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Moral Autonomy and Divine Commands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Chan L. Coulter
Chan L. Coulter
Affiliation:
Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania
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Extract

A Divine Command Theory of Ethics is sometimes rejected on the grounds that such a theory is incompatible with human moral autonomy. If we assume that human beings are morally autonomous, the argument goes, then no human being can be obligated to perform any action simply because God (or any other agent) has commanded it. The incompatibility between a Divine Command Ethic and moral autonomy is a corollary of an argument James Rachels uses to deny the very existence of God. He argues that any being which can be denoted by the term God must be a being worthy of worship. But, in order to be a being worthy of worship it must be such that other beings owe it unconditional obedience. Since human beings are morally autonomous and cannot owe unconditional obedience to any other being, nothing can meet the criterion for being God. Hence, there is no possible state of affairs which includes both a being worthy of worship and morally autonomous human agents.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 1989 , pp. 117 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

page 117 note 1 Rachels, James, ‘God and Human Attitudes’, Religious Studies, VII (1971), 325–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar and reprinted in Divine Commands and Morality, ed. Helm, Paul (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1981).Google Scholar Page references will be to the Helm anthology.

page 177 note 2 Quinn, Philip L., ‘Religious Obedience and Moral Autonomy’, Religious Studies, XI (1975), 265–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar and reprinted in Divine Commands and Morality, ed. Helm, Paul (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1981).Google Scholar Page references will be to the Helm anthology. See also Chapter I, ‘Divine Commands and Moral Autonomy’, Divine commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1978).Google Scholar

page 117 note 3 Chandler, John H. ‘Is the Divine Command Theory Defensible?’, Religious Studies, XX (1984), 443–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 118 note 1 Rachels, , ‘God and Human Attitudes’, p. 45.Google Scholar ‘…worship requires the abandonment of one's role as an autonomous moral agent.’

page 118 note 2 Quinn, , ‘Religious Obedience and Moral Autonomy,’ p. 52.Google Scholar

page 118 note 3 Ibid. p. 54.

page 118 note 4 Ibid. p. 63.

page 119 note 1 Ibid. p. 64.

page 120 note 1 Ibid. p. 56.

page 121 note 1 Kant, Immanuel, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Beck, Louis White (New York, N.Y.: Library of Liberal Arts Press, 1959), p. 14.Google Scholar

page 121 note 2 Ibid. pp. 16–17.

page 121 note 3 Ibid. p. 49. ‘By this principle all maxims are rejected which are not consistent with the universal lawsgiving of will. The will is thus not only subject to the law but subject in such a way that it must be regarded also as self-legislative and only for this reason as being subject to the law (of which it can regard itself as the author).’

page 123 note 1 It does not seem to be the case that arbitrary choices are always irrational. In the case of the ass stationed equally between two equally delicious stacks of hay, it would seem entirely rational to make an ‘arbitrary’ choice of one or the other. Certainly it is not rational to choose starvation in order to avoid an ‘arbitrary’ choice.

page 127 note 1 See Burch, Robert, ‘Objective Values and the Divine Command Theory of Morality’, New Scholasticism, 54. 378–408 (1980)Google Scholar for a defence of the thesis that the Divine Command Theory would be a theory which could provide an account of values which would justify the claim that there are objective values.

page 128 note 1 Augustine, St, Epistle CXX i.3, 4Google Scholaras found in An Augustine Synthesis arranged by Pryzywara, Erich, Harper Torchbooks (New York, N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1958), pp. 62–3.Google Scholar

page 129 note 1 If one demands that the Divine Command Theory must be true in all possible worlds if it is true in any, then the thesis of this paper collapses. However, it is not clear why we would make such a demand on our theory. See Wierenga, Edward, ‘A Defensible Divine Command Theory’, Nous, XVII (1983), 396Google Scholar for a reference to the claim that an ethical theory may be true in some possible worlds but not in all.