posted by Alex Miller

During the program on Sunday July 1st I drew a distinction between two ways in which this question might be taken. First, we could take it as a question about the *causal origin* of morality: how does it originate? (Compare: where did Stonehenge come from? This would be answered by telling a story about how those prehistoric people managed to get those huge stones from the west of Wales to Salisbury Plain). This is an interesting question, but I suspect that it is not quite the question that philosophers have in mind when they discuss the issue. The answer about causal origin is presumably that morality comes from *us*, or from the way we have evolved through history, or something roughly along those lines. However, philosophers are interested less in the empirical-cum-anthropological question about the causal origins of morality (which is not to say that it is uninteresting) and more in the question about the source of the *authority* of morality. Given that morally right actions are the actions that we ought to perform, what grounds this “ought”? One answer would be that the authority of morality stems from the fact that right actions are, by definition, the acts that God approves of. If being kind to Granny Smith is approved of by God, then it is no wonder that I ought to be kind to Granny Smith, no wonder, in other words, that the prescription to be kind to Granny Smith is authoritative. God, the supreme authority, approves of it, so what more could you want by way of a ground for the authority of the claim that you ought to help her?

This is the kind of story about the source of morality’s authority that many philosophers consider to have been destroyed by the argument that Socrates gives in Plato’s dialogue *Euthyphro*. In that dialogue, Euthyphro claims that the rightness of right acts consists in the fact that they are approved by God: by definition, an act is right if and only if it is approved by God. I take it that an updated version of the argument Plato has Socrates deliver against this suggestion goes something like this. God is supposed to be omnibenevolent as well as omniscient and omnipotent: in other words, he’s supposed to be infinitely good in addition to being infinitely knowledgeable and infinitely powerful. But what is it for an agent to be good? An agent is good if they do the right thing *because* it is right: if you are kind to Granny Smith because you want to be left a large sum of money in her will, that is not the action of a good person. A good person, therefore, is a person who performs right acts for the right sorts of reasons. And now for the killer blow against Euthyphro. If being right consists in being approved by God, if being right is by definition a matter of being approved by God, then the claim that e.g.

(*) God approves of kindness because it is right

becomes empty of all content. Since being right consists in being approved by God (*) turns out to be an empty truism along the lines of

(**) God approves of kindness because God approves of kindness.

在Euthyphro的立场上，我们因此失去了坚持像(*)这样的主张的能力。如果我们失去了坚持(*)这类主张的能力，我们就失去了上帝是善的想法，因为善就是做正确的事情(或至少赞成正确的事情)，因为它们是正确的。如果我们不相信上帝是善的，我们就不相信上帝是全能的，或无限的善。所以，总而言之，为了保留Ethyphro的理论，即善在于得到上帝的认可，我们必须将上帝视为一个本质上的“非道德的”代理人，一个很可能认可正确的事情的代理人，但不是“因为”它们是正确的。

So, God is of no help to us if we are seeking to answer the question “Where Does Morality Come From?” construed as a question about the source of morality’s authority. If we are to make a serious attempt at accounting for the authority of morality we have to jettison God, and for all intents and purposes restrict ourselves to the sorts of materials that would be acceptable to an atheist.

这个怎么样。正确的行为是那些倾向于促进有知觉生物的福祉，考虑到正直、诚实、公正等价值观。

Suppose that if I’m kind to Granny Smith her well being will be promoted: she’ll feel less lonely, for example. Suppose also, that my being kind to Granny Smith does not involve my lying to her or to anyone else, does not involve any violation of anyone’s integrity, and is not performed at the expense of anyone else’s well-being, and so on.

所以善待史密斯奶奶能以一种可接受的方式促进她的健康。这就是为什么我应该对她好。与上帝无关。那么为什么这不是一个关于道德权威来源的可信的故事呢?

请注意，道德的权威并不依赖于我们，因为对奶奶好是否能促进她的幸福等等与我是否“认为”它能促进她的幸福无关(可能也与“她”是否认为它能促进她的幸福无关)。

因此，就因果起源的问题而言，道德至少部分地取决于我们。就权威的问题而言，道德的权威与事物对我们的影响密切相关，因为事物对我们的影响会极大地影响我们的幸福。但这并不意味着我们可以决定某一特定行为或行为的对错，因为某一特定行为或行为是否影响我们的幸福并不仅仅取决于我们。

Some good introductory level books on related themes:

Simon Blackburn *Being Good* (Oxford: OUP 1999).

Russ Schafer-Landau *Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?* (New York: OUP 2004).

Michael Parenti *The Culture Struggle* (Seven Stories Press 2006)

Parenti’s book is more on politics than philosophy, but his chapters on cultural relativism and ethnocentrism are excellent. He'd be a great guy to have on Philosophy Talk!