The Divine Command Theory of Morality (DCT) is a relatively simple theory of moral obligation that equates our moral duties to the commandments of God: X is morally obligatory if, and only if, God has commanded X. Y is morally prohibited if, and only if, God has forbidden Y.

Required reading 1 The Divine Command Theory of Morality

The Divine Command Theory of Morality (DCT) is a relatively simple theory of moral obligation that equates our moral duties to the commandments of God:

X is morally obligatory if, and only if, God has commanded X.

Y is morally prohibited if, and only if, God has forbidden Y.

Moreover, the DCT holds that God’s commands are the source of morality. Consider, for example, the seventh commandment, “thou shall not commit adultery.” Assuming that God exists and has indeed issued this command, then, according to the DCT, it is morally wrong to commit adultery. If God does not exist or has not issued the command, then adultery is morally permissible.

The motivation behind this theory is obvious: with its universal rules, the DCT at once solves challenges of relativism and of why one ought to be moral. Furthermore, the DCT emphasizes the idea that moral commands are overriding, in the sense that they trump other motivations such as convenience or self-interest. Furthermore, the DCT suggests a strong reason to act morally: morality is essentially submission to the authority of the creator, who may punish transgressors.

Detail of God from Michaelangelo fresco. Source: Wikimedia. This photo is in the public domain.

The DCT tries to equate morality to the purported commands of God. Some thinkers, for instance Robert Adams (1999), argue that the existence of objective moral obligations is coherent only if a personal God exists. In other words, the idea is that objective morality either presupposes that God exists, or that the existence of God is the best explanation for objective moral obligations. Consideration of such arguments, some which can be traced to Immanuel Kant (1788), would take us too far from the central themes of this module.

The DCT is interesting in that, in contrast with most other theories of ethical action, it emphasizes obedience or submission as a central virtue—not obedience in general, of course, but to God and perhaps to God’s representatives. The idea of moral autonomy, of determining the right course of action using one’s reason, is not emphasized. One does need to use reason, perhaps to determine whether an action falls under the scope of a particular commandment, but the principal virtue for the DCT is obedience to the will of God. This may be attractive for some people, as it offers an escape from the weighty demands of moral judgment; one essentially transfers responsibility to a third party. One major religion reflects this idea in its very name: in Arabic, “Islam” means submission, and a “Muslim” is one who submits (to Allah).

Problems with Divine Command Theory

Some theists (people who believe that God exists) might think of the DCT as consistent with their overall worldview. It may seem that if God has created the world and everything that exists, then God must have created morality too. Furthermore, if God is omnipotent, then it would seem that God could choose any morality—we are just fortunate that God chose a morality that facilitates human flourishing. However, as we dig a little deeper, some serious problems appear.

Some problems arise from the application of the theory to practical decision making. How do we know what God has commanded? One of the virtues of the DCT is supposed to be its moral clarity, but the DCT is not so unequivocal as it appears. First, the DCT presupposes that we have the right religion, and also that we interpret that religion correctly. Clearly, this is going to make it very challenging to apply the DCT to issues that demand agreement with those of diverse or no faith. Second, how can we resolve issues that arise from applying ancient commands to contemporary moral problems, including problems arising from human cloning, pornography, assisted suicide, or nuclear weapons? Minimally, we will need to use our judgment to determine what the commands suggest God would have commanded, but this will render obedience less clear. Third, to make matters worse, God has issued multiple commands, sometimes leading to dilemmas in which we are commanded to do two incompatible actions. What if the only way to “honor thy parents” is to “bear false witness,” or if keeping the Sabbath holy will require violating the duty to honor thy parents? Supporters of the DCT can develop responses to these problems of application, but the cost will be that the theory will lose its simplicity, one of its chief attractions. However, even if we put these challenges aside and agree that we know that God has, for example, forbidden adultery, there remains a still more fundamental challenge to the DCT, the “Euthyphro dilemma”, which we will cover in the next reading.

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Source: Morgan, Jeffrey. “Can We Have Ethics Without Religion? On Divine Command Theory and Natural Law Theory.”  Introduction to Philosophy: Ethicsedited by George Matthews, Chapter 2 (2019). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Reading 2 The Natural Law Theory of Morality

Divine Command Theory is still embraced by some theistic thinkers today, often in a modified form such as Craig’s or Adams’. However, many theists argue for a different conception of the relationship between God and morality. One important theistic moral tradition is the Natural Law Theory of Morality (NLT). This approach to morality does not deny that God issues commands, but instead takes morality to be implicit in God’s creation of the universe and rational human beings. The idea is that the universe is created by God with everything holding a natural purpose. These purposes can be determined by careful study, using our reason. From knowledge of the proper purposes of objects, one can identify the proper ways to interact with the world and each other.

Portrait of Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli. Source: Wikimedia. Photo is in the Public Domain

The moral theology of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 CE) contains one influential version of the NLT. Aquinas derives his underlying metaphysics from Aristotle (384-322 BCE). For Aristotle, understanding any object requires knowing four aspects of it. We must know of what it is made (its material cause), its form (formal cause), how it came to be (its efficient cause), and its function (its final cause). Consider rain, for example. The material cause of rain is water; its formal cause is droplets of liquid falling from clouds; and its efficient cause is the condensation of vapor along with the force of gravity. Its final cause can be thought of as its functions of watering plants and refilling the streams and lakes from which we drink. As it turns out, science today has progressed greatly by rejecting final causes, but for centuries western science was influenced by the Aristotelian idea that in order to understand X we need to know what X is for. In Aristotelian terms, the function of an object will be understood as how it fulfills functions within the system to which it belongs—teeth allow us to chew food, the heart functions as a pump to circulate the blood. The NLT easily bends the idea of an object’s function into its purpose, which further suggests how it ought to be used.

Briefly, there are three components of this approach to morality:

• God created the universe, including human beings and other objects, with purposes.
• The purpose of objects in the world can be discerned using natural reason, with which God has endowed human beings.
• The purpose for which God created an object determines its proper use.

The upshot is that our capacity to discern God’s purposes in creation provides us with awareness of our ethical obligations. One of the strengths of the NLT is that it allows us to perceive God’s purposes without knowing God’s commands, or even believing that God exists.

For example, our reason allows us to identify that our sexual organs have the function of reproduction of our species. Indeed, for Aquinas, something can have just one final cause. So, reproduction is why God provided our sexual organs to us. If sexual organs are created solely in order to fulfill reproductive needs, then it would be wrong to use them for other purposes. In general, sex for pleasure becomes problematic, but especially so when reproduction is either impossible or thwarted; thus, homosexual acts, mechanical or chemical birth control, and masturbation are all ruled out on this account. These acts constitute use of sexual organs in ways that could not lead to reproduction. If we add the insight that marriage functions to provide a legitimate outlet for sexual needs and as a space for rearing children, then it will be clear that adulterous sex will also be wrong.

Aquinas’s version of the NLT is clearly theistic, as it presupposes the existence of an intelligent designer of the universe who has endowed us with the capacity to discern the natural law. However, it does not suggest that acts are right or wrong according to God’s arbitrary commands. Instead, it takes the position that when God commands us to do X, it is because X is right. Further, we do not need to believe in God in order to know what is right or wrong. Anyone, theist or not, is able to identify the laws of nature that govern morality, because these are implicit in nature itself. Why then would God give us commandments?

One reason is that God is able to infallibly identify the consequences of our actions. Human beings can predict the consequences of our actions (“if I shoot the gun at the man, then he will probably be killed”), but God’s omniscience implies infallible prediction. God even will be able to anticipate the consequences of our actions into the afterlife. Also, while God’s reasoning is impeccable, our own reasoning is subject to error, so we can use God’s commands as a failsafe that reliably allows us to determine the right course of action. So, if God has commanded us to do X, then under the NLT we should do X.

Still, the NLT is problematic. First, it presupposes a model of explanation at odds with today’s successful scientific reasoning. Science can proceed without identifying purposes in nature. Indeed, the onset of the scientific revolution is dependent on rejecting insistence on Aristotelian final causes. It is true that there are examples of functionalist reasoning in some areas of the life and human sciences—as when we say that the heart serves as a pump, but there is a significant difference between an object’s function and its purpose. The latter idea presupposes an intelligence that creates or guides the object in question. Second, the idea of an object’s function is not as clear as the theory suggests. Even if we allow that sex is for reproduction, it does not follow that it is only for reproduction, or that it could not be used for other purposes. Sex could be used to enhance intimacy, or perhaps just as a form of amusement, even if we allow that it also has the function of reproduction. Some proponents of the NLT will respond to this line of thinking in interesting ways, developing, for example, a doctrine of double effect.

A third and decisive challenge to the NLT is that it commits the naturalistic fallacy. British philosopher G. E. Moore (1873-1958), who introduced the term, argues that it is fallacious to infer claims about what is good or right (moral properties) from claims about natural properties. Moore specifically offered the inference from something being pleasurable to it being good as an example. Earlier, David Hume (1711-1776) argued that claims about what ought to occur cannot be inferred from claims that describe the world; we cannot infer an “ought” claim from purely “is” claims. The important differences between Hume’s and Moore’s positions need not detain us too much here; what we need to note is that the NLT would have us describe the world in purely naturalistic terms, then infer something about how the world ought to be. We observe, for example, that sex has an essential role in reproduction, then infer something about the proper role of sex. If either Hume or Moore are correct, such inferences are illegitimate, because the conclusions of our inferences include concepts that are not implicit in the premises. The challenge, in Moore’s terms, is that the NLT implies that goodness or rightness are natural properties, whereas in fact they are properties of an altogether different type.

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Source: Morgan, Jeffrey. “Can We Have Ethics Without Religion? On Divine Command Theory and Natural Law Theory.”  Introduction to Philosophy: Ethicsedited by George Matthews, Chapter 2 (2019). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)