Moral theories usually aspire to be explanatory – to tell us why something is wrong, why it is good, or why you ought to do it. So it is worth knowing how moral explanations differ, if they do, from explanations of other things. This paper uncovers a common unarticulated theory about how normative explanations must work – that they must follow what I call the Standard Model. Though the Standard Model Theory has many implications, in this paper I focus primarily (...) on only one. It plays a crucial role in an argument originally due to Cudworth that has been widely held to conclusively establish that voluntaristic ethical theories are incoherent. But if Cudworth’s argument works, then so would similar arguments against many other moral theories. All of these theories therefore need a different model for how normative explanations can work. So I also motivate and sketch one such alternative model. The result enables us to make progress in evaluating the prospects for a successful reductive view about the normative. (shrink)

If the divine will is not subject to any principle, and God controls all truths including moral truths, morality will be arbitrary at the deepest level. It will not be possible to offer any explanation of why God has willed certain actions rather than their contraries. Throughout the history of philosophical debate there have been many attempts to support the dependence of moral truths on God's command (or divine command theory) and at the same time to avoid this charge of (...) arbitrariness. In the West, one such an attempt has been made by Thomas V. Morris and Christopher Menzel (, hereafter M&M), who refer to their position as theistic activism. In this paper I will discuss their view and argue that: 1) their position does not satisfy the requirements of divine freedom, and that 2) to regard moral truths as necessary and unalterable is not adequate. (shrink)

In addressing objections to the theological voluntarist program, the consensus response by defenders of theological voluntarism has been to affirm a restricted theological voluntarism on which some, but not all, important normative statuses are to be explained by immediate appeal to the divine will. The aim of this article is to assess the merits and demerits of this restricted view. While affirming the restricted view does free theological voluntarism from certain objections, it comes at the cost of committing the theological (...) voluntarist to the view that no theses about the divine nature itself could alone be sufficient to motivate a theological voluntarist thesis about any normative status. And when we examine the case for a theological voluntarist account of any particular normative status – say, rightness, or obligatoriness – there are severe difficulties with that case as it stands. It is thus unclear whether the theological voluntarist program of providing good reasons to affirm a voluntarist explanation of non‐trivially‐theistic normative statuses has borne fruit. (shrink)

In this article I consider the respective merits of three interpretations of divine command theory. On DCT1, S’s being morally obligated to φ depends on God’s command that S φ; on DCT2, that moral obligation depends on God’s willing that S be morally obligated to φ; on DCT3, that moral obligation depends on God’s willing that S φ. I argue that the positive reasons that have been brought forward in favor of DCT1 have implications theists would find disturbing and that (...) the positive reasons brought forward in favor of DCT2 support only a weak formulation of DCT2 that is indistinguishable from other theistic moral theories. DCT3 is, however, a distinctive theory that theists have strong reasons to affirm. (shrink)

In this article, I look at recent developments in the field of the Philosophy of the relationship between morality, understood in a realist manner, and the primary object of religious belief in the monotheistic religions, God. Some contemporary solutions to the Euthyphro dilemma and versions of moral arguments for the existence of God are discussed.

As a matter of fact, few, if any, theists have been expressivists about morality. This is probably because expressivism is thought to have unacceptable theological implications. That is, it is thought to imply (1) that God’s goodness depends on our desire-like states, (2) that God’s goodness is not a real property, (3) that it is not true that God is good, and (4) that God’s moral thoughts have no explanation. I argue that expressivism has no such implications and conclude that (...) expressivism is theologically acceptable. (shrink)

In 2010, pitcher Armando Galarraga was denied a perfect game when umpire Jim Joyce called Jason Donald safe at first with two outs in the bottom of the 9th. In the numerous media discussions that followed, Joyce’s ‘blown’ call was commonly referred to as ‘mistaken’, ‘wrong’, or otherwise erroneous. However, this use of language makes some not uncontroversial ontological assumptions. It claims that the fact that a runner is safe or out has nothing to do with the ruling of the (...) umpire himself, but rather with some state of the universe that does not depend on the umpire for its existence. In this paper, I recast the problem as a version of Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma and argue that the view implied by the above assertions is actually misguided. Instead, I hope to show that an alternative view – what I call ‘restricted umpire voluntarism’ – is actually more in line with the spirit of the game of baseball and is not as counterintuitive as it may appear.. (shrink)

Moral realists often assume that folk intuitions are predominantly realist, and they argue that this places the burden of proof on antirealists. More broadly, appeals to intuition in metaethics typically assume that folk judgments are generally consistent across individuals, such that they are at least predominantly something, if not realist. A substantial body of empirical work on moral objectivism has investigated these assumptions, but findings remain inconclusive due to methodological limitations. Objectivist judgments classify individuals into broad categories of realism and (...) antirealism, but they do not address more specific conflicts in the metaethical literature between different types of realism and antirealism, such as between nonnaturalism and divine command theory, or between noncognitivism and error theory. Further, the data currently show that the folk are objectivists about some moral claims but not others, raising questions that have not been addressed in previous studies about how much of the moral domain is judged to be objective, and about how endorsements of different types of realism and antirealism are distributed among different types of moral claims. Here, I present a new survey that addresses these limitations. The results challenge both of the empirical assumptions identified above, with important implications for metaethical methodology. (shrink)

One of the foremost objections to theological voluntarism is the contingency objection. If God’s will fixes moral facts, then what if God willed that agents engage in cruelty? I argue that even unrestricted theological voluntarists should accept some logical constraints on possible moral systems—hence, some limits on ways that God could have willed morality to be—and these logical constraints are sufficient to blunt the force of the contingency objec­tion. One constraint I defend is a very weak accessibility requirement, related to (...) (but less problematic than) existence internalism in metaethics. The theo­logical voluntarist can maintain: Godcouldn’t have loved cruelty, and even though he could have willed behaviors we find abhorrent, he could only have done so in a world of deeply alien moral agents. We cannot confidently declare such a world unacceptable. (shrink)

Non-naturalism is the view that there are sui generis, non-natural moral properties. This paper poses a dilemma for theists who accept this view. Either God explains why non-moral properties make sui generis, non-natural moral properties obtain, or God does not explain this. If the former, then God is unacceptably involved in the explanation of his own moral goodness. If the latter, then God’s sovereignty, stature, and importance are undermined, and an unacceptable queerness is introduced into the world. This paper concludes (...) that theists have good reasons to reject non-naturalism on account of the unacceptable consequences of accepting either horn. (shrink)

At the center of all medieval Christian accounts of both metaphysics and ethics stands the claim that being and goodness are necessarily connected, and that grasping the nature of this connection is fundamental to explaining the nature of goodness itself. In that vein, medievals offered two distinct ways of conceiving this necessary connection: the nature approach and the creation approach. The nature approach explains the goodness of an entity by an appeal to the entity’s nature as the type of thing (...) it is, and the extent to which it fulfills or perfects the potentialities in its nature. In contrast, the creation approach explains both the being and goodness of an entity by an appeal to God’s creative activity: on this view, both a thing’s being and its goodness are derived from, and explained in terms of, God’s being and goodness. Studies on being and goodness in medieval philosophy often culminate in the synthesizing work of Thomas Aquinas, the leading Dominican theologian at Paris in the 13th century, who brought together these two rival theories about the nature of goodness. Unfortunately, few have paid attention to a distinctively Franciscan approach to the topic around this same time period. My dissertation provides a remedy to this oversight by means of a thorough examination of John Duns Scotus’s approach to being and goodness—an approach that takes into account the shifting tide toward voluntarism (both ethical and theological) at the University of Paris in the late 13th century. I argue that Scotus is also a synthesizer of sorts, harmonizing the two distinct nature approaches of Augustine and Aristotle with his own unique ideas in ways that have profound implications for the future of medieval ethical theorizing, most notably, in his rejection of both the natural law and ethical eudaimonism of Thomas Aquinas. After the introduction, I analyze the nature of primary goodness—the goodness that Scotus thinks is convertible with being and thus a transcendental attribute of everything that exists. There, I compare the notion of convertibility of being and goodness among Scotus and his contemporaries. While Scotus agrees with the mainstream tradition that being and goodness are necessarily coextensive properties of everything that exists, he argues that being and good are formally rather than conceptually distinct. I argue that when the referents of being and good are considered, both views amount to the same thing. But when the concepts of being and good are considered, positing a formal distinction does make a good deal of difference: good does not simply add something to being conceptually, but formally: it is a quasi-attribute of being that exists in the world independently of our conception of it. Thus Scotus’s formal distinction provides a novel justification for the necessary connection between being and goodness. Furthermore, I argue that Scotus holds an Augustinian hierarchy of being. This hierarchical ranking of being is based upon the magnitude or perfection of the thing’s nature. But since goodness is a necessarily coextensive perfection of being, it too comes in degrees dependent upon the type of being, arranged in terms of the same hierarchy. This account, while inspired by Augustine’s hierarchical nature approach, is expressed in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics. But this necessary connection between being and goodness in medieval philosophy faced a problem: Following Augustine, medievals claimed that “everything that exists is good insofar as it exists.”’ But how is that compatible with the existence of sinful acts: if every being, in so far as it has being, is good, then every act, insofar as it has being, is good. But if sinful acts are bad, then we seem to be committed to saying either that bad acts are good, or that not every act, in so far as it has being, is good. This first option seems infelicitous; the second denies Augustine’s claims that “everything that exists is good.” Lombard and his followers solve this problem by distinguishing ontological goodness from moral goodness and claiming that moral goodness is an accident of some acts and does not convert with being. So the sinful act, qua act, is (ontologically) good. But the sinful act, qua disorder is (morally) bad. Eventually, three distinctive grades of accidental or moral goodness will be applied to human acts: generic, circumstantial, and meritorious. I argue that Scotus follows the traditional account of Peter Lombard, Philip the Chancellor, Albert the Great, and Bonaventure in distinguishing ontological goodness from moral goodness, and claiming that only the former converts with being, while the latter is an accident of the act. Aquinas, in contrast, writing in the heyday of the Aristotelian renaissance, focuses instead on the role of the act in the agent’s perfection and posits his convertibility thesis of being and goodness in the moral as well as the metaphysical realm. Thus, when one begins a late medieval discussion with Aquinas, and then considers what Scotus says, it seems as though Scotus is the radical who departs from the conservative teachings of Aquinas. And this is just false: we need to situate both Aquinas and Scotus within the larger Sentence Commentary tradition extending back to Peter Lombard and his followers in order to understand their agreement and divergence from the tradition. Next, I turn the discussion to Scotus’s analysis of rightness and wrongness. I first explore the relationship between rightness and God’s will, and situate Scotus’s account within contemporary discussions of theological voluntarism. I argue Scotus holds a restricted-causal-will-theory —whereby only contingent deontological propositions depend upon God’s will for their moral status. In contrast to Aquinas, Scotus denies that contingent moral laws—the Second Table of the 10 Commandments (such do not steal, do not murder, etc.)—are grounded in human nature, and thus he limits the extent to which moral reasoning can move from natural law to the moral obligations we have toward one another. In conjunction with these claims, I argue that Scotus distinguishes goodness from rightness: An act’s rightness will depend on its conformity to either (1) a necessary moral truth or (2) God’s commanding some contingent moral truth. The moral goodness of an act, in contrast, involves right reason’s determination of the suitability or harmony of all factors pertaining to the act. In establishing this, also argue that much of the disparity among contemporary Scotus scholarship on the question of whether Scotus was a divine command theorist or natural law theorist should be directly attributed to a failure to recognize Scotus’s separation of the goodness of an act from the rightness of an act. (shrink)