Episode 148, 'Divine Commands' with Paul Taylor (Part II - Further Analysis and Discussion)

The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast

Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane

Education, Philosophy, Society & Culture, Courses

4.8 • 612 Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Most people believe in moral facts – that is, there's something about torturing and murdering innocent people that makes it wrong, which goes beyond just a feeling. Yet it's hard to locate morality anywhere in the natural world. For this reason, many have understood God to be the source and arbiter of moral truth. But can morality depend on divine decree – or would that make goodness a matter of celestial whim?

In this episode, we'll be discussing the nature of moral obligation with Paul Taylor, doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Liverpool. There, as a university teacher, he specialises in ethics, political philosophy, and – our topic for today – philosophy of religion. As the recipient of the Robbins Rotblat Scholarship, Paul's research examines one of the oldest and most perplexing questions in moral philosophy – first posed by Plato over two thousand years ago: does God decide what is moral, or merely report moral facts?

In search of the best answer, we've been diving into Paul's unpublished work – pieces that ask not just the big meta-ethical questions, but the practical ones: what are we obliged to do, and why are we obliged to do it. As we'll discover, Taylor's work – and contemporary discussion on the Euthyphro dilemma – pushes us to think again about where morality comes from and whether we, and even God, must answer to it.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan
0:07.6	Scicast
0:08.5	Part 2 Further analyses Part two, further analysis and discussion.
0:26.8	Welcome back, listeners.
0:28.5	I just wanted to return to one of the questions we were exploring.
0:31.7	In the last episode, we were comparing kind of two cups of coffee, one where Jack had made it and the other God had made.
0:40.4	I mean, we're trying to discern if at all one was better than the other, even though they say had identical properties and there were identical cups of coffee.
0:49.5	One question I wanted to ask Paul is whether we might think that there's something important about a relation rather than an intrinsic property that might allow us to distinguish between the two.
0:58.5	So it's hypothesize that I've got a fake Monet and a real money in front of me and the
1:02.9	properties are one and the same.
1:05.2	Still we might think that one is better than the other in virtue of the relation it has to
1:09.2	the original painter. It doesn't have to be in virtue of the relation it has to the original painter.
1:16.7	It doesn't have to be a property of the coffee or of the Monet, right?
1:19.2	It can just be that it's relational.
1:23.8	By virtue of there being a relation to God, it's improved in that way, right?
1:29.3	On the one we spoke about a couple of weeks ago again, one of the solutions we spoke about was Billy Craig's solution that it's a false dichotomy and morality is internal to God,
1:34.3	and God couldn't command murder is good.
1:37.3	God couldn't command murder as good because part of the essence of God involves murder being wrong.
1:41.3	Do you think, as a separate question, say you did defend one of
1:45.3	those positions, that the blueprint of morality is contained within God or the disposition of God?
1:51.1	Do you think that limits God's powers in such way? Do you think that's a problem of omnipotence as
1:56.5	well? I was just wondering at the back of it, like, if God can't command all to murder and say murder's
	...

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