[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Personal Identity ] [ Mind and Body ] [ Epistemology ] [ Readings ]

Selections from Christian, Confucian, Islamic texts

Each selection you have read offers a series of ethical directives and admonitions -- i.e. you are told what you can and cannot do, and what rewards/punishments you can expect based upon your actions. But what justifies these demands? Why should we regard these claims as authoritative?

Plato, in his dialogue Euthyphro, addressed these issues with the following question (posed by Socrates): "Is an action pious (i.e. right or morally correct) because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious?" Put differently, is what makes an action right or correct the fact that God (or some deity) says that it is right or correct, or is there something about that action itself that God recognizes, and for this reason declares the action correct? If you think the first explanation is correct (actions are moral because God commands them), then you are endorsing some version of the Divine Command theory. If you prefer the second explanation, you are probably endorsing some version of the Autonomy thesis, which holds that what makes an action moral or not is some feature of the action (i.e. that it causes happiness, or helps humans reach their full potential, etc.). Let's take a closer look at each of these views.

1) DIVINE COMMAND THEORY: Briefly, this view claims that ethical principles are simply commands of God, and that accordingly, they derive their validity from God's having commanded them. Louis Pojman writes that on this view, moral rightness just means "willed by God," and moral wrongness means "being against the will of God."

One strength of this view is that it (for the believer) reaffirms that both the need for God (since without morality life would be both short and unbearable) and the sovereignty of God. All moral value ultimately rests upon God.

But there are a number of weaknesses in this view as well. Consider the phrase "God commands us to do what is good" (which most believers affirm). On the divine command theory, "good" just means "what God wills or commands." So the statement "God commands us to do what is good" really means "God commands us to do what God wills or commands us to do."

Hence if the property of goodness is equivalent to the property of being commanded by God, then the statement "God's commands are good" becomes meaningless. It is like saying "Dogs are dogs" -- it tells us nothing.

What's more, if the Divine Command theory is true, it appears to make morality arbitrary. Recall that what makes an act wrong is simply that it is against the will of God; nothing about the action itself (that it causes pain, etc.) is the cause of its wrongness, save its being against the will of God. It is therefore logically possible that God could command rape, murder, etc., and by doing so make them okay. Put differently, God could have arbitrarily chosen any action to be immoral, and simply in virtue of choosing it, make it immoral.  Is that correct? If so, how can we tell the difference between the commands of God and the commands of the devil (especially in areas where there is no explicit instruction in any religious text)?

2) AUTONOMY THESIS: On this view, moral principles are not right or wrong based on God's willing or commanding them, but for reasons which may be known independently of God's will. (Note that accepting this view does not entail that one is rejecting God, or God's being the source of moral value. A theist could argue that God is still the source of right and wrong as follows: in creating the world, God made some actions/principles intrinsically right or wrong. These principles, however, are right or wrong because of certain features about them (i.e. that they cause suffering or bring joy, etc.), features that God put into them. It is the presence or absence of these features that makes the actions in questions right or wrong, and that is why God commands them.)

This solves a lot of the problems cited above...goodness is now an identifiable property (though we still need an account of what that property is.) Morality is no longer arbitrary for what makes actions right or wrong depends upon the kinds of action they are, and not simply because they are commanded or not.