The command version of divine command theory

Suppose that morality is grounded in God’s commands. What are God’s commands?

The most obvious idea would be that God’s commands are speech acts of command or legislation like: “Thou shalt not steal.”

But this is implausible. For such speech acts to be binding, they must be promulgated. But where? If we take seriously that these are genuinely speech acts, we have three main options:

1. A text from God

2. One or more human individuals speaking for God

3. A voice in people’s heads, from God or a representative of God.

I don’t think any of these are plausible once we take into account that morality applies to all, but no text has been accessible to all, no human individuals seemingly speaking for God have been audible to all, and lots of people have never heard such a voice in their heads.

So, I think, the divine command theorist needs to understand “command” in some less literal sense. I think the most plausible story would connect with Biblical descriptions of God’s law written in people’s minds or hearts. There will then be a substantive question of what kind of a feature of the mind or heart the commands are, with the two main options being:

4. Emotions (sentimentalist divine command)

5. Intuitions (cognitivist divine command).

(Combinations are also possible.)

But both cases face the following problem: How do we distinguish the attitudes, emotional or cognitive, that constitute divine commands from attitudes of the same sort that do not. Some people have moral attitudes that are screwed up—this might reduce or remove culpability, but nonetheless the screwed up attitudes are not divine commands.

I see three main options for making the distinction:

1. The properly functioning moral attitudes define morality.

2. Morality is defined by the moral attitudes that God has directly instilled either in each individual or in the ancestors of all individuals from whom they are passed on genetically and/or culturally.

3. God’s mental attitudes of approval or disapproval for moral attitudes distinguishes whether the attitudes define morality.

Option (a) pushes divine command theory very close to theistic natural law. Some people will like that (C. Stephen Evans likes to say that natural law is compatible with divine command theory).

Option (b) is interesting and promising.

Option (c) pushes the command version of divine command, which is what I have been exploring, closer to the divine will version. And it has problems with divine simplicity on which God doesn’t have intrinsic contingent features, and the approval/disapproval sounds to me like it would likely need to be an intrinsic contingent feature of God.