[Note: follow-up posting here.]
As I read about the topic of the meaning of life at the SEP entry (and in connection with thinking about Tolstoy/Schopenhauer on "the problem of boredom," which may be either the biggest roadblock to better living through philosophy or a book by that name, or the biggest launching-board to such...), the Euthyphro dilemma pops up again. It's probably been hashed over plenty already, but here's how I conceive the issue:
(1) The 'metaphysical' problem: What grounds goodness (in the context of Divine Command theory)?
(2) The 'epistemological' problem: Assuming that divine command grounds goodness, how do we know what the good is?
The dilemma as typically posed seems to address the 'metaphysical' problem as stated above, but isn't it really addressing the 'epistemological' one?
To explain: The 'metaphysical' problem tends to be concerned with whether God's command alone suffices to ground goodness, or whether God bases commands on some independent standard of goodness, which presumably would itself suffice to ground goodness. Assuming the latter, does God's explanatory role in this fall afoul of Ockham's Razor? (I think it does.) But a Divine Command theorist might still come back and say that God is a perfectly good being (which runs into another problem - I'll call it the Problem of Morally Pointless Suffering - e.g., animal suffering) who creates the world, its laws, and human nature, that last being crucial in grounding human goodness. Without this Creator, there would be no goodness at all (or evil, or anything at all, for that matter).
What I don't see is how or where this metaphysical grounding of goodness, even if true, answers what I think is the real concern raised by the Euthyphro dilemma, which can be stated in perhaps multiple ways, but perhaps most importantly: How do we discover what it is that God commands, i.e., how do we discover goodness? For the typical philosopher, simply pointing to some holy book where X is prescribed, or simply claiming as a matter of faith that God commands X, isn't going to cut it. There's too much disagreement on the contents of these putative commands.
(Does God command that there be a welfare state, or laissez-faire? And when there is a commandment, "thou shalt not kill," how does that get interpreted and applied? If we specify that only innocents shall not be killed, then what about killing human shields in wartime, something that many a Southern evangelical finds acceptable while declaring with utmost confidence that even a "morning after pill" is murder? One might consider how/why they've not had much luck persuading the skeptical of the latter claim. [On a related, blatantly political note: I hear quite a bit from evangelical types about how Trump was sent by God to "save America." So how did God allow America to be put in the position of requiring saving in the first place - I'll gladly liken the academic left and its spawn to a cancer that (supposedly?) God both inflicts and then sometimes cures people of - and why Trump of all people? Lord working in mysterious ways, as usual? And are the dialectical 'antipodes' of the academic left and the evangelical right in America's best interests?])
What we really want to know is, regardless of how goodness comes about in a metaphysical account, how we determine what's good or not. In other words, we are tasked with the hard epistemic work of sorting through competing moral claims, something that divine command theorists qua such (i.e., in that capacity, where some theory is appealed to as an account of their ordinary folk-wisdom moral judgments, which are usually quite reliable across a great range of cases [excluding political questions...]) don't seem to be up to doing, which is an acute cause of philosophers' frustration when it comes to people not doing hard epistemic work to support their opinions. Of course, the Euthyphro dilemma is one way for the philosophers' frustration to be sublimated and the ball put in the court of the epistemically lazy.
(It could also be that the hard epistemic work that philosophers seek to do is too overwhelming for so many "mere" possessors of folk-wisdom; that I can understand. Perhaps "God commands X" is shorthand more or less for "There is moral truth and it comes from somewhere even if we don't know where, but if there is a God then the morally true is of course what such a being would command." [The question of ultimate justice in an afterlife, or a setting-right beyond this world of animal suffering in this world, is a further question requiring hard epistemic work if we really want credible answers; all that I can see at this point is that such ultimate justice or setting-right makes a perfectly good-and-powerful God consistent with morally pointless animal suffering, but the morally pointless suffering seems to be consistent with there being no God, as well.])
Another consideration, related surely with the "meaning of life" issue althougly less clearly or directly so with Euthyphro problems: As far as we know, this world and this life is all there is. The likes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche seem quite ready to take the implications of this head-on, wherever the argument leads (even if it leads in a very dark or terrible direction, as clearly the case with Schopenhauer). Do all that many theists have a back-up plan for what to do/think about this life just in case it turns out they don't have a good reason for belief in an afterlife? (Also: does the question of meaning reduce to the question of reasons, i.e.: What is the reason for life/living; and how does the principle of sufficient reason enter into this?) And aren't the standard practices of philosophy, as overwhelming as they might end up being to some or at some times, a gateway to better thinking about or formation of such a back-up plan? Alternatively, if we do indeed have access to ethical and other knowledge independent of our (non-)beliefs about a Creator, does such (non-)belief make any actual difference to how folks tend to lead their lives?
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A couple newly discovered blogs that look interesting (what took so long?...):
https://reasonandmeaning.com/
https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/
