ETHICS

V83.0040-001

Mondays and Wednesdays 12:30pm-1:45pm in LC 1 Tisch

New York University

Spring 2001

Divine Command Theory and God’s Benevolence

(Cribbed from James Rachels)

Divine Command Theory says:

1. What God commands is what is morally right; what God forbids is what is morally wrong.

This leads to the question Socrates asks Euthyphro in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro:

2. Is what is right that way because God commands it, or does God command it because it is already morally right?

Euthyphro opts for the latter option, and the dialogue shows the consequences of that choice. Here I want to sketch some of the consequences of the first option, the claim that God’s commanding something is what makes it right.

Consequences of the first option: the entire source of something’s rightness is the fact that God commanded it

Moral rightness is completely arbitrary—Assuming that God commanded us to be honest, this makes honesty morally right. But the choice of commanding honesty was not made for any reason (if it were, then that reason is what makes it morally right and God recognizes this). God could just as easily chosen to command lying (murder, theft, torturing babies, etc.) and then this would have been morally right. It makes no sense to say, “But God would never command those things!” Why wouldn’t he? (You can’t say, “Because they are wrong!”) Any reason you come up with will move us from the first option in Socrates’ question to the second.

The idea that God is benevolent is rendered empty—The idea of God’s benevolence has to do with the thought that he does what is good for us rather than what is bad for us. Presumably, our doing what is morally right is good for us (at least morally). So we have

3. God commands us to do what is morally right = God commands us to do what is good for us.

Typically, God’s commands are considered the commands of an all-powerful being (they must at least be considered the commands of a being much more powerful than us), so there is something (power) backing them up regardless of their moral status. If what an extremely powerful being commands us to do is good for us, then that being is benevolent. If what that being commands us to do is bad for us, then that being is malevolent. But notice that given what “morally right” means on this view, whatever God commands is automatically morally right. After all,

4. God commands us to do what is morally right = God commands us to do what he commands us to do.

Since the right-hand side of 4 is an empty truism this means that God commanding us to do what is morally right is trivially true, no matter what he commands. If he had commanded the Ten Anti-Commandments (Thou shalt steal, Thou shalt kill, Thou shalt bear false witness…), these would have been morally right. Since so long as God commands us to do what is morally right he commands us to do what is good for us, God commands us to do what is good for us no matter what he commands. Combining 3 and 4 above we get

5. God commands us to do what is good for us = God commands us to do what he commands us to do.

Again, since it is trivially true that God commands us to do what he commands us to do, it is trivially true that God commands us to do what is good for us. Since God’s benevolence is supposedly his doing for us what is good for us, and the latter is trivial and automatic, this makes the idea of God’s benevolence trivial and empty. As Leibniz said in Discourse on Metaphysics (1686):

So in saying that things are not good by any rule of goodness, but sheerly by the will of God, it seems to me that one destroys, without realizing it, all the love of God and all his glory. For why praise him for what he has done if he would be equally praiseworthy in doing exactly the contrary?

Notice that all this shows is that there is a conflict between the idea that what makes something morally right is God’s commanding it and the idea that there is something significant to God’s benevolence. One or the other has to go.