Divine Command Ethics
From Theology.net.nz
1. Introduction
A divine command theory of ethics is any theory of ethics where there is a very close connection between the will of God and what is morally right or wrong.
Why should we do something? Because God wants us to do it.
What makes something wrong? God wants us to not do it.
Either of these theories (or any similar theory) would count as a divine command theory. In the literature, this view is referred to in a couple of ways. Sometimes it is called theological voluntarism. Voluntarism refers to the use of the will, since in this view, it is God’s will that makes things right or wrong. The more common term, and the term we will be using here, is a divine command theory of ethics (DCT), since right and wrong depend on God’s commands.
It is important to say clearly from the beginning that DCT is not a theory of goodness and badness, it is a theory of morality, of rightness and wrongness. Rightness concerns that which is morally obligatory – we ought to do it, otherwise we will be doing wrong, and wrongness concerns that which is morally prohibited – we ought not to do it, otherwise we will be doing wrong.
Defenders of DCT explain that they intend the term “commands” to be construed quite broadly, so as to include God’s intentions generally, regardless of how that will is expressed – for example, in religious texts, via some sort of direct special revelation, or even by way of moral intuition imprinted on the human conscience.
2. Various formulations of DCT
Saying that morality boils down to God’s commands can mean one of several things.
2.1. Identity
One version of DCT sees obedience to God’s commands as being identical to moral rightness. We can express this by saying: “Moral rightness just is doing what God commands.”
2.1.1 Identification vs. predication
When we talk about two things being identical, and when we use the term “just is,” it pays to distinguish between two different uses of the word “is.”
When we say “that song is catchy” or “that car is red,” we are taking a subject, and applying a predicate to it. We are bringing together two different things, for example a car and the predicate or property of redness. That’s not a statement about identity. If it were, then we would be saying “that car is the same thing as the property of redness,” which would be ridiculous.
The other way of using the word “is” is not about predication as in the previous two examples of songs and cars, but identification. When we make a statement about identity, we’re not combining a subject with a property or predicate, but we are identifying the subject that is referred to in more than one way as being the same thing or property. A classic case of the “identifying is” in use would be at a police line-up.
“Maam, can you identify the man who robbed you?” “Yes, that man right there. That is the man who robbed me.”
What is meant here is that the man standing there in the lineup and the man who committed the robbery are one and the same person.
This is the way the term “is” is used in the DCT where the property of moral rightness just is the property of being commanded by God.
2.1.2 Identity vs. Coextensivity
A further clarification should be made on identity, similar to the previous one. When we say that two things are identical, we are not talking about two labels being accidentally coextensive, that is, covering all the same acts. Here’s a claim about coextensivity:
“All students at the University of Otago are all the members of OUSA, the students’ association.”
Let’s say for now – although it’s not actually the case – that there are no other members of OUSA. The claim is that the property of being a a student at the University of Otago is coextensive with the property of being a member of OUSA, since those properties happen to coincide. Perhaps this is true, but if we say that, we’re not saying that the property of “being a student at the University of Otago” actually is the property of “being a member of OUSA.”
When the Divine Command Theorist says “The property of being commanded by God is the property of rightness,” she is not saying that all the things that have the property of rightness also turn out to have the property of being commanded by God and vice versa. The claim is not that these two properties are coextensive, but that they are the same property, i.e. they are identical.
2.1.3 Identity vs. Meaning
None of this is to say that the terms “morally right” and “commanded by God” mean the same thing, i.e. that they are semantically equivalent. Far from it. We are already quite familiar with cases where two terms refer to one thing but those terms are not semantically equivalent. Here are some fairly clear examples:
“The morning star is the evening star.”
This doesn’t mean that the words “the morning star” mean the same thing as the words “the evening star.” They obviously don’t mean the same thing, and yet they refer to the same object, namely the thing that we call the planet Venus. One more example:
“The pupil of Plato is the teacher of Alexander the Great.”
Again, the words “the pupil of Plato” do not mean the same as the words “teacher of Alexander the Great,” and yet they refer to the same person, the man named Aristotle.
Thus, in saying “the property of being commanded by God is the same as the property of moral rightness,” we certainly aren’t saying that “right” just means “commanded by God.”
2.2 Causality
A second major variety of divine command ethics is a causal DCT. In this view, what causes acts to be right or wrong is God’s will. In other words, an act would not be morally right unless God commanded it, and His commanding it makes it the morally right thing to do. Likewise, nothing would be morally wrong unless God forbade it.
There are other varieties of divine command ethics, but these are the two dominant views, and other variations are very similar to them. For example the theory that acts are morally right in virtue of the fact that they are commanded by God is very similar to the identity thesis outlined above, and the view that moral rightness depends on God’s commands is very similar to the causal thesis.
3. Criticism of the DCT
3.1 The “Euthyphro Dilemma”
Undoubtedly the most famous objections to the DCT are based on the dialogue in Plato’s Euthyphro. The Euthyphro objection is old and very well known. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates encounters a man (named Euthyphro) outside a court, who is bringing a lawsuit of murder against his father. Socrates is horrified that a man would prosecute his own father, but the man explains that he is doing what the gods would will him to do, and hence it is the virtuous thing to do, regardless of how shocking it might seem. Seeing that Euthyphro considers himself knowledgeable on matters of theology and morality, Socrates asks him to explain what piety is. Euthyphro’s famous reply was to say that “Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.” [1]
Plato’s first objection to this view is of little importance, since it has to do with the problems that Euthyphro’s position has given the pantheon of many Greek gods. Since the gods quarrel over what is pious and impious, there are some things that are both dear to the gods and hated by the gods, meaning that some things are both pious and not pious, suggesting that Euthyphro’s understanding of piety must be mistaken. I have no interest in this objection, since it would be avoided entirely if there is only one God, or even, perhaps, a number of gods who never disagree.
Plato’s objections that follow the first have become myth. By this I mean that it really no longer matters exactly what Plato meant by them since they have taken on a life of their own, formulated in much more succinct terms, and there is now a received understanding of what the Euthyphro dilemma means, and it is really this received understanding with which the theological ethicist must contend, since this is the form of the argument generally used against him. The dilemma, in Plato’s terms, consists of the question of “whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is loved of the gods.” In modern times, the dilemma has been used as a critique of divine command ethics, and has been phrased: “Are morally good acts good because God wills them, or does God will them because they are morally good?” [2]
The first horn of the dilemma is not a divine command theory, as it presents God commanding that which is already morally right. A divine command theorist embraces the second horn.
3.2 The “Emptiness” objection
The first objection to a DCT is probably the weakest and easiest to deal with, so let’s get it out of the way to move on to the more serious objections. The “emptiness problem” is the objection that if things are right because God commands or wills them, then the statement that “what God commands is right” becomes an empty tautology, as it really just means “what God commands is what God commands.”
Given the two main ways of construing a DCT outlined earlier, is this objection a good one? There is no reason to think so.
This attack on divine command ethics rests on the assumption that unless two terms mean the same thing they cannot identify the same thing, or that unless two terms mean the same thing, the thing identified by one term cannot cause the thing identified by the other. This is obviously not true. The combination of the words “the twin towers in New York City” clearly does not carry the same semantic meaning as “the target of a horrific terrorist attack in 2001,” but they do identify the same thing, and it is hardly a tautology to say “The twin towers in new York City were the target of a horrific terrorist attack in 2001.” Likewise “heat” does not mean “melting,” but heat causes melting. So the emptiness objection is pretty empty. Important to note here is that of all noteworthy defenders of DCT in the last fifty years, as well as throughout history, it is very difficult, if even possible, to find one who maintained that “morally right” just means “commanded by God.”
3.3 The problem of arbitrariness
The second objection to taking the second horn of the dilemma is that if morality is determined by God’s will (i.e. if we are dealing with a causal theory or something like it), then morality is just arbitrary, and even if God willed something utterly abominable, it would become the right thing to do, which seems incredible.
Peter Singer makes this argument:
Some theists say that ethics cannot do without religion because the very meaning of “good” is nothing other than “what God approves”. Plato refuted a similar view more than two thousand years ago by arguing that if the gods approve of some actions it must be because those actions are good, in which case it cannot be the gods approval that makes them good. The alternative view makes God’s approval entirely arbitrary: if the gods had happened to approve of torture and disapprove of helping our neighbours, torture would be good and helping our neighbours bad. [3]
As an aside, Singer characterises the DCT as a semantic theory, which is a mistake, as noted earlier. But the main objection here is that if acts are right because God commands/approves/wills them, then those commands must be arbitrary, and just any horrible thing could be morally right, if God willed it. Greg Dawes echoes the objection: “If God is not bound by any pre-existing moral standards, he could wake up tomorrow morning (speaking metaphorically) and decree that torturing small children is now good.” [4]
How might the believer in DCT respond? There are two responses. Firstly, one might simply bite the bullet and say yes, if God commanded torture – and he could – then that would be the right thing to do. End of story. After all, the fact that the outcome of a theory shocks us does not, in itself, show that a theory is false.
However, the major response to this objection is this: Yes, that would theoretically be true, if God commanded torture then it would be the right thing to do, however, it is also true that God simply would or could not command certain things, including torture. Using Greg Dawes as a local example again, he does not think this defence is very promising:
One popular defence may be rejected immediately. It consists in the view that while God could command us to torture small children, he would not do so. … The difficulty with this position arises when one asks: Why not? Why would God not command us to torture small children? If the answer is that God is good, then one can ask what standard of goodness is being applied in making this claim. [5]
In other words, the claim is that this response to the problem of arbitrary commands leads us to the “problem of independence,” as it implies “that the good exists prior to God's command and that the moral facts are independent of God.” [6]
As this is supposed to be about DCT, a theory of rightness, substitute “God does what is right” for “God is good” in this reply. The point is still clear. If we say that God would not command, say, torture, because He does what is right, then it would appear that God is obeying some higher moral rule, so the argument goes.
But does the defender of DCT have to say that God wouldn’t command torture because He follows moral rules? Not necessarily. It might still be possible that God’s commands cause acts to be morally right, and God does not command as He does because He is following moral rules, and His commands are not arbitrary. The fact that God is not morally required to command as He does need not mean that His commands are arbitrary, if by arbitrary we mean without any reasons. Maybe God does have reasons for commanding as He does, but they are not reasons that morally compel Him. Consider a possible scenario. God does not like the torture of children for fun. Therefore He wills that we not do it. He does not like it because, hypothetically, God is loving and kind, and would prefer not to see innocent people suffer. Divine command ethicist Edward Wierenga notes that “a divine command theorist might well believe that some features of God’s character, for example, that He is essentially loving, place constraints on what He commands.” [7] Here, God is not commanding against something because it is morally wrong, so there is no problem of independence.
Does this reply work? Some think not. It might still be objected that this fails, since it is no longer God’s will or commands that make this act wrong, it is, rather, the fact that it causes suffering, something God doesn’t like. It is therefore the fact of suffering, rather than God’s command, that makes torture wrong.
This objection is a logical mistake. The objection here has the following form, where R are God’s reasons for commanding, C are God’s commands, and M is a moral obligation that we have:
R is the reason for C C is the reason for M Therefore R is the reason for M
While perhaps initially persuasive, this argument is logically problematic. Consider an example: I am out after work, drinking with my friends. My wife phones me, asking me to come home. Although she does not tell me this, my wife is angry with me, and the reason she is asking me to come home is that she wants to fight with me. The reason that I consider that it is right to go home is that my wife has asked me to do so. Now consider these facts when plugged into the above form of argument:
That my wife is angry and wants to fight with me is the reason she has asked me to go home That my wife has asked me to go home is the reason why I should go home Therefore the fact that my wife is angry and wants to fight with me is the reason why I should go home. [8]
This does not seem to follow at all. In fact my wife’s anger and desire to fight would actually serve as a reason not to go home. What this shows us is that the phrase “is the reason” should not be taken as transitive here.
A second response to the objection is that it appears to equivocate between different understandings of “reason,” namely epistemic and causal. When we say that God “has reasons” for commanding as he does, surely we mean that He has epistemic reasons, the type of reasons that we might reflect on before making a decision. But the causal DCT does not use the word this way when it asserts “God’s commands are the reasons that things are right or wrong.” Rather than using the word “reason” in an epistemic sense, this DCT uses it in a causal sense. Consider these two sentences: 1) The (epistemic) reason that I ate my broccoli is that I love the taste. 2) The (causal) reason that I gained the health benefits of eating broccoli is that I ate it. It does not follow that the reason (causal) that I gained the health benefits of broccoli is that I love the taste of broccoli (otherwise I could gain the health benefits without even eating broccoli), and it makes no sense at all to say that the reason (epistemic) that I gained the health benefits of broccoli is that I love the taste of broccoli, since my body’s gaining health benefits is not even voluntary, let alone grounded in an epistemological process.
The objection, therefore, does not really seem to overcome the explanation that God may have non-moral reasons for commanding as he does. It is possible that His reasons are purely aesthetic or prudent. He (hypothetically) just doesn’t find himself enjoying torture, so he chooses to command us not to do it.
So even if God’s commands are the sole cause of actions becoming right or wrong, this does not necessarily mean that morality or God’s commands are arbitrary, and in avoiding this objection, the defender of DCT certainly need not end up with a “problem of independence.”
3.4 The problem of Pluralism
One familiar objection to morality having theological roots is the fact of religious pluralism. Which God sets the standard? Bernard Gert rejects the claim that a necessary and sufficient condition for a rule being a genuine moral rule is that it has a divine origin. In fact, he takes the flaw with this claim to really be an “obvious difficulty.” He tackles the claim that morally right can be defined as commanded by God and calls it one of the “more popular” definitions of what it takes for a rule to be a moral one, but I will set this aside, since his criticism would still apply to the views of divine command ethics and religious ethics that really are the more popular ones.
This definition suffers from the obvious difficulty that different religions offer different rules that are supposedly given by God. Hence even if it were an adequate definition, it can never be known if it is satisfied. No one can ever know if the rules that are said to come from God really do so. [9]
The argument goes something like this: 1) Some different groups of people disagree about what moral rules God has given (setting aside for now the question of how He has given them). 2) If there is disagreement about what moral rules God has given, then not only does nobody know what any of the moral rules God has given are, but nobody can know what any of those rules are. 3) Therefore nobody knows or can know what any of the moral rules that God has given are.
Actually the only premise that Gert supplies is 1), but it is clear enough that 2) is the premise doing the work since 3) is Gert’s conclusion. Is 2) true? Let’s generalise the claim:
2) For any source of facts S, where people disagree about what facts S supply, none of those people know or can know whether or not they are correct.
This is obviously false. What if one or some of those people are correct, and the others are wrong? This happens all the time. Scientists, on some contentious issues – like some issues of environmental concern – disagree about what facts the natural world is showing us. Does that mean that they must all be wrong, and none of them can know that they are correct? Surely not.
3.5 Can unbelievers have moral knowledge too?
It is claimed that any theory wherein morality depends on theological facts results in the counterintuitive claim that religious unbelievers can have no moral knowledge. Since this is unbelievable, the theory must be false. Gert makes the argument:
It is also a consequence of this view [that morality requires a theological foundation] that atheists cannot consider anything to be a moral rule. Further, not only atheists, but deists, or anyone who does not believe that God gave persons any rules to live by, would also be logically excluded from holding that anything is a moral rule. Also, anyone who doubted that the rule against killing came from God would necessarily have to doubt that it was a moral rule. None of these consequences is true. Hence it cannot be a necessary condition for a rule to be a moral rule that it be a command of God. [10]
The argument is as follows, where Q is the act of knowing moral facts.
1) If C is the cause of our ability to Q, then person p cannot Q unless he believes that C exists. 2) p does Q, and does not believe that C exists. 3) Therefore C is not the cause of our ability to Q.
The argument is not sound. Counterexamples to 1) are readily available. For example, certain biological facts about the windpipe and lungs bring it about that a human can breathe. It does not follow that since a member of a scientifically illiterate tribe of bushmen doesn’t know anything about the way windpipes and lungs work – or even that we have such things – he cannot know that he can breathe. In fact the scientific implications of what Taylor and Gert suggest are absurd, leading to the view that we cannot know that any phenomenon at all occurs unless and until we know what causes it.
It is worth noting that a DCT of what makes acts morally right and wrong is quite consistent with a view like moral intuitionism, which is a view on how we can know that acts are right or wrong. There is no contradiction in thinking that since God created people to function so that when they see outrageous acts of barbarism they intuitively recognise the act as wrong, even though they do not realise that the thing that makes it wrong is God’s command or will.
One final objection might be that a DCT does not even get off the ground, since there just is no God and therefore no divine will. A couple of things should be said here. Firstly, this is an intellectually unsatisfying response. You do a much better job of responding to a position by “getting inside” of it, to show that it breaks down internally. Give it a fighting chance. Secondly, it may even be possible that a DCT is compatible with atheism. Maybe it’s true that what would be required to make an act morally right or wrong is the command or prohibition of God, and since there is no God, there are no moral facts, as suggested by, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche or J. L. Mackie. Thirdly, if the opponent of DCT is to take this line of response, they will need to provide reasons for accepting the soundness of the objection, which would involve showing that atheism is true.
Nothing said here implies that DCT is true, and new criticisms of the theory may be forthcoming. However, the traditional arguments used against the theory are in need of serious reconsideration and amendment if they are to be successful.
NOTES
- ↑ Plato, Euthyphro ed. and trans. B. Jowett (London: Oxford University Press, 1892, 3rd Ed.), paragraph 10.
- ↑ Greg Dawes, Phil 210: Philosophy of Religion, Coursebook (Dunedin: University of Otago, 2005), 99.
- ↑ Peter Singer Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 2nd ed.), 3.
- ↑ Dawes, Philosophy of Religion, 99.
- ↑ Dawes, Philosophy of Religion, 100.
- ↑ Dawes, Philosophy of Religion, 99.
- ↑ Edward Wierenga, “A Defensible Divine Command Theory,” Nous 17:3 (1983), 401.
- ↑ This illustration is essentially the same as that found in Baruch Brody, “Morality and Religion Reconsidered,” Paul Helm (ed.), Divine Commands and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 143.
- ↑ Bernard Gert, Morality: Its Nature and Justification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 117.
- ↑ Gert, Morality, 117.
Suggested Bibliography
Adams, Robert Merrihue, “Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again,” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:1 (1979), 66-79.
Almeida, Michael J., “Supervenience and Property-Identical Divine Command Theory,” Religious Studies 40:3 (2004), 323-333.
Brody, Baruch, “Morality and Religion Reconsidered,” Paul Helm (ed.), Divine Commands and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 141-153.
Dawes, Greg, Phil 210: Philosophy of Religion , Coursebook (Dunedin: University of Otago, 2005).
Joyce, Richard, “Theistic Ethics and the Euthyphro Dilemma,” Journal of Religious Ethics 30:1 (2002), 49-75.
Flannagan, Matthew, “The Premature Dismissal of Voluntarism,” Colloquium: The Australian and New Zealand Theological Review (forthcoming 2009).
Hare, John, God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands and Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001);
Nielsen, Kai, “Some Remarks on the Independence of Morality from Religion,” Mind 70:278 (1961), 175-186.
Peoples, Glenn, “A New Euthyphro,” Think: Philosophy for Everyone (forthcoming, 2009)
Plato, Euthyphro (many editions available).
Quinn, Philip L., Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), especially the chapter on objections.
__________ “The Recent Revival of Divine Command Ethics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1990), 345-365.
Timmons, Mark, Moral Theory: An Introduction (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), chapter 2, “Divine Command Theory.”
Wierenga, Edward, “A Defensible Divine Command Theory,” Nous 17:3 (1983), 387-407.
