"Divine Command: Religion and Morality." John Hare, Yale Divinity School

From the University of Chicago’s Youtube page:

Questions about the relationship between God and the good and the right remain as urgent today as they did in ancient times. For example, what is the relationship between claims about the nature or character of God and the moral actions motivated by those claims? What is the relationship between moral codes underwritten by claims about God and the ethics espoused by the (ideally agnostic) civic sphere? Are beliefs about God open to moral critique by others who espouse different beliefs or no beliefs at all? Today answers to these questions must take into account factors such as cultural and religious pluralism, hybrid theologies that incorporate teachings and beliefs from a variety of religious traditions, and religiously motivated violence around the world.

This conference invites philosophers, theologians and religious ethicists to offer accounts of God relevant to the current state of affairs in the West while taking seriously the possibility of a relationship between God and ethics. This conference was supported by grants from the University of Chicago Divinity School, the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion, the University of Chicago Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Norman Wait Harris Fund of the University of Chicago Center for International Studies, and the Aronberg Fund of the University of Chicago Center for Jewish Studies.

Recorded in Swift Hall on April 9-11, 2014.

LINK

Can God Ground Necessary Moral Truths?

Robert from Canada wrote to Reasonable Faith:
Dear Dr. Craig,

There have been a lot questions recently asked about grounding the existence of morality in God, and I have one as well. The Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne rejects the Moral Argument for God because, he thinks, moral truths are necessarily true, and so the existence of God cannot have an effect on their truth.

He comes to the conclusion that moral truths are necessary because certain events are thought to be morally good or bad; more than that, the moral goodness or badness of an event is inseparable from the state of affairs itself. So, Swinburne claims, there is no possible world in which the exact same things occur as occurred during the holocaust, and in which the holocaust is not morally abominable. It is the same with other events that are considered morally good or bad. There is no possible world in which the event is the same as in the actual world and in which the moral judgement of the event is different than in the actual world. Thus Swinburne concludes that the moral judgement of an event is necessary to the event itself. And this leads naturally to his conclusion that the existence or non-existence of God is irrelevant to the existence of the moral judgement since the moral judgement is necessary given the event.

Swinburne's argument would thus undercut one of the premises to your moral argument. I am a Christian philosophy student at a secular university where many of my professors take a view similar to Swinburne, holding that the objectivity of moral values does not depend on God's existence. I have read and heard your arguments about the absurdity of life without God, and I am currently undecided. What would be your response to Swinburne's argument?

Robert

Thinking Matters Talk: Does Morality Need God? Part One

Editor’s note: This article was orignally posted here. It is shared with the author’s permission.

This year the New Zealand apologetics organization Thinking Matters, ran a “Confident Christianity Conference” in Auckland. I was asked to speak at this conference on the topic. Does Morality Need God? Below is a slightly streamlined version of the talk I gave.

“If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” These words from Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers of Karamazov express a widely held intuition that moral requirements depend upon God’s existence. Most contemporary ethicists today would dismiss this intuition. In this talk, I will argue their dismissal is premature. I will defend what philosophers call a divine command theory of ethics. The thesis that moral wrongness is (identical to) the property of being contrary to God’s commands.[1] Where God is understood, in orthodox fashion, as a necessarily existent, all-powerful, all-knowing, essentially loving and just, immaterial person who created and providentially ordered the universe. 

Note three things about this thesis:

First, it is a thesis about the nature of moral requirements. It is not a thesis about the nature of goodness. The concept of “good, is ambiguous, as is seen by the following statements “I had a really good dip in the spa pool last night,” Or “going on a low carb diet is good for you.” Or “Carlos the Jakal was a good hitman.” The concept of the morally obligatory, or morally required, is not identical to the concept of what it is good to do. It might be good, even saintly, for me to give a kidney to benefit a stranger, but it is not an act I am obliged to do.[2] 

Second, my thesis is that the property of being morally required is “identical” to the property of being commanded by God.  I am not saying that people cannot know what is right and wrong unless they believe in God. Nor am I claiming that the word “wrong” means “contrary to God’s command.” These are distinct claims. Consider light; Light is identical to a certain visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. But obviously, that isn’t the meaning of the word “light.” People knew how to use the word “light” long before discovering its physical nature. And they knew the difference between light and darkness long before they understood the physics of light. Analogously, we can know the meaning of moral terms like “right” and “wrong” and know the difference between right and wrong without being aware that the moral requirements are God’s commands.[3]

Third, this is a thesis about the relationship between God and morality. It is not a claim about the relationship between the bible and morality. The thesis I laid out does not mention any sacred text such as the Bible, Quran, Hadith, Torah, or Talmud. While many divine command theorists accept that God has revealed his commands in an infallible sacred text, some do not. The claim that God’s commands are contained in some sacred text is not part of or entailed by a divine command theory itself. It is the result of other theological commitments they have. One could consistently be a divine command theorist without holding this. Divine command theories are ecumenical; they have had advocates within the Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and even deist traditions.

Having clarified my thesis, I will defend three contentions.

  • Secular accounts of morality cannot coherently account for our fundamental intuitions about moral requirements.

  • If God exists, then a divine command theory can coherently account for our fundamental intuitions about moral requirements.

  • Standard objections to divine command theories fail.

I. Four Assumptions about Moral Requirements

But first, what do I mean by fundamental assumptions? Moral theories are tested, in part, by how well they account for various assumptions about morality implicit in our moral thought and practice. [4] I will begin by listing four plausible assumptions about the type of requirements morality imposes upon us.

One is that moral requirements are inescapable: they apply to us irrespective of whether following them contributes to any ends or aims we currently desire.  Consider a criminal who stands in the dock convicted of a crime; he openly admits the crime, is unrepentant and informs us that he wanted to kill and torture. Doing so did not frustrate any of his desires. Does our moral condemnation of him depend on us assuming he does not have statistically abnormal desires so that we withdraw this judgment when we discover he really does desire to kill and maim?  Moral requirements can’t be escaped or begged off by noting they don’t fulfill one’s goals or ends. [5]

Second moral requirements are requirements that are justified from an impartial point of view. Peter Singer explains:

The ‘Golden Rule’ attributed to Moses, to be found in the book of Leviticus and subsequently repeated by Jesus, tells us to go beyond our own personal interests and ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ – in other words, give the same weight to the interests of others as one gives to one’s own interests. The same idea of putting oneself in the position of another is involved in the other Christian formulation of the commandment, that we do to others as we would have them do to us. The Stoics held that ethics derives from a universal natural law. Kant developed this idea into his famous formula: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ Kant’s theory has itself been modified and developed by R. M. Hare, who sees universalisability as a logical feature of moral judgments. The eighteenth -century British philosophers Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith appealed to an imaginary ‘impartial spectator’ as the test of a moral judgment, and this theory has its modem version in the Ideal Observer theory. Utilitarians, from Jeremy Bentham to J. J. C. Smart, take it as axiomatic that in deciding moral issues ‘each counts for one and none for more than one’; while John Rawls, a leading contemporary critic of utilitarianism, incorporates essentially the same axiom into his own theory by deriving basic ethical principles from an imaginary choice in which those choosing do not know whether they will be the ones who gain or lose by the principles they select…. One could argue endlessly about the merits of each of these characterisations of the ethical; but what they have in common is more important than their differences. They agree that an ethical principle cannot be justified in relation to any partial or sectional group. Ethics takes a universal point of view[6]

Third moral requirements have practical authority: agents always have conclusive reasons to do what is morally required and never have sufficiently good reasons for doing what is morally wrong. Someone has conclusive reasons to act in a certain way when the reasons in favor of acting, taken together, are stronger than any set of reasons we may have to act in some other way.  If we don’t always have conclusive reasons to do what is right, having total allegiance to morality will be arbitrary and, at worst irrational.   We will have no more reason to do what is right than wrong. Or doing the right thing will be doing what we have a most reason not to do.[7]

Moral requirements are supposed to answer questions about what we are to do. They are considerations that guide our actions.  When we learn something is wrong, that tells us what we are not to do. They cannot do this if we lack conclusive reasons to do what they say.  Suppose you and I are discussing whether it is my duty to donate to the red cross. You convinced me it is my duty to do so. The red cross knocks on my door. I refuse to donate. I suspect this would puzzle you; didn’t I concede that I had a duty to do it? If I responded with “yes, I am persuaded it is my duty to do it, but that doesn’t mean I have reasons to do it,” I suspect you would think I was missing something. I would deny moral requirements have any authority or claim on my behavior and don’t address the question, “what ought I do?”.[8]

Or suppose you heard that I had resigned from my high-paying job. You think I am nuts. How am I going to provide for my family? Why would I give up the career I always dreamt of? I tell you, I discovered the firm was engaging in unethical business practices, and I had to resign to avoid being complicit. On hearing this, wouldn’t it now make sense that I did this? I was justified in doing so. If you do, you are assuming that the fact an action is wrong justifies my refraining from doing it.[9]

Fourth, a final assumption is that if something is morally required, we are accountable for doing it in an important sense.  John Stuart Mill famously stated,

“We do not call anything wrong unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it—if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures, if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience. This seems the real turning point of the distinction between morality and simple expediency.”[10]

There is a conceptual link between something being morally obligatory and something being blameworthy. If we do what is morally wrong without excuse, others can legitimately blame us, and guilt is warranted. Moral requirements conceptually are demands people make upon one each, which we can hold each other accountable through demanding an excuse, practices of blaming, criticizing, and guilt.

Robert Adams asks us to imagine a situation in which there are compelling reasons to support you not walking on the lawn. However, these reasons give you no grounds for feeling guilty if you do, and they provide no reasons for other people to make you feel like you must stay off the lawn or to blame and reproach you for doing so. Adams concludes that while there would be a sense in which you ought not to walk on the lawn, you have no obligation not to do so.[11]

So, whatever property moral wrongness is, it is the property of being prohibited by certain standards: standards that are inescapable and justified from an impartial point of view. The fact these standards prohibit an action means agents have conclusive reasons not to do the action in question. Agents are also accountable for actions doing actions prohibited by these standards. Others can blame and sanction me if I act contrary to them without an adequate excuse. A plausible thesis about the nature of moral wrongness should account for these facts.

In my next post, I will defend my first contention: that secular accounts of morality struggle to coherently account for these four assumptions.


[1] Robert M. Adams, “Divine Command Meta-Ethics Modified Again,” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:1 (1979): 76.

[2] Example from C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16.

[3] This illustration comes from William Lane Craig see “Is Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural? The Craig-Harris Debate” available at  https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-the-foundation-of-morality-natural-or-supernatural-the-craig-harris-deba/) accessed 19 August  2022.

[4] The implicit method here is described in Richard Joyce’s “Theistic Ethics and the Euthyphro Dilemma,” Journal of Religious Ethics 30 (2002): 68-69;”

[5] Richard Joyce, “Mackie’s Arguments for an Error Theory,” Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/moral-error-theory.html, accessed 20/4/17).

[6] Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11

[7] This argument is adapted from C. Stephen Layman’s “God and the Moral Order” Faith and Philosophy, 23 (2006): 306- 307

[8] This example comes from Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 1994) 6

[9] This example comes from C Stephen Layman’s “A Moral Argument for The Existence of God” Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics eds Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008) 53-54

[10] John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 5 available at https://www.utilitarianism.com/mill5.htm accessed 23 August 2022

[11] Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 238.

Matthew Flannagan

Dr. Matthew Flannagan is a theologian with proficiency in contemporary analytic philosophy. He holds a PhD in Theology from the University of Otago, a Master's (with First Class Honours), and a Bachelor's in Philosophy from the University of Waikato; he also holds a post-graduate diploma in secondary teaching from Bethlehem Tertiary Institute. He currently works as an independent researcher and as teaching pastor at Takanini Community Church in Auckland, New Zealand.

Mailbag: What about the Cudworth Objection?

Question:

I am writing to you because I am currently working on an article that is critical of certain versions of the moral argument and I am researching the work that you have done on the topic. I have read both Good God and God and Cosmos. Recently, as I was reviewing your arguments concerning moral obligation, I was re-reading a passage from chapter 9 of God and Cosmos, specifically the section titled, "Moral Obligations." What caught my attention is something that you say on p. 289: "[God's] commands would furnish powerful new reasons or performing various acts." 

I hope that you might have time to consider and respond to a couple of questions about what you say here. The focus of my article is precisely on the question of whether God's commands can provide us with additional reasons. My view, roughly, is that divine commands provide additional reasons only when there is an antecedent obligation to obey God. In the absence of such an antecedent obligation, divine commands are normatively impotent (i.e., they add nothing to our reasons to engage in any action). My question is this: Do you agree that God's commands provide additional reasons only given the existence of such a prior obligation or do you think that God's commands can provide such reasons without such a prior obligation? If the latter, do you have an argument for the conclusion that God's commands can provide additional reasons in the absence of any prior obligation to obey God (and have you provided such an argument in any of your published works?). 
Please forgive me if you have addressed these questions in your books or other writings. I have tried to track down answers, but I have not found anything that directly addresses these questions. If I have missed something, I sincerely apologize.

Thank you very much for you time,

Jason

 Answer:

Hi Jason! Thanks for the note. Hope you are well. I'll offer what I have, which isn't much!

What a fun project you're working on. Appreciate the question, and it's an important one, I think. I suspect the answer to your question is "yes," that DCT provides new reasons iff we're antecedently obligated to obey God. The question then boils down to why whether we're obligated to obey God and, if so, why. This is the "prior obligations objection," and it's a thorny challenge, I think. We first discussed it a bit on pp. 122-123 of Good God, though not by name. There we took up the question of God's authority--does he have the authority to give us binding commands? And we try tying our answer to his great-making properties. That was at least our first go trying to address what we considered the crux of the issue. 

In a later book that my wife and I wrote together called The Morals of the Story, we discuss it at a bit more length, though still altogether too briefly. Here we discuss it explicitly by name, on pages 147-149. The objection is tied to Cudworth historically, so sometimes gets dubbed the "Cudworth objection." At any rate, we mention what Jer and I said about it in Good God, but also discuss a half dozen possible solutions to the puzzle that Evans provides in God and Moral Obligation. We don't really discuss them at length as much as point readers to take a look at what he says on pages 98-101 of his book. We also mention Hare's solution echoing Scotus and Pufendorf that you can find on p. 58 of God's Command.

'm sure there's quite a bit more to say about this important objection, but so far those are the only places I've addressed it. I'm inclined to think that if we can answer the question of God's authority well, it will address the matter. Although Evans made mention of the possibility of bootstrapping, most worry that there's something circular to punting to God's command to account for the authority of God's command--even though God does tell us to obey him. I'm left wanting more, and understand others who do as well. So far I've rested somewhat content with the sketch of an answer provided by the considerations Evans, Hare, and Jer and I have offered, but as I say I'm sure quite a bit more can and should be said.

The reason I retain such openness to DCT is not because I think it's the only possible way to ground ethics in God, but just because, honestly, it strikes me as intuitive that God would be the one able to issue authoritative commands owing to who he is and who we are as creatures, and because the objections to it I've heard usually strike me as admitting to a solution. So it's never seemed an obviously bad theory to me, although I'm more strongly committed to a dependence relation of morality on God in one way or another than specifically this way. Regarding this objection, if bootstrapping isn't enough, as I suspect it isn't, it would show that a key foundational principle on which DCT is predicated is an obligation not attributable to DCT. But since I don't think that all moral realities are grounded in DCT, this doesn't bother me too much. Maybe it should bother me more than it does, but at least I console myself by the reminder that other moral theories, at their root, encounter a similar challenge. For example, the utilitarian is confronted with the question, Why maximize utility? Appealing to the maximization of utility doesn't help much. It makes some amount of sense, to me anyway, that so foundational a grounding principle might have a slightly different moral rationale than the rest of the theory. And if, for the DCT'ist, it comes down to something as foundational as good moral reasons, and even an obligation, to obey our Creator who loves us, is perfect, who desires our well-being, etc., then I feel like we're on the right track. 

As I say, I have tended to divide the two questions you're tying together, though I can see why you think them intimately connected: does God have authority to issue us binding commands, and does DCT offer us distinctive ("powerful new") reasons to perform various acts. I find that explicit connection intriguing, and wondering if there's something new you're pointing out there or if there are just two conceptually distinct questions here.

Blessings in your work! I look forward to what you come up with.

 

Best,

Dave

 


Can a Divine command theory account for the objectivity of moral requirements? Brink and Appraiser Independence

Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at MandM. It has been posted here with permission of author.


David Brink has objected to a divine command theory of ethics by contending such theories cannot vindicate the objectivity of ethics. Brink begins by defending a particular conception of the objectivity of ethics and then argues that a divine command theory fails to meet that conception.  Brink writes:

Our commitment to the objectivity of ethics is a deep one. Ethics is objective just in case there are facts or truths about what is good or bad and right or wrong that obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers. A commitment to objectivity is part of a commitment to the normativity of ethics. Moral judgments express normative claims about what we should do and care about. As such, they presuppose standards of behavior and concern that purport to be correct, that could and should guide conduct and concern, and that we might fail to accept or live up to. Normativity, therefore, presupposes fallibility, and fallibility implies objectivity. Of course, this presupposition could be mistaken. There might be no objective moral standards. Our moral thinking and discourse might be systematically mistaken. But this would be a revisionary conclusion, to be accepted only as the result of extended and compelling argument that the commitments of ethical objectivity are unsustainable. In the meantime, we should treat the objectivity of ethics as a kind of default assumption or working hypothesis [1]

 He continues:

…Ethical subjectivism is one way to deny ethical objectivity. It claims that what is good or bad and right or wrong depends on the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers. But voluntarism is just subjectivism at the highest level. If God exists and is both omniscient and perfectly good, then his approval – if only we could ascertain it – would be a perfectly reliable – indeed, infallible – indicator of what was good or right. This is what naturalism claims. But voluntarism implies that God’s attitudes play a metaphysical, not just an epistemic, role in morality; his attitudes make things good or right. This is a form of subjectivism about ethics. But then the supposition that morality requires a religious foundation, as voluntarism insists, threatens, rather than vindicates, the objectivity of morality.[2]

The argument can be summarised as follows:

[1] Our commitment to morality presupposes that moral requirements are objective

[2] Moral requirements are objective just in case there are facts or truths about what is right or wrong that obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers.

[3] If divine command metaethics is true, facts about right and wrong depend on the attitude of an appraiser.

The conclusion is that a divine command theory fails to vindicate and instead contradicts a presupposition of our commitment to morality. 

This argument is invalid to see why consider the definition of objectivity Brink proposes in [2]; “Ethics is objective just in case there are facts or truths about what is good or bad and right or wrong that obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers[3]. Central to his definition is the idea that objectivity involves appraiser independence. The truth of a moral judgement does not depend on the attitude of the appraiser.

However, there are two ways one can understand the notion of appraiser independence here, which correspond (loosely) to different accounts of objectivity in meta-ethical literature. One way is that truths about what is right and wrong obtain independently of the beliefs and attitudes of actual human appraisers. i.e. appraisers like you and I who are imperfect reasoners with limited information, subject to biases and make errors and mistakes.  

Chris Meyers expounds an understanding of appraiser independence along these lines. Meyers states that moral truth is objective when it’s “truth is independent of any particular appraisers or appraisals, but not independent of appraising generally”[4]

The truth of a moral judgment is determined not by our actual judgments – which might be arbitrary, biased, or otherwise irrational – but on the judgments we would hypothetically make under ideal circumstances. An act is wrong, for example, if it would be prohibited by principles regulating interpersonal conduct that would be freely agreed to by rational agents in ideal conditions.

This understanding of appraiser independence distinguishes the attitudes and beliefs of actual human appraisers and the attitudes and beliefs that an appraiser would hold in ideal conditions: conditions of full information, flawlessly rationality, impartiality, etc. Moral judgements are subjective when facts about what is right and wrong depend on the attitude of actual human appraisers towards those judgements. 

This understanding of objectivity is associated with constructionist accounts of morality. However, it is also implicit in the writings of moral realists who account for moral facts in terms of the attitudes of ideal observers or facts about what communities or individuals would rationally desire or endorse under conditions of full information. [5]

The second understanding of appraiser independence is that moral judgements are objective just in case truths about right and wrong obtain independently of what any appraiser thinks. This would include actual human appraisers, but also idealized agents, hypothetical ideal observers or even God.

These two different understandings of “appraiser independence” help us see Brink’s argument’s subtle flaw. Suppose we adopt the first understanding of appraiser independence. Brink’s argument becomes: 

[1] Our commitment to morality presupposes that moral requirements are objective 

[2] moral requirements are objective if and only if facts or truths about what is right or wrong obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of any actual human appraisers. 

[3] If divine command metaethics is true, facts about right and wrong, depend on the attitude of an actual human appraiser. 

Taken this way [3] is obviously false. Divine command metaethics does not make facts about right and wrong depend upon an actual human appraiser. It entails that moral facts depend on God’s attitudes. Brink is aware of this fact. He argues that divine command metaethics is “subjectivism at the highest level” because “God’s attitudes play a metaphysical, not just an epistemic, role in morality; his attitudes make things good or right” Moreover, in the very same paragraph, Brink states that: “If God exists and is both omniscient and perfectly good, then his approval – if only we could ascertain it – would be a perfectly reliable – indeed, infallible.” So, God, would be a person who appraises under ideal conditions.  He is not an appraiser like you or I: an imperfect reasoner with limited information, subject to biases, and makes errors and mistakes. 

For this reason, I think it is best to read Brink as adopting the second understanding of appraiser independence in his argument. Hence we should read the argument as:

[1] Our commitment to morality presupposes that moral requirements are objective 

[2] moral requirements are objective if and only if facts or truths about what is right or wrong that obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of any human or ideal appraisers. 

[3]If divine command metaethics is true, facts about right and wrong, depend on the attitude of an ideal appraiser. 

Given Brink’s own meta-ethical views, this seems to be a much more plausible interpretation of his intent. This reading of the argument also makes [3] true. Divine command theories do entail that facts about right and wrong depend on the attitude of an ideal appraiser. In this respect, it is similar to ideal observer theories, constructivist theories and various forms of response-dependent realism. All of which account for moral facts in terms of the responses of appraisers under ideal conditions. 

The problem, however, is that for this argument to be valid, the word “objective must have the same meaning in premises [1] and [2]. Consequently, we must read premise [1] as claiming that our commitment to morality presupposes that moral requirements are appraiser independent in the sense Brink defines in premise [2].

However, there doesn’t appear to be any reason for thinking that our commitment to the objectivity of morality commits us to this stronger conception of appraisal independence. Note again the argument Brink gives for [1]

Ethics is objective just in case there are facts or truths about what is good or bad and right or wrong that obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers. A commitment to objectivity is part of a commitment to the normativity of ethics. Moral judgments express normative claims about what we should do and care about. As such, they presuppose standards of behaviour and concern that purport to be correct, that could and should guide conduct and concern, and that we might fail to accept or live up to. Normativity, therefore, presupposes fallibility, and fallibility implies objectivity.[6] 

Note the inference here; Brink concludes that normative judgements assume that moral facts are appraiser independent. Why? Because normative judgements presuppose that “we” can fail to accept and live up to moral judgements. “We” are “fallible” and can make mistaken moral evaluations. Because “we” are fallible in this way that facts about what is right and wrong must be independent of the moral beliefs and attitudes of appraisers. 

This inference is valid if the appraisers in question are actual human appraisers. i.e. appraisers like you and I: imperfect reasoners, who have  limited information, are subject to biases, and make errors and mistakes. If “we” can have mistaken moral attitudes and beliefs, then correct moral judgements are independent of our attitudes and the attitudes of beings like us who share these limitations. But the argument is a non sequitur if Brink the appraisers in question include agents that appraise in ideal conditions. The fact, “we” can have mistaken moral attitudes and beliefs entails that correct moral judgements are independent of our attitudes. It does not entail that correct moral judgment is independent of appraisers’ attitudes who don’t make those mistakes. Ex hypothesis: agents who appraise under Idealised conditions, are not subject to the kind of biases, errors, and mistakes we are. 

I think this problem will afflict any attempt to argue that divine command metaethics does not account for the objective nature of moral judgements. Reasons for thinking morality is objective are typically based fallibility of the appraisers in question. The fact that individuals and societies can make mistaken appraisals. That history demonstrates reformers have pointed out flaws in our moral thinking and correctly advocated change against the tide of social pressure. That we think certain actions are wrong even if everyone approved of them. That societies have made progress in their judgements over time. That moral disagreement involves contradicting judgements other appraisers make and pointing out flaws in their reasoning or facts missed. That we don’t consider the appraisals made by racists and anti-Semites as correct as those made by people who advocate benevolence and charity. These features of moral discourse point to the fact that human appraisers are fallible: fallibility implies that the moral evaluations I make and what is wrong are distinct things and not always co-extensive. However, these features of our discourse do not presuppose that the truth of moral judgements is independent the attitudes of those who appraise under ideal conditions. They do not support the strong appraiser independence needed to justify the claim that God’s commands are not objective facts.


Matthew Flannagan

Dr. Matthew Flannagan is a theologian with proficiency in contemporary analytic philosophy. He holds a PhD in Theology from the University of Otago, a Master's (with First Class Honours), and a Bachelor's in Philosophy from the University of Waikato; he also holds a post-graduate diploma in secondary teaching from Bethlehem Tertiary Institute. He currently works as an independent researcher and as teaching pastor at Takanini Community Church in Auckland, New Zealand.

What Makes Something Morally Good or Bad? Natural Law vs. Divine Command Theory (Part 3)

Editor’s note: Adam Johnson has graciously allowed us to republish his video series, “What Makes Something Morally Good or Bad?” Find the original post here.


The two predominant positions within Christianity that answer the question of “Where does objective morality come from?” are known as Natural Law Theory and Divine Command Theory. Both theories have strengths and weaknesses, which leads to robust debate between proponents of each. Natural Law Theory says that both human moral values (i.e., what things are good and bad) and moral obligations (i.e., what things are right and wrong to do) come from facts about what causes human beings to flourish. In Natural Law Theory, God created the world, including human beings, and thus something is good or right when it causes human beings to flourish. On the other hand, Divine Command Theory says that our moral obligations come from God’s commands. Right and wrong are determined by what God commands us to do, and God commands us according to what is good. In this lecture, Adam explores each of these theories and discusses objections against each offered by proponents of the other.


Adam-Lloyd-Johnson-pic-2019-2-e1597088389465.jpg

Adam Lloyd Johnson serves as a university campus missionary with Ratio Christi. He also teaches classes for Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and spends one month each year living and teaching at Rhineland Theological Seminary in Wölmersen, Germany. Adam received his PhD in Theological Studies with an emphasis in Philosophy of Religion from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2020.


Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma: Part IV

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Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at MandM. It has been posted here with permission of author.


This is a talk I gave to the Philosophy Club at Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, this weekend. The talk was followed by a long discussion with some faculty, students at the college, and others who zoomed in.

In this talk, I introduced and defended a divine command theory of ethics. I divided the talk into three parts. In section I, I set out what modern divine command theories of ethics typically contend. I distinguished this from some common misunderstandings in section II. In Section III, I discussed the Euthyphro dilemma. I argued this objection is not the conclusive rebuttal it is often assumed to be. In my first post, I reproduced sections I and II. My second post began my discussion of the Euthyphro objection in section III. Focusing on the Anything Goes Objection. My third post examined the claim that a divine command theory would, if true, entail that morality is arbitrary. This post concludes this discussion. 


In my last post, I argued that divine command theories do not entail that morality is arbitrary. If anything, the opposite is the case. A divine command theory entails that actions will be wrong in virtue of those actions’ non-moral properties, properties that would provide an informed, loving and just person with reasons for prohibiting those actions.

The Vacuity Objection

Finally, critics press what is known as the vacuity objection. A divine command theory entails that “the doctrine of the goodness of God is rendered meaningless”[1]  Oppy puts the objection forcefully: “It cannot be…that God’s commands or decisions determine what is morally good because God is morally good prior to the giving of those commands or the making of those decisions.”[2]  If God is essentially good, he must be good prior to the issue any commands. However, this means that goodness cannot depend upon the existence of these commands. If it did, goodness would exist prior to itself. 

Like the previous objection, I think this one is based on an equivalent. In the first section of this talk, I pointed out that the word “good” is ambiguous”. I stated that a divine command theory is an account of moral requirements, not an account of goodness in general. This observation is essential here. When divine command theorists say God’s commands determine what is good, they mean only that the existence of moral obligations or moral requirements depends upon God. By contrast, when a divine command theorist says God is good, he means by this that God has certain character traits: God is loving, just, impartial, faithful, in all possible worlds.  

But the question of whether someone has certain character traits is distinct from whether they have moral requirements to behave in a certain way. 

Consider a nihilist who denies the existence of objective moral requirements. This nihilist could, if he wanted, choose to live in accord with the norms of justice and could decide to be a faithful, loving and impartial person. What he could not do is claim that there exists any moral obligation to live this way.[3] 

This distinction removes the sting from Oppy’s objection. God’s commands determine the existence and content of moral requirements. This does not mean his commands determine whether people can have certain character traits. Consequently, God can have these character traits prior to giving any commands.

Even if, antecedent to commanding, God has no moral duties, it does not follow that he can’t have certain character traits. Traits such as being truthful, benevolent, loving, gracious, merciful. Nor does it mean he is not opposed to actions such as murder, rape, torturing people for fun, and so on. If God has no duties, he is not under any obligation to love others or tell the truth, but that does not mean he cannot love others or be truthful. God does not have to have a duty to do something to do it.

 Conclusion

The “anything goes,” “arbitrariness,” and “vacuity” objections, therefore, all fail. This is significant because these are the three reasons commonly given for rejecting Divine command theories. Almost everyone who dismisses the claim that morality is dependent upon God cites these three objections as decisive. Seeing that these objections all fail, in the absence of further argument, one cannot proclaim with any confidence that a divine command theory is a flawed theory.


[1] James Rachels, Elements of Moral Philosophy (New York: Mcgraw-hill Education, 2003), 50.

[2]Graham Oppy, “Morality Does Not Depend Upon God,” in Problems in Philosophy: An Introduction to the Major Debates on Knowledge, Reality, Values, and Government, ed. Steve Cowan (Bloomsbury Publishing House, Forthcoming 2018).

[3] For this point, see John L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 26-27.  

Matthew Flannagan

Dr. Matthew Flannagan is a theologian with proficiency in contemporary analytic philosophy. He holds a PhD in Theology from the University of Otago, a Master's (with First Class Honours), and a Bachelor's in Philosophy from the University of Waikato; he also holds a post-graduate diploma in secondary teaching from Bethlehem Tertiary Institute. He currently works as an independent researcher and as teaching pastor at Takanini Community Church in Auckland, New Zealand.

Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma: Part 3

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Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at MandM. It has been posted here with permission of author.



This is a talk I gave to the Philosophy Club at Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, this weekend. The talk was followed by a long discussion with some faculty, students at the college, and others who zoomed in.

In this talk, I introduced and defended a divine command theory of ethics. I divided the talk into three parts. In section I, I set out what modern divine command theories of ethics typically contend. I distinguished this from some common misunderstandings in section II. In Section III, I discussed the Euthyphro dilemma. I will suggest this objection is not the conclusive rebuttal it is often assumed to be. In my first post, I reproduced sections I and II. My second post began my discussion of the Euthyphro objection in section III. This post continues that discussion. 

In my last post, I argued that a divine command theory does not entail the content of morality is arbitrary, in the sense that anything at all could be right or wrong. It entails that an action can only be permissible, only in situations where it is possible for a fully informed, rational, loving and just person to command it knowingly. Far from being absurd, this implication is entirely plausible. 

Some have objected that divine command theory makes morality arbitrary in a different sense. It means there is no reason why one action is right or wrong rather than another. Russ Shafer-Landau presses the following dilemma: “Either there are, or there are not, excellent reasons that support God’s prohibitions. If there are no such reasons, then God’s choice is arbitrary, i.e. insufficiently well supported by reason and argument.” [1] Alternatively:

If God is, in fact, issuing commands based on excellent reasons, then it is those excellent reasons and not the fact of God’s having commanded various actions, that make those actions right. The excellent reasons that support the requirements of charity and kindness are what make it right to be charitable and kind.[2]

We can summarise this argument as follows, take a paradigmatically immoral action such as rape.

(P1) Either (a) God has a reason for prohibiting rape, or (b) God has no reason for prohibiting rape. 

(P2) If God has no reason for prohibiting rape, then God’s commands are arbitrary. 

(P3) If God has a reason for prohibiting rape, then that reason is what makes rape morally wrong. 

(P4) If something distinct from God’s commands is what makes rape morally wrong, then the divine command theory is false.  

(C1) Either morality is arbitrary, or the divine command theory is false 

This argument is based on a subtle equivocation. (P3) and (P4) refer to what “makes” something morally right. But the word “makes” is ambiguous. 

In this context, Stephen Sullivan has argued that the word “make” can be used in two different senses.[3] The first sense refers to what Sullivan calls a constitutive explanation: On a hot February day, I pour a glass of water to drink it and quench my thirst. There is a legitimate sense in which I can say that what makes me pour a glass of water is the fact that I am pouring a glass of H20. When I speak like this, I use the word “makes” to refer to a relationship of identity. I am explaining one thing (the pouring of the water) but citing the existence of another thing that I take to be identical with it.

The second sense involves what Sullivan calls a motivational explanation, such as when I state that what makes me pour a glass of water is the fact that I am thirsty. Motivational explanations do not explain an action by referring to something taken to be identical with it. Instead, they attempt to tell us why an agent acted the way they did by giving us the reasons and motivations the agent acted upon. 

Let’s assume that Landau is using the word “makes” in the “motivational” sense. The inference is:

(P1) Either (a) God has reasons for prohibiting rape, or (b) God doesn’t have reasons for prohibiting rape. 

(P2) If God doesn’t have reasons for prohibiting rape, then God’s commands are arbitrary. 

(P3)’ If God has reasons for prohibiting rape, then those reasons motivationally explain why rape is morally wrong.  

(P4)’ If something distinct from God’s commands motivationally explain why rape is morally wrong, then a divine command theory is false.  

(C1) Either morality is arbitrary, or the divine command theory is false. 

On this interpretation of the argument (P3)’ is plausible. Suppose God has reasons for issuing the commands he does, and the property of being wrong is identical with the property of being contrary to God’s commands. In that case, these reasons do provide a motivational explanation as to why rape is wrong. However, (P4′) is false. The fact that God’s prohibition does not motivationally explain the wrongness of rape is wrong does not entail that the prohibition is not identical to the moral wrongness of rape. Divine command theories contend that wrongness is identical with the property of being contrary to God’s commands. So it only in the constitutive sense of the word “makes” that they deny anything other than God’s commands “make” actions wrong. 

Consequently, For Shafer-Landau’s argument to have a bite, he must use the word “makes” to refer to a constitutional explanation. So interpreted, the argument is:

(P1) Either: (a) God has reasons for prohibiting rape, or (b) God doesn’t have reasons for prohibiting rape. 

(P2) If God doesn’t have reasons for prohibiting rape, then God’s commands are arbitrary. 

(P3)” If God has reasons for prohibiting rape, then those reasons are identical with the property of moral wrongness.   

(P4)” If something distinct from God’s commands is identical with the property of moral wrongness, then a divine command theory is false.  

(C1) Either morality is arbitrary, or the divine command theory is false. 

On this interpretation (P4)” is plausible, if something distinct from God’s prohibition is identical with wrongness. God’s prohibition cannot be identical with wrongness.

However, now (P3)” turns out to be implausible. Why should the fact that God has reasons for issuing a command mean that those reasons are identical with the property of being morally wrong? The Landau seems to assume the following inference: If A is identical to B, and someone has reasons r for bringing about B, then A is identical with r.  However, this inference is invalid. An analogy will show this; A Batchelor is identical to an unmarried man, John has reasons for being unmarried, he dislikes women. Does it follow that the property of being a Bachelor is identical with the property of disliking women?[4]

Landau’s argument, therefore, is unsound. Graham Oppy proposes a more direct argument for the conclusion that a divine command theory makes morality arbitrary:

Could it have been, for example, that murder, rape, lying, stealing and cheating were good because God proclaimed them so? Surely not! But what could explain God’s inability to bring it about, that murder, rape, lying, stealing and cheating are good by proclaiming them so, other than its being the case that murder, rape, lying, stealing and cheating are wrong quite apart from any proclamations that God might make?[5]

However, this is implausible. Suppose God has character traits such as being essentially loving and just. In that case, God can and would have reasons for prohibiting actions like rape, murder, or cheating, quite apart from whether these actions are antecedently wrong. Antecedent to any command on God’s part, these actions won’t have the property of being morally prohibited. But they could still have other properties such as being cruel or harmful or unjust or detrimental to human happiness— or being expressions of hatred, for example. And a loving and just God could prohibit these actions because these actions have these non-moral properties.

Consequently, divine command theories do not entail that morality is arbitrary. If anything, the opposite is the case. A divine command theory entails that actions will be wrong in virtue of certain non-moral properties those actions have. Non-moral properties that would provide an informed, loving and just person with reasons for prohibiting those actions.

[1] Russ Shafer-Landau, “Introduction to Part IV,” in Ethical Theory: An Anthology, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 237.

[2]Ibid., 238.

[3] Stephen Sullivan, “Arbitrariness, Divine Commands, and Morality,” International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 33:1 (1993): 33-45.

[4] These points are made cogently by Stephen Sullivan, “Arbitrariness, Divine Commands, and Morality,” 37-39. See also Matthew Flannagan’s, “Is Ethical Naturalism More Plausible than Supernaturalism: A Reply to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong,” Philo 15:1 (2012): 19-37.

[5]  Graham. Oppy, Best Argument against God (Hampshire: Palgrave Pivot, 2014), 44.

Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma: Part 2

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Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at MandM. It has been posted here with permission of author.


This is a talk I gave to the Philosophy Club at Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, this weekend. The talk was followed by a long discussion with some faculty, students at the college, and others who zoomed in.

 In this talk, I introduced and defended a divine command theory of ethics. The talk was divided into three parts. In section I, I set out what modern divine command theories of ethics typically contend. I distinguished this from some common misunderstandings in section II. In Section III, I discussed the Euthyphro dilemma. I will suggest this objection is not the conclusive rebuttal it is often assumed to be. In my first post, I reproduced sections I and II. This post will begin my discussion of the Euthyphro objection in section III. 


In my last post, I argued that semantic and epistemic objections to a divine command theory fail. However, the most famous and important objection to divine command theories is an argument known as “The Euthyphro Objection”. After a dialogue written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato in the 4th century BC. Plato’s original argument is somewhat obscure and applied only to polytheistic religions (those religions that believe in many gods). However, the version used by philosophers today is an adaptation of Plato’s argument for use against monotheistic faiths. Critics of divine command theories appeal to three arguments that are loosely associated with Plato’s dialogue. These are (1) the anything goes objection, (2) the arbitrariness objection, and (3) the vacuity objection. I will take each in turn.

The Anything Goes Objection

One objection is that a divine command theory makes morality arbitrary in the sense that anything at all could be right or wrong. King and Garcia explain the alleged problem in this way:

[Divine command theory] implies that it is possible for any kind of action, such as rape, not to be wrong. But it seems intuitively impossible for rape not to be wrong. So [Divine command theory] is at odds with our common-sense intuitions about rape.[1]

We can formalise the objection as follows:

(P1) If the divine command theory is true, then whatever God commands is morally required.

(P2) God could command rape.

(C1) So, if the divine command theory is true, rape could be morally obligatory.

(P3) But rape could not be morally obligatory.

(C2) Therefore, the divine command theory is false.

In response, divine command theorists have contested (P2) Divine command theorists do not contend that moral requirements are dependent upon the commands of just anyone. They base moral obligations on the commands of God conceived in a particular way. God is an all-powerful, all-knowing, essentially loving, just, immaterial person who created the universe on their conception. Once we realize this, the horrendous deeds objection appears to be unsound.

We can put this in terms of a dilemma: consider (P2): (P2) only holds if it is possible for a fully informed, rational, loving and just person to knowingly command rape. However, this is unlikely. Critics cite examples of rape because they view it as an action that no virtuous person could ever knowingly entertain. So (P2) appears to be false. However, suppose; I am mistaken about this. It is possible for an essentially loving and just person to command rape. Rape, then, would only be commanded in situations where a just and loving person aware of all the relevant facts could endorse it. Under these circumstances, it is hard to see how (P3) could be maintained.

Once we realize that God, as conceived by the divine command theorist, is essentially loving and just, it is difficult, if not impossible, to see how both (P2) and (P3) can be true. Whatever reasons we have for thinking (P2) is true seem to undermine (P3). By contrast, whatever reasons we have for accepting (P3) undermine (P2).


[1]Nathan L King, “Introduction”, in Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics, eds. Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 11.

Matthew Flannagan

Dr. Matthew Flannagan is a theologian with proficiency in contemporary analytic philosophy. He holds a PhD in Theology from the University of Otago, a Master's (with First Class Honours), and a Bachelor's in Philosophy from the University of Waikato; he also holds a post-graduate diploma in secondary teaching from Bethlehem Tertiary Institute. He currently works as an independent researcher and as teaching pastor at Takanini Community Church in Auckland, New Zealand.

Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma: Part I

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Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at MandM. It has been posted here with permission of author.


This is a talk I gave to the Philosophy Club at Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, this weekend. The talk was followed by a long discussion with some faculty, students at the college, and others who zoomed in.


In this talk, I introduced and defended a divine command theory of ethics. The talk was divided into three parts. In section I, I set out what modern divine command theories of ethics typically contend. I distinguished this from some common misunderstandings in section II. In Section III, I discussed the Euthyphro dilemma. I will suggest this objection is not the conclusive rebuttal it is often assumed to be. This first post will contain sections I and II. 

I. What is a Divine Command Theory 

For purposes of this talk, the term “divine command theory” will refer to the divine command meta-ethics defended by Robert Adam’s, William Lane Craig, William Alston, and C Stephen Evan’s. This theory contends that the property of being morally required is identical to the property of being commanded by God[1] Where God is understood, in orthodox fashion, as a necessarily existent, all-powerful, all-knowing, essentially loving and just, immaterial person who created and providentially ordered the universe.

Note three things about this thesis:

First, it is a thesis about the nature of moral requirements, not about the nature of goodness in general. The concept of “good, is ambiguous, as is seen by the following statements “I had a really good dip in the spa pool last night”. Or “going on a low carb diet is good for you”. Or, “Carlos the Jakal was a good hitman”. The concept of the morally obligatory, or morally required, is not identical to the concept of what it is good to do. It might be good, even saintly, for me to give a kidney to benefit a stranger, but it is not an act I am obliged to do.[2] To be obligatory, an action must be more than just good or praiseworthy in some sense. Obligatory actions are actions we are required to do; another person can legitimately demand we do them. Omitting to do them without an adequate excuse renders one guilty and blameworthy. Others can justifiably blame you, censure you, and sanction you in various ways. 

Nor is this is an idiosyncratic limitation of theory. While some critics of divine command theories characterize it as an account of “goodness” or of all “all evaluative properties.”  Almost all contemporary defenders of divine command theories; Quinn, Adams, Alston, Craig, Wierenga, Hare, and  Plantinga present a divine command theory of obligation, not goodness per se. Nor is this unique to modern divine command theorists; older divine command theorists such as William Paley, John Locke, George Berkeley, and Francisco Suarez limited divine command theories to accounts of moral obligations or requirements, not to goodness in general. 

Second, the postulated relationship between moral requirements and God’s commands is one of identity. Mark Murphy refers to this sort of explanation as “informative identification”. Such as when “we explain the nature of water by identifying it with H2O or explain the nature of heat by identifying it with molecular motion”. We are aware of something we refer to as “water” and want to understand its nature. We answer this question by postulating that what we refer to as water is identical with H20; by doing this, we answer the question, “what is the nature of water?”. In this instance, divine command theorists attempt to explain the nature of a particular kind of moral property, the property of being morally required. The theory is that the property we refer to when we say “X morally required” is the property of being commanded by God.

Third, this is a thesis about the relationship between God and morality. It is not a claim about the relationship between the bible and morality. To claim that moral requirements are identical with God’s commands is not to claim our moral requirements are identical with the commandments laid down in a particular sacred text. The thesis I laid out makes no mention of any sacred text such as the Bible, Quran, Hadith, Torah or Talmud. While many divine command theorists accept that God has revealed his commands in an infallible sacred text, some do not.

Moreover, the claim that God’s commands are contained in some particular sacred text is not part of or entailed by a divine command theory itself. It is the result of other theological commitments they have. One could consistently be a divine command theorist without holding this. Divine command theories are ecumenical; they have had advocates within the Christian, Islamic, Jewish and even deist traditions.

Of course, what role sacred texts should play in our moral thinking and decision-making is important. Whether God has infallibly revealed himself in such text is a question of great interest. However, it is not the question that the divine command theorist is addressing when he says moral requirements are identical with Gods commands.

II What the Divine Command Theory is Not: Avoiding Strawman

These clarifications as to what a divine command theory enable us to address two common objections to the theory: semantic and epistemic objections.

 1. Semantic Objections

Harry Gensler expresses one common objection to a divine command theory. Gensler writes:

 “Imagine an atheist who says the following: “kindness is good, but there is no God”. If “x is good” meant “God desires x”, then this claim would be self-contradictory (since it would mean “God desires kindness, but there is no God”). But it isn’t self contradictory. So “x is good” doesn’t mean “God desires x”.[3]

Gensler concludes that the phrases “X is good” and “desired by God” are not synonymous phrases. This is a conclusion about the meaning of moral terms and words. However, a divine command theory isn’t a theory about the meaning of moral terms. It is a thesis about the nature of moral properties. It contends that the property of being morally required is identical with the property of being commanded by God.

Consequently, Gensler’s argument has an implicit assumption. If two phrases such as “x is wrong” and “X is contrary to Gods commands” are not synonymous in meaning, they cannot refer to the same property. 

 This assumption is questionable. Consider the example of water and H20; the phrase “x is a cup of water” is not synonymous with the words “x is a cup of H20”. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle could, without self-contradiction, claim “this cup is full of water and atoms don’t exist”. Yet that doesn’t entail that water is not identical to H20. “water” and “H20” are distinct non-synonymous ways of referring to what turns out to be the same property. The fact two phrases are not synonymous does not entail they are not referring to the same property. 

Gensler’s argument appears to conflate two separate questions. The question of whether the words “x is morally required” has the same meaning as the phrase “God commands x” and the question of whether those words pick out the same or distinct properties. He mistakenly takes a divine command theory as answering the first of these questions, when it is proposed as an answer to the second.

 2. Epistemic Objections

Many critics of divine command theories object that we know the truth of moral claims independently and prior to any beliefs they have about divine commands. This idea figures prominently in criticisms posed by Nowell Smith.[4], Lehrer and Corman[5], Louise Anthony[6]. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong[7]. Paul Kurtz provides an example:  

 If God is essential, then how can it be that millions of people who do not believe in God, nevertheless behave morally. On [the divine command] view they should not and so God is not essential to the moral life[8]

Like the semantic objection I just discussed, this one is based on a confusion. This objection takes a divine command theory to entail that people cannot know what is right and wrong unless they first know what God has commanded. 

 However, this is incorrect. Divine command theorists contend the property of being morally required is identical with the property of being contrary to God’s commands. If two descriptions refer to the same property, that doesn’t entail we cannot know something answers one description unless we believe something answers the other. 

 It is a fact that water is identical to H20. This does not mean that we cannot know about the existence of water unless we first know about hydrogen and oxygen. The Polynesians who first settled New Zealand around 1300 AD were very good at navigating water: they knew what water was, what rain was, and how to discern currents and tides. They had lots of justified belief about water. However, they knew nothing about atomic or molecular theory. 


[1]Robert M. Adams, “Divine Command Meta-Ethics Modified Again,” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:1 (1979): 76.

[2] Example from C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16.

[3]Harry Gensler Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction (London: Routledge Publishing, 1988) 39.

[4]Patrick H. Nowell-Smith, “Morality: Religious and Secular,” in Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Ian T. Ramsey (London: SCM Press, 1966) 97.

 [5]James W. Cornman & Keith Lehrer, Philosophical Problems and Arguments (New York: MacMillan, 1979), 429.

 [6]Louise Anthony “Atheism as Perfect Piety” in Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics, Eds. Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2008),67-84

 [7]  Armstrong writes, “The divine command theory makes morality unknowable [because such theories entail] we cannot know what is morally wrong, if we cannot know what God commanded … we have no sound way to determine what God commanded.” For critique, See my “Is Ethical Naturalism more Plausible than Supernaturalism: A Reply to Walter Sinnott Armstrong” Philo 15:1 (2012):19-37

 [8]Ibid 33-33, note the slippage in Kurtz statement; he goes from the claim that belief in God is unnecessary to live a moral life to the claim that God is unessential to morality. This is like arguing that; because people can fly successfully in planes without believing in the laws of aerodynamics, it follows, the laws of aerodynamics are not essential for flight.

Matthew Flannagan

Dr. Matthew Flannagan is a theologian with proficiency in contemporary analytic philosophy. He holds a PhD in Theology from the University of Otago, a Master's (with First Class Honours), and a Bachelor's in Philosophy from the University of Waikato; he also holds a post-graduate diploma in secondary teaching from Bethlehem Tertiary Institute. He currently works as an independent researcher and as teaching pastor at Takanini Community Church in Auckland, New Zealand.

4 Popular Objections to Theistic Ethics

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I’ve had the opportunity to teach ethics and philosophy as an online adjunct for about five years now. During that time, I’ve noticed that students often express similar concerns about the moral argument specifically and theistic ethics in general. Here are the four most popular objections to theistic ethics I’ve encountered and a brief reply.

1.     People can be good without God. Theistic ethics says that people need God to be moral, but there are many good atheists. So, theistic ethics must be incomplete or incorrect.

First, it will help to settle what is meant by “good” atheist in this context. Most of the time, when we say Ms. Smith is a good person, we just mean it in a relative sense. Relative to other people, Ms. Smith is a good person. She is kind to others, she donates to charity, she is generous, and so on.

This objection usually comes from a misunderstanding of the implications of one of the premises of the deductive moral argument. That argument goes like this:

1.     If objective moral values and duties exist, then God exists.

2.     There are objective moral values and duties.

3.     Therefore, God exists.

A correct implication of (1) would be that morality requires God and, therefore, one needs God to be good. God must exist for there to be morality at all. However, (1) does not imply that atheists cannot be good, moral people. All that (1) implies is a view about moral ontology, and not a view about what it takes to be a moral person. Nothing in the moral argument suggests that an atheist cannot be a moral person. An atheist is someone who disbelieves in God. Disbelief of this sort does not make it impossible to be a good person. God can be the ground of morality and atheists can be good people. These are not contradictory statements.

Some may think that while the moral argument doesn’t say that one must believe in God to be good, the Bible nonetheless does. So, if one is committed to a theistic ethical theory that affirms the teaching of the Bible, then she is, at the end of the day, saying one must believe in God to be good. However, I am not convinced that is what the Bible teaches. A key verse in this debate comes from Romans 3:10 “…there is none righteous, not even one.” Often, the verse is interpreted to mean that, apart from salvation in Christ, there are no good people. However, “righteousness” here has a specific, forensic or legal meaning.[1] A better gloss might be “no one is justified, not even one.” In this case, at least, the Bible has in view something different than what me mean by “good person.”

Some may think that the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity stipulates that atheists cannot be good people. But this is not always the case. According to one theological dictionary, 

Total depravity refers to the extent and comprehensiveness of the effects of sin on all humans such that all are unable to do anything to obtain salvation. Total depravity, therefore, does not mean that humans are thoroughly sinful but rather that they are totally incapable of saving themselves.[2]

Total depravity only says no one can earn that forensic status of righteousness.

So, neither the moral argument nor the bible implies that an atheist cannot be a good person or do good things.  

2.     Theistic ethics is too narrow. Not everyone agrees that God exists, so not everyone could have moral knowledge. We need an ethical theory that’s accessible to all.  

This might be the most common of these four objections and it leverages an important concern: the availability of moral knowledge.  As a preliminary reply, we can point out that this sort of critique would work for any ethical theory. We could argue against the utilitarian: Well, not everyone believes that the good is identical to utility (or pleasure), so not everyone could have moral knowledge. Or against the Kantian: Well, not everyone agrees with the categorical imperative, so not everyone could have moral knowledge. The objector might say that in both those cases, one gains moral knowledge through common sense or introspection. These modes of investigation are available to all people, while access to divine commands are not.

There are three vital points to make in response. First, if some ethical theory implies that moral knowledge will be inaccessible, that does not entail it is false. It may be a problem for that ethical theory, but problems can be addressed. Plato’s ethical theory is a good example of this. Morality is grounded in the Forms, but from our present position and with our current abilities, we cannot access the realm of the Forms. Thus, Plato proposes some alternative means through which such knowledge can be attained, including his ambitious doctrine of pre-existence. Possibly, Plato’s ethical theory is correct and moral knowledge just is hard to come by.

Second, most versions of theistic ethics, despite the impression of many, say that moral knowledge is widely accessible, and by means like common sense and introspection. Clearly, this is the case with theistic natural law theories, but it is also the case for divine command theory, which is usually the target of this sort of objection. If we consider the sort of divine command theory offered by David Baggett and Jerry Walls in Good God, we can see how this is so. They say that God’s commands are not arbitrary, but flow from his nature. God’s nature, in their view, is identical to the good. Therefore, one can infer, purely based on reason and her implicit knowledge of the good, what is right and wrong in many cases and, thus, what God has likely commanded. For example, given these things, one should easily see that it is wrong to murder, even if she doesn’t know that God has prohibited murder. In this way, someone has access to much of moral knowledge without access to special revelation; a point consistent with the teaching of Romans 1.

Third, from the Christian perspective, God has revealed himself dramatically and publicly in the person of Jesus Christ and there is sufficient evidence of this (ably demonstrated by scholars like Gary Habermas and Michael Licona). That some people find the evidence unconvincing does not imply that evidence is, in fact, insufficient. If the Christian perspective is correct, then God has provided direct, sufficient, and accessible evidence for his moral authority and the authenticity of his commands through Jesus and his resurrection.

3.     The meaning of the Bible is unknowable. No one really knows that the Bible teaches. It’s all open to interpretation and we don’t know what it originally said anyway.

When I run across this objection, students often give one of two motivations for their view. First, they often say something like this: “The Bible has been copied so many times! All we have is a translation of a copy of translation. It’s been copied and translated so many times, who knows what it really said at the start!” This concern represents a widely held misunderstanding of the origin of our modern Bibles. Our modern Bibles are not copied from other translations; they are copied from the original languages. Some pieces of these texts even date to the second century for the New Testament and the seventh century B.C. for the Old Testament. The source texts for the modern Bible are early and they are in abundance. Through careful study, textual critics of the New Testament conclude that what we have now accurately represents over 99% of the original manuscripts. So, we know with a high degree of confidence what the books and letters of the Bible actually said.

The other motivation seems to come from a general skepticism about the clarity of the Bible. Certainly, there are unique interpretive challenges when it comes to the Bible. It was written in another time, place, and culture. Some passages remain deeply debated and mysterious. However, much of the Bible can be understood on its face, in a straightforward way. This is true in the case of the Bible’s central ethical teaching, presented by Jesus himself: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). This command in particular does not seem especially hard to understand or interpret. On many central ethical issues, the Bible is perspicuous. But even in those cases where the Bible presents readers with an interpretive challenge, one can still often discern the correct meaning with careful, methodical hermeneutics. Therefore, we do know what the Bible originally said, and we can know what it originally meant.

4.     The Bible is unenlightened. The Bible is full of bronze age ethics that we know are immoral now. Theistic ethics needs to be discarded in favor a more modern ethical theory that fits with a modern perspective.

My aim here is not to respond to all of the specific ethical issues in the Bible, but I will offer a general reply in two directions. First, in defense of the Bible, it is very likely that for many of the difficult passages, we are simply misreading them. The Bible can often be read and understood at face value, but not always. Not infrequently, our modern assumptions distort our reading and understanding of the Bible. A possible example of this comes in the Conquest of Canaan narratives. In the ancient world contemporary to the Conquest, it was common to exaggerate one’s victory over the enemy. Language of total destruction of cities, including its citizens, was often used, when it is clear from the surrounding context that such cities were not utterly destroyed. One example of such a text comes from Joshua 10:40:

Thus Joshua struck all the land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes and all their kings. He left no survivor, but he utterly destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.

Paul Copan notes of passages like this:

Joshua’s conventional warfare rhetoric was common in many other ancient Near Eastern military accounts in the second and first millennia BC. The language is typically exaggerated and full of bravado, depicting total devastation. The knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized this as hyperbole; the accounts weren’t understood to be literally true.[3]

It may be that similar interpretative issues exist for all the ethically difficult passages in the Bible. However, that is unlikely to be the case.

Second, it would be rather strange if the moral vision of the Bible comfortably fit our own. That some parts of the Bible cause us discomfort suggests that the Bible is not a mirror for our own views or some pliable clay to be shaped to our own liking. Rather, it suggests that in the Bible we encounter a moral perspective that is not our own. It belongs to someone else, even if we have adopted it in some measure.

In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis wrote this:

Divine "goodness" differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.

Lewis argues that our moral knowledge is not exactly correct. Our knowledge of the good is not univocal, but analogical. It’s off by some margin of error.

If morality is objective, this is what we should expect. If morality was made in our image, a mere human convention, then moral truth should cause us no discomfort or distress. But if morality comes from without and not within, then so long as our moral vision is imperfect, there will be some incongruence between what is actually the case and what we merely believe to be the case. That’s exactly the experience we have when reading the Bible. Significantly, though, this dissonance runs in multiple directions. The wrath of God on display in the Bible may make us shudder, but the Bible also teaches that we should love our enemies, that we should give without withholding to the poor and destitute, that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. This incredible calling sounds its own discordant note in our modern, Western minds. The horizons of our moral vision are widened by the Bible. An effect that should come as no surprise if in it we find an ethic from someone else.

 

 

 


[1] Moo, D. J. (1996). The Epistle to the Romans (p. 203). Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Here’s a fuller comment from Moo on this passage (including Romans 3:12):

10b–12 The quotations begin with a series of phrases taken from Ps. 14:1–3 (LXX 13:1–3) (Ps. 53:1–3 is almost identical). As is the case with most of the quotations in this series, Paul’s wording agrees closely with the LXX.28 But there is one important difference: where the Psalms text has “there is no one who does good,” Paul has “there is no one who is righteous.” Granted the importance of the language of “righteousness” in this part of Romans (cf. 3:4, 5, 8, 19, 20), the word is almost certainly Paul’s own editorial change.29 It will thus carry with it Paul’s specifically forensic nuance (cf. 1:17). What he means is that there is not a single person who, apart from God’s justifying grace, can stand as “right” before God. This meaning is not far from David’s intention in the Psalm, as he unfolds the myriad dimensions of human folly.

Here is what Kruse says in the Pillar commentary on Romans:

Paul’s purpose in listing these quotations is to say that as a people Jews are no better than Gentiles. Paul would certainly know of the many righteous persons spoken of in the OT, not least Abraham, to whom he refers in the next chapter (4:1–25). However, it must be said that such ‘righteous’ persons are not the morally flawless, but those who have responded with repentance to the goodness of God. Not one of them would have been declared righteous by God because of their peerless behavior. Thus Paul’s conclusion that follows in the next verse stands.

Still, some Calvinists, like R.C. Sproul, seem to understand total depravity and the thrust of Romans 3:10-12 to be teaching that only Christians can do good things. Sproul says this in his commentary on this passage:

Is Paul saying here that unless a person is a believer in Christ, he will not ever do a good deed? That is precisely what it means. It may seem outrageous, but nobody ever does a single thing that is good, we are so corrupt that our sin infects even the best of our deeds.

However, even in this very strong view of the implications of the passage, Sproul clarifies that Paul here is using “good” in a technical sense. A good deed consists in right and action and right motivation. Only Christians can have the right sort of motivation, pleasing God, so only Christians can do what is good. But if Paul has this technical sense of “good” in mind, that does nothing to undermine the idea that atheists or other non-Christians can do “good” things in the everyday sense of that word.

Sproul makes the dubious claim that actions are either motivated by selfishness or a desire to please God. It seems obvious from human experience that many actions are motivated by a sincere concern for others, without explicit reference to God (that this is appropriate is perhaps evidenced by the fact that Jesus says that there are two commands that sum up the law: Love of God and love of neighbor. cf. Matt 22:40). Further, even if my actions are motivated by a concern for my own interests, that does not entail that they are not good actions. If we suppose, for the sake of the argument, that Bill Gates, an atheist, works on eradicating malaria because it brings him satisfaction, the fact that he is the sort of person that finds satisfaction in curing malaria rather than spreading it is an obviously good moral quality. So, it seems to me, that Sproul’s binary understanding of moral motivation should be rejected.

[2] Grenz, S., Guretzki, D., & Nordling, C. F. (1999). In Pocket dictionary of theological terms (p. 37). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

[3] Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God, vol. 1 (Baker Books, 2011), 171.

Problems in Value Theory An Introduction to Contemporary Debates: Matt Flannagan's Chapter with Graham Oppy is finally published

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at MandM.org.nz.

Yesterday, I was informed that the book Problems in Value Theory An Introduction to Contemporary Debates has finally been published. The book is now available both on amazon on Bloomsbury’s website. Chapter 3 of this book “Does Morality Depend on God?” is co-authored by myself and Graham Oppy (Monash University). Both Graham and I each wrote an article (around 5000 words) spelling out our respective answers to the question, and then wrote a shorter piece (1500 words) where we responded to the other’s original essay. 

Problems in Value Theory is edited by Steve Cowan (Lincoln Memorial University). The table of contents is as follows:

  Introduction, Steven B. Cowan

  Part I: Problems in Ethics and Aesthetics

 Introduction to Part I, Steven B. Cowan

  1. Is Morality Relative?

 Morality Is Relative, Michael Ruse

 Morality Is Objective, Francis J. Beckwith

 Responses:

 Beckwith’s Response to Ruse

 Ruse’s Response to Beckwith

  2. What Makes Actions Right or Wrong?

 Consequences Make Actions Right, Alastair Norcross

 Respect for Persons Makes Actions Right, Mark Linville

 Responses:

 Linville’s Response to Norcross

 Norcross’s Response to Linville

  3. Does Morality Depend on God?

 Morality Depends on God, Matthew Flannagan

 Morality Does Not Depend on God, Graham Oppy

 Responses:

 Oppy’s Response to Flannagan

 Flannagan’s Response to Oppy

  4. Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?

 Beauty is Relative, James Mock

 Beauty is Objective, Carol S. Gould

 Responses:

 Gould’s Response to Mock

 Mock’s Response to Gould

  5. What Is the Meaning of Life?

 The Meaning of Life Is Found in God, Douglas Groothuis

 The Meaning of Life Can Be Found without God, Christine Vitrano

 Responses:

 Vitrano’s Response to Groothuis

 Groothuis” s Response to Vitrano

  Essay Suggestions

 For Further Reading

  Part II: Problems in Political Philosophy

 Introduction to Part II, Steven B. Cowan

  6. Do We Need Government?

 We Do Not Need Government, Roderick T. Long

 We Need Some Government, Alex Tuckness

 Responses:

 Tuckness’s Response to Long

 Long’s Response to Tuckness

  7. Should Wealth Be Redistributed?

 Wealth Should Be Redistributed, Jon Mandle

 Wealth Should Not Be Redistributed, Jan Narveson

 Responses:

 Narveson’s Response to Mandle

 Mandle’s Response to Narveson

 8. When May the Government Wage War?

 The Government Should Never Wage War, Andrew Alexandra

 The Government May Sometimes Wage War, Nathan L. Cartagena

 Responses:

 Cartagena’s Response to Alexandra

 Alexandra’s Response to Cartagena

  Essay Suggestions

 For Further Reading

 Index

 The blurb from Bloomberry is as follows:

Problems in Value Theory takes a pro and con approach to central topics in aesthetics, ethics and political theory.

 Each chapter begins with a question: What Makes Actions Right or Wrong? Does Morality Depend on God? Do We Need Government? Contemporary philosophers with opposing viewpoints are then paired together to argue their position and raise problems with conflicting standpoints. Alongside an up-to-date introduction to a core philosophical stance, each contributor provides a critical response to their opponent and clear explanation of their view.

 Discussion questions are included at the end of each chapter to guide further discussion.

 With chapters ranging from why the government should never wage war to what is art and does morality depend on God, this introduction covers questions lying at the heart of debates about what does and does not have value.

Get your copy now, read it, and let me know what you think both here and on Amazon. I am sure there is much more both Graham and I could say on this topic. Graham Oppy is one the best Philosophers of Religion in the world, and it was a real privilege being part of this project with him.  

Divine Command Theory: Answering Classic and Contemporary Objections (Interview with Matthew Flannagan)

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at MandM.

Last week Jordan Hampton from Crash Course Apologetics interviewed me about chapters 12-13 of my book Did God Really Command Genocide. In this is the section of the book, I discuss divine command metaethics and critique some of the most important objections raised against divine command theories. The interview is nearly two and a half hours long. We go over every objection I respond to in the book. Enjoy

 
 

MatthewFlannagan.jpg

Dr. Matthew Flannagan is a Theologian with proficiency in contemporary analytic philosophy. He holds a PhD in Theology from the University of Otago, a Masters (with First Class Honours) and a Bachelors in Philosophy from the University of Waikato; he also holds a post-graduate diploma in secondary teaching from Bethlehem Tertiary Institute and a Graduate Diploma in history from Massey University

The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg (Part One)

The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Response to Erik Wielenberg

Matthew Flannagan

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at MandM.org.nz.

Recently, Erik Wielenberg has developed a novel objection to divine command meta-ethics (DCM). DCM “has the implausible implication that psychopaths have no moral obligations and hence their evil acts, no matter how evil, are morally permissible” (Wielenberg (2008), 1). Wielenberg develops this argument in response to some criticisms of his earlier work. One of the critics he addresses is me. In some forthcoming posts, I will respond to Wielenberg’s arguments. In this post, I will set the scene by explaining the argument and the context in which it occurs. Subsequent posts will offer criticism of the argument

  1. Wielenberg’s New Argument from Psychopathy.

Wielenberg calls his new argument the Psychopathy objection. The Psychopathy objection is the latest move in the contemporary debate between Wielenberg and his critics over the defensibility of divine command meta-ethics. By divine command theory, Wielenberg has in mind the divine command meta-ethics (DCM) defended by Robert Adams (1999) (1979), William Lane Craig (2009), William Alston (1990), Peter Forrest (1989) and C. Stephen Evans (2013). This version of DCM holds that the property of being morally required is identical with the property of being commanded by God.

In previous writings, Wielenberg has pioneered the promulgation objection to divine command meta-ethics. (see Wielenberg (2005), 60–65; Morriston (2009); Wielenberg (2014), 75–80). According to this objection, a divine command theory is problematic because it cannot account for the moral obligations of reasonable unbelievers.

In making this argument, Wielenberg takes for granted the existence of “reasonable non-believers” people whom “—have been brought up in nontheistic religious communities, and quite naturally operate in terms of the assumptions of their own traditions.” Similarly, “many western philosophers, have explicitly considered what is to be said in favor of God’s existence, but have not found it sufficiently persuasive.” Wielenberg assumes many people in these groups are “reasonable non-believers, at least in the sense that their lack of belief cannot be attributed to the violation of any epistemic duty on their part.” (Wielenberg (2018), 77)

Wielenberg argues that if the property of being morally required is identical with the property of being commanded by God, then these people would have no moral obligations. Seeing reasonable non-believers clearly, do have moral obligations it follows that, DCM is false. 

Why do reasonable non-believers lack moral obligations, given DCM? Wielenberg cites the following exposition of the problem from Wes Morriston:

Even if he is aware of a “sign” that he somehow manages to interpret as a “command” not to steal, how can he [a reasonable non-believer] be subject to that command if he does not know who issued it, or that it was issued by a competent authority? To appreciate the force of this question, imagine that you have received a note saying, “Let me borrow your car. Leave it unlocked with the key in the ignition, and I will pick it up soon.” If you know that the note is from your spouse, or that it is from a friend to whom you owe a favor, you may perhaps have an obligation to obey this instruction. But if the note is unsigned, the handwriting is unfamiliar, and you have no idea who the author might be, then it is as clear as day that you have no such obligation.

In the same way, it seems that even if our reasonable non-believer gets as far as to interpret one of Adams’ “signs” as conveying the message, “Do not steal”, he will be under no obligation to comply with this instruction unless and until he discovers the divine source of the message. (Morriston (2009), 5-6)

I have responded to Wielenberg both in my book and in a recent article. I argued that Morriston’s argument contains a subtle equivocation. In the first line above, he expresses a disjunction. A person is not subject to a command if he does not know (a) who issued it, or (b) that it has an authoritative source. The example he cites, the case of an anonymous note to borrow one’s car, is a case where neither of these disjuncts holds. The owner of the car knows neither who the author is, nor whether its author has authority. We can illustrate this mistake, by reflecting on examples where, a person does not know who the author of the command is, but does recognize that it has an authoritative source.

Consider two counter-examples I offered, first:

Suppose I am walking down what I take to be a public right of way to Orewa Beach, New Zealand. I come across a locked gate with a sign that says: “private property, do not enter, trespassers will be prosecuted.” In such a situation, I recognize that the owner of the property has written the sign, though I have no idea who the owner is. Does it follow I am not subject to the command? That seems false. To be subject to the command, a person does not need to know who the author of the command is. All they need to know is that the command is authoritative over their conduct. (Flannagan (2017), 348)

A second counter-example I provided was; 

Suppose, for example, that an owner of one of the beachfront properties in Orewa puts up a sign that states “private property do not enter, trespassers will be prosecuted” and that John sees the sign and clearly understands what it says. He understands the sign as issuing an imperative to “not enter the property.” John recognizes this imperative is categorical and is telling him to not trespass; he also recognizes this imperative as having authority over his conduct, he also recognizes that he will be blameworthy if he does not comply with this imperative. However, because of a strange metaphysical theory, he does not believe any person issued this imperative and so it is not strictly speaking a command. He thinks it is just a brute fact that this imperative exists. Does this metaphysical idiosyncrasy mean that the command does not apply to him and that he has not heard or received the command the owner issued? That seems to be false. While John does not realize who the source of the command is, he knows enough to know that the imperative the command expresses applies authoritatively to him and that he is accountable to it. (Flannagan (2017), 351)

In the first example, I am aware of the command but do not know who issued it. Despite my ignorance of the source of the command, I know it is authoritative over my conduct, and hence can be said to be subject to it. In the second example, John does not believe he is being commanded. However, he discerns the imperative expressed by the command and is aware both that it authoritatively applies to him and that he is accountable for performing it. A person who doesn’t believe in God can be subject to his commands if he discerns the imperative the command expresses and percieves its authority. 

Craig, (2018) Evan’s (2013) and Adams (1999) have raised similar counter-examples. In a dialogue at the University of Purdue between with Wielenberg Craig responded by citing my second example and discussed is subsequently on his podcast. Evan’s gives a similar counter-example. He imagines a person walking on the border between Iraq and Iran, who perceives a sign warning him to stay on the path. Because he is on the border, he does not know whether the Iranian or the Iraqi governments posted the command, yet he knows some government has issued it. (Evans (2013), 113-114) Adam’s argues: “We can suppose it is enough for God’s commanding if God intends the addressee to recognize a requirement as extremely authoritative and as having imperative force. And that recognition can be present in non-theists as well as theists.” (Adams (1999), 268) These examples all suggest that reasonable believers can be “subject to God’s commands” without believing or knowing that God exists.

In his most recent work, Wielenberg (2018) appears to concede the problem. He concludes that a reasonable unbeliever does not need to recognize moral obligations as God’s commands to be subject to them. However, he suggests this response to the promulgation objection raises a deeper worry. Wielenberg suggests that, behind the responses of Evan’s, Adam’s, Craig and myself is a “plausible principle” which he labels R.

(R) God commands person S to do act A only if S is capable of recognizing the requirement to do A as being extremely authoritative and as having imperative force. 

R enables the divine command theorist to claim consistently that a reasonable non-believer has moral obligations. However, Wielenberg contends this comes at a cost; this is because when conjoined with DCM, R implies that Psychopath’s lack of moral obligations. 

According to Wielenberg “the mainstream view of psychopaths in contemporary psychology and philosophy” which is that lack “conscience and are incapable of grasping the authority and force of moral demands”. Wielenberg states, “According to principle (R) above, since psychopaths cannot grasp morality’s authority and force, God has not issued any commands to them, and so DCT implies that they have no moral obligations” (Wielenberg (2018), 8) 

Wielenberg summarises his argument as follows:

The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory

[1] There are some psychopaths who are incapable of grasping the authority and force of moral demands. (empirical premise) 

[2] So, there are some psychopaths to whom God has issued no divine commands. (from 1 and R) .

[3] So, if DCT is true, then there are some psychopaths who have no moral obligations. (from 2 and DCT). 

[4] But there are no psychopaths who have no moral obligations. 

[5.] Therefore, DCT is false. (from 3 and 4)

In the next few posts, I will criticise this argument. In my next post, I will argue that the argument is crucially ambiguous in some of its key terms. In a subsequent post, I will argue that these ambiguities undermine the argument.



Notes:

Adams Robert Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again [Journal] // The Journal of Religious Ethics. – Spring 1979. – 1 : Vol. 7. – pp. 6-79,.

Adams Robert Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics [Book]. – Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999.

Alston William Some Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists [Book Section] // Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy / ed. Beaty Michael. – Notre Dame  : Notre Dame University Press, 1990.

Craig William Lane Debate: God & Morality: William Lane Craig vs Erik Wielenberg [Online] // Reasonablefaith.org. – February 23, 2018. – 8 10, 2019. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iVyVJAMiOY.

Craig William Lane This most Gruesome of Guests [Book Section] // Is Goodness Without God Good Enough? A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics / ed. King Robert K Garcia and Nathan L. – Lanthan: : Rowan and Littlefield Publishers Inc, 2009.

Evans C Stephen God and Moral Obligation [Book]. – Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013.

Flannagan Matthew Robust Ethics and the Autonomy Thesis [Journal] // Philosophia Christi. – 2017. – 2 : Vol. 17. – pp. 345-362.

Forrest Peter An argument for the Divine Command Theory of Right Action [Journal] // Sophia. – 1989. – 1 : Vol. 28. – pp. 2–19.

Morriston Wes The Moral Obligations of Reasonable Non-Believers: A special problem for divine command meta-ethics [Journal] // International Journal of Philosophy of Religion. – 2009 . – Vol. 65.

Wielenberg Erik Divine command theory and psychopathy [Journal] // Religious Studies. – 2018. – pp. 1-16.

Wielenberg Erik Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless [Book]. – New York : Oxford University Press, 2014.

Wielenberg Erik  Virtue and Value in a Godless Universe [Book]. – Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2005

Matthew Flannagan

Dr. Matthew Flannagan is a theologian with proficiency in contemporary analytic philosophy. He holds a PhD in Theology from the University of Otago, a Master's (with First Class Honours), and a Bachelor's in Philosophy from the University of Waikato; he also holds a post-graduate diploma in secondary teaching from Bethlehem Tertiary Institute. He currently works as an independent researcher and as teaching pastor at Takanini Community Church in Auckland, New Zealand.