Divine command, divine will, and moral obligation

Faith and Philosophy

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 3-27

  Murphy, Mark C ^a  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 58149498312     PISSN: 07397046     EISSN: 21533393     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/faithphil19981512     Document Type: Review

References (21)

1. Philip Quinn, Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. vi-vii.
2. Actually, this is only one issue concerning the relata. I have assumed that the relata will be states of affairs. But one might make the relata properties, as Adams and Wierenga do; see Robert Merrihew Adams, "Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again," Journal of Religious Ethics 7 (Spring, 1979), pp. 66-79, esp. p. 76
3. Edward Wierenga, "A Defensible Divine Command Theory," Nous 17 (September, 1983), pp. 387-407, esp. p. 388.
4. Robert Merrihew Adams, "Divine Commands and the Social Nature of Obligation," Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987), pp. 262-275, p. 262
5. William Alston, "Some Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists," in Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy, ed. Michael Beaty (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), pp. 303-326, p. 304.
6. Janine Marie Idziak discusses what I would regard as historical precursors of such an argument in "In Search of 'Good Positive Reasons' for an Ethics of Divine Commands: A Catalogue of Arguments," Faith and Philosophy 6 (January, 1989), p. 55.
7. See John Searle's discussion of promises and other illocutionary acts in Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 54-71, and his emphasis on institutional facts in the derivation of "ought" from "is" at pp. 184-186.
8. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 344-346.
9. A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 16-23, pp. 38-41.
10. Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 14-15.
11. Wierenga'83, p. 390.
12. Philip Quinn, "An Argument for Divine Command Ethics," in Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy, ed. Michael Beaty (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990b), p. 293 (emphasis added). One might claim that Quinn illicitly assumes that commands are equivalent to assertions about one's will: "Perform §" would be, on this view, equivalent to "I will that you §." These are of course not equivalent: the former is not truth-valuable, but the latter is. But Quinn does not say that commands are assertions of will, but that they are expressions of it. A mark of the correctness of this claim is that a command is not sincere if one commands another to § but does not will that the other f Cf. Searle '69, p. 60.
13. Idziak discusses the historical sources for arguments from omnipotence, liberty, and impeccability in Idziak '89, pp. 51-53. See also her "Divine Command Morality: A Guide to the Literature" in Divine Command Morality: Historical and Contemporary Readings, ed. Idziak (New York: Edwin Meilen Press, 1979), pp. 8-9.
14. Quinn '90b, pp. 293-294.
15. Quinn'90b, p. 295.
16. For an account of how this sort of metaphysical dependence might be less strange than it first appears, see Thomas V. Morris and Christopher Menzel, "Absolute Creation," in Morris, Anselmian Explorations (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), pp. 174-176.
17. Some - a very few - might hold that a proper understanding of divine sovereignty does commit one to a direct dependence view in physics and ethics alike. To hold such a direct dependence view with regard to the natural order is to affirm occasionalism, the doctrine that "God is the only cause of [natural] phenomena. In other words, [occasionalists] have denied that there is any such thing as genuine secondary (i.e., creaturely) causation in nature" (Alfred J. Freddoso, "Medieval Aristotelianism and the Case against Secondary Causation in Nature," in Thomas Morris, ed., Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism [Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988], pp. 74-118, p. 76).
18. It might be thought that a quicker and more intuitively appealing argument for the "what God intends, God gets" thesis can be made in terms of God's omnipotence: if God intends some state of affairs, then God's being all-powerful guarantees that this state of affairs will obtain. Even assuming that God intends nothing impossible (an assumption that would require mention of God's rationality if it were to be defended), this argument would fall short if it is true, as it has been argued by Alvin Plantinga, that there are some possible worlds that even an omnipotent God could not have actualized. To assume that God could actualize all possible worlds is to commit "Leibniz's Lapse"; see Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 184.
19. As Quinn in fact does in Quinn '78, pp. 67-71.
20. For discussions of human cooperation with God from the perspective of natural law theory, see John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 409
21. Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis, "Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends," American journal of'Jurisprudence 32 (1987), pp. 143-145.