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:
A text from God
One or more human individuals speaking for God
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:
Emotions (sentimentalist divine command)
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:
The properly functioning moral attitudes define morality.
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.
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.
4 comments:
What follows is unrelated to the main topic, but as I could not find another way to reach out, I am writing it here and hope for a reply.
A question on the Grim Reaper argument.
I am writing to you as someone with a deep interest in the philosophy of theology and time. I recently came across Rob Koons’s argument against the possibility of an infinite past, which employs the Grim Reaper paradox, and I found it to be a truly compelling piece of reasoning.
As I considered the argument's structure, one of the premises stood out to me, and I would be grateful for your thoughts on it. The premise in question is the one stating that the dispositions and actions of each Reaper are intrinsic properties, independent of what occurs in other regions.
My question arises when this premise is combined with the Patchwork Principle. It seems that once we "patch" together the different possible worlds to create the paradoxical scenario, the state of any given Reaper (whether it acts or not) is no longer independent. Its inaction becomes explicitly conditional on the action of a preceding Reaper. This interdependence appears to conflict with the idea that its properties are strictly intrinsic to its own region.
This leads me to wonder about the necessity of this premise. The core of the paradox seems to be generated by two fundamental conditions: the Unbegun Chain (UC) and the rule that each member acts If and Because no Predecessor has (AIBC). Since the patchwork construction already aims to satisfy these conditions, I am curious if the premise about intrinsic properties is strictly required.
Therefore, I wanted to ask for your perspective: would dispensing with this premise about intrinsic dispositions preserve the argument's logical force, or would its removal cause the argument to fail?
Thank you for your time and for your significant contributions to the field.
The argument in the post seems to assume the promulgation requirement is some kind of promulgation directly to each person to whom the command applies, but this is surely not correct; outside of very small societies, there is no society in which this is ever the case. Legislatures do not notify people in their jurisdiction of the laws, they simply make them available to be known. Thus (1) and (2), and especially (2), are entirely on the table. (In fact, (2) is the standardly accepted position in most Muslim versions of divine command, since the Qur'an indicates that every nation were originally sent prophets who presented the divine commands in their own language, until Muhammad arrived as the universal prophet. Thus every long-enduring culture has a tradition of the divine law, although over time the traditions tend to become garbled, and all our moral vocabularies trace back, directly or indirectly, to some prophetic revelation of divine commands.)
I was trying to assume not direct promulgation but availability. However, it has to be "reasonable availability" to the individuals who are governed. What exactly that means is going to be complicated, but in all cases I think there has to be a practicable and reasonable means by which someone who is governed by a law can find out what the law is.
In particular, I don't think promulgation to our ancestors via prophets, when followed by garbling, does the job unless every reasonable person governed by a specific rule has a practicable and reasonable way of ungarbling.
What I just wrote does suggest that I left out a promising hybrid option. We have promulgation to our ancestors, followed by garbling, AND all reasonable people have rational abilities in our nature that allow us to ungarble the text when we need to apply it. This is a kind of hybrid of divine command with natural law.
In particular, I don't think promulgation to our ancestors via prophets, when followed by garbling, does the job unless every reasonable person governed by a specific rule has a practicable and reasonable way of ungarbling.
The problem with this idea is that it seems to float apart from any actual situation with actual laws. Most laws in most societies have arguably been promulgated in precisely this way -- peasants in medieval Europe or China had only customary promulgation, which often did garble things over long centuries, and while there were attempts to go farther than this -- in China, in particular -- it had at best mixed success. A theory of law in which most societies have few if any laws, and that could only conceivably apply to a society with high literacy, easy access to lawyers and other legal advisors, and highly developed communication systems, seems not to be a viable theory of law.
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