16 Problems with Divine Command Theory

Divine Command Theory, or DCT, is the most prominent ethical framework adopted by religious thinkers in modern times. The idea for them is that it gets them an objective grounding for morality.

DCT says that whatever God commands is necessarily good because God commands it, and this is based on God’s good nature. There are many problems with this. This is wrapped up with the classic Euthyphro Dilemma: Are morally good acts willed by God because they are morally good, or are they morally good because they are willed by God?

This  can be summed up as follows:

(1) If divine command theory is true then either (i) morally good acts are willed by God because they are morally good, or (ii) morally good acts are morally good because they are willed by God. (2) If (i) morally good acts are willed by God because they are morally good, then they are morally good independent of God’s will. (3) It is not the case that morally good acts are morally good independent of God’s will. Therefore: (4) It is not the case that (i) morally good acts are willed by God because they are morally good. (5) If (ii) morally good acts are morally good because they are willed by God, then there is no reason either to care about God’s moral goodness or to worship him. (6) There are reasons both to care about God’s moral goodness and to worship him. Therefore: (7) It is not the case that (ii) morally good acts are morally good because they are willed by God. Therefore: (8) Divine command theory is false. What I want to do here is set out a list of issues concerned with this and other aspects of Divine Command Theory. Here goes:  

1) Arbitrariness

Rather as the argument set out previously shows, there is no third party benchmark and so the idea of goodness becomes arbitrary if it is a non-rational assumption made of God. You cannot defer to something else to morally rationalise God's nature, as this would then become the moral grounding, and this would not necessitate God. But for God to be that grounding, what makes his commands good become merely arbitrary assertions when lacking such rationalisations. Good becomes merely a synonym of God and lacks any useful meaning.

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By Dean Hochman from Overland Park, Kansas, U.S. (arrows) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]

2) Direction of causality

This is a hugely important point, but one that is often overlooked. The direction of causality works like this: God has lovingness, mercy, kindness etc., but these are not good characteristics, because goodness is rooted in God. These are good BECAUSE God has them. They do not make God good. So if we have lovingness, if we ask why it is good, it is because it reflects God, not for any other reason. Justice and lovingness are only good on account of God having them, not because they obtain any good consequences within or for society, of for any other moral reasoning.

3) We are good only because we reflect God

Think about the previous point on a practical, everyday basis. When you are being good, you cannot use moral reasoning to define that goodness, only that it reflects God. In other words, moral reasoning cannot ground morality, because then the grounding would not be in God. This leaves us with a weird scenario such that you cannot provide any reasoning for moral actions. “Why is this behaviour good?” cannot be answered in any way other than “because it reflects God’s nature”, and thus moral reasoning becomes impotent. It also means that God cannot have reasons for doing as he does, otherwise these will ground the moral value of the action!

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By Inside_my_head.jpg: Andrew Mason from London, UK derivative work: -- Jtneill - Talk (Inside_my_head.jpg) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]

4) Defies everyday moral reasoning and intuition (in, say, consequences)

In other words, what makes rape wrong, for us, is roughly what harm it causes. For the DCTer, it is because God commanded us not to rape. Although, he kind of did in the Old Testament! We will look about the world and say, “Look how horrible rape is! Look at the harm it does.” But this in no way makes it wrong! This carries no moral value. Of course, this seems patently ridiculous. None of this plays well with our sense of moral intuition. We feel we are being good for X and Y reason, and yet this is supposed to be reflective of God, and this is what makes it good. Yet most everybody being good on a daily basis believes this or thinks of God in this way when being good.

Indeed, as Walter Sinnott-Armstrong states in Morality Without God (p. 107-108):

Larry Nucci found that almost all Amish teenagers said that if God had not commanded them to work on a Sunday, then it would not be wrong to work on Sunday. In his terms, they saw this wrongness as conventional and dependent on authority. When asked why it was wrong to hit other people, many of these Amish teenagers replied that hitting is wrong because God commanded them not to be aggressive or violent. Luckily, Nucci did not stop there. He went on to ask these same Amish teenagers whether it would still be morally wrong to hit other people, if God had made no rule about hitting other people. More than 80 percent of these Amish teenagers replied that hitting would still be immoral. In Nucci’s terms, they treated the wrongness of hitting as moral rather than conventional (or authority dependent) even though they had talked about it as if it were conventional. Their responses, thus, show that even teenagers who were brought up in a strict religious way and who espouse the divine command theory still recognize that morality has a sound foundation outside of God’s commands.

5) Which God? Which Commands?

We are also unclear as to which god exists, and what each god’s commands are. The commands in the Old Testament appear to have been replaced overnight with the commands of the New Testament. Incidentally, this looks like moral relativism (Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism) such that the historical and geographic context of the Jews defined the morality of their actions. So there is a gross lack of clarity in what actions DO reflect God’s nature – we might call this the Argument From Divine Miscommunication. Is stoning adulterers good? Is it bad? Is it only good before 33CE? Did God’s nature change then? Is all the Bible literally true? If so, then Jesus is literally a door. If not, then Jesus and the Bible talks at times in metaphor. What is metaphor and what is literal? We do not have commands for a good many things in the Bible, what of these? Such divine commands are indeed muddled and unclear at best. Slavery etc. appears to be morally bad, and yet God countenanced it in the Bible.

6) Genocide and ordinary morality

The idea that God commanded genocide in the Old Testament is also problematic and does not fit well with ordinary morality. But given DCT, it must be morally good. This potentially gets you to an uncomfortable reality: DCT just depends on who tells you stuff. Genocide from God = good. Genocide from Hitler = bad! It all starts looking like the context (moral relativism, even) and the consequences are all important. More on this later. Hitler gets a lot of bad press for his terrible genocide. God less so. The scales are skewed, methinks.

7) Is God a better stopping point?

Theists have done nothing to show that God is a more appropriate stopping point than the moral properties of kindness, generosity and justice themselves. Why is it, in any rational sense, that grounding morality in God is actually any better than grounding it in real and observable features of the world, such as the consequences that such moral actions obtain? There seems to be this assumption that a framework set outside of our minds and our reality, dictated to by some reasoning or being that we cannot access or remotely understand, is somehow better.

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freeimages.com / Chris Whiteside[/caption]

8) Why follow the commands?

Why should we follow such commands? Only to get into heaven and avoid hell? If so, that is not really a reason to be good. If it is because they are good things to do based on moral reasoning, then again, the framework fails. In this way, there is no reason to accept DCT, even if it is true!

I have talked about how heaven and hell are the ultimate emotional blackmailing techniques and they don't allow us to be free moral agents in the manner that Christians themselves would want and argue for. I wrote about this in the piece "Heaven & Hell Stop You From Genuinely Morally Evaluating".

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By Joreth (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]

9) Things not commanded are on limits?

Anything not commanded by God is potentially on limits. Since we cannot access the source directly (God), then we end up having to guess what is good or bad. This is a guess because it cannot be based on moral reasoning! So anything not covered by divine commands in the Bible is on limits as being potentially morally fine. Those actions lacking moral clarity leave us with either having to do moral reasoning, or simply not having a moral clue about what actions we should do in order to be reflective of God. This is even harder when it appears some things are both good and bad, depending on the context!

10) But God would never command rape! Apart from he did.

The defence that God would never command bad things like murder and rape (i.e., that it is not in his nature) is falsified by the very fact that he DID command it in the Bible! Including the death of all men, women, children and animals in different contexts. Some examples:

Murder, rape, and pillage at Jabesh-gilead (Judges 21:10-24)

Murder, rape and pillage of the Midianites (Numbers 31:7-18)

More Murder Rape and Pillage (Deuteronomy 20:10-14)

Laws of Rape (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)

Death to the Rape Victim (Deuteronomy 22:23-24)

David’s Punishment – Polygamy, Rape, Baby Killing, and God’s “Forgiveness” (2 Samuel 12:11-14)

Rape of Female Captives (Deuteronomy 21:10-14)

Rape and the Spoils of War (Judges 5:30)

Sex Slaves (Exodus 21:7-11)

God Assists Rape and Plunder (Zechariah 14:1-2)

Nice.

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By Dean Hochman from Overland Park, Kansas, U.S. (arrows) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]

11) But God would never command rape! Er, how can you know?

Again, the defence is common: "But God would never command rape!" Yet, in order to say that God would never command rape, you have to know that rape is already wrong, independent of God! You cannot say he would never command it because he has never not commanded it, and to say that he wouldn’t would involve moral reasoning! We have this problem with causality, and the Christian can't say "We know he wouldn't command rape because we know it is bad because of X and Y reasons". You get seriously hamstrung when you cannot appeal to moral reasoning!

12) God cannot know he is all-good...

God cannot even know that he himself is all-good because to do so, he would need to judge himself on an objective standard! This is quite a difficult concept to think about, but how would God be able to have the self-reflective knowledge to be able to claim that he was all-good. All God could say was that he was Godlike. Good, being tautologous with God, means that God would work himself into a circle in trying to define himself. It's quite similar to God being unable to know that he is not a God-in-a-vat, and that there isn't a chain of gods, Matrix-style, above him.

13) Moral development of children

In Morality Without God, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong states ((p. 110):

...anyone who helps and refrains from harming others just because God commanded her to do so might not be hard-hearted, but her motivations are far from ideal. It would be better for them to help nd refrin from harming other people out of concern for those other people.

That is what we ought to teach our children. Studies of development and education show that children develop better moral attitudes as adults if they are raised to empathize rather than to obey commands without any reasons rather than to avoid punishment. To raise children to obey God's commands just because God commanded them will undermine true caring and true morality.

He cites Martin L. Hoffman's Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice for further reading on this.

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By Jorge G. Mori (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bora_Tribe.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]

14) Non-Christians who have no access to Christianity

People who have not read the Bible or experienced the Christian God would have no idea how to be moral (unless, again, there is an acceptable recourse to moral reasoning, which, again, has no need of God). Think of horrible people existing before biblical times, or in different countries without access to those divine commands. Is murder acceptable because they have not had divine commands?

Apologists like William Lane Craig have even posited ideas such as that these people God knew would not freely come to love him, or wouldn't simply be bad people, so he front-loaded their souls into these pre-biblical times as cannon fodder.

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Dietmut Teijgeman-Hansen - Flickr - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/[/caption]

15) Stephen Maitzen: Ordinary Morality Presupposes Atheism

Here is an argument from Stephen Maitzen. And this is an analogy used by Christians themselves. Imagine that you are a five-year-old being taken to the doctors for an injection against a deadly disease. You do not understand how immunisation works. Your parents cannot adequately explain it to you. You just have to know that a greater good will come about from your immunisation. It is a piece of necessary pain and suffering, the needle going in, that will bring about a greater good. Now, an onlooker would never see the doctor just about to inject this poor boy, run over and rugby tackle the doctor so as to stop the pain. That would stop the greater good from taking place.

However, that IS what every god-fearing Christian SHOULD do. Let me explain. imagine an old lady being set upon by some youths across the road. Using our ordinary morality, if we saw this, we would like to think we would step in and stop this from happening. But there can be no such thing as gratuitous evil in this world with an all-loving God. This man getting beaten up, as horrible as it is, is necessary for a greater good to come about. By stepping in and helping this woman, we are stopping the greater good from coming about. We would be rugby tackling the doctor to stop those youths!

In other words, as Maitzen states, ordinary morality simply does not make sense under theism. Ordinary morality presupposes atheism. Moreover, this whole scenario of the problem of evil and greater goods coming from suffering is consequentialist in nature. God is USING people as a means to an end. This is the sort of utilitarianism that theists decry, and attack atheists for holding to.

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Adi Holzer [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]

16) God is a consequentialist

And finally...

A fundamental problem for Christians is that theologians claim that things like DCT are correct, but actually, most of the population tend to be consequentialists. As William Lane Craig has declared: “consequentialism is a terrible ethic”. However, it turns out that about 90% of people are intuitively consequentialist. The most famous experiment to look into this is the trolley problem. 90% of people would pull the lever. This goes dramatically down if they have to push a fat man off the bridge, which shows that morality is a function of psychology. It turns out that (as Jonathan Haidt would say in “The emotional dog and the rational tail”) that we intuitively moralise and then scrabble around for reasons as to why we did something.

But Christians supposedly decry such consequentialism. Funny this, because it turns out that God is the biggest consequentialist of them all. You will hear that God moves in mysterious ways, that there is a reason for everything. The Problem of Evil dictates that there can be no gratuitous evil, that every bit of suffering must be necessary towards eventuating a greater good. So the moral value of the action which brings about suffering is in the consequence of the eventual greater good. It cannot be good that all of the world, bar 8, and all of the animals bar some died in a great flood. No. So the goodness comes from the greater good which this brought about. Everything happens for a reason and God moves in mysterious ways. Jesus being sacrificed was for the sins of the world. This was pure consequentialism. In fact, every atrocity in both the Bible and the real world is explained in this way.

But, according to Christians, this ethic is terrible. The ethical system employed by theologians to use in EVERY SINGLE THEODICY is consequentialist, and apparently terrible!

See more in my essay here.