Questions of right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and vice are the kind of things that we might expect to lose sleep over: abortion, euthanasia, human rights, treatment of animals, stem cell research … a never-ending list of perilous and supercharged issues. More than any other area, ethics feels like a minefield—treacherous terrain where you expect to be tripped up at any moment, yet where stumbling might prove very costly.
Paradoxically, though, for many people the business of moralizing is, on the face of it, more like a stroll in the park. In the minds of millions of people morality is inextricably tied up with religion: this or that is right or wrong for the simple reason that God (or a god) has ordained that it should be so; good is good and bad is bad because God says so.
In each of the three “religions of the Book”—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—the system of morality is based on “divine command”: it is for God to command, humans to obey; God imposes on its worshippers a set of moral injunctions; virtuous behavior requires obedience, while disobedience is sin. Surely such a code of ethical rules, underwritten by God’s own hand, should banish the concerns that beset subjectivist accounts of morality—the nasty suspicion that we are making up the rules as we go along?
“No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.”
A.J. Ayer, 1968
The Euthyphro dilemma Without God, of course, the divine command theory immediately collapses, but even allowing that God does exist, there are still a number of serious problems threatening the theory. Probably the gravest of these is the so-called Euthyphro dilemma, first raised by Plato some 2400 years ago in his dialogue Euthyphro. Socrates (Plato’s mouthpiece in his dialogues) engages a young man named Euthyphro in a discussion of the nature of piety. They agree that piety is “whatever is loved by the gods,” but then Socrates poses a crucial question: are pious things pious because they are loved by the gods, or are they loved by the gods because they are pious? It is on the horns of this dilemma (usually expressed in monotheistic terms) that the divine command theory is caught.
The biggest danger facing the divine command theory is the risk of losing its divine commander: we may be less than fully persuaded by the various arguments put forward to prove the existence of God and we may not have the benefit of faith (see Faith and reason). Undaunted, some advocates of the theory have ingeniously turned the danger to their advantage, using it as a proof of God’s existence:
This line of reasoning is unlikely to win over an opponent, however. The first premise, implying that morality is essentially something that exists independently of humans, begs one of the most basic underlying questions. And even allowing that morality does exist independently of us, the second premise has to bear the full brunt of the Euthyphro attack.
So, is what is good good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? Neither alternative is very palatable to the divine command theorist. Taking the first part first: killing (say) happens to be wrong because God commands it, but things might have been otherwise. God might have ordained that killing is OK or even obligatory, and it would have been—just because God said so. On this reading religious observance adds up to little more than blind obedience to an arbitrary authority. So does the other alternative fare any better? Not really. If God commands what is good because it is good, clearly its goodness is independent of God. At best God’s role is that of moral messenger, passing on ethical prescriptions but not the source of them. So we could go straight to the source and happily shoot the messenger. At least in the role of moral lawmaker, God is redundant. So when it comes to morality, either God is arbitrary or God is irrelevant. Not an easy choice for those seeking to make God the guarantor or sanction of their ethics.
“Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?”
Plato, c.375 BC
A common counterattack on the Euthyphro dilemma is to insist that “God is good” and therefore that it would not command evil. But this line of attack risks circularity or incoherence. If “good” means “commanded by God,” “God is good” will be virtually meaningless—something like “God is such that it complies with its own commands.”
More promising, perhaps, is to take the phrase to mean “God is (identical with) good(ness)” and therefore that its commands will inevitably be good. But if Godness and goodness are one and the same, “God is good” is utterly vacuous: no light has been shed and we have gone in a circle—an example, perhaps, of God’s fondness for moving in mysterious ways.
The Euthyphro dilemma aside, another serious difficulty facing those who would base morality on divine command is that the various religious texts that are the principal means by which God’s will is made known to humans contain many conflicting and/or unpalatable messages. To take a notorious example from the Bible, the book of Leviticus (20:13) states that: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.” If the Bible is the word of God and the word of God determines what is moral, the execution of sexually active homosexual males is morally sanctioned. But most people today would regard such a view as morally abhorrent, and it is in any case inconsistent with injunctions elsewhere in the Bible (most obviously, the commandment not to kill). Clearly, it is a challenge for the divine command theorist to use God’s known views to construct a generally acceptable and internally coherent moral system.
the condensed idea
Because God says so
| Timeline | |
|---|---|
| c.375BC | The divine command theory |
| AD1670 | Faith and reason |
| 1739 | The boo/hoorah theory Hume’s guillotine |
| 1958 | Beyond the call of duty |