1010. There clearly seems to be something . . .

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There clearly seems to be something like a universal, rational ideal—namely, being completely open in one's lines of communication, internal and external, with self and others, and acting accordingly. But, equally clearly, this ideal could not be fully realized by any human (or, more generally, fragmentary) being. Only God, being logically-ontologically unique as the one universal, nonfragmentary individual, could and necessarily does fully realize it, in that God's lines of communication with self and others (although both are and must be internal only) are always and fully open. This means that a human being can challenge God's valuations and actions only by implicitly repudiating her or his own idea of complete openness both to oneself and to all others. Also, to oppose her or his own valuations to God's would likewise be irrational, because, arguably, only God's aim and our aim as serving God's can relate to the future as such, all the future, which any rational aim must, in principle, relate to.

But isn't this to derive an ought from an is? It is, indeed. But the is in this case is unique, involving nothing less than a difference in logical-ontological type. Neither God's existence nor God's will that creatures serve God by serving all others as themselves just happens to be the case. On the contrary, both are strictly necessary and eternal, so that God logically-ontologically could not will that creatures should not live for all others as themselves and inclusively for God as ideally concerned with all of them. And from this is, this strictly necessary is, an ought can be validly derived. For only the logically-ontologically contingent can be open to negative rational criticism, since it makes no sense to think and say that what is logically-ontologically necessary and, therefore, could not conceivably be or have been otherwise ought not to be, or ought to have been other than it is. The only attitude appropriate toward the necessary is positive acceptance. Moreover, we "have no reason to reject the ideal that God alone fully realizes or can realize, if it entirely agrees with our own universal, rational ideal of complete openness both to self and to all others.

But, then, there is a solution, after all, to Plato's problem in the Euthyphro. It lies in a genuinely dipolar conception of God, according to which God is at once unsurpassably absolute and unsurpassably relative. Qua unsurpassably absolute, God simply is the standard of all goodness, whether that of God's own utterly free, contingent choices qua unsurpassably relative or that of any other choices. Moreover, even God's utterly free, contingent, and so relative choices are, in their way, unsurpassably good and to be positively accepted as such, because there have to be some cosmic "traffic rules," and the rules that God contingently enacts for the cosmos are rules that are and must be fully in accord with the standard of goodness that God Godself qua absolute simply is.

(Following Hartshorne in "Equality, Freedom" and the Insufficiency of Empiricism": 23 ff.)