of interest follows from any true hypothetical with a counteressential antecedent. 3

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Let us grant that counteressentials prove nothing, and that it is against God's essence to command ritual murder. The Euthyphro problem simply re-emerges with the question of why commanding ritual murder is against God's essence. What is it about God's nature and ritual murder that make the two incompatible? The most obvious explanation, that ritual murder is evil and God naturally eschews evil, is equally obviously the guided will theory in a new form, and un- available to an "essentialist" proponent of the pure will theory. A more interesting move for the essentialist is flat denial that there is an explan- ation; ritual murder is wrong because it is against God's nature to will it, and God's inability to will ritual murder is, so to speak, a brute logical fact. Just as there is no reason why water is H 2 0 - water just is H20, of metaphysical necessity, "water" being the name we happen to have attached to H 2 0 - so "virtue" is the name we happen to have attached to whatever it is God's nature to will. This high-handed line does avoid questions about what the moral status of ritual murder would be if God willed it, since we are continuing to assume that those questions involve vacuous counteressentials. However, praising God for opposing ritual murder again becomes difficult. Such opposit ion would have to be praiseworthy because it is, as a matter of brute logical fact, part of God's nature. We would be praising God 's nature for being itself - rather an odd basis for praise. As well praise the number 9 for being odd. The familiar Leibnizian objections regain a foothold against the no-counteressentials defense.

These objections return with renewed force when one looks a bit more sceptically at the eschewal of explanation o f God's nature. While some sorts o f explanation may well be inappropriate for necessary truths about essence - causal explanation, for instance - other kinds of ex- planation are perfectly in order. A necessary truth may be shown to be natural, or understandable, or consistent with other truths, or en- tailed by more general necessary truths. No mathematical truth of any complexity is treated as brute, and while water may just be H 2 0 of metaphysical necessity, it is certainly in order to cite the evidence that makes it plausible to suppose that water just is (metaphysically necessarily) H20. An account of some sort o f why God cannot will ritual murder is therefore to be expected, and this propels us right back to the ritual-murder-is-wrong explanation. So far as I can see, the only position left for someone who recognizes the propriety o f explanations of God's essence, but rejects the guided-will theory, is

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to maintain that there is an explanation, for each particular object of God's will, of why he necessarily wills it (or refrains from willing it), but that none of these explanations involve the value of what he wills. This promissory note may be logically consistent, but it is hard to see how such a series of explanations could avoid ad-hocness, and those who consistently maintain in words that there is no normative explana- tion of God's will are characteristically unable to maintain this position in thought. One finds in practice, I think, that those who say that evil just is incompatibility with God's nature constantly find themselves using prior moral standards to anticipate w h a t God's nature m u s t be,

thereby in effect explaining or anticipating God's will in terms of the moral character of its objects. This brings them in thought, if not in words, to the guided-will theory.

2.2 Phillip Quinn 4 argues that we simply do not know enough about "possible worlds" in which God commands ritual murder to know whether ritual murder really is wrong in those worlds, and he cautions against exporting moral intuitions shaped by the actual world to those hypothetical situations. On the face of it, however, there ought to be a possible world exactly like this one with respect to basic human drives, the capacity for pain, and everything else about human nature that makes ritual murder evil in this world, but in which God commands ritual murder. The intuition that God is commanding something wrong in that near-actual world is very powerful, and not weakened by the observation that it is a world-bound intuition. After all, what could there be abou t that tailor-made world to render our actual moral intuitions inapplicable to it? Indeed, fit with our actual moral intuition is the only available basis for judging general theories about the foundations of ethics; what other basis do we have for assessing anything? 5 Not that this methodological point needs pressing; Quinn's insistence on our ignorance about right and wrong in other possible worlds pays it discrete respect. To say that we do not know enough to condemn ritual murder in worlds in which God commands it is to say that, for all we know, there might be factors in those worlds which mitigate its apparent wrongness - that, for all we know, ritual murder is permissible or obligatory in such worlds by our present standards. Quinn seems to be arguing that that putatively possible world just like ours but for God ordering ritual murder in it is not really possible at all, because those truths about human nature which make

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ritual murder wrong are not in Goodman's phrase, cotenable with the hypothesis that God commands it. It is hard to avoid the con- clusion that Quinn is assuring us of God's not willing ritual murder in any possible world in which ritual murder was not all right, and that he is, like the counteressentialist, using prior moral standards to deter- mine what God could and could not will. Again, it might be possible to maintain Quinn's position in words, but by promising that if we knew enough we would always find God's will conformable to our antecedent moral convictions, Quinn is in thought conceding everything to his Leibnizian critic.

2.3 Baruch Brody defends the pure will theory on the grounds that "God owns the universe. ''6 God made everything, including us, and we are at most stewards of his property. We are therefore obliged to follow his commands about what to do with and to the world he owns even though God himself may have no reasons whatever for his com- mands. The owner of property has, by definition, a right to do what he pleases with his property (consistently with the property rights of others) even if his pleasure is without objective justification. Those who are minding his property are obliged to obey his commands with regard to it even if those commands are arbitrary.

This ingenious theory is clearly vulnerable to Leibnizian objections - would a steward be obliged to obey a divine directive to destroy as much property and kill as many other stewards as possible? A more instructive objection is that Brody has merely shifted the venue of the Euthyphro problem. There is a jump in Brody's argument, as so far stated, from God's having created the universe to his owning, having property rights in, the universe. To get from creation to ownership, Brody must, and does, appeal to Locke's theory of property: we own what we "mix our labor with." Creation from nothing is the limiting case of labor-mixing; every speck of an object made from nothing embodies the work of its creator. Unpacking "X is the property o f A " as "A has a right to do with X as he pleases, ceteris paribus," Brody's argument runs in full that a person has a right to do whatever he pleases with what he creates; God created the world; therefore God has a right to do whatever he pleases with the world, including issue commands to its human stewards. Unfortunately, however, Brody has not explained the key Lockean element in his argument, namely why people have the right to do what they please with what they

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create. 7 Why does creating something, mixing your labor with it, make it yours? In particular, why does God's having made the world oblige us to obey his commands about what to do with it? That people (in- cluding God) do own what they create is not in question; the question is why they do. There are as usual two sorts of answers: Either creating something makes it the property of its creator because God has so decreed, or creating something makes it the property of its creator for reasons independent of any divine decree. The first answer is a special case of the pure will theory, and Brody cannot offer it without moving in a circle. ("Why should we listen to God? .. . . Because it's his property we're talking about, so what he says goes." "But what makes it his property? . . . . He created it, and he says that what you create is yours, and what he says goes." "But why does what he says go? . . . . Because it's his property we're talking about ...") The second answer rekindles familiar worries about God's independence, for, should Brody give it, his argument now is not that God's commands are authoritative just because they are his commands, but because they are God's commands about things to which, independently o f his commands, he has rights. I am obliged to refrain from ritual murder because God feels like ordering me to and because God's creation of the world gave him the right to order me about on matters like ritual murder. In short, Brody has merely exchanged the general Euthyphro problem for the Euthy- phro problem applied to property rights.

3. A solution

The history of the Euthyphro problem, especially its recent history as recapitulated in Section 2, suggests that the pure will theory is a dead end. We might therefore wish to persuade ourselves that the guided will theory is not as bad as it looks. With that in mind, let me begin with a few words about "dependence."

In its core sense, dependence is a relation between substances. One substance X may depend on another substance Y, and do so in two basic ways. X may depend ontologically on Y, if Y brought X into being or keeps X in being over time. Statues are ontologically de- pendent on sculptors, and flowers are ontologically dependent on sun- light. (The two cases can obviously overlap; perhaps the ontological dependence of flowers on sunlight belongs to the overlap.) X depends

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causally on Y if changes in the states o f X are effects of changes in the states of Y. A satellite is causally dependent, with respect to its instant- aneous velocity, on its parent body. ("Ontological" dependence patent- ly involves causality, but the distinction between the two kinds of de- pendency is clear enough, and conveniently indicated by present ter- minology.) Many seemingly remote uses of "depend" rest on analogies with dependence in one of these basic senses. When a = 3b, the "de- pendent variable" a is said to vary with the "independent variable" b, even though neither a nor b is a substance and b's being 4 does not cause a to be 12, because changes in the specification of b entail changes in the specification of a. Such analogical uses of dependence serve mainly to emphasize that, in its core sense, a substance can de- pend only on another substance.

I stress this conceptual point to drive home that when God is con- ceived as independent o f anything beyond himself, the (in)dependence meant is ontological and causal: the intuitive idea of a self-sufficient and wholly self-acting God is that of an uncreated God, a God not sustained by any substance (and therefore not annihilable by the ces- sation of sustenance), and a God whose character is not at the mercy of changes in other substances. Deity so conceived is challenged by any threat to causal or ontological independence. That being allowed, the solution or dissolution of the Euthyphro problem lies in recog- nizing that goodness, moral standards and moral truth are none of them substances. They radiate no causal power. Even if right acts are right in virtue of something other than God's will, the rightness of right acts - the standards in virtue of which right acts are right - are not the sorts of things that could create, sustain or change God. They are not properly things at all. The guided-will horn of the Euthyphro dilemma thus respects the sort of independence God is traditionally supposed to have.

4 . E l a b o r a t i o n s

God's ontological independence of moral standards is quite straight- forward once norms are conceeded not to be substances. This con- cession immediately entails that God was not created by norms and would not disappear if norms ceased to exercise their (non-existent) sustentative powers. The only reason for including norms among

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the things in the world God must transcend is a conflation of the objectivity of value with the existence of values as objects. I do not know how many philosophers or theologians have actually made this mistake and then gone on to imagine norms as things on which God might ontologically depend, but it is a mistake serious enough to belabor. Objectivity is one thing, objects another; truths outnumber substances. My desk truly and objectively weighs fifty pounds, yet, it seems to me and many other philosophers, there is no such enti ty as 'the being fifty pounds in weight of my desk' or 'my desk's weighing fifty pounds. ' My desk admittedly affects other substances, like scales, in part because of (as the natural Platonising idiom has it) its weight, but it remains my desk that exercises those powers. The objectivity of mathematics can similarly be maintained without commitment to mathematical objects - if, for instance, the objectivity of mathe- matical statements is construed as their objectively following from specified axioms. To affirm the objective wrongness of ritual murder and the existence of moral standards by which it may be assessed, is, finally, to say that ritual murder is, really, wrong. So far as ! can see, belief in the "reality of values" carries no ontological implications whatever.

More serious difficulties arise from the apparent causal dependence imposed on God by the guided will theory. "All right," says the objec- tor I am imagining, "norms are not substances. Still, you concede - nay insist, for purposes of discussion - that things are objectively good and bad. Yet if God commands the acts he does because of their right- ness, 8 and the rightness of right acts lies in some feature they possess apart from God's decree that they be done, God's commands are being determined by a feature of things independent of his will. That is causal dependence on substances, with respect to their value. 9 It won' t help to say that it was God who originally decided which things were to be good and which evil, and in that sense created the value things possess, since, on the guided will theory, it was not up to God what features a thing must have in order to be good or evil. God was con- strained to make Mother Theresa kind and Caligula cruel, if it was God who made one good and the other evil."

Talk of God examining things in order to decide what to do (next?) may be objectionably anthropomorphic, but our hypothetical objector must accept it if he is going to accuse the guided will theory o f com- promising God's causal independence. One can hardly complain that

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divorcing the goodness of X from God's commanding X implies God's causal dependence on the goodness of X, unless the "because" in "God commands X because he finds X good" is the causal "because." But if God is to be likened to a decision-maker constrained by the val- ues of the options open to him, what determines God to command X is God's belief that X is right, not the rightness of X per se. In general, an agent A's choice of an option O is always explained by reference to the characteristics of A. The value of O to A is explanatorily irrelevant if A does not see O as valuable. 1~ Decision-makers decide on the basis of the perceived values of the options before them. Thus, if the lan- guage of action-explanation is appropriate to God at all, God's com- manding X is caused by his belief that X is to be done, not by X's obli- gatoriness. Inasmuch as God's commands depend on God's own judge- ment, God has not yet been shown to be causally dependent on any- thing beyond himself.

"This is mere evasion," our objector fairly shouts. "God's beliefs about right and wrong may be the immediate cause of his commands, but what causes God's beliefs about right and wrong in the first place? On the guided will theory, God's belief that an action is obligatory for man is caused by the obligatoriness-for-man of that action. So God's beliefs about right and wrong, if not his actions, depend on the moral character of actions; the guided-will theory robs God of autonomy after all."

We must proceed carefully. In whatever way the rightness of action X determines God's belief that action X is right, whether causally or in some other way, all of God's beliefs are determined by the truth of those beliefs. God may believe that X is right because X is right, but God believes that fire engines are red because fire engines are red (how- ever "because" is construed). With respect to his dependence on things beyond himself, God's knowledge of value is no different from his knowledge of anything else. If his independence is compromised by his knowledge of value, it is compromised by his knowledge of the color of fire engines. To be sure, some philosophers have worried that omniscience does war with omnipotence; others worry that God's knowledge of the passage of time wars with his changelessness, a trait closely associated with self-sufficiency. But these worries only emphasize that problems raised by God's knowledge of values have nothing to do with its being values that are known about; they are special cases of general problems raised by divine knowledge of any mundane thing.

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"Ah," retorts our objector, "you forget the difference between God's knowledge of the color of fire engines and his knowledge of the goodness of generosity, a difference that lies in how the reality under- writing his knowledge came to be. If God made everything, he made fire engines red, indirectly if not by direct decree. Fire engines are red, ultimately, because he decided they would be. So even if God's belief about the color of fire engines is a function of the color of fire engines, the color of fire engines is in the end a function of God's will, and his independence is preserved. However, if generosity is good for some reason other than God's having decreed that it would be, God's knowledge of the goodness of generosity cannot ultimately be ex- plained in terms of his will. It may have been up to God whether to put generosity in the world, but it was not up to him whether generosi- ty would be good. So values do create a special difficulty for God's independence. Take that familiar analogy for God's creative acts, an author's creation of his characters. His characters certainly exercise no causal influence on the author, but it is not up to an author which traits a character must have to be sympathetic or unsympathetic. Are we to say that God is similarly bound?"

This argument, appealing as it is, rules out at least free will under any indeterministic analysis of free will. Indeterminism sees my will alone as accounting for the mot ion of my arm at time t if I freely raise my arm at t. God may know at t that I am raising my arm; he may have known from all eternity that I was going to raise my arm at t; he may know timelessly that I am (timelessly) raising my arm at t; but God does not raise my arm for me at t or raise it indirectly by programming my arm's rising at t into the causal structure of the universe. Indeter- minism has God's knowledge of free action depend irreducibly on the nature of certain things, namely free agents, beyond himself. Surely, no object ion to the guided-will theory can sustain an implication as weighty as denial of indeterministic freedom.

Our hypothetical objector has a final retort: "Compatibilism, which construes free action as action caused by wants, allows people to raise their arms freely even if God has programmed them to do so so long as the program includes their wanting to raise their arms as the imme- diate cause. Compatibilists, at any rate, can embrace both free will and my objection to the guided-will theory. In fact, as the author of the paper in which I find myself has elsewhere defended compatibilism at considerable length, 11 this sudden appeal to indeterminism becomes him ill."

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I do not mind my creature's indescretion, which usefully redirects attention to God's knowledge of everything which he created. Allow that there is something that is not literally God himself, and God's knowledge about that something is to some extent dependent on that thing. Even if God knowingly created me (or the Big Bang) with an arm-raising-at-t program, God cannot know I've moved my arm until I actually move it. The same limitations are imposed by fire engines: God may have decreed that fire engines are to be red, but so long as fire engines are not literally part of God their redness is not literally identical to God's decree that they be red. God cannot know that fire engines are red unless fire engines themselves exist and are red. Logical consequences are sometimes said to be "contained in" their premises, and causes said (currently less reputably) to contain their effects, but implicit consequences and contained effects must still see the light of day for logical and causal judgments about them to be true. An event E may be "contained in" the state S of the universe just prior to E, in the sense that S plus the laws of nature jointly necessitate that E will happen, but E is not literally part of history until E actually gets around to happening. I may know full well that a computer I have built and programmed to calculate 3n will generate "51" when I plug in "17" a second from now, but the actual processing inside the com- puter and its actual display of the number 51 must take place for me to know that i t has generated 51. The most I can know without the computer 's really going through its paces is that it will crank out 51 when 17 is plugged in. God's knowledge of the consequences of natural causation he has decreed still awaits the actual occurrence of effects, as does his knowledge of the realization of his direct decrees. Let God be outside time: it is still one thing for God to decree a world at which I will raise my arm at t, another for there to be a world in which I raise my arm at t.

There are forms of pantheism and monism which hold all so-called natural events to be acts of God, and all states of affairs whatever to be conditions of God. On such views, perhaps most deeply expressed in the western tradition in Spinoza's Ethics, 12 God is literally all there is. Such views recognize no separable "realizations" of God's will to constrain God's knowledge. Any such view will accordingly accuse the guided will theory of imposing unique restrictions on God's knowledge. While a resolution of the Euthyphro problem should ideally accomo- date all theological perspectives, I am not unduly distressed that mine

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makes no room for extreme monism. Monism will be at least problem- atic until it can make sense of creation, and as soon as creation makes sense, some form of the general dependency issue will arise.

5. A concluding reflection

I cannot claim to have surveyed and neutralized every conceivable mode of dependence that God might be thought to have on values. But in my concentration on ontological and causal dependence I may seem to have been remiss in overlooking moral dependence. Making moral standards independent o f God's will, it might be said, places God in the position of having to live up to them just like everyone else, and permits the impossible presumption of our judging God in accordance with these standards. That is the objectionable depen- dency imposed upon God by the guided will theory.

My own feeling is that this objection is another version of the on- tological-dependence objection, in the sense that it draws its psycholog- ical force from an inappropriate reification of moral standards. If rectitude is pictured as a gigantic ruler against which all things are held, or a tribunal before which all things high and low must stand, God is put in the inappropriate posture of an applicant or a supplicant. But once these tendentious pictures are banished, it becomes obvious that God can be judged by reference to moral standards in just the way he can be judged with reference to anything else distinct from him. Because fire engines have their own distinctive nature and characteris- tics, it is possible to ask whether God has the nature or characteristics of a fire engine - whether he meets the standards for being a fire engine. The question is logically well formed; arrogance (or in this case fatuity) enters not with countenancing the question, but with supposing it to take an affirmative answer. God's match with moral standards can similarly be discussed without arrogance. In tradi- tional jargon, the issue of God's goodness involves the synthetic yoking of distinct concepts; so far as logic goes, it can be answered affirmatively or negatively. There is nothing impudent in affirming God's unique congruence with the standards of excellence. Impu- dence enters only when God is said to fail these standards. 13

I was originally prompted to reconsider the Euthyphro question, and ultimately to write this essay, on becoming acquainted with the

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Chorale o f Bach's Canta ta 99, whose title I men t ioned in the opening

paragraph. Few acquain ted with Bach's music would be prepared to

call the music or the man presumptuous . Indeed, while I would nor-

mally discourage all defeatist t a l k about " the limits o f ph i l o sophy"

and no t cede one inch of speculative ter r i tory to the claims o f non-

discursive thought , I for one am prepared to call a halt to discussion

here. There is m u c h to be said for allowing Bach 's Canta ta 99 to s tand as mank ind ' s definitive p r o n o u n c e m e n t on the E u t h y p h r o problem.

Notes

1. I follow standard philosophical usage in calling this the Euthyphro problem. The brilliance of the eponymous Platonic dialogue is the more breathtaking, given the polytheistic context in which the Platonic Socrates found himself and the unavailability to him of a logic of relations.

2. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, II, in the translation by Peter G. Lucas and Leslie Grint (Manchester University Press, 1953).

3. I cannot associate this argument with any particular philosopher, but I have encountered it in discussion. It is of a piece with the recent revival of essen- tialism.

4. The Ethics of Divine Command (Oxford University Press, 1978). Quinn for- mulates the "divine command" theory of ethics as the thesis that [] (p is obligatory iff God commands p), and similarly for the forbidden and the permissible. The example of ritual murder is mine, not Quinn's.

5. I defend this methodological claim somewhat more fully in a review of Robert N. Wennberg, Life in the Balance (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI: 1985), Consti- tutional Commentary 3.2 (Summer 1986):500-513. I would extend this methodological claim even to Locke's theory of property, metioned in para- graph 2.3 above. As a statement of conditions under which ownership claims are justified, Locke's theory is open to numerous familiar objections: if I mix my labor with the Atlantic Ocean by swimming in it for five minutes, do I own it? What's so great about labor-mixing, anyway? And why must there be "enough and to spare" before ownership sets in? As a descriptive explica- tion of ordinary intuitions about ownership, however, Locke's theory can answer these objections by saying either that cases like the Atlantic Ocean case lie well beyond the core of situations which actually shaped ownership intuitions, or that hard cases are to be decided by stipulation. These answers, especially the first, are obviously unavailable to a justification of property rights.

6. Baruch Brody, "Morality and Religion Reconsidered," in Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. B. Bordy (Prentice-Hall, 1974):592-603.

7. I owe this insight to my former student, Gail Brenner.

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8. Mutatis mutandis for wrongness and permissibility. 9. The ontology here needs sorting out. We cannot say that generosity is the

substance with the proper ty of goodness, lest we forbid nominalists from objecting to the guided will theory along the present lines. Nor is it clear that generous acts have the proper ty of goodness, since it is not clear that acts are substances. It might be best to say that the persons who perform generous acts are the substances with the proper ty of goodness. The force of the present objection does not depend on resolution of this issue.

10. See my Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem (Oxford University Press, 1979), Chapter 7, for a more detailed discussion of the reasons-and-causes issue.

1 I. Ibid. 12. See Arthur Collins, Thought and Nature (University of Notre Dame Press,

1986), Chapter 2, for a penetrating discussion of Spinoza's denial of "par- t iculari ty."

13. British empiricists seem prone to this sort of impudence. Mill is reported to have said, when told he would go to hell for his views, "Then to hell I go!" When asked what he would say to God if God confronted him with his record of atheism on Judgement Day, Bertrand Russell replied, "I would say 'You gave me insufficient evidence' ."