Euthyprho's Dilemma Deflated

The problem with your argument is that you assume that changeability is the heart of the dilemma. It is not.The real issue is that the proposer of a God-based morality wants to be able to meaningfully say that God is good in a non-trivial sense. But they also want to deny that there is any standard by which we could say such a thing. For example if we tried to ground morality in terms of God's nature we would have to say that if God's nature were such that he approved of child rape, child rape would be good. And this applies to any and all moral commands. .To refute this it must be argued that God's nature must be such that God would necessarily approve of "good" actions and disapprove of "evil" actions - without setting up a standard by which to judge an action "good" or "evil". But how could this be done ?Ultimately, most people who propose God as source of morality also tacitly assume that there is an independant standard of morality. They appeal to God's nature on the assumption that God's nature is necessarily good in an objective non-trivial non-question-begging way. Without this assumption all we have is an arbitrary redefinition of morality which can - and should be - rejected.

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The reason I've been becoming a little suspect of this response is that I've been applying the same sort of argument to my own tentative ideas about morality. I'm not sure they're directly analogous, which is why I started this topic.

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I think that any attempt to say that morality is objective runs into similar problems. That doesn't mean that the problems are invalid. It means that we don't have a valid grounding for objective morality. The problem is especially acute in the God version since there is no necessary link between God and any factor directly relevant to our judgement of an act.

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Let's say I ground morality in minimizing the suffering/maximizing the happiness of sentient beings, as is a popular way of stating a secular humanists viewpoint wrt to the issue. Would it be troublesome if say child rape did in fact increase the happiness of the rapist and the victim? Even though this is most suredly not the case in reality, what if it did? Would it then be moral to child rape?

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As you point out there is a clear difference here, isn't there ? If God's nature happened to favour child rape it could be every bit as horrific as we know it to be. But here you're having to propose that there are differences which most people would agree are relvant to judging the act . Which reveals that the humanistic idea is closer to our moral intuitions than the God idea.