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Single Idea 4350

[filed under theme 28. God / A. Divine Nature / 6. Divine Morality / b. Euthyphro question ]

Full Idea

If people perform virtuous actions simply because they are commanded by God, would they cease to perform such actions if they lost their faith in God?

Gist of Idea

If people are virtuous in obedience to God, would they become wicked if they lost their faith?

Source

Rosalind Hursthouse (On Virtue Ethics [1999], Ch.6)

Book Ref

Hursthouse,Rosalind: 'On Virtue Ethics' [OUP 2001], p.133

A Reaction

To be consistent, the answer might be 'yes', but that invites the response that only intrinsically evil people need to be Christians. The rest of us can be good without it.

The 20 ideas with the same theme [which comes first - morality or God(s)?]:

4013 And God saw the light, that it was good [Anon (Tor)]
1657 Socrates holds that right reason entails virtue, and this must also apply to the gods [Vlastos on Socrates]
336 Is what is pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it? (the 'Euthyphro Question') [Plato]
337 It seems that the gods love things because they are pious, rather than making them pious by loving them [Plato]
2627 I wonder whether loss of reverence for the gods would mean the end of all virtue [Cicero]
1515 Pythagoreans believe it is absurd to seek for goodness anywhere except with the gods [Iamblichus]
23178 Divine law commands some things because they are good, while others are good because commanded [Aquinas]
7399 Even without religion, there are many guides to morality [Bacon]
6892 Moral principles have some validity without a God commanding obedience [Grotius, by Mautner]
19330 If justice is arbitrary, or fixed but not observed, or not human justice, this undermines God [Leibniz]
5642 For Shaftesbury, we must already have a conscience to be motivated to religious obedience [Shaftesbury, by Scruton]
18242 Confucius shows that ethics can rest on reason, rather than on revelation [Wolff, by Korsgaard]
5633 We don't accept duties as coming from God, but assume they are divine because they are duties [Kant]
8046 We can only know we should obey God if we already have moral standards for judging God [Kant, by MacIntyre]
3721 We judge God to be good by a priori standards of moral perfection [Kant]
6199 Obligation does not rest on the existence of God, but on the autonomy of reason [Kant]
3780 We must judge a thing morally to know if it conforms to God's will [Bentham]
19454 A God needs justice, kindness and wisdom, but those concepts don't depend on the concept of God [Feuerbach]
2609 If God's decrees are good, and this is not a mere tautology, then goodness is separate from God's decrees [Russell]
4350 If people are virtuous in obedience to God, would they become wicked if they lost their faith? [Hursthouse]