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Notes
This seems to be the view of William of Ockham, Patterson Brown, and Edward Wierenga, among others. See Ockham,Philosophical Writings, ed. P. Boehner (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1967), Ch. XI; Brown, “Religious Morality,”Mind 73 (1963): 235–244; and Wierenga, “A Defensible Divine Command Theory,”Nous 17 (1983): 387–407.
This characterization of the theory follows William K. Frankena,Ethics, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973) p. 28 and John Chandler, “Divine Command Theories and the Appeal to Love,”American Philosophical Quarterly 22 (1985): 231–239, pp. 231, 236. I should add that the characterization is incomplete: it gives principles of rightness (in the sense ofrequiredness orobligatoriness) and wrongness but not of permissibility. But the lacuna is easy to eliminate: the permissible is that which God neither commands nor forbids. See, e.g, Wierenga, op. cit., p. 389. James G. Hanink and Gary R. Mar deny that ‘an act's being rightconsists in God's willing it’ implies ‘the act is rightbecause God wills it’, appealing to the following alleged counterexample to the general claim that ‘consists’ implies ‘because’: measurement's being quantitative “just consists in its use of numbers,” but “it is not quantitative because it uses numbers” (“What Euthyphro Couldn't Have Said,”Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987): 241–261, p. 255 (cf. p. 245)). But I confess I do not seewhy “[w]e cannot take the use of numbers in measurement to be ⋯ the reason or the explanation of that activity's being quantitative” (p. 245); indeed I think we might well give such a reason in explaining quantitativeness to a child. For more on this (“constitutive”) kind of explanation, see Section 2 above.
Plato'sEuthyphro is often interpreted as raising a parallel objection to a divine-command theory of piety or holiness: see, e.g., Baruch A. Brody, “Morality and Religion Reconsidered” and Robert Young, “Theism and Morality,” both inDivine Commands and Morality, ed. Paul Helm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). The objection has been endorsed in whole or in part by many philosophers: see, e.g., Young, op. cit., pp. 155–156 and especially both Chandler, op. cit., pp. 231, 236–238 and John Hospers,Human Conduct (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), pp. 186–187.
See, e.g., Brown, op. cit., pp. 239–240; Wierenga, op. cit., pp. 400–401; and Robert Nozick,Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 553.
See, e.g., Brody, op. cit., esp. p. 143.
Hanink and Mar also maintain (op. cit., pp. 253–255) that the divinecommand theory iscompatible with the claim that God's reasons provide the standards of morality. In their view, God commands an action because it promotes human flourishing, the fulfilment of human nature; God's will is thebasic, human nature theproximate, standard of morality. But this rebuttal simply misses the point, which concernsbasic moral standards only.
Brody, op. cit., p. 142.
See, e.g., R.M. Adams, “A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness,” ed. Helm, op.cit., pp. 84–86.
See, e.g., Wierenga, op.cit., pp. 394–395; Hanink and Mar, op.cit., pp. 251–252.
Brody, op. cit., p. 142.
Ibid., p. 143.
Hanink and Mar, op. cit., p. 253.
See Peter Achinstein,The Nature of Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 237. But the form he gives is ‘The reason that p is that r’.
See ibid., pp. 165–166, 186–187 (though Achinstein does not discuss the explanation of desires). The more common term in the literature seems to be ‘rationalizing explanation’.
There are alsotheoretical grounds for defending the transitivity of ‘because’ in Brody's example. Suppose that — as many philosophers believe — when an agent acts for a reason, his reasoncauses his action, so that motivational explanations arecausal explanations. Then the following causal chain seems to exist in the example: Joe's wife's desire to have it out with him causes her to tell Joe to come home, which causes him to want to go home, which causes him to go home. Now the causal relation is generally acknowledged to betransitive (see, e.g., Mario Bunge,Causality: The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1970), p. 244). Thus Joe's wife's desire to have it out with himcauses him to go home, and he does sobecause she wants to have it out with him. I find this line of argument persuasive, accepting as I do the still controversial thesis that an agent's reasons are causes. But most divine-command theorists, as theists, are likely to reject this thesis, so invoking it in the present context would do little to advance the discussion.
See, e.g., Lawrence H. Davis,Theory of Action (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 196–202 on interpretive accounts of motivational explanations of action.
See, e.g., R.M. Adams, “Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again,”Journal of Religious Ethics 7 (1979): 66–79, pp. 76–77. But contrast Wierenga, op. cit., p. 390.
See Achinstein, op. cit., pp. 235–236. The identity statement can of course be explicitly included in the explanation (cf. p. 235).
Ibid., pp. 234–237. But see note 23 on etiological versus constitutive causal explanations.
Ibid., pp. 234, 236.
More cautiously:etiological causal explanations, which citeantecedent causes, are nonconstitutive. Wesley Salmon would evidently classify the second and third of the foregoing examples ascausal on the grounds that they reveal “the internal causal structure of the explanandum”; he calls such explanationsconstitutive and contrasts them with etiological explanations. (SeeScientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 269–270; quotation at p. 270.) I will continue to use ‘constitutive explanation’ more broadly than Salmon does.
The commitment toidentity is explicit in Adams, “Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again,” p. 76. Wierenga, op. cit., pp. 388–389 adopts thesupervenience option (though he speaks instead of a noncausal, “assymmetric relation of dependence” (p. 389)). Note thatany theory of thenature of morality will offer constitutive explanations of why actions, persons, etc. have the moral properties they do. In defending acausal version of the divine-command theory, Philip L. Quinn may be an exception to my generalization about divine-command theorists. According to Quinn, God's commanding thatp is causally necessary and sufficient for its being obligatory thatp (“Divine Command Ethics: A Causal Theory,” ed. Janine M. Idziak,Divine Command Morality (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1979), p. 312). If he has in mindnonsimultaneous causation — and thus is giving, in Salmon's terminology, anetiological causal explanation — then he is indeed an exception. But if instead he has in mind either simultaneous causation or the sort of broadly “causal” relation that exists between an entity and its internal causal structure (see note 23), then perhaps he is no exception after all. For in the former case, it seems natural to think of his theory as implying that obligatoriness is causallyrealized in orconstituted by — and sosupervenes on — divine commands. (Moral theorists who defend a causal-realization view of the supervenience of moral properties include Nicholas L. Sturgeon, “Harman on Moral Explanations of Natural Facts,”Southern Journal of Philosophy 24, Suppl. (1986): 69–78, p. 75; James A. Montmarquet, “On the Explanatory Power of Some Metaethical Views,”Journal of Value Inquiry 16 (1982): 249–257, p. 255; and David O. Brink,Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Secs. 6.5–6.6, 7.1.) And in the latter case, Quinn's theory again provides aconstitutive causal explanation (to use Salmon's terminology once more) of the obligatoriness of obligatory actions.
See, e.g., Wierenga, op. cit., pp. 393–395.
Nozick, op. cit., p. 553 seems to approximate this point.
Chandler, op. cit., p. 236. Chandler also makes the point that on the view in question, “[t]he content of the moral code can in principle be read off from the knowledge of which acts are loving, without reference to God” (ibid.). But thisepistemological point is irrelevant to the issue of arbitrariness, and for that matter to the truth of the divine-command theory, which is a theory not about how we can tell right from wrong but about thenature of morality (see, e.g., Wierenga, op. cit., pp. 396–397).
Chandler, op. cit., p. 239, n. 7.
Chandler correctly notes the similarity between his point about making a difference and a once common objection to intuitionism. But that objection was refuted by William Frankena a number of years ago: see “Obligation and Motivation in Recent Moral Philosophy,” reprinted inPerspectives on Morality: Essays by William K. Frankena, ed. K.E. Goodpaster (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), pp. 52–53.
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Thanks to an anonymous referee for this journal for helpful comments to an earlier draft of the present paper, and to J.D. Trout for useful discussion.
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Sullivan, S.J. Arbitrariness, divine commands, and morality. Int J Philos Relig 33, 33–45 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01314315
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01314315