Defending Purpose Theory of Meaning: Meeting Koons’s New Euthyphro Dilemma

Abstract The recent surge of interest in the philosophical study of life’s meaning generated multiple challenges to a default, often taken-for-granted theistic position—Divine Purpose Theory (DPT). This paper defends DPT against Koons’s Euthyphro Dilemma (KED), which questions whether a purpose is meaningful because God assigned it or did God assign that purpose because it is meaningful. The first horn implies that God’s purpose is arbitrary, while the second horn renders God otiose in life’s meaning. Koons points out that the standard theistic response to KED fails because it generates asecond-order Euthyphro dilemma that remains unresolved. This paper first argues that we can resolve the second-order Euthyphro dilemma if we read Koons’s interlocutor—Alston—more charitably. Second, this paper shows how KED misses the target. While DPT is an account of life’s meaningfulness, KED is only about purposes’ meaningfulness. In addition, this paper also argues that KED, even as a challenge to an account of purposes’ meaningfulness, is a false dilemma. Last, this paper modifies KED into a version (Revised-KED) that specifically targets DPT as an account of life’s meaningfulness and argues that committing to the first horn of Revised-KED does not imply that God is arbitrary in God’s choice of purposes.