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.

Punishment, reward and theistic natural law

I’ve always found punishment and (to a lesser extent) reward puzzling. Why is it that when someone does something wrong is there moral reason to impose a harsh treatment on them, and why is it that when someone does something right—and especially supererogatory—is there moral reason to do something nice for them?

Of course, it’s easy to explain why it’s good for our species that there be a practice of reward and punishment: such a practice in obvious ways helps to maintain a cooperative society. But what makes it morally appropriate to impose a sacrifice on the individual for the good of the species in this way, whether the good of the person receiving the punishment or the good of the person giving the reward when the reward has a cost?

Punishment and reward thus fit into a schema where we would like to be able to make use of this argument form:

1. It would be good (respectively, bad) for humans if moral fact F did (did not) obtain.

2. Thus, probably, moral fact F does obtain.

(The argument form is better on the parenthetical negative version.) It would be bad for humans if we did not have distinctive moral reasons to reward and punish, since our cooperative society would be more liable to fall apart due to cheating, freeriding and neglect of others. So we have such moral reasons.

As I have said on a number of occasions, we want a metaethics on which this is a good argument. Rule-utilitarianism is such a metaethics. So is Adams’ divine command theory with a loving God. And so is theistic natural law, where God chooses which natures to exemplify because of the good features in these natures. I want to say something about this last option in our case, and why it is superior to the others.

Human nature encodes what is right and wrong for. Thus, it can encode that it is right for us to punish and reward. An answer as to why it’s right for us to reward and punish, then, is that God wanted to make cooperative creatures, and chose a nature of cooperative creatures that have moral reasons to punish and reward, since that improves the cooperation.

But there is a way that the theistic natural law solution stands out from the others: it can incorporate Boethius’ insight that it is intrinsically bad for one to get away unpunished with wrongdoing. For our nature not only encodes what is right and wrong for us to do, but also what is good or bad for us. And so it can encode that it is bad for us to get away unpunished. It is good for us that it be bad for us to get away unpunished, since its being bad for us to get away unpunished means that we have additional reason to avoid wrongdoing—if we do wrong, we either get punished or we get away unpunished, and both options are bad for us.

The rule-utilitarian and divine-command options only explain what is right and wrong, not what is good and bad, and so they don’t give us Boethius’ insight.

The variety of virtue ethical systems

One thinks of virtue ethics as a unified family of ethical systems. But it is interesting to note just how different virtue ethical systems can be depending on how one answers the question of what it is that makes a stable character trait T be a virtue? Consider, after all, these very varied possible answers to that question, any one of which could be plugged into a virtue ethical account of rightness as what accords with virtue.

• having T is partly constitutive of eudaimonia (Aristotelian virtue ethics)

• having T is required by one’s nature or by the nature of one’s will (natural law virtue ethics)

• a typical human being is expected to gain utility by having T (egoist virtue ethics)

• a typical human being is expected to contribute to total utility by having T (utilitarian virtue ethics)

• it is pleasant to think of oneself as having T (hedonistic virtue ethics)

• it is pleasant to think of another as having T (Humean sentimentalist virtue ethics)

• God requires one to have T (divine command virtue ethics).

The resulting ethical systems are all interesting, but fundamentally very different.

Divine hiddenness and divine command ethics

Once upon a time, there was an isolated village in the mountains. It had a large electronic billboard. Every so often, unsigned demands appeared on the billboard. Most of these demands seemed reasonable, and the villagers find themselves with an ingrained feeling that they should do what the billboard says, and typically they do so, often deferring to the billboard even when the reasonableness of its demands is less clear. There were two main theories about the billboard. Some villagers said that thousands of miles away there was an authoritative and benevolent monarch who had cameras and microphones hidden around the village, and who issued commands via the billboard. Others said that there was no monarch, but centuries ago, as a science fair project, a clever teenager wrote a machine learning program that offered good advice for the village—a program that wasn’t sophisticated enough to count as really intelligent, but nonetheless its deliverances were quite helpful—and hooked it up to the billboard, and eventually the origins of the system were largely forgotten. The evidence is such that neither group of villagers is irrational in holding to their theory.

Suppose that the monarch theory was in fact the correct one.

Question: Did the monarch’s demands constitute valid commands for the villagers who accepted the software theory?

Response: No. Anonymous demands are not valid commands even when they are issued by a genuine authority. A valid command needs to make it evident whom it comes from. When the authority chooses not to make a subordinate be aware of the demand as an authoritative command, the demand is not an authoritative command.

Objection: Given the widely ingrained feeling that the billboard should be obeyed, even the villagers who accepted the software theory had a duty to obey the billboard. That was just part of the governing structure of the village: to obey the billboard.

Response: Perhaps. But even so, the duty to obey the billboard (at least over the villagers who accept the software theory) wasn’t grounded in the monarch’s authority, but in either the authority of the individual’s conscience or the law-giving force of village custom.

Question: Did the monarch’s demands constitute valid commands for the villagers who accepted the monarch theory?

Response: I am not sure. I think a case can be made in either direction.

A problem for non-command divine command theories

Some divine “command” theories do not ground obligations in commands as such, but in divine mental states, such as his willings, intentions or desires. It’s occurred to me that there is a down-side to such theories. Independently of accepting a divine command theory of any sort, I think the following is plausible (pace Murphy):

1. All humans have a duty to obey any commands from God.

But if obligations are grounded in divine mental states, there is the following possibility: God commands one to ϕ even though God does not will, intend or desire that one ϕ, and so I am not obligated to ϕ. The actuality of this possibility would not fit with (1). In fact, the case of the Sacrifice of Isaac appears precisely such: God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but did not will, intend or desire for Abraham to do so. God only willed, intended and desired for Abraham to prepare to sacrifice Isaac.

In my previous post, I was happy with the corollary of the divine intention account of duty that Abraham did not have a duty to sacrifice Isaac. But given the plausibility of (1), I should not have been happy with that.

The command version of divine command theory obviously verifies (1). So do natural law theories on which obedience to God is a part of our nature (either explicitly or as a consequence of some more general duty).

A divine intentional promotion account of duty

In my previous post, I argued against divine desire versions of divine command theory. Reflecting on that post, I saw that there is a simple variant of divine desire that helps with some of the problems in that post. Instead of saying that we ought to do what God desires us to do, the divine command theorist can say that:

1. We have a duty to ϕ (respectively, not to ϕ) if and only if God is intentionally trying to get us to ϕ (respectively, not to ϕ).

On this picture, God doesn’t just “sit around” and wish for our actions: God intentionally promotes some of our actions and obstructs others. He does this in a multitude of ways: by commanding, by creating us with a human nature that inclines us towards some actions and against others, by inspiring us with his grace, and more generally by intentionally putting us in an environment that encourage or discourages certain actions. An advantage of this view is that it allows for divine commands to be constituted by a plausibly broad variety of divine actions.

One of the problems I raised in the previous post for divine desire theories of duty was the problem of conflicting divine desires. Even a perfectly rational being can have conflicting desires. It is perfectly rational to desire a medical procedure one knows to be painful while desiring not to have pain. Thus there is a serious possibility of conflicting desires on the part of God. This possibility is raised to the level of likelihood when we reflect on the fact that God is said to bring greater goods out of the evils we do, which makes for a likely conflict between God’s desire for these goods and God’s desire that we not perform the evils.

But while a perfectly rational being can have conflicting desires, it is plausible that a perfectly rational being does not have conflicting intentions. A perfectly rational being may desire A and not-A, but he won’t be intentionally promoting both. (Of course, a perfectly rational being may intentionally promote both A and B despite the fact that promoting A makes B less likely. But that doesn’t seem to raise particular difficulties for the intentional promotion account of duty, though I could be missing something.)

My second worry about divine desire theories was cases where our action goes against God’s desires but leads to God’s desires being on the whole better satisfied, such as when our succumbing to temptation keeps a large number of people untempted. I suggested that it is a loving thing to go against someone’s desires when doing so better promotes their desires on the whole. Here, I think there are subtle and difficult issues, but I think the same worry does not apply to the intentional promotion view. Suppose that Bob is intentionally trying to produce A and B. Alice, however, correctly judges that B is more important than A to Bob, and that intentionally acting directly against A will better get Bob what she wants. So she opposes Bob with respect to A in order to produce B. There are cases where this is perfectly appropriate. But I think these are all cases where Alice has a certain kind of superiority to Bob, say because she is Bob’s parent and hence has authority over him, or because she is much smarter than Bob. When Alice and Bob are equals, for Alice to intentionally act against A is not a proper act of love. It is either an act of enmity or at best an act of improper paternalism. (One might think something similar is true in the case of desires, but I doubt it. See the gift example in my previous post.) And this is much more so the case when Bob is Alice’s superior, as God is ours in every respect.

Love seeks union. To oppose oneself to one’s beloved’s intentions is innately contrary to that union. Sometimes love will make such opposition appropriate when the person we love is confused in some way (while love seeks union, union is only one of multiple aspects of love, and sometimes the other aspects may take precedence). But God is superior to us in every respect. Thus it seems plausible that love for God will never require us to oppose God’s intentions. But it may well require us to oppose some of God’s desires, because God’s desires themselves oppose one another, since an all-good being desires all goods, and the goods conflict (thus, God’s desire to exhibit forgiveness to creatures conflicts with God’s desire that creatures not do anything that needs to be forgiven).

Indeed, I think if we have a divine intentional promotion account of duty, there is hope that we may be able to ground moral duty in something virtue-theoretic, like Evans’ account that the virtue of gratitude calls on us to obey God—for it is fairly plausible that gratitude to a being superior in all respects calls on us to further that being’s intentions—or a love account.

Here are some interesting and nice corollaries of the view:

2. There are no true moral dilemmas, because God’s intentions do not conflict.

3. If to tempt someone is to try to get them to do the wrong thing, then God cannot tempt anyone (James 1:13), since if God were to try to get someone to do something, that would ipso facto be the right thing to do.

4. God cannot intentionally unconditionally predestine anyone to damnation. For he who intends the end intends the means, and the means to damnation is sin, and God cannot intend sin.

5. Abraham did not have a duty to sacrifice Isaac, but only a duty to prepare to sacrifice Isaac. For God has no intention that he sacrifice Isaac.

On the other hand, here is an uncomfortable consequence:

6. God cannot intentionally promote a supererogatory action. For any action intentionally promoted by God becomes not supererogatory but a duty.

Perhaps we can say that sometimes God’s promotion of an action doesn’t come with the intention that one do the action but that one be more likely to do it, and that’s what happens in the case of supererogation? If that subtle distinction works, then we can turn a disadvantage of the theory into a significant advantage—for being able to account for supererogation is a serious challenge to many theories of morality.

Finally what about God’s duties? We have two options. First, we could say that (1) is limited to creatures, and God has no duties. Second, we could say that (1) applies to God as well. In that case, every time God intentionally does anything, God is fulfilling his duty, since if God intentionally ϕs, God is thereby intentionally (and in a very strong way) promoting his ϕing. Neither option is appealing. Perhaps the first one is better. In any case, questions about divine duties are always going to be tricky for a divine command theory.

All that said, I don’t endorse the theory. I much prefer a love theory or a natural law theory.

Against divine desire theories of duty

On the divine desire version of divine command theory, the right thing to do is what God wants us to do.

But what if God’s desires conflict? God does’t want us to commit murder. But suppose a truthful evildoer tells me that if I don’t murder one innocent person, then a thousand persons will be given a choice to murder an innocent person or die. Knowing humanity, I can be quite confident that of that thousand people, a significant number, maybe as much as a fifty or more, will opt to murder rather than be murdered. Thus, if I commit murder, God’s desire that there be no murder will be violated by one murder. If I don’t commit murder, God’s desire that there be no murder will be violated by about fifty or more murders. It seems that in this case murder fulfills God’s desires better. And yet murder is wrong.

(Some Christians these days have consequentialist inclinations and may want to accept the conclusion that in this case murder is acceptable. I will assume in this post that they are wrong.)

Perhaps we can say this: Desires should be divided into instrumental and non-instrumental ones, and it is only non-instrumental divine desires that define moral obligations. The fact that by murdering an innocent person I prevent fifty or so murders only gives God an instrumental desire for me to murder that innocent.

But this line of thought is risky. For suppose that God’s reasons for wanting the Israelites to refrain from pork were instrumental. What God really wanted was for the Israelites to have a cultural distinctiveness from other peoples, and refraining from pork served to produce that. On the view that instrumental desires do not produce obligations, it follows that the Israelites had no obligation to refrain from pork, which is wrong.

Perhaps, though, another move is possible. Maybe we should say that in the scenario I gave earlier God knows that his desires will be better served by my committing murder, but he does not want me to do so, whether instrumentally or not. For we need not suppose that whenever a rational being desires y and sees that x is instrumental to y then the rational being desires x. This does indeed get us out of the initial problem.

But we still have a bit of a puzzle. For suppose that someone you love has multiple desires and they cannot all be satisfied. Among that person’s desires, there will be desires concerning what you do and desires concerning other matters. Is it the case that in your love for them, their desires concerning what you do should automatically take precedence over their other desires? No! Suppose Alice and Bob love each other. Now imagine that Bob would really like a certain expensive item that he cannot afford to buy for himself, but that Alice, who is wealthier, can buy for him with only a minor hardship to her. We can now imagine that Bob’s desire that Alice spend no money is weaker than his desire for the expensive item. In that case, surely, given her love for Bob, Alice has good reason to buy the gift for Bob, and it is false that Bob’s desire concerning what Alice does (namely, his desire that she not spend money) take precedence over Bob’s stronger desire concerning other matters (namely, his desire for the item). It would be a loving thing for Alice, thus, to transgress Bob’s desire that she not spend money.

But presumably God’s desire that I not commit murder is weaker than God’s desire that fifty other people not commit murder. Thus, it seems that committing the murder would exhibit love of God—assuming that God’s desires is all that is at issue, and there are no moral obligations independent of God’s desires. Hence, there is a tension between love for God and obedience to God on the divine desire version of divine command theory. And that’s a tension we should avoid.

Divine command theory and atheism

Suppose that the captain impersonates an admiral and yells: “Turn hard to starboard!” The sailors ought to turn hard to starboard and the captain had the authority to command them this. But nonetheless the captain has failed to issue a valid order. For in order to issue a valid order, the captain needs to make herself heard as the captain. The sailors’ obligation to turn to starboard is not a command-obligation but rather is an obligation of conscience to do what one believes, correctly or not, to be the commands of legitimate authority. A sailor who refused to turn would be acting badly, but would not be disobeying an order: she wouldn’t be disobeying the captain’s order, since the captain did not order anything qua captain, or the admiral’s order, since the admiral didn’t order anything.

The same thing would be true, though perhaps less clearly, if the admiral impersonated the captain and told the crew to turn to starboard. The admiral had the authority to issue the order (or so I assume), but to do that she would have to have made herself heard as the admiral.

Similarly, if the captain is a telepath and induces in the helmsman a strong moral belief that he should turn the ship to starboard, no order has been issued to the helmsman. If the helmsman refuses to turn, he is disobeying conscience but he is not disobeying the captain.

Now, consider the command version of the divine command theory: God’s commands (rather than will) define moral obligation. Now we have a prima facie problem with atheists. The atheist believes in an obligation to refrain from stealing, but is not aware of it as a divine command. Therefore, it seems that no command has been validly issued to the atheist: the case seems relevantly like that of the telepath captain. Thus it follows that on the command version of the divine command theory, the atheist has no obligations.

This was a bit too quick, however. For a promulgation condition on commands that requires actual cognitive uptake is too strong. If the captain is yelling orders as captain but the helmsman has deliberately plugged her ears so as not to hear the orders, the helmsman’s failure to hear does not impugn the validity of the orders.

But suppose instead that the helmsman is hard of hearing due to a recent explosion, and the captain whispers the order while knowing the helmsman won’t hear it. In this case, the order is invalid. It seems, roughly, that if the captain could easily make the command heard as her command but does not do so, and the failure to hear it as her command is not something the other party is antecedently at fault for, then the command is invalid.

Now, it seems that there are atheists who are not at fault for their atheism, and whose failure to hear divine commands as divine commands is not something they are at fault for. But God could easily (everything is easy to an omnipotent being) make them hear them as such. So, on the command version of divine command theory, these atheists have never been validly commanded, and hence have no obligations—which is clearly false.

Maybe I will get some pushback on the claim that there are atheists who are not at fault for atheism. Let’s consider, then, the case of Alice, a life-long atheist who is at fault for her atheism and who was never aware of any divine command as a divine command. Then, at some point t₁ of time, Alice did the first thing that made her be at fault for her atheism and/or her failure to be aware of divine commands as divine commands. Perhaps an argument for theism was being offered to her by Bob, but she refused to listen to Bob out of racism.

Now to be at fault, you have to culpably do something wrong. And, according to divine command theory, the wrong is always a violation of a (valid) divine command. So, at t₁, Alice’s action was the violation of a valid divine command. But at t₁, Alice wasn’t aware of the command as one from God, since we’ve assumed that Alice was never aware of any divine command as a divine command. And Alice’s failure to be aware of the command as one from God was not due to any antecedent fault of hers, since we have assumed that t₁ is the time of Alice’s first action that made her be at fault with respect to this failure.

Thus, it seems that the divine command theorist who takes the command part of the theory seriously has to say that those who are now atheists are atheists because they disobeyed a command from God which they were aware of as a command from God. This is deeply implausible. It is way more implausible than the already not very plausible response to the hiddenness argument that says that all atheists are morally guilty for their atheism.

But perhaps we want to distinguish epistemic from moral fault, and say that a command can still be valid if it fails to be heard due to an epistemic fault that the commander could have easily overcome, even when that epistemic fault does not correspond to a moral one. I do not think this is plausible. Being unable to parse complex sentences might be an epistemic fault. But if I issue a complex command to someone I know to be incapable of parsing such complex sentences, when I could easily have used a simpler sentence with the same content, I do not validly command.

Laws of nature and moral rules

There is a lot to be said for the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis (MRL) account of laws as the axioms of a system that optimizes a balance of informativeness and simplicity. But there are really serious problems. The deepest is that the MRL regularities seem to systematize but not explain.

Similarly, there is a lot to be said for rule utilitarianism, but it also suffers from really serious problems. The deepest is probably that it just does not seem to be a compelling moral reason to do something harmful that under normal circumstances it is beneficial.

The MRL account of laws and rule utilitarianism are similar and a number of the problems facing them are structurally similar. Most deeply, the MRL laws don’t move things physically and rule utilitarian rules don’t move us morally. But there are also structurally similar technical problems, such as the account of simplicity, the way in which simplicity is to be balanced with informativeness or beneficiality, the apparent influence of future facts on present laws or moral truths, etc.

It is interesting that many of the problems of both accounts can be solved by bringing in theism. For instance, one can get a theistic MRL account of laws by saying that laws are the divinely willed axioms of a system that optimizes a divinely defined balance of informativeness and simplicity. And one can get a theistic rule utilitarian account by saying that laws are the divinely commanded rules that optimize a divinely defined balance of beneficiality and simplicity.

(I myself would prefer not to go for something quite so simple on the moral side: I’d prefer to insert our natures to mediate between God and our duties.)

Parameters in ethics

In physical laws, there are a number of numerical parameters. Some of these parameters are famously part of the fine-tuning problem, but all of them are puzzling. It would be really cool if we could derive the parameters from elegant laws that lack arbitrary-seeming parameters, but as far as I can tell most physicists doubt this will happen. The parameters look deeply contingent: other values for them seem very much possible. Thus people try to come up either with plenitude-based explanations where all values of parameters are exemplified in some universe or other, or with causal explanations, say in terms of universes budding off other universes or a God who causes universes.

Ethics also has parameters. To further spell out an example from Aquinas' discussion of the order of charity, fix a set of specific circumstances involving yourself, your father and a stranger, where both your father and the stranger are in average financial circumstances, but are in danger of a financial loss, and you can save one, but not both, of them from the loss. If it's a choice between saving your father from a ten dollar loss or the stranger from an eleven dollar loss, you should save your father from the loss. But if it's a choice between saving your father from a ten dollar loss or the stranger from a ten thousand dollar loss, you should save the stranger from the larger loss. As the loss to the stranger increases, at some point the wise and virtuous agent will switch from benefiting the father to benefiting the stranger. The location of the switch-over is a parameter.

Or consider questions of imposition of risk. To save one stranger's life, it is permissible to impose a small risk of death on another stranger, say a risk of one in a million. For instance, an ambulance driver can drive fast to save someone's life, even though this endangers other people along the way. But to save a stranger's life, it is not permissible to impose a 99% risk of death on another stranger. Somewhere there is a switch-over.

There are epistemic problems with such switch-overs. Aquinas says that there is no rule we can give for when we benefit our father and when we benefit a stranger, but we must judge as the prudent person would. However I am not interested right now in the epistemic problem, but in the explanatory problem. Why do the parameters have the values they do? Now, granted, the particular switchover points in my examples are probably not fundamental parameters. The amount of money that a stranger needs to face in order that you should help the stranger rather than saving your father from a loss of $10 is surely not a fundamental parameter, especially since it depends on many of the background conditions (just how well off is your father and the stranger; what exactly is your relationship with your father; etc.) Likewise, the saving-risking switchover may well not be fundamental. But just as physicists doubt that one can derive the value of, say, the fine-structure constant (which measures the strength of electromagnetic interactions between charged particles) from laws of nature that contain no parameters other than elegant ones like 2 and π, even though it is surely a very serious possibility that the fine-structure constant isn't truly fundamental, so too it is doubtful that the switchover points in these examples can be derived from fundamental laws of ethics that contain no parameters other than elegant ones. If utilitarianism were correct, it would be an example of a parameter-free theory providing such a derivation. But utilitarianism predicts the incorrect values for the parameters. For instance, it incorrectly predicts that that the risk value at which you need to stop risking a stranger's life to certainly save another stranger is 1, so that you should put one stranger in a position of 99.9999% chance of death if that has a certainty of saving another stranger.

So we have good reason to think that the fundamental laws of ethics contain parameters that suffer from the same sort of apparent contingency that the physical ones do. These parameters, thus, appear to call for an explanation, just as the physical ones do.

But let's pause for a second in regard to the contingency. For there is one prominent proposal on which the laws of physics end up being necessary: the Aristotelian account of laws as grounded in the essences of things. On such an account, for instance, the value of the fine-structure constant may be grounded in the natures of charged particles, or maybe in the nature of charge tropes. However, such an account really does not remove contingency. For on this theory, while it is not contingent that electromagnetic interactions between, say, electrons have the magnitude they do, it is contingent that the universe contains electrons rather than shmelectrons, which are just like electrons, but they engaged in shmelectromagnetic interactions that are just like electromagnetic interactions but with a different quantity playing the role analogous to the fine-structure constant. In a case like this, while technically the laws of physics are necessary, there is still a contingency in the constants, in that it is contingent that we have particles which behave according to this value rather than other particles that would behave differently. Similarly, one might say that it is a necessary truth that such-and-such preferences are to be had between a father and a stranger, and that this necessary truth is grounded in the essence of humanity or in the nature of a paternity trope. But there is still a contingency that our world contains humans and fathers rather than something functionally very similar to humans and fathers but with different normative parameters.

So in any case we have a contingency. We need a meta-ethics with a serious dose of contingency, contingency not just derivable from the sorts of functional behavior the agents exhibit, but contingency at the normative level--for instance, contingency as to appropriate endangering-saving risk tradeoffs. This contingency undercuts the intuitions behind the thesis that the moral supervenes on the non-moral. Here, both Natural Law and Divine Command rise to the challenge. Just as the natures of contingently existing charged objects can ground the fine-structure constants governing their behavior, the natures of contingently existing agents can ground the saving-risking switchover values governing their behavior. And just as occasionalism can have God's causation ground the arbitrary-seeming parameters in the laws of physics, so God's commands can ground the arbitrary-seeming parameters in ethics (the illuminating analogy between occasionalism and Divine Command is due to Mark Murphy). Can other theories rise to the challenge? Maybe. But in any case, it is a genuine challenge.

It would be particularly interesting if there were an analogue to the fine-tuning argument in this case. The fine-tuning argument arises because in some sense "most" of the possible combinations of values of parameters in the laws of physics do not allow for life, or at least for robust, long-lasting and interesting life. I wonder if there isn't a similar argument on the ethics side, say that for "most" of the possible combinations of parameters, we aren't going to have the good moral communities (the good could be prior to the moral, so there may be no circularity in the evaluation)? I don't know. But this would be an interesting research project for a graduate student to think about.

Objection: The switchover points are vague.

Response: I didn't say they weren't. The puzzle is present either way. Vagueness doesn't remove arbitrariness. With a sharp switchover point, just the value of it is arbitrary. But with a vague switchover point, we have a vagueness profile: here something is definitely vaguely obligatory, here it is definitely vaguely vaguely obligatory, here it is vaguely vaguely vaguely obligatory, etc. In fact, vagueness may even multiply arbitrariness, in that there are a lot more degrees of freedom in a vagueness profile than in a single sharp value.

A moral argument

I've never found the moral argument for morality—except in its epistemic variety—particularly compelling. But now I find myself pulled to find plausible premises (1) and (2) of the following pretty standard argument:

1. Only things that are infinitely more important than me can ultimately ground absolutely overriding rules on me.
2. Rules without ultimate grounding are impossible or not absolutely overriding.
3. I am a finite person.
4. The only things that could be infinitely more important than a finite person are or have among them (a) infinitely many finite persons or (b) an infinite person.
5. Moral rules that apply to me are absolutely overriding.
6. Moral rules that apply to me are not grounded in a plurality including infinitely many finite persons.
7. So, moral rules that apply to me are grounded at least in part in an infinite person.
8. So, there is an infinite person.

The vague thought behind (1) is that rules grounded in something merely finitely more important than me will not be absolutely overriding. After all, it is logically possible that I rise in importance by some large finite amount in my life and then exceed the importance of the ground of moral rules if they are grounded in something of merely finite importance. The vague thought behind (2) is that a regress of grounding in effect leaves things ungrounded, and and ungrounded facts can't be that important to me, because it is beings that are important. Premise (3) is plausible.

I find (4) quite plausible. It's based on the personalist intuition that persons are the pinnacle of importance in reality. Merely Platonic entities, should there be any, while perhaps beautifully structured and infinite in their own way are not important, not unless they are persons as well.

Next, (5) is obvious to me. And (6) seems very plausible. The only plurality of finite persons who could plausibly provide a ground for the moral rules that apply to me is a human community, and there are only finitely many humans. Even if we live in an infinite universe with infinitely many people, the infinitely many aliens surely are not needed to ground the absolute wrongness of degrading a fellow human being.

All that said, I am a dubious about (1). I think there are no reasons other than moral reasons, and so the fact that moral reasons take priority over other reasons is a triviality.

But even within this controversial framework, I am now realizing there is room to ask the question of why some reasons are absolutely conclusive—they should close deliberation no matter what else has been brought to bear. "But A requires intentionally degrading my neighbor" should close deliberation about A: it doesn't matter what reasons there are for A once it becomes clear that A requires intentionally degrading my neighbor.

And that makes something like (1) still plausible. For nothing but a person can be the ultimate ground for a rule whose deliberative importance is so absolutely conclusive—nothing but a person matters enough for this task. Could this person just be my neighbor? Yes—but only if my neighbor is infinitely important, and important in a personal kind of way. This infinite importance can be had in two ways: either my neighbor is an infinite person, or else the infinite importance of my neighbor is derivative from other persons (if it's derivative say from Platonic entities it's not the right kind of importance, for only considerations about persons can bestow the kind of importance that trumps all conflicting considerations about persons). In the latter case we get a regress that is vicious unless there is an infinite person or an infinite number of finite persons grounding the rule. The latter is implausible, so there is an infinite person.

This argument requires deontology, of course.

Let me end by saying that none of this means I am being pulled to Divine Command Metaethics (DCM). DCM is just one among many ways of grounding morality in an infinite person, and it seems to me to be less plausible than other ways of doing so.

Civic and legal duties

Here is an example of a civic duty that isn't required by law: Be reasonably well informed as to what the law commands in your circumstances. In particular, someone who goes out of her way to avoid learning what the law requires of her in some circumstance is going against one of her civic duties even if in fact she does not go against the law. There is no general law requiring that one be reasonably well informed about the law, but the role obligations of being subject to the law include a duty to be well-informed.

This suggests an argument against divine command theory. It is one's moral duty to be well-informed about what God commands us. And this moral duty would be in place even if God in fact did not command us anything.

Here's another example. It is one's duty to do what one believes God to have commanded us, at least when doing so does not conflict with what God has in fact commanded us. Thus, if one believes that one has been commanded by God to refrain from eating beef, it is one's duty to abstain from beef even if God did not command it. Now, a divine command theorist might say that in fact God additionally commanded us to do what we think he has commanded us. But it is intuitive that even if God had not commanded us that, we would still be doing something morally wrong if we went against what we think are God's commands (at least assuming that God did not command us to act as we did).

Similarly, one is a bad citizen—one violates the duties incumbent on one as citizen—when one disobeys something that one incorrectly believes to be a just law.

Self-referential properties

The following is even rougher than is usual for posts.  It's notes to self mainly.

Consider this anti-self-referentiality (ASR) thesis about properties:

• There is no property P and relation R (complex or not) such that a component (say, a conjunct or disjunct) of P is the property of being R-related to P.

Suppose ASR is true.  Then we may well get the following consequences:  

1. Property-identity forms of divine command theory are in trouble.  On these theories, being obligatory is identical with being commanded by God.  But being commanded by x is a complex property one component of which is being intended by x have obligatoriness.  And that's a way of being related to obligatoriness.  And hence property-identity forms of divine command theory likely violate ASR.
2. For the same reason, property-identity forms of legal positivism and moral prescriptivism are in trouble.  For in both cases, we identify a species of obligation with a species of being commanded, and it is plausible that the property of being commanded in the relevant way will include a relation to obligation.
3. The property of being asserted (requested, commanded, etc.) by x is not identical with any complex property that includes a conjunct like being intended to be taken as asserted (requested, commanded, etc.) by x.  Thus various accounts of illocutionary force fail.
4. No property P is identical with being taken to have P, being properly taken to have P, being felt to have P, etc.  All sorts of projectionist views are in trouble.

A fair amount of work would be needed to substantiate the inference from ASR to the above claims. 

I suspect quite a bit of other stuff is ruled out by ASR.  For instance, no property P can have a component of being R-related to Q while Q has a component of being S-related to P.  

I don't know if ASR is true.  I suspect it is.

Two items elsewhere

1. First Things online has a piece by Chris Tollefsen and me on lying.
2. I posted an argument against some divine command theories on prosblogion.

Divine Command Metaethics

The following simple and valid argument came out of discussions with Mark Murphy (who has a forthcoming book that contains related arguments, though perhaps not this one).

According to the identity version of Divine Command Metaethics (IDCM), to be obligated to A is to be commanded to A by God (or to be willed to A by God or to be commanded to A by a loving God--details of this sort won't matter). But:

1. If p explains x's being F, and to be F is the same as to be G, then p explains x's being G.
2. My being commanded by God to follow Christ explains my being obligated to follow Christ.
3. It is not the case that my being commanded by God to follow Christ explains my being commanded by God to follow Christ.
4. Therefore, it is false that to be obligated to A is the same as to be commanded by God to A. (By 1-3)

And so IDCM is false.

The argument more generally shows that no normative-level answer to a "Why am I obligated to A?" question can provide a property identical with being obligated. Thus, sometimes at least the answer to "Why am I obligated to A?" is that Aing maximizes utility. Hence, by an exactly parallel argument, being obligated to A is not the same as having A as one's utility maximizing option.

The argument is compatible with constitution versions of DCM on which the property of being obligated to A is constituted by the property of being commanded to A. But such theorists then have the added complication of explaining what the constitution relation means here, over and beyond bidirectional entailment (after all, many non-divine-command theorists will agree that necessarily x is obligated to A iff God wills x to A).

Divine command metaethics

Divine command metaethics (DCM) says that

1. the obligatory is defined as what God commands.

(Variants on which the obligatory is defined as what God wills can be handled in the same way.) The following question now seems to me to be quite important. How does the word "God" function in DCM?

Option 1: "God" is a proper name of a particular individual. Then, DCM licenses the following surprising per impossibile counterfactual:

2. If the cosmos were created by an essentially omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, perfectly good, loving, unique, infinite, and necessarily existing (I will abbreviate such a list as "omni-omni") creator other than God, then there would be no duty to obey this creator.

This counterfactual is surprising, because it makes very puzzling why it is that we have a duty to obey God, even though we would have no duty to obey an omni-omni creator other than God. The answer cannot be grounded in any of the attributes of God, since (per impossibile) the omni-omni creator other than God would have all of the same attributes.

In other words, a DCM where "God" is a proper name is implausible.

Option 2: "God" is a definite description. Presumably, then, it is a description such that it is a conceptual truth that any omni-omni creator is God. (If not, just throw enough attributes into the "omni-omni" list to make that be true.) But if so, then the DCM claim is basically that the obligatory is what is commanded by a being who satisfies D, where D is some part of the "omni-omni creator" description. If so, then we have a problem identified in an excellent paper by MacIntyre: Exactly which attributes are a part of D? This problem is not unanswerable, perhaps, but it is very difficult.