Good Because It Is Commanded, or Because It Is Good?

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You tell a child not to lie, and the child asks you why. Because it's forbidden, you say. But is it bad because it's forbidden, or forbidden because it's bad — and whichever answer you give changes, from the ground up, what morality rests on.

The porch of the official the Athenians called the king archon was an ordinary stone portico where court business was handled. In the spring of three ninety-nine B.C., a man of seventy was on his way there to register the case that had been brought against him. A young poet named Meletus had charged him with showing no respect for the gods and with corrupting the minds of the young. The man was Socrates, and within a few weeks he would drink hemlock.

On the steps he met an acquaintance. Euthyphro was a man who took himself for a seer, mocked in the assemblies for claiming that he could read the future. He had a case of his own. But the defendant was his own father.

The story ran like this. A day laborer working on family land on the island of Naxos had killed a slave in a drunken quarrel. Euthyphro's father had the man bound and thrown into a ditch, then sent word to Athens to ask an interpreter of religious law what ought to be done. Before the messenger returned, the man in the ditch had died of hunger and cold. Now the son was prosecuting his father for murder.

In Athens this was beyond comprehension. To bring your own father to court was to trample on the sacred bond of the family. What was more, the dead man was neither a relative nor a free man; by the common understanding of that age, this was not even a matter in which the son had any standing. Euthyphro's answer was perfectly clear: what he was doing was pious, it was pleasing to the gods, it was holy.

That is exactly what Socrates fastened onto. If you are so certain, he said, then teach me what holiness is. Do not give me examples; give me a definition. Euthyphro's first answer was: that which the gods love. Socrates reminded him that the gods are forever quarreling among themselves, one loving what another hates; in that case the very same act turns out to be both holy and unholy. So Euthyphro corrected his definition: that which all the gods love.

And when the dialogue reaches its tenth section, perhaps the sharpest question in the history of philosophy is asked. Socrates asked: is the holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or does it become holy because the gods love it?

Looked at carelessly, that sentence resembles a play on words. It is not. It builds two separate worlds, and it leaves no room to stand between them.

Consider the first possibility. Goodness exists before the command. A thing is good in itself, and the gods, being good, love it. In that case the command is not the cause of goodness but its consequence. God is like a seal: confirming a truth that is already there.

Consider the second possibility. Goodness is born of the command. What makes a thing good is that it has been commanded. Before the command there is no such thing as good or evil; there is only will, and whatever that will commands is the good.

Let us not leave this question on the temple steps, because it meets us inside ordinary life every day. A child asks their mother: why is lying wrong? The mother gives one of two answers. Either she says, because I say so, or she says, because lying destroys people's trust in one another, and you would not want to live in a world where nobody believes you. The first answer ties the rule to authority. The second ties the rule to something deeper than the rule itself.

The same question is asked in a workplace. The instruction your manager has given strikes you as wrong. Is the phrase company policy the sentence that ends the discussion, or is it the place where the real discussion begins? The same question is asked in a courtroom: is a thing right because it is legal, or should it become law because it is right? The objection voiced by defense counsel at Nuremberg, that they had merely obeyed the orders then in force, is in fact this twenty-four-hundred-year-old question entered into the court record.

When Euthyphro met this question, he did not know what to do. He circled about for a while, then suddenly said he was in a hurry and left. The dialogue ends without arriving at any definition. But the question did not leave. It went on its way, crossing the Mediterranean, the centuries, and the religions.

In the eighth and ninth centuries, in the theological assemblies of Basra and Baghdad, the same question began to be asked in another language. In that language its name was husn and qubh: the question of what determines whether an act is beautiful or ugly, good or evil.

The school of thought known as the Mu'tazila gave a clear answer: reason can know good and evil on its own. Today that claim may sound harmless, but its consequences were enormous. For the Mu'tazila, justice did not take its beauty from a command; justice was already beautiful, and that is why it had been commanded. Oppression was not ugly because it had been forbidden; it had been forbidden because it was ugly.

Qadi Abd al-Jabbar, who lived in the city of Rayy and died in ten twenty-five, is among the most systematic defenders of this view. An example of the kind he often used ran like this: you need no sacred text at all to understand that it is ugly to repay with harm someone who has never harmed you, someone who has in fact done you good. Even a person who has never heard a revelation, who grew up alone on a mountainside, knows this. For the Mu'tazila this knowledge lies ready in the human mind; revelation does not create it, it reminds and completes.

And what was the price? The price was this: if justice and oppression are realities independent of the divine will, then God is in a sense subject to them. The Mu'tazila saw no harm in accepting that; they even counted it as praise. God cannot do injustice, because God is just. But to their opponents this meant placing limits on absolute power. Was there an uncreated moral law standing above the Creator?

The strongest voice raised against that objection was Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari, who died in nine thirty-six. What makes it interesting is that al-Ash'ari himself had been raised for many years inside the Mu'tazila; he was the student of the school's great teacher Abu Ali al-Jubba'i. Then he broke away and founded one of the most widespread schools of theology in the Islamic world.

There is a famous account of how he left. He asks his teacher about three brothers. One lived a virtuous life and died; one died in sin; the third died as a small child. The teacher says that the first will be rewarded, the second punished, and that the child will be saved but will not reach the rank of the virtuous one. Al-Ash'ari asks: and if the child says, Lord, why did you take me early, had I lived I too would have been virtuous, what answer is given? The teacher says, had you lived you would have become a sinner and gone to hell; this was better for you. Al-Ash'ari makes his final move: in that case, if the sinful brother asks, Lord, since you knew what would become of him and had mercy on him, why did you not take me as a child too? According to the account, the teacher falls silent.

The historical details of this story are disputed, but the idea it carries is perfectly clear. The conclusion al-Ash'ari reached was this: if you set out to place divine wisdom on the scales of human justice, you will come away empty-handed every time. Because those scales are the scales of a human being. For the Ash'ari school, husn and qubh belong to revealed law: the good is what God commands, the evil what God forbids. Before the command, acts are morally naked. Put in the most extreme formulation of this view, if God commanded today the exact opposite of what He has forbidden, that too would be good.

Here the two ends of Socrates' question turned into a tension that would last for centuries. On one side, a view that makes morality firm and objective but sets a limit on divine power. On the other, a view that leaves power infinite but binds morality to the discretion of a will.

This tension was not peculiar to the Islamic world. In the West, in the fourteenth century, the English thinker William of Ockham walked a similar road. For him too, moral values were the product of the divine will. God could, if He wished, command that He be hated, and when that command was carried out, a virtuous deed would have been done. A view of this kind is today called voluntarism, and Ockham, who in all likelihood never read al-Ash'ari, was standing at the edge of the same abyss.

Was there a way of standing in the middle? There was. And the man who opened it was Abu Mansur al-Maturidi, born in Maturid near Samarkand, who died in nine forty-four. This thinker, who flourished in Transoxiana, in the lands of present-day Uzbekistan, and who established one of the main arteries of Turkish-Islamic thought, pointed to the place where both sides are right.

For al-Maturidi, reason really can grasp the good and the evil in acts. The ugliness of oppression finds an answer in the human mind, and so does the beauty of justice. Up to here he stands where the Mu'tazila stand. But he draws a distinction: knowing that a thing is good is one matter, and that thing being bound upon you as an obligation is another. Knowing belongs to reason; binding force belongs to revelation. Reason sees the good; revelation turns it into responsibility. In this way morality is not made arbitrary, and reason does not take the place of revelation.

This may look like a formula for compromise. But in fact it carries the question to a finer place. Socrates' question was: what establishes goodness? Al-Maturidi's distinction adds a second question: is knowing the good the same thing as being obliged to it?

Now let us put weight on the other pan of the scales, because what waits there is not light either.

Suppose you chose the first possibility. Goodness is good in itself; the command confirms it rather than creating it. True, this view secures morality. But a question is left standing: if goodness is already there, what is the command for? Is God necessary for morality to stay on its feet?

The most famous answer to this question is not really an answer but a fear. In the novel The Brothers Karamazov, which Dostoevsky published in eighteen eighty, there is an idea that circles around the character of Ivan: if there is no God and no immortality, everything is permitted. One detail has to be stated correctly here, because this is one of the most misquoted sentences in the world. In the novel the words do not come out of Ivan's mouth in precisely that mold, like a slogan; the idea enters circulation through other characters reporting it and arguing over it. The one who sharpened the formula was Sartre, in the famous lecture on existentialism he gave in nineteen forty-six. Sartre used the sentence not as an accusation but as a starting point: the human being has been abandoned, there is no ready-made table of values to hold on to, and precisely for that reason each person is personally responsible for everything they do.

But history had long since shown that without God morality collapses is not so easy a claim. In sixteen twenty-five a Dutch jurist named Hugo Grotius wrote a book on the law of war and peace. This work, which we now call On the Law of War and Peace, counts among the founding texts of modern international law. In it Grotius sets out an assumption that was shocking for his age: let us suppose, and it is a great sin even to say it, that God does not exist or takes no interest in human affairs. The rules of natural law would still hold.

This sentence needs underlining, because Grotius was not an unbeliever; he was a devout Protestant who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in his own country on account of his faith, and who escaped from the fortress hidden in his wife's book chest. What he was doing was not setting God aside but showing that morality and law have an inner logic of their own. Just as two plus two makes four, fidelity to a contract being good and gratuitous cruelty being evil belonged to the nature of things.

On the other hand, a serious objection came to those who chose the side of the command as well. One of the clearest statements of it is Leibniz's, in a text he wrote on the concept of justice at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He says: if goodness is merely what God wills, then what does it mean to say that God is good? That sentence turns into God wills what He wills, and what you are left holding is not praise but an empty tautology. If you are praising divine justice, what you praise must have a meaning independent of will.

Both sides carry a knife that draws the other's blood. Choose the side of the command, and morality becomes arbitrary and your praise loses its meaning. Choose the side of goodness in itself, and morality becomes firm but the place of the command begins to shake.

And this deadlock, abstract as it looks, has a very concrete echo. What Nietzsche was describing at the end of the nineteenth century when he said that God is dead was not a declaration of victory but the description of a wreck. He spoke of a sponge wiping away humanity's horizon, of a falling that goes on falling. His real warning was this: people have stopped believing in God, but they expect the moral demands that came from God to stay perfectly in place. Something like cutting off the branches and still wanting the root to feed them.

Today a great many people live in this strange middle state. They no longer know where the rule comes from, but they still feel its weight. They keep a promise they never made to anyone, they behave honestly where nobody can see them, and they have no ready answer for those who ask why they do it. This is where the sorrow is to be looked for: the ladder of command has been pulled away, but the person is still standing up there, with no memory of how they climbed.

Socrates' question appears to have two ends. But as with most dilemmas of this kind, there is a hidden third possibility, and that possibility takes aim at the way the question is built.

In Islamic thought and in Christian thought alike, this road was opened as follows: what if goodness is not an independent law standing above God, but the expression of God's own nature? Then the command ceases to be an arbitrary decision taken from outside, and goodness itself ceases to be a cold tablet hanging above God. It becomes something like the sun giving light. The sun does not decide, now let me give light; light is a consequence of what the sun is.

Whether this answer fully resolves the dilemma is open to argument. When you say that God's nature is good, it can be objected that you still have to take the measure of that goodness from somewhere. But it is true that it at least blunts both ends of the dilemma: no arbitrariness is left, and no external law that turns God into a surplus.

Yet at the end of this part there is something else that really needs saying. Socrates' question asks about the source of goodness. Life generally asks us a different question: who is a good person?

These two questions are not the same. Someone who knows the answer to the first perfectly may fail the second.

Consider this: two people find a wallet, and both return it to its owner. One of them because they saw the security camera. The other because the camera never crossed their mind. To someone looking from outside, the two acts are identical. But these two are not the same person, and getting into the same elevator as the second one is a different matter altogether.

In Islamic moral thought the name of this distinction is intention. When al-Ghazali explains the difference between the outer shell of acts of worship and deeds and their inner meaning, he places at the center the tradition reporting that deeds are judged according to intentions. Two hands making the same movement may not be doing the same thing. The distance between carrying out the rule and being good is a distance the rule itself cannot measure.

Aristotle came at this matter from another direction: virtue is not a piece of knowledge but a habit. You learn to be brave by acting bravely, just as you learn to play the lyre by playing it. Knowing by heart what the right action is may be of no use when the frightening moment that calls for that action finally arrives. Kant, at the end of the eighteenth century, drew the same distinction in his own language: acting in accordance with duty is not the same as acting from duty. The shopkeeper who does not cheat their customers, if they do it only for the reputation of the shop, is an honest merchant but not yet an honest person.

This distinction catches us today in a place we never expected. Modern life has largely handed goodness over to rules. Codes of ethics, compliance units, signature authorities, tick boxes. All of these are necessary. But they share one side effect: reducing a person's moral judgment to a checklist. To say that whatever the regulation does not forbid is permitted is Euthyphro's answer wearing corporate clothes.

That same question is being placed today, in a form harsher than at any point in history, before artificial intelligence systems. How do you teach a machine to be good? Give it a list of rules, and it will not know what to do in a situation the list does not cover; it may keep faith with the letter of the rule while trampling its spirit. And if you set out to give it a power of judgment that goes beyond the list, where will you take the measure of that judgment from? This is Socrates' question written onto silicon, and at this moment the world's finest engineers stand before it not much more comfortably than Euthyphro did two thousand four hundred years ago.

Perhaps the matter is this: the question of the source of goodness is a question of thought, and its answer takes a long time. But the question of being good is a question of life, and its answer cannot be postponed. Without knowing whether the command came first or goodness did, you can still choose not to speak ill of someone behind their back. Without settling whether husn and qubh are matters of reason or of revealed law, you can still tell the truth at a moment when nobody is watching.

That day on the steps, Euthyphro said he was in a hurry and left. For hundreds of years, everyone who reads that dialogue has thought that he ran away. But perhaps the real flight is not leaving without being able to answer the question. The real flight was believing you knew the answer and forgetting the man in the ditch. Because at the place where that whole argument began, a human being whose name we do not even know had died, bound, waiting for someone who never came back. However elegant Socrates' question may be on paper, there is always a ditch like that behind it.

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