Tuesday 2/12

Moral Theology II: Divine Command Theory (b)

Readings

Texts

• Emil Brunner, "The Divine Imperative" (from last time)
• John Arthur, "Morality Without God"

Notes

• Divine Command Theory (from last time)
• The Euthyphro Argument

Synopsis

Having been rudely interrupted by the first examination, we returned today to our discussion of Divine Command Theory (DCT).

DCT is especially interesting because a great many of the people in the world believe something like DCT, even if they have never explicitly formulated it as we have. So it seems important to find out whether or not DCT has a chance of being true.

Today we returned to our puzzle, prompted by the Standard of Clarity, whether all the terms of DCT are intelligible. It may be that the term 'God' is problematic. Consider the following way of framing the argument, which goes a bit further than I did in class to include the assumption that God exists:

The idea is fairly intuitive. If you saw a small child about to wander into traffic, you would, doubtless, run and stop the child. Of course, you may not be able to, because you may not be able to run fast enough. But you are a good person, so you'll do your best to avert disaster.

What would we say of someone who stood by and watched as the child wanders into traffic to be struck and killed?

Because it's so hard to believe that somebody would just stand by and let it happen, we might first wonder whether the person was able to save the child. Perhaps this person, though standing, requires a cane to get around and knows that he can't get to the child in time to save it. Then we might be less inclined to hold him blameworthy for not saving the child. After all, we cannot be expected to do what is not in our power.

Yet suppose we find out this person was perfectly able to save the child. Then we might wonder, did he know that the child was about to wander into traffic? His attention might have been elsewhere. One cannot intervene in a situation if one doesn't even know the situation exists.

Suppose now that we discover the person did, in fact, know what was happening. He knew what was happening, he could have acted to prevent it, yet he did nothing. Our conclusion must be that he is morally, and perhaps legally, blameworthy for failing to save the child. At the very least, we would say that he is not a good person, because a good person who knew what was about to happen and could intervene would have done so.

God, so the atheist argues, is in much the same position as this person we have been imagining. If God exists, then God can do anything, knows everything, and is perfectly good. It couldn't then be the case that children die in the thousands from starvation, abuse, and natural catastrophe every day, but it is. If God exists, then God watches, refusing to lift a finger.

So either God does not exist at all, or God is either not perfectly good, not all-powerful, or not all-knowing.

Put this way, it seems like a fairly powerful argument. There are, however, many responses to the Problem of Evil. There is no hope that we can solve the problem in this class, so we set it aside to consider further and, as it turns out, decisive arguments against DCT.

DCT implies a contradiction. This contradiction comes from holding that morality depends on God's will and asking the question, is an action right because God commands it or does God command it because it is right? This is the Euthyphro Question, so named because it is first asked by Plato in his "Euthyphro" dialogue.

Spelling out the argument in detail is somewhat complicated. What it comes down to is this: If an action is morally right just because God commands it then there is nothing else which makes the action morally right. In particular, there are no reasons God might have for so commanding, since in that case the action would presumably be morally right not because God commanded it but because of the reasons God has for commanding it. On the other hand, if God commands an action because it is morally right, then it must be the case that there are facts or reasons which make the action morally right independent of God's will.

So either God has reasons for His/Her/It's commands, or God doesn't. If God has no reasons, then morality is arbitrary, which is an intolerable implication. It must be the case that God has reasons for so commanding. But then morality is not dependent on God's will, which contradicts the basic tenet of DCT that morality is dependent on God's will. Thus DCT implies a contradiction. Any theory which implies a contradiction must be false.

A further problem for DCT is, of course, that there may not be a God. If there is no God then DCT is inconsistent with the facts. But whether or not there is a God is another issue which could easily take up the entire semester and we still would not be able to come to a conclusion. So instead I put the point this way: For those who do not think there is a God, DCT is at odds with the facts as they believe them to be.

We uncover a deeper problem when we reflect that there is no way to decide which of the many religions is true or, at least, false. Generally speaking, religious people endorse their particular religion because it is part of their cultural or familial heritage. But mere cultural or familial tradition cannot determine whether, for example, Islam or Buddhism are false while Christianity is true. Yet religions vary greatly in the facts they presuppose about the world. Thus the facts we need to check to see if DCT is consistent with known facts change depending on which religion is employing the theory, which makes it impossible to determine whether DCT is consistent with known facts.

Since DCT implies a contradiction and is inconsistent with known facts insofar as no single consistent set of facts are presupposed by DCT, we conclude that the theory fails the Standard of Coherence.

There are, of course, additional problems with Reflective Equilibrium. For example, DCT as it is commonly understood in the Christian tradition implies that homosexuality is morally wrong, slavery is morally permissible, women have fewer rights than men, and those who do not believe in God or do not believe in the same God have no rights. These implications are objectionable by argument-backed intuition. Unfortunately,there are many people who are willing to argue, for example, that women should have fewer rights than men and homosexuality is morally wrong. While I think that these people are seriously mistaken, we leave off by simply saying that DCT arguably fails to pass Reflective Equilibrium.

Since no theory that fails Coherence can be true, we conclude the theory is false. Interestingly, none other than Saint Thomas Aquinas agreed that DCT ought to be rejected. Next week we take up his intriguing alternative theory of Moral Theology.

Some clarification of our discussion of Moral Theology is perhaps in order. What I argued in this lecture and will argue in the next is that the two most prominent ethical theories derived from the religious conception of morality fail to meet the Standards of Evaluation.

It would be easy, I suppose, for someone to conclude that the course is anti-religious. Nothing could be further from the truth. What we are showing is that, contrary to the almost universally held view, morality is in fact independent of religion. Moral truths are not determined by religion or faith, or so our arguments conclude. But this should not be taken to imply that religion is somehow defunct or nonsense. Though religious folks might find this result off-putting, all the course argues is that it is possible--indeed, necessary--to investigate moral matters without religious doctrine. Yet that is surely no reason to scorn religions, which may well possess wisdom apart from moral insight.