Abstract
What do we understand by God’s goodness? William Alston claims that by answering this question convincingly, divine command theory can be strengthened against some major objections. He rejects the idea that God’s goodness lies in the area of moral obligations. Instead, he proposes that God’s goodness is best described by the phenomenon of supererogation. Joseph Lombardi, in response, agrees with Alston that God does not have moral obligations but says that having rejected moral obligation as the content of divine goodness, Alston cannot help himself to supererogation as a solution to the content of God’s moral goodness. If God has no moral obligations and does not perform supererogatory acts, Lombardi suggests that God’s goodness may be explicated through concentrating on God’s benevolence, but he does not develop this theme. I propose that Alston’s idea of divine supererogation without obligation is sustainable, but that a reshaping of the concept of supererogation is required; one in which love, rather than benevolence, plays an important part. If the love associated with supererogation is characterised in a certain way, I suggest this adds a new angle to the understanding of divine goodness.
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Notes
See Lombardi and Joseph (2005).
See Alston (1989), pp. 255–256.
Some extra moves are required to show that the source of God’s goodness and the content are linked in a way which will produce the desired result, but as I am not primarily concerned with Divine Command Theory here, I shall not develop these.
Alston does not say give any more details about the sort of divine acts he would view as supererogatory. All that we have to go on is Alston’s reference to loving, just and merciful acts.
Eleanor Stump has argued against Alston that God has moral obligations by suggesting the Jesus’ two natures, divine and human leave room for Jesus (and thus God) to have a tendency to do wrong (even if he did not do so and could not do so). I cannot do justice to Stump’s counterarguments to Alston here, but anyway consider that Lombardi and Alston are right about the inapplicability of moral obligation to God. In addition, one might take a version of Elizabeth Anscombe’s view that moral obligations only make sense when the source of goodness from which they are derived has already been defined. It would be question begging to go looking for a source of goodness to help divine command theory within a structure which is derived from it.
See Urmson (1958).
See (Urmson (1958), p. 65).
He did not propose a solution, but wondered whether utilitarianism might prove to be the theory which would best accommodate such acts. As it has turned out, utilitarian theories have enormous difficulties with supererogatory acts. On such theories it is hard to explain why a supererogatory act which is better than another morally permissible act is optional rather than required.
(Rawls (1971), p. 100).
The example comes from Dreyfus and Kelly (2011).
(McGoldrick (1984), p. 528).
In interviews after the event, Autrey does seem to give a commentary in which he suggests he considered whether or not to help the man on the track, although he also agrees that this deliberation seemed to last no time at all. He thought to himself, “Fool, you got to go in there!”, as he looked over the edge of the platform and saw the man lying there and the oncoming train. There is an unfortunate aftermath to Autrey’s heroism which includes his being packaged as ‘intellectual property’ by unscrupulous lawyers and PR people. In press interviews over the next few months, Autrey described his difficulty in dealing with the fame and the sporadic wealth and the demands for help which followed his act of heroism.
I have in mind here not just a lack of self-interest, but a diminishing of the ego even to the extent that the agent does not reflect upon himself as a moral agent as such but simply sees the person who needs help and acts accordingly.
The theme of Dreyfus and Kelly’s book is the burden of choice that is present in secular morality and the danger of falling into nihilism, hence the appeal of such examples.
See (Dreyfus and Kelly (2011), p. 11). Dreyfus and Kelly promote an unusual thesis in this book; that there should be a return to polytheism, in the form of something like the Greek gods, so that we are rescued from our present day nihilism. They consider heroic actions are events which call agents out of themselves and represent a fittingness of behaviour to the circumstances.
This characterisation of love as gratuitous and unconditional is echoed by Christopher Cordner, who claims that our philosophical understanding of love is skewed towards goal-orientation, being influenced heavily by Plato’s eros, whereas there is room for an understanding of love as a creative force in the Christian sense. See Cordner (2011).
See Marion (2007) for development of this theme.
See Cordner (2011) for echoes of this theme. If we see love as very closely tied to respect, it becomes hard to disentangle love from benevolent action, designed purely to achieve good for the recipient. Seeing love as a creative force instead reaffirms the beloved as ‘truly’ themselves.
References
Alston, W. (1989). Some suggestions for divine command theorists. In Divine nature and human language (pp. 253–73). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Cordner, C. (2011). Two conceptions of love in philosophical thought. Sophia, 50, 315–329.
Dreyfus, H., & Kelly, S. D. (2011). All things shining. New York: Simon and Schuster Free Press.
Lombardi, S. J., & Joseph, L. (2005). Against God’s moral goodness. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 79(2), 314–326.
Marion, J. L. (2007). The erotic phenomenon. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
McGoldrick, P. M. (1984). Saints and heroes: A plea for the supererogatory. Philosophy, 59, 523–528.
Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Urmson, J. O. (1958). Saints and heroes. In A. I. Melden (Ed.), Essays in moral philosophy (pp. 60–73). Seattle: University of Washington Press; reprinted in J. Feinberg (Ed.), Moral concepts. Oxford: OUP.
Acknowledgments
A version of this paper was presented at the second Glasgow Philosophy of Religion Seminar, May 2012. My thanks are due to participants and organisers for their helpful comments.
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Drummond Young, E. God’s moral goodness and supererogation. Int J Philos Relig 73, 83–95 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-012-9392-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-012-9392-z