Divine Command Theory

Abstract: In a 1978 lecture in Tokyo, Foucault drew a comparison between his own philosophical methodology and that of ‘Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy’, claiming the label ‘analytic philosophy of politics’ for his own approach. This may seem like a somewhat surprising comparison given the gulf between contemporary analytic and continental philosophy, but I argue that it is a very productive one which indeed might help us reconsider this gulf. I proceed through a comparison between Foucault and the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, one of the analytic philosophers Foucault had in mind in his Tokyo lecture. By focusing on the methodological commonalities between Foucault and Austin, this article identifies the core of a philosophical methodology that cuts across the analytic/continental divide in philosophy in general while constituting a powerful alternative to the methods applied by analytic political philosophers specifically. This approach, which I term ‘analytic critique’, is one that starts from a critical analysis of what happens in ordinary lived experience and theorises ‘bottom-up’ in an avowedly politically engaged way – thereby challenging the conceptual and political aloofness of contemporary political philosophy in the liberal-Rawlsian tradition. Foucault’s appropriation of the label ‘analytic philosophy’, it is argued, ought to function as a call to more imaginative methodological-theoretical engagement across the traditional division between continental and analytic approaches.

Divine law theories of metaethics claim that moral rightness is grounded in God�s commands, wishes and so forth. Expressivist theories, by contrast, claim that to call something morally right is to express our own attitudes, not to report on God�s. Ostensibly, such views are incompatible. However, we shall argue that a rapprochement is possible and beneficial to both sides. Expressivists need to explain the difference between reporting and expressing an attitude, and to address the Frege-Geach problem. Divine law theorists need to get past the Euthyphro dilemma, and to avoid moral externalism. This paper shows how a combined theory helps us to achieve this.

ABSTRACTJohn Laird was a Scottish philosopher associated with New British Realism. He held the position of Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen from 1924 to 1946. Among his notable works during this time was Recent Philosophy, a book published in 1936 that introduced current movements in philosophy. In this work, Laird included a chapter entitled “Analysis,” which introduced the term “new analytic philosophy.” Additionally, in the conclusion of this book, he used the term “contemporary analytical philosophy.” This article has two primary objectives. First, it seeks to reconsider Laird's contributions to philosophy. Second, it aims to elaborate on Laird's conception of “analytic philosophy” and compare it with the views of John Terence Wisdom, L. S. Stebbing and A. J. Ayer. In the article, it is also noted that Laird's book was published in the same year as Nagel's two‐part paper on analytic philosophy. It should be added that Nagel visited Cambridge in 1935. The article also endeavours to shed light on British philosophy and the development of the term “analytic philosophy” in the 1930s.

It is widely believed that the Divine Command Theory is untenable due to the Euthyphro Dilemma. This article first examines the Platonic dialogue of that name, and shows that Socrates’s reasoning is faulty. Second, the dilemma in the form in which many contemporary philosophers accept it is examined in detail, and this reasoning is also shown to be deficient. This is not to say, however, that the Divine Command Theory is true—merely that one popular argument for rejecting it is unsound. Finally some brief thoughts are presented concerning where the real problems lie for the theory.

This chapter deals with fuzzy logic in Zadeh’s ‘narrow sense’ [27], pointing to t-norm based truth functional logics, where the truth values model ‘degrees of truth’, identified with reals from the unit interval [0,1]. In particular, we are interested in Łukasiewicz logic Ł and some of its variants, but also in Godel logic G, and in Product logic P. The literature on formal deduction systems for these and related many-valued logics is vast and even more has been written about their algebraic background. We refer to the monographs [23], [22], and [10] for more information and references. Most authors take the usefulness of these logics in the context of approximate reasoning, i.e., reasoning with vague and imprecise notions for granted. However the corresponding proof systems are hardly ever explicitly related to models of correct reasoning with vague information. In other words: the challenge to derive particular fuzzy logics from first principles about approximate reasoning is not addressed explicitly. The reference to general models of reasoning and to theories of vagueness – a prolific discourse in contemporary analytic philosophy – is only implicit, if not simply missing, in most presentations of inference systems for fuzzy logics. Some notable exceptions, where an explicit semantic foundation for particular fuzzy logics is aimed at, are: Ruspini’s similarity semantics [35]; voting semantics [25]; ‘re-randomizing semantics’ [24]; measurement-theoretic justifications [7]; the Ulam-Renyi game based interpretation of D. Mundici [29]; and ‘acceptability semantics’ of J. Paris [31]. As we have argued elsewhere [12], these formal semantics for various t-norm based logics (in particular Łukasiewicz logic) should be placed in the wider discourse about adequate theories of vagueness, a prolific subfield of analytic philosophy.

This paper will respond to James Sterba’s paper “An Ethics without God That is Compatible with Darwinian Evolution”. In his paper, Sterba argues that God cannot be the source of morality. Sterba maintains this position because he believes that his problem of extreme suffering entails that God cannot exist. Furthermore, Sterba argues that divine command theory has a number of serious problems confronting it. Alternatively, Sterba maintains that one can account for objective morality without appealing to God’s nature and/or commands. In response, this paper grants that Sterba presents a logically consistent account of objective morality without appealing to God’s nature and/or commands. However, this paper also cites a couple of reasons why one might think that God is still the better explanation for objective morality. This paper furthermore argues that Sterba’s objections do not demonstrate that divine command theory is false. The main thrust of this paper, though, focuses on Sterba’s argument about horrendous suffering. This paper argues that Sterba’s argument on horrendous suffering (while challenging) does not prove that a morally perfect God could not exist.

John Hare proposes a version of “divine command theory.” Like Kant, he worries that if we don’t believe in God, morality becomes unstable. Lest we lose hope and abandon our moral efforts, we can place our trust in the super-sensible author of nature, God, who rewards us by creating the conditions for our happiness. Hare argues (as Kant does) that God can grant us happiness in equal measure to our virtue. Still following Kant, Hare argues that God makes the moral law and gives it to us. Though we are able to identify our moral obligations and honor them for their own sake, a “moral gap” exists between how we ought to live and the way we can live without “outside” assistance from others including God. This “outside” assistance is an effect of divine grace. To the question of why we should be moral, Hare turns to the philosophical theologian, Duns Scotus, who argued that to love God is to obey God – in other words, to love God is to will what God wills for us to will – our obedience.

In recent analytic philosophy of religion, one hotly debated topic is the veridicality of religious experience. In this paper, I briefly trace how the argument from religious experience comes into prominence in the twentieth century. This is due to the able defense of this argument by Richard Swinburne, William Alston, and Jerome Gellman among others. I explain the argument's intuitive force and why the stock objections to religious experience are not entirely convincing. I expound Swinburne's approach and his application of the Principle of Credulity to religious experience. Then I critically examine four major objections to Swinburne. I conclude that the argument from religious experiences is not likely to be conclusive but it should not be dismissed either.

O autor estuda o impacto de Kant na filosofia analítica contemporânea e na respetiva historiografia, desde Frege, Russell e o positivismo lógico vienense, até a algumas reformulações mais recentes do problema kantiano sobre a distinção entre o analítico e o sintético, e a possibilidade do sintético a priori, como é o caso, entre outras, da de Quine e da de Kripke. Discute as razões que estão na origem do retorno a Kant na filosofia analítica desde os anos cinquenta do século passado até aos nossos dias (particularmente do que chama “rejeição versus aceitação de Kant”), e mostra que esse retorno se centrou (e em parte continua a centrar-‑se) na atualidade do problema referido e das respetivas implicações.

In this paper, the author argues that within the current philosophical debate, pragmatism has a distinct advantage over its rivals—on the one hand, Anglo-American analytic philosophy and, on the other hand, continental philosophy. By refusing to succumb to `naturalizing’ tendencies, pragmatism is able to overcome scientistic tendencies in contemporary analytic philosophy. At the same time, by emphasizing the `natural’, pragmatism provides a helpful correction to metaphysical tendencies in continental philosophy.

One prominent response, based on the work of Robert Adams, Edward Wierenga, and others, to the Euthyphro objection to the divine command theory is to point out that God is essentially omnibenevolent. The commands of an essentially loving being will not be arbitrary since they are grounded in his nature, nor is it possible for a loving God to issue horrendous commands such as the gratuitous torture of infants. This paper argues that this response is inadequate. The divine command theory attributes to God the power to make an action morally obligatory. Given the reasonable assumption that any omnipotent being has the same powers as God, contemplating the commands of a malevolent deity is enough to cast doubt on the claim that any being, loving or otherwise, has the power to make an action morally obligatory just by commanding it.

Virtue theory has occupied a place of relative prominence within the Christian intellectual tradition. But there is a problem facing it: how one contemplates the virtues and vices will ultimately depend upon deeper accounts of the good and the right. Accordingly, virtue theory is incomplete, at least when taken by itself. Our task in this paper is to show that neither of the standard approaches to explaining the metaphysical foundations of morality within the Christian tradition—natural law theory and divine command theory—are sufficient to fix this incompleteness. We thus propose a combination of natural law theory and divine command theory to remedy the matter. The upshot of our argument, then, is this: what counts as a virtue ultimately depends upon the natural law and divine commands.

Early Ashʿarites (including al-Juwainī) espouse divine command theory. Al-Ghazālī, however, rejects divine command theory and offers a new semantics for moral terms. He advocates a self-centered consequentialist ethical theory. The chapter provides an overview of al-Ghazālī’s ethical theory and his moral epistemology, according to which reason has no power to discover the moral status of actions. Based on al-Ghazālī’s consequentialist ethical theory, the argument for strict adherence is reconstructed to reject the reliability of our independent moral judgments. The argument implies that we have to follow Scriptural injunctions in their literal sense. The argument’s reliance on consequentialism, however, generates some worries for the argument.

This chapter answers various epistemic challenges to divine command theory, and extends the moral argument by offering a few epistemic variants of it; in the process it also stresses that divine command theory is not primarily an epistemic theory so much as a metaphysical one. In fact, since the “way of being” is not the “way of knowing,” as the medievals put it, certain moral commitments stand with greater epistemic privilege than religious ones, but rather than this fact undermining the moral argument, it in fact is a requisite condition for a workable moral apologetic, since the moral premises must be at least as strong as the theistic conclusion—another reminder of the rational need for God's goodness to be analogically explicable and not so unrecognizable that it robs ascriptions of goodness to him of determinate content and implicates speakers in an egregious equivocation. This chapter also argues that theistic ethics, rightly understood, never involves a genuine conflict between what's morally required and what's rational to do.

Linda Zagzebski proposes a formal framework for an ethical theory in which the incarnation is central and the imitation of Christ the basic normative idea. Her formal framework of exemplarism makes it possible to utilize the advantages of narrative ethics within a formal theory. She then sketches a practical form of exemplarist virtue theory that she calls Divine Motivation (DM) theory. In this theory, all evaluative concepts are derived from the concept of a good motive, and God's motives are the metaphysical ground for all value. Zagzebski argues that DM theory is more distinctively Christian than such law‐based theories as divine Command theory and Natural Law theory.