Thursday, 7/09

Divine Command Theory I

Readings

Texts

• Emil Brunner, "The Divine Imperative"

Notes

• Divine Command Theory

Synopsis

Having developed the Standards of Evaluation (Clarity, Coherence, and Reflective Equilibrium), we turned to examining two variations on moral relativism, the idea, roughly, that there is no universal moral Truth-with-a-capital-'T', only many moral truths-with-a-lower-case-'t'. Thus Cultural Ethical Relativism holds that morality is relative to culture, so each culture defines what is morally right or wrong. There are as many moral truths on this view as cultures such that, for instance, the statement "killing the homeless for sport" is true in one culture but false in another. Simple Ethical Subjectivism, on the other hand, takes there to be as many moral truths as there are individuals inasmuch as moral truths are reduced to simple subjective approvals and disapprovals--opinions, as it were.

Our study of moral relativism was deeply unsatisfying. The view that morality is a matter of culture is no more defensible than the view that morality is a matter of opinion, once we properly formulated those views and uncovered their failings by critically reviewing them in light of the Standards of Evaluation.

Are we justified, then, in rejecting moral relativism altogether given the failures of CER and SES?

I began today by suggesting that while it is always possible for someone to develop a defensible version of moral relativism, every attempt to do so has likewise been unsatisfactory. That is, devising versions of CER or SES which are immune to the criticisms we gave in class only seems to open them up to other, generally devastating criticisms.

So while we cannot reject moral relativism once and for all, prospects are bleak for those seeking to defend it. Indeed, while other academic disciplines embrace moral relativism, Philosophy has generally treated it with all the skepticism it so richly merits.

Our puzzle, though, is evident: If we reject moral relativism, we commit to the existence of universal moral truths and the search for their grounds.

The obvious solution, I argued, is the traditional one found in moral theology. If we want a secure foundation for universal moral truths, we can do scarcely better, it seems, than God's will and the nature of the created universe.

Like moral relativism, moral theology provides two specific theories we shall investigate in the coming days. The first, Divine Command Theory, asserts that morality is determined by God's will.

Today we formulated Divine Command Theory. We then proceeded to ask the questions demanded of us by the Standard of Clarity: Can we even apply the theory to determine its implications, and has it any unintelligible concepts.

As we discovered, it may be that the term 'God' is problematic. Consider the following argument:

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 certainly 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. As we found, however, there are 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 next time to consider further and, it turns out, altogether decisive arguments against DCT.