Morriston on Ethical Criticism of the Bible (Part Two)

What's up with the moral character of the God of Abraham?

(Part One)

This is the second part in a brief series of posts looking at Wes Morriston’s recent paper “Ethical Criticism of the Bible: The Case of Divinely Mandated Genocide”. As noted in part one, the paper takes issue with some Christian strategies for dealing with the more ethically troubling passages in the bible. Last time out, we looked at the Canaanite genocide and Richard Swinburne’s apologia for it. This time out, we’ll consider two further biblical stories and the purported justifications for them.


1. Consorting with the Midianites
According to one passage in the book of Numbers, when the Israelites were encamped with the Midianites at Peor, some of the Israelite men had illicit relations with some of the Midianite women and joined them in the worship of the false god, Baal. It’s a pretty typical tale of theistic infidelity, the bible is littered with similar examples. Needless to say, Yahweh isn’t best pleased by all of this and he sends a plague to kill 24,000 Israelites. As you do.

Interestingly, his wrath abates when a young Israelite named Phinehas impales another Israelite man and his Midianite bride on a spear. Yahweh rewards Phinehas with a covenant of perpetual priesthood — the ANE’s equivalent of tenured professorship, I guess.

You’d have thought that the plague and the impaling would have helped Yahweh to settle accounts with the Midianites, but you’d be wrong. He goes on (Numbers 25:18) to command Moses to “avenge the people of Israel on the Midianites” for what they did in the affair of Peor. This is to be done by harassing and defeating them. Moses dutifully obliges and with the help of his army kills all the Midianite men and all the women who have “known a man by sleeping with him”, with the rest being kept as a reward (Numbers 31:8-18)

Once again, this is all said to be done in an effort to wipe out the spiritual infection (worshipping a false god and so on) that is spread by the Midianites. We covered this notion in some detail in part one. What’s interesting here is the sequence of events and the accompanying rationales. In the earlier passage from Numbers, the Israelites were punished for disloyalty (the plague that kills 24,000). In the later passage, it’s the Midianites who are punished for their role in what happened in the earlier passage. In other words, the Midianites are punished for helping the Israelites to be punished.


2. Is the Punishment of the Midianites Justifiable?
I find this interesting because of the biblical attitude toward punishment that is evinced in these passages. Indeed, Morriston makes this attitude the centrepoint of his criticisms, but to understand them we need to take a short detour into the concept of retributivism.

Now I’m no big fan of retributivism — as you might have gathered from some of my recent posts — but at least defenders of that position bring with them the idea that punishment can only be inflicted on those who are morally blameworthy, and that the most severe forms of punishment can only be inflicted on those who are really morally blameworthy. Typically, this means that those who are negligent or reckless in their wrongdoing merit less severe forms of punishment, whereas those who intend wrongdoing and act with full knowledge of the likely consequences of their actions merit more severe forms of punishment.

Either way you look at it, genocide is a pretty severe form of punishment. In fact, I doubt whether even the most bullish retributivist would ever think it warranted, but let’s (per impossibile) grant that it could be. Even then, the punishment of Midianites seems unjustifiable. As Morriston points out, they didn’t intentionally engage in wrongdoing since they (presumably) were sincere in their worship of Baal. Furthermore, they did not act with full knowledge of the consequences of their actions because they could not have foreseen how Yahweh would visit a plague upon the Midianites. Thus, they could not be eligible for the more severe forms of punishment.

Allow me to summarise this line of thinking, as is my wont, in argumentative form.

• (1) It is unjustifiable to inflict severe forms of punishment upon those who neither intend wrongdoing, nor act with full knowledge of the consequences of their actions.

• (2) The Midianites in the affair at Peor neither intended wrongdoing, nor acted with full knowledge of the consequences of their actions.

• (3) Therefore, it would be unjustifiable to inflict severe forms of punishment upon the Midianites for what they did in the affair at Peor.

I think this is pretty compelling — assuming the presentation of biblical story is correct — and it could be used as the basis for further arguments about the moral character of Yahweh and/or the reliability of the bible. I leave those to the imagination of the reader.


3. The Agonies of the Amalekites
The next story discussed by Morriston comes from 1 Samuel 15. It tells us that Yahweh is going to punish (the actual word used is “paqad”) the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they first came out of Egypt. We are told that they are to be utterly destroyed, and that this includes extermination of the men, women, children, ox, sheep, camels and donkeys (1 Samuel 15:1-5). Quite an extermination, I’m sure you’ll agree. This all hearkens back to an earlier passage in Deuteronomy (25:17-19) in which the Israelites are told that once God has given them rest from their other enemies, and once they have settled in the land of Canaan, they shall “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven”.

As Morriston notes, the timeline here is again significant. The divine judgment in Deuteronomy predates that actual command to destroy the Amalekites by several hundred years. The reason for the delay is to give the Israelites time to settle on the land of Canaan. There is no suggestion that the descendants of the Amalekites who were alive at the time of the Deuteronomy narrative had done anything to merit punishment in the interim. This suggests — as is in fact all too common in the bible — that Yahweh is quite comfortable with the idea of punishing those who themselves are not guilty of wrongdoing. Again, this would seem to clash with notions of retributive justice according to which punishment is justified if and only if it is imposed upon the guilty.

Perhaps unsurprisingly some Christians try to avoid this troubling conclusion. Eleonore Stump is one of them. She argues that in issuing the command for genocide (let’s not dress it up) God could have taken into account other facts about the Amalekites. In particular, she argues that the Amalekites might have been on a bad cultural trajectory since the earlier time and that God realised enough was enough. The Amalekite national identity needed to come to an end. Stump emphasises this as a possible reading, not a necessary, of the relevant text.

Morriston declines her invitation to this make possible reading for two reasons. First, although her suggestion is possible — in the sense that it involves no obvious contradiction with the text — it is not plausible. It involves ignoring or downplaying what the text actually says. This is reinforced by his second reason which is that there’s every reason to suspect that God would visit punishment on future generations for the actions of previous generations. For example, the Mosaic Covenant explicitly states that God will do this (Exodus 20:5). Morriston discusses several other biblical passages that support this idea.

Okay, that's it for now. Next time we'll look at what Morriston has to say about the reasons for not commanding genocide.

Morriston on Ethical Criticism of the Bible (Part One)

What's up with the Moral Character of the God of Abraham?

It’s a Sunday so why not look at something in the philosophy of religion? Wes Morriston has a new paper out challenging the remarkable willingness of some Christian philosophers to defend the more morally questionable passages in the Old Testament. I covered one of his earlier papers on this topic a while back. That was when I was relatively new to this whole blogging thing and I figure there’s no harm in taking a second look at the topic.

For those who are interested, the paper I’m using as reference is the following:

• Morriston, Wes “Ethical Criticism of the Bible: The Case of Divinely Mandated Genocide” (2011) Sophia , Published Online 2nd August 2011

On the face of it, the paper is relatively straightforward. Morriston criticises three sets of Christian responses to the passages in the bible in which God seems to condone or command genocide. First, he criticises the likes of William Lane Craig, Paul Copan and Richard Swinburne, who seem to support the biblically cited reasons for genocide. Second, he will criticise the likes of Eleonore Stump, who suggests alternative moral justifications for the genocide. And third, he will criticise the skeptical theist response to these cases.

Unfortunately, the resulting article is a bit messier than that initial description suggests.  The actual discussion doesn't follow the structure set out at the beginning in the logical fashion that I would like, and Morriston sometimes fails to properly specify the nature of his criticism against the various Christian responses. This is something I’ve encountered in several other articles by Morriston, which is a shame since he invariably has good insights into the issues he discusses.

Anyway, I’ll try to follow Morriston’s structure as best I can here, feeling free to elaborate on certain points where I think this helps the overall argument. In this post, I’ll be looking at Richard Swinburne's attempt to justify the Canaanite genocide. Subsequent posts will cover different passages and different justifications.

Note: most of the references in Morriston's article are to the book Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (Oxford: OUP, 2011). For example, the discussion of Swinburne's argument is based on passages from this book.


1. The Canaanite Genocide
Anyone who has been following the philosophical debate over these biblical passages over the past few years will, no doubt, be familiar with the details of the Canaanite genocide. Canaan was, roughly, the land that was bequeathed to the Israelites by Yahweh. The Canaanites were the people occupying that area of land before the Israelites, led by Moses and Joshua, invaded. This was following their exodus from Egypt and their inexplicably long period of desert-wandering.

The genocide is presaged in several passages in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses (acting as always with the backing of Yahweh) tells his people that when the time comes Canaanites are to be utterly destroyed, that they are to “make no covenant with them” and “show them no mercy” (Deut. 7:1-2).

There is, however, a distinction to be drawn between the inhabitants of the nearby Canaanite cities (those given to the Israelites) and the inhabitants of the faraway cities. In the case of the latter, all the men are to be killed while the women, children, livestock and other goods are to be taken as booty (Deut. 20:14-15). In the case of the former, the Israelites are not to “let anything that breathes remain alive” (Deut. 20:16).

Of course, if some are to be believed (namely: Paul Copan and Matt Flannagan), all this reckless talk of extermination is mere hyperbole and not to be taken seriously. We should feel about it much the same as we should when you say that you are going to “kill” your boss following a particularly stressful day at work.

The hyperbole defence is not discussed by Morriston so, if your interested, check out the relevant passages of Thom Stark’s book-length rebuttal of Paul Copan on this. Briefly, as Stark points out, the hyperbolic language in the bible mimics the imperialistic propaganda that was common in the Ancient Near East (ANE). Texts of this sort would have to have been read to (or recited to) the people by the elites who could read and write. It cannot be taken for granted that they would convey it in a nudge-nudge wink-wink manner or, indeed, that it would be understood to be hyperbolic by those who were hearing it. It is more likely that this language was used to encourage tribal or nationalistic loyalties.

There’s a more general point to be made here too. According to leading biblical historians, the genocidal events depicted in the bible are unlikely to have taken place. Morriston and other critics would be happy to accept this view — indeed, I’m happy to believe that most of the bible is fictional. But this would do nothing to lessen the force of the criticisms being made here. After all, the concern here is with the moral character of the being depicted in the bible, and with those who take the moral authority of the bible seriously. If you wish to bowdlerise the biblical text such that it can no longer have a claim to historical accuracy, or reject it’s moral authority completely, then that’s all for the good.


2. Justifying the Canaanite Genocide
Still, there are those who want to have their cake and eat it too; who wish to preserve both the historical accuracy and moral authority of the bible. How do they do so in the light of such seemingly morally abhorrent passages? The basic strategy is to argue that God had some morally compelling reasons for commanding or condoning the acts.

The first variation on this strategy, mentioned at the outset, is to offer an apologia of the moral reasons that are mentioned (explicitly or implicitly) in the bible itself. Richard Swinburne does exactly this when he defends the “spiritual infection” justification of the genocide which is implicit in Deut. 20:17-18:

You shall annihilate them…so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the lord your God.

The abhorrent things that they did for their God are, apparently, twofold. First, they are alleged to have engaged in child sacrifice (Deut. 12:31) and second, they are said to have had a ritualised practice of male prostitution (1 Kings:14:24). Swinburne suggests that these practices constituted a lethal spiritual infection and that genocide was the best cure. He backs this up with the following, rather startling, analogy:

…many people would think it justified to kill people who had an infectious lethal disease and refused to be kept isolated from the rest of the population. Those who think that an infection which leads to spiritual death is as bad an evil as one which leads to natural death will think that there are reasons (though not of course adequate reasons) for the Israelites to kill the Canaanites even without a divine command. (2011, p. 225)

This passage can be construed as endorsing a straighforwardly analogical argument, as follows:

• (1) We would have prima facie moral reason to kill those with an infectious (physical) disease, if they refused to be kept isolated from the rest of the population.

• (2) Those with an infectious spiritual disease are in all important respects similar to (perhaps even worse than) those with an infectious physical disease.

• (3) Therefore, we would have prima facie moral reason to kill those with an infectious physical disease, if they refused to be kept isolated from the rest of the population.

Of course, the “prima facie” clause in this argument is key. As was apparent from the quoted passage, Swinburne thinks these prima facie reasons are not necessarily morally adequate. In other words, the reasons may not be decisive or compelling. What can make them morally adequate? The answer is that God, who has dominion over life, has the moral authority to command us to act upon those prima facie reasons, and that his command would makes those prima facie reasons morally compelling. So we follow up the preceding argument with this:

• (4) If God commands us to act upon prima facie moral reasons, they become morally adequate reasons for action.

• (5) Therefore, if God commanded us to kill those with an infectious spiritual disease (who refused to be kept isolated), we would have morally adequate reasons for doing so.

I should note that this is my own reconstruction of Swinburne’s argument. It is based on what I found in Morriston’s article, but you should know that Morriston himself is less formal in his analysis. Assuming my reconstruction is fair, how can this argument be challenged? We turn to that question next.



3. Responding to Swinburne’s Argument
I have several qualms about the analogy Swinburne uses to ground his argument. Most obviously and most importantly, it is not at all clear to me that “most” people would think it justified to kill someone with an infectious disease, even if that person refused to be kept isolated. I’d say we only have reason to kill such a person if all other means of preventing the spread of the infectious disease are unavailable to us. The mere unwillingness of the person to be isolated would seem insufficient. If we had a cure for the disease, then we should use that. If we can persuade the person to confine themselves in the interests of the greater good, then we should do that. If that fails, we should sedate and quarantine the person. Killing them would seem to be permissible in only the most extreme circumstances.

This essentially undercuts the persuasive force of Swinburne’s analogy. There’s no reason to think that the spiritual disease afflicting the Canaanites was so bad that killing them was the only solution. If the problem is that they worship a false god (or group of gods), then surely presenting them with compelling evidence of the true god would “cure” them of their infection?

It also seems to me that the analogy between what we have prima facie reason to do, and what God has prima facie moral reason to do doesn't work. If (under extreme circumstances) we do have permission to kill someone with an infectious disease, then I suspect it is only because we make our moral choices under extreme temporal and physical constraints (lack of resources to stop the spread of infection, lack of time to quarantine etc). God would not operate under such constraints; he would be bound only to the constraints of logical possibility. Thus, I see no reason to think God has even prima facie moral reason to command genocide.

To these criticisms we can add two of Morriston’s.

First, is his claim that Swinburne’s argument proves too much. After all, there are surely plenty of people alive today (perhaps myself included) who suffer from a contagious spiritual infection and who are pretty stubborn about trying to spread it around. Do we have reason to kill them too? Morriston thinks Swinburne has no principled reason to say “no”. (He returns to this point later in the article, and so too shall we).

Second, he points out that even if eradicating a spiritual infection were grounds for genocide, the biblical text itself seems clear that genocide was not fit for purpose. The passage in 1 Kings that Swinburne uses to support the notion that the Canaanites engaged in ritual prostitution refers to a period long after the conquest of Canaan, and it suggests that the Israelites availed of such prostitutes at that later time. Indeed, in the biblical narrative the Israelites seem to repeatedly turn away from Yahweh only to turn back again later when some calamity is visited upon them. Given this alleged waywardness, it seems like genocide was not a good means to God’s desired end.

We’ll leave it there for now. We’ll look at the rest of Morriston’s article later.

Must Goodness be Independent of God? (Part 3): Alston and the Divine Metre Stick

This post is part of my series on Wes Morriston's discussions of theistic morality. For an index, see here.

I am currently taking a look at an article by Wes entitled "Must there be a Standard of Moral Goodness Apart from God?". This article looks at the attempts of William Lane Craig and William Alston to rescue divine command morality from the horns of the Euthyphro dilemma.

Part one introduced the whole Euthyphro debate. Part two covered Craig's solution to the dilemma. It was found to be lacking. In this part we will consider Alston's solution. It will also be found to be lacking.

1. The Supervenience Relationship

Alston's solution to the Euthyphro relies on the concept of supervenience. This is something that I have covered before on this blog. It is probably best explained here with an analogy.

Consider a painting. It has different sets of properties. Its pigmental properties are determined by the precise distribution of pigment across the canvas; its aesthetic properties depend on the pigmental properties but not necessarily in a causal or logical manner. They are said to supervene on the pigmental properties. Any change in the aesthetic properties must result in a change in the pigmental properties.

Alston envisages something like this when it comes to God and the Good. For him, God's commands are an expression of His perfect goodness.* And his perfect goodness is something that supervenes upon his attributes. 

According to Alston's picture, God's existence is not merely incidental to the existence of morality. His existence is necessary for the supervenience relationship to hold. No God, no morals.

This is illustrated below.

To this point, Alston's solution sounds suspiciously similar to Craig's. Both seem to be singling out a set of properties as the basis for morality and in doing so their positions seem to reduce to Moral Platonism. Alston tries to avoid this interpretation with an analogy.

2. The Metre Stick Analogy

Alston suggests that there are two distinct kinds of predicate: Platonistic and particularistic. The former predicates are defined in terms of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions; the latter in terms of similarity to a paradigm.

An example of Platonistic predicate would be triangle. A triangle has a precise geometrical definition. Indeed, the definition is so precise that no existing object, no matter how triangular it appears to be, is actually a triangle. 

By way of contrast, an example of a particularistic predicate would be metre. This is a unit of measurement that defined in terms of similarity to a paradigmatic object. According to popular misconception, this object is a platinum-iridium bar in Paris (Morriston points out that this is no longer true).

So now we reach the punchline: the property of goodness is to God as the property of being a metre is to the platinum-iridium bar. Consequently, to say something is good is to highlight its similarity to God.

In this way, Alston hopes to escape Platonism. But does he escape the Euthyphro dilemma?

3. An Unfortunate Analogy? 

Recall, that the other horn of the Euthyphro is represented by the Ockhamist. According to the Ockhamist, God's commands are good for no other reason than that they are God's. This is thought to make morality arbitrary.


Is Alston's position simply a disguised form of Ockhamism? It would seem so. He claims that God plays the part of moral metre-stick, but what is it about God that justifies his choice for that role?


Alston has two responses to this.


i. The Significance of Particularism
First, he argues that the objection doesn't imbibe the full importance of the Platonist/particularist distinction. If one is going to charge his account with arbitrariness, one may as well ask: what singles out the platinum-iridium bar for the special status of metre-hood? The answer is nothing. Particularist properties simply don't work that way.


But this is, of course, a bizarre answer. The metre is an arbitrarily-chosen unit of measurement. We only use it because we need some agreed-upon unit of measurement. To pick God as the moral metre-stick simply because we need some standard of morality would make a mockery of moral thought.


Alston is aware of this, so he sometimes falls back on the idea that God's "maximality" is what makes him a non-arbitrary moral metre-stick. But this seems to be a reversion to Platonism: it is now maximal love, maximal kindness etc. that are doing all the work.


ii. The Arbitrariness of Platonism
Alston's second response comes in the shape of a riposte to the Platonist. He argues that his invocation of God as the supreme moral principle is no worse than the Platonist's invocation of some abstract property. Explanations have to come to an end somewhere and for Alston that somewhere is God.


This is all well and good. It may well be that explanatory stopping points are always metaphysically arbitrary. But that leaves us with a pragmatic question: is God more useful than a Platonic standard?


It would seem unlikely that he is (these observations are largely my own, although somewhat influenced by what Morriston says).


First of all, we frequently use Platonic properties - e.g. trianglehood - for pragmatic reasons without labouring under the misapprehension that triangles actually exist in the physical world.


We could do something similar in morality by appealing to an ideal observer and using him/her when making moral calculations. This observer is somewhat analogous to God, but no one thinks he/she actually exists. In fact, many secular theories of morality already do this.

Second, we may actually end up in a worse position if we appeal to God. After all, to make the appeal worthwhile, we would need epistemic access to unambiguous divine commands. Such access is sorely lacking.



4. Divine Sovereignty
I'm skipping a large part of Morriston's discussion on the truth conditions of particularistic predicates. I feel that it is too technical for a blog entry. Instead, I will close out this series by summarising what he has to say about divine sovereignty.


One reason that theist's cling to divine command theory is that they want morality to be "up to God"; to preserve divine sovereignty. That is what Alston and Craig's solutions to the Euthyphro were designed to do.


Morriston thinks that even if Alston and Craig's theories were successful, they would not preserve the notion of divine sovereignty.


Think about it: if God's nature is responsible for the existence of moral properties (in a particularist or Platonic way), then he would still not be able to exercise control over what those moral properties are.


Craig and Alston admit as much: their answer to the Ockhamist horn of the Euthyphro is that God's commands are not arbitrary because they are constrained by his nature.


This is similar to someone who might argue that logical and mathematical truths owe their existence to God's existence. Even if they are right, it would seem odd to say that God literally wills the validity of the modus ponens.


If this is right, then a divine command theory of morality would always be superfluous.

* It should be noted that Alston does not defend a divine command theory. He offers his solution to those who might wish to defend such a theory.

Must Goodness be Independent of God? (Part 2): Craig on God's Nature

This post is part of my series on Wes Morriston's discussions of theistic morality. For an index, see here.

I am currently taking a look at an article by Wes entitled "Must there be a Standard of Moral Goodness Apart from God?". This article looks at the attempts of William Lane Craig and William Alston to rescue divine command morality from the horns of the Euthyphro dilemma.

Part One covered some background material: it looked at what most people want from a moral theory; what theists want from a moral theory; and the dilemma facing theistic morality. As we saw, any theistic theory of morality has to sidestep two unwelcome interpretations.

According to the Ockhamist interpretation, God creates morality through his commands and we must obey them. Why we should obey them is unclear.

According to the Platonist interpretation, God is simply a moral expert who has perfect knowledge of an independent existing realm of moral truths. This interpretation would make God metaphysically unnecessary for morality.

In this Part we will look at Craig's attempt to avoid those unwelcome interpretations. This post is short because Craig's attempt blends into Alston's attempt after a careful reading (at least, that seems to be Wes's take on it).


1. The Divine Nature
Craig's answer to the Euthyphro is disarming in its simplicity. God's commands, he tells us,* flow directly from his moral nature. Morality is expressed to us in the form of commands, but it is wrong to say that these commands are whimsical or capricious: they necessarily reflect the divine moral nature. This nature consists in lovingness, generosity, justice, kindness and so on.

I suspect that there may be theological inconsistencies within this account: how can God be free and omnipotent if his commands are necessarily dictated by his moral nature? I have heard lawyers advance similar claims about criminals. But these theological difficulties are irrelevant to this discussion.

The real question is why is it that the properties of love, generosity, justice and kindness are good? How does Craig avoid moral platonism? Morriston says:

Craig's answer would appear to be that these qualities are good because they are united in God's nature. There is no standard of goodness apart from God. God's moral nature -- his character as we might say -- plays the role of the "Good" in Plato's Republic. It, and nothing else is the true Ultimate."

2. What is a Divine Nature?
The cogency of Craig's solution starts to unravel as soon as we consider what it means to have a "nature". A person's nature is a set of properties that they are imbued with and possess in every possible world. So to say that God has a moral nature is to say that he possesses a set of properties in every possible world.

This leads to what we might call Craig's Dilemma. If Craig is simply identifying the Good with a set of properties that God happens to possess, then God is not the source of morality. It is the properties he possesses that perform this function. And anyone who had these properties would be good, irregardless of God's existence.

This lands us back in the Platonic waters Craig was trying to rescue us from.

One potential solution to Craig's dilemma is the doctrine of divine simplicity. Adhering to the tenets of this doctrine, we would have to say that God's nature is singular and indivisible and thus not distinct from his being. On this doctrine, it is wrong to say that the property of goodness stands over-and-above God.

However, it is not clear that divine simplicity can provide a source of morality. After all, the moral properties beloved by Craig (love, generosity, kindness, and justice) are not simple. They would seem to require a God with part-whole distinctions.

If we want to find some way to yoke God's existence to the existence of morality we would be better off considering Alston's argument.

Funnily enough, that's exactly what we'll be doing in part 3.




* Morriston's discussion of Craig's views is based on the following paper:
"The Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Morality"

Must Goodness be Independent of God? (Part 1): Solving the Euthyphro

This post is part of my series on Wes Morriston's discussions of theistic morality. For an index, see here.

Over the next few entries I will be taking a look at that the following article:

"Must There be a Standard of Moral Goodness Apart from God? (2001) 3 Philosophia Christi 127-138.

In this article, Wes sets his sights on the attempts of William Lane Craig and William Alston to rescue theistic morality from the horns of the Euthyphro dilemma. As we shall see, Alston's attempt is more worthy of consideration than Craig's, but neither is quite successful.

In this introductory post, I will sketch the playing field in which this discussion takes place. The playing field consists of three basic questions.


1. What do we want from a Moral Theory?
Moral prescriptions are ubiquitous. I suspect that no one gets through life without being told that some actions are morally obligatory, some are morally permissible, and some are morally impermissible. And I suspect, further, that no one gets through life without passing on this message to others.

But what are these moral prescriptions really? Are they the inane effusions of people who like to control others? Are they projections of our own predilections and biases? Do they have any deeper ontological grounding?

Most people would like it if morality had some deep ontological grounding. Indeed, if one examines most moral debates, one will usually discover that two things are demanded of moral prescriptions:

1. Objectivity: they should be independent of our subjective biases and whims. All rational observers should be able to agree on the content of these moral prescriptions, just like all rational observers must agree that the earth is round.
2. Practical Motivation: our awareness of their existence should be enough to motivate us to follow them. After all, what good is a morality that no one obeys?

The question is whether any theory of morality can actually give us what we want? Theists think they have the answer.

2. What do Theists want from a Moral Theory?

Theists argue that God - the all-powerful, immaterial, personal creator of the universe - can provide our moral prescriptions with the deep ontological grounding we desire.

In particular, they argue that God's commands, which form the basis of our moral prescriptions, can pass the objective and motivational tests outlined above. After all, God's commands are clearly independent of our subjective whims and we should also be motivated to follow these commands. (Why? Well let's leave that to the side for now.)

Some theists would like to go a bit further with this. They would like to be able to say that morality is, in some sense, impossible without God and that God is sovereign over the domain of morality. Why would they like to do this? Simple: so they can use this as the basis for an argument for the existence of God.

These arguments will usually work from the "undeniable", "incontrovertible" existence of moral values, to the existence of God. A good example is William Lane Craig's moral argument. It runs as follows:

• (1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
• (2) Objective moral values and duties do exist.
• (3) Therefore, God exists.

Could arguments like Craig's actually succeed? Well, that brings us to the third question.

3. Can Theists get what they want from a Moral Theory?

There is an infamous dilemma facing all divine command theories of morality. It is the Euthyphro dilemma, from the eponymously-titled Platonic dialogue.

Simply put, this dilemma asks the following questions: why are God's commands the source of morality? Is because they reflect some standard of moral goodness independent of God, or do they become good because they are God's commands? 

There are two standard answers to this dilemma. We can call them the Ockhamist and the Platonist answers, respectively.

According to the Ockhamist, God's commands are good simply in virtue of the fact that he commands them. This is troubling because God is supposed to be omnipotent and could command anything: murder, rape, genocide, you name it.

And if he did issue such commands we would seem to have no reason to obey them. In other words, the Ockhamist answer fails the practical motivation test outlined above. Prudential reasons for following God's commands could be advanced -- eternal life anyone? -- but in advancing them we would be abandoning the idea that there are moral reasons to follow God's commands.

According to the Platonist, God's commands are good because they reflect some standard of goodness that is independent of his will. This is troubling for the theist because it sets up the possibility of having a morality that does not depend on God.

To see this possibility, we need to realise that for the Platonist the realm of moral goodness is wholly distinct from God. God, thanks to his omniscience, might have perfect knowledge of this realm and so might be able to communicate moral truths to his creation. But this would mean, at best, that God is pragmatically necessary for morality, not that he is metaphysically necessary.

These two positions are illustrated below.

4. Alston and Craig to the Rescue

The Euthyphro raises a significant problem for the defender of theistic morality. Either they accept the arbitrariness and lack of motivational mojo that is implied by the Ockhamist, or they accept the divine irrelevance that is implied by the Platonist.

Either/or options like this are always philosophically circumspect. It could easily be the case that the Euthyphro is setting up a false dichotomy. Is there be a third option that does not impale itself on either horn of the dilemma?

Some theistic philosophers think there is and it is these philosophers that are addressed in Morriston's article. In particular, he takes a look at the arguments of Craig and Alston. 

Both men try to collapse the two horns of the Euthyphro dilemma back into the being of God. They maintain that God's commands are good because (a) his attributes/nature is essentially good and (b) his existence is necessary for those attributes to come into existence.

We will look at Craig's argument in part 2 and Alston's in part 3.

Did God Command Genocide? (Part 4) The Case for the Prosecution

This post is part of my series on Wes Morriston's discussions of theistic morality. For an index, see here.

I am currently working my way through an article entitled "Did God Command Genocide?"

In Part 1, I sketched Morriston's argument: according to Deuteronomy, God commanded the Israelites to utterly destroy the Canaanites; God, being good, would not do this unless he had morally sufficient reasons for doing so; he is unlikely to have had such reasons; thus, the bible must have got it wrong.

In Part 2, I covered Paul Copan's attempt to justify God's command. As we saw, Copan's argument turned on the claim that the Canaanite's were incorrigibly wicked. In Part 3, I covered Morriston's responses to the charge of incorrigible wickedness.

In this final part, I cover some final concerns about the command to utterly destroy the Canaanites and sum up the argument against biblical inerrancy.

Moral Corruption
One concern not addressed to this point is the effect that the command would have had on the Israelites. William Lane Craig, in his attempt to justify the slaughter, sees this as a key worry. The problem is that in ordering the genocide, God may have been hampering the moral development of the Israelites. Craig responds with two claims:

• In the cultural milieu of the Ancient Near East (ANE), war and violence were commonplace. God was not asking the Israelites to do anything that might induce agonies of conscience.
• God needed to demonstrate to the Israelites how serious was their calling to be the chosen people. What better way to do this than to order an ethnic cleansing? Craig himself says "Yahweh is not to be trifled with...if Israel apostasizes the same could happen to her."

Let's take these rationalisations one at a time.

First, it may well be true that the ANE was a brutal time and place. But this does not address the central question: was God's command morally justified? After all, God was not shackled to the morality of the ANE. His own laws advocated the ideal of neighbourly love. So he clearly expected more from the Israelites than the perpetuation of moral brutality.

Second, the idea that genocide was the best way to demonstrate Yahweh's seriousness seems strange. God could have simply written that message on the heart of every Israelite (Jer. 31:33). And furthermore, reinforcing the morality of the ANE does not seem like a good way to set the chosen people apart from the other tribes in the area.

Neither of Craig's rationalisations get God off the hook.

What About the Children?

The Simpsons has probably lost its status as the gravity well of pop culture references. But I am sure most people remember how Revered Lovejoy's wife would, when any crisis presented itself, often shout hysterically "won't someone please think of the children?" On this occasion, such hysteria is warranted: why the slaughter of the Canaanite children?

One justification of their slaughter is that it was an unfortunate unintended consequence of a morally necessary act. In other words, they were the "collateral damage" of a "just war". 

Now we have already questioned the moral necessity of the genocide, but let's take it that the case has been made. For the collateral damage argument to be salient, it would need to shown that the death of the children was inadvertent. This does not fit with the command made in Deuteronomy. There, the slaughter of children was directly ordered.

An alternative justification, coming from William Lane Craig, is that it would have been dangerous to allow them to live. They would have formed a fifth column that would have destroyed the Holy Land from within.

This argument presumes that the Canaanite children would have perpetuated the wicked Canaanite culture. This seems to be an affront to the autonomy of the children: they are not even given the opportunity to escape the Canaanite system.

Additionally, the remainder of the bible makes it clear that the Israelites were constantly being tempted by other religions and intermarrying with other cultures. So the destruction of Canaanites did not in fact solve the problem of cultural contamination.

The final justification for slaughtering the children is that death wasn't all that bad. They entered into an incomparable state of joy in heaven.

Morriston responds by pointing out that this is a highly unbiblical view. The early Israelites did not have a well-worked concept of the afterlife (hell or heaven). The covenant of the Pentateuch is clearly concerning with earthly welfare.

But perhaps we are not limited to this early view. Perhaps biblical inerrantists can appeal to the full sweep of biblical doctrine. In doing so, they seem to make the following argument:

God is good. God would not harm the Canaanite children. Given the necessity of harming them in wiping out the Canaanite religion, he must have done something wonderful for them in the afterlife.

Morriston responds by saying this logic could support an alternative argument:

God is good. The brutal eradication of the Canaanite children would be bad for both them and their attackers. So God would not command anyone to kill those children.

And this second argument is, after all, the argument Morriston is trying to make.


Summing Up
The argument made by Morriston was that the alleged divine command to carry out a genocide of the Canaanites, as described in Deuteronomy, is prima facie evidence against biblical inerrancy. Why? Because it is unlikely that God had morally sufficient reasons for commanding genocide.

We have examined the attempted rationalisations of the command and found them all wanting. Morriston's original argument still stands.

Let me close with some personal reflections. One thing that struck me in writing this series is how the arguments of the inerrantists force you into the worst kind of racist propaganda: the Canaanites were incorrigibly wicked, the only solution was a complete ethnic cleansing, not even the children could be saved because they were tainted by the Canaanite culture.

I can easily imagine similar arguments rationalising the Holocaust.

It is disturbing that anyone tries to present such an apologia for a morally contemptuous act.

Did God Command Genocide? (Part 3) Canaanite Wickedness

This post is part of my series on Wes Morriston's discussions of theistic morality. For an index, see here.

I am currently working my way through an article entitled "Did God Command Genocide?". Part 1 outlined Morriston's key argument: that the idea of God commanding genocide -- as the bible suggests he did -- is highly unlikely unless he had sufficient moral reason for doing so. He is unlikely to have had sufficient reason, so there is good reason to reject biblical inerrancy.

In Part 2, I covered Paul Copan's attempted justification of the Canaanite genocide. As we saw there, Copan's defence boils down to the following: the Canaanite religion was incorrigibly wicked, it had to be eradicated.

In this post we take a look at the charge sheet against the Canaanite religion. This charge sheet usually pinpoints three issues of concern.


Troubling Sexual Practices
The first is the charge that the Canaanites engaged in morally circumspect sexual practices, including: adultery, having sex during a woman's menstrual period, homosexuality and bestiality.

Now we may not find these objectionable (I have concerns about the lack of consent in bestiality myself), but let's take it that they are morally condemnable. Is the fact that the Canaanites engaged in them sufficient to warrant their extermination?

Morriston thinks not. He suggests that all available evidence points to the fact that such practices are found in every society, that they are not limited to Canaanites. Thus it would not be right to single out the Canaanites. Consider also that in the destruction of Sodom God was willing to countenance the possibility of innocent Sodomites (Genesis 19). Why not in this instance?


Child Sacrifice
The second argument against the Canaanites is that they engaged in child sacrifice. This would seem to be a weightier charge than the first. But again we must ask: is it enough to warrant genocide?

Again, Morriston thinks not. His main reason for thinking so is that several biblical passages suggest that child sacrifice was not clearly condemned by God. Thus there is no reason for attacking the Canaanites on these grounds.

The classic examples of this come from Exodus and Genesis. Exodus 22:29c-30 seems to offer express approval of child sacrifice. Likewise, the infamous Abraham-Isaac story from Genesis 22 seems to praise someone who was willing to sacrifice their child. Admittedly in this latter case, Abraham did not have to go all the way.

In contradistinction to this, the unfortunate Jephtha in Judges 11:30-40 was forced to go all the way. The story has it that Jephtha asked God to help him gain a victory against the Ammonites. To sweeten the deal, Jephtha promised to sacrifice the first person he met after the battle. Alas, the first person he met was his daughter. He allowed her to bewail her virginity for two months but after that he sacrificed her in accordance with his vow.

Jephtha was the Judge of Israel. So his recorded experiences offer pretty compelling evidence against the idea that child sacrifice was enough to warrant Canaanite genocide.


Ritual Prostitution
The final charge against the Canaanites is that they practiced a form of ritual prostitution. Three biblical passages are offered in support of this: Genesis 38: 15, 22-23; Deut. 23: 18-19; and Hosea 4:14. Morriston goes through these passages one-by-one.

Genesis 38 describes events that took place long before the Canaanite genocide. The relevant passages only suggest that there was once a practice of ritual prostitution. Is that enough to warrant genocide over four hundred years later?

Elsewhere in his article, Copan suggests that there had to be build-up of wickedness amongst the Canaanites during the period of bondage in Egypt. Only this build-up explains why the Israelites were allowed to carry out the genocidal war when they did, and why they were allowed to take the land belonging to the Canaanites. Thus the reference to the earlier period described in Genesis 38 would seem to be irrelevant.

The Deuteronomy passages simply say that the Israelites should not engage in ritual prostitution. They do not single out the Canaanites as special offenders.

Finally, the Hosea passages suggest that the practice of ritual prostitution was common long after the Canaanite genocide. If it was not wiped out at the time, how can its desired eradication be a sufficient reason for genocide? Surely God would have gotten rid of it if that was his desire?


Extra-Biblical Evidence
Morriston points out that all the evidence concerning Canaanite wickedness discussed to this point comes from the bible, a text that was written and compiled by the victorious Israelite conquerers. Victor's historiography is always biased. What does the extra-biblical evidence say?

Well, Morriston says the best we can do is to look at recent scholarly work on tablets unearthed at Ras Shamra on the northwest Syrian coast. These tablets come from the Bronze Age Canaanite city of Ugarit. This city was at its height roughly around the time of the Israelite arrival.

These tablets suggest that the Canaanites were polytheistic, and fond of a good animal sacrifice. But nowhere is child sacrifice or ritual prostitution mentioned.

Okay that's it for now. In the final part, I will wrap up some loose ends and see whether Morriston's argument remains cogent.

Did God Command Genocide? (Part 2) Copan's Casuistry

This post is part of my series on Wes Morriston's discussions of theistic morality. For an index, see here.

I am currently working my way through an article entitled "Did God Command Genocide? A Challenge to the Biblical Inerrantist".

In Part 1, I sketched the broad outline of Morriston's argument. What it boils down to is this: if God commanded genocide -- as he apparently did according to Deuteronomy -- then he needs to have had morally sufficient reasons for doing so. It is unlikely that he had such reasons. Therefore, the bible cannot be an accurate representation of what God said.

As noted in Part 1, the key for the inerrantist is to provide some moral justification of what God did that takes account of what is actually said in the bible.

In this post, we take a look at one such attempt from the Christian philosopher Paul Copan.


The Cultural Milieu
At the outset it must be acknowledged that Copan's discussion is not a response to Morriston's argument but a more general response to the arguments of the New Atheists.

The NAs relish pointing out the moral atrocities that are apparently condoned by Yahweh in the Old Testament. These atrocities seem to undermine the idea that Christians occupy the moral high ground. So you can see the attraction.

Copan tries to defend Yahweh. One of his key arguments is that any moral judgement we may wish to issue must take into account the socio-cultural milieu of the ancient near east (ANE). The ANE had very different, almost brutal, moral standards. It was, after all, a fallen world.

Yahweh and the Mosaic laws offered incremental moral improvement over what was common in the ANE. God was working with the available raw material in a way that respected human freedom and took the first steps on the path to the ethical ideal represented by Jesus.

Now questions arise as to why God would choose to do things in this incremental fashion, and as to whether Copan has got the cultural milieu of the ANE right, but we can leave these to one side. The historical relativism promoted by Copan still would not justify God's commanding of genocide. It would not give us the morally sufficient reasons we are looking for. Something more is required.


Copan's Justification
To his credit, Copan rises to the task. But he proffers a somewhat mixed argumentative strategy. He presents four lines of evidence that might justify the command:

1. The Canaanite religion was incorrigibly wicked, it had to be wiped out.
2. The language of Deuteronomy seems to tacitly presume that the Canaanites will be around in the future.
3. The "utter destruction" language is clearly hyperbolic since the text of Joshua assumes some Canaanites will survive.
4. God, as the author of life, does not stand in the same moral relation to human beings as we do to each other. He does not owe us our lives; he can take them away if he wishes. He can do this directly (by his own actions) or indirectly (by commanding the actions of others).

(2) and (3) are clearly designed to downplay the genocide and so target P3 from Morriston's original argument. They are not successful because they simply ignore the clear command for genocide.

(1) and (4) seem like more straightforward moral justifications of God's command. Now, even if God has the right to take away life, as (4) is suggesting, surely he cannot take it away capriciously? He must have some reason for doing so. Thus we are left with (1): the idea that the Canaanites were so wicked that they had to be eradicated.

This seems to be the most popular line among biblical inerrantists. It is often coupled with the idea that the Holy Land needed to be purified for the Jews.

But why is genocide the only way to get rid of a wicked religion? Why not use the method of rational persuasion? Surely God would not use an inefficient and brutal method where a more subtle and human one was available?

These questions, rhetorical as they are, seem to force the inerrantist to defend the indefensible. One shocking manifestation of this comes from Copan's justification for the slaughter of the Canaanite children. Consider the following quote:

What then of the children? Death would be a misery, as they would be ushered into the presence of God and spared the corrupting influences of a morally decadent culture.

This would appear the apologetics at its worst. Indeed, after the passage just quoted, Copan goes on to justify other killings as a form of necessary "collateral damage".

If any of this is going to work, then it must be shown that the Canaanite religion was irredeemably wicked, to such an extent that genocide was the only option for its eradication. That is a proposition that will be explored in future entries.

Did God Command Genocide? (Part 1) The Problem

This post is part of my series on Wes Morriston's works on theistic morality. For an index, see here.

Over the next few posts I want to cover the following article by Morriston:

"Did God Command Genocide? A Challenge to the Biblical Inerrantist" (2009) 11 Philosophia Christi 7-26

This article presents a fairly compelling argument against the doctrine of biblical inerrancy by focusing on the genocidal passages in the Old Testament.

In this post, I will introduce the broad outline of Morriston's argument, sketching its form and its dialectical context.


The Genocide Passages?
There are many morally questionable commands from Yahweh in the Old Testament, but Morriston focuses his attention on certain parts of the Exodus-Deuteronomy story. After fleeing from Egypt, procrastinating in the Sinai and finally entering Israel, God commanded (through Moses) the genocide of the Canaanites. He said:

You must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them; and show no mercy to them (Deut. 7:1-2 RSV)

...in the cities that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes (Deut. 20:16 RSV)

This seems to be a pretty clear case of God signing a blank cheque for genocide.


The Argument
Morriston argues that this passage presents a series problem to the biblical inerrantist. Genocide is probably the greatest moral offence that we know of: to systematically attempt to wipe out an entire people/culture/race/ethnicity without any concern for individual differences is an abomination.

That God would command such a thing is unthinkable, unless he had exceptional reasons for doing so. But going on the biblical texts, he did not have exceptional reasons. Thus, it is more than likely that the human authors of the bible got it wrong.

The argument can be stated formally as follows (this is a slight reworking of the version found in Morriston's article - I've added a premise in the interests of clarity):

• P1. God exists and is morally perfect.
• P2. Genocide is morally wrong, unless there are exceptional countervailing moral concerns.
• C1. So God would not command genocide unless he had morally sufficient reasons for doing so.
• P3. According to the OT, God commanded genocide.
• P4. It is highly unlikely that God has morally sufficient reasons for commanding genocide.
• C2. So it is highly unlikely that the OT is inerrant.

Morriston suggests that P1, P2 and P3 would not be denied by an inerrantist. Consequently, P4 is where the rubber may fail to hit the road. The inerrantist will have to argue that God had morally sufficient reasons for commanding the genocide.

The argument is illustrated below. This will provide an illustrative framework for the remainder of the discussion.

The Dialectical Context
In arguing that God had morally sufficient reasons for the Canaanite genocide, the inerrantist faces certain dialectical restrictions.

First of all, it is not open to them to make the standard skeptical theist hand-waving argument: "God is wholly other, beyond all human comprehension; just because we cannot find a morally sufficient reason for his actions does not mean that morally sufficient reasons do not exist."

The reason that this move is barred is straightforward: we must contend with the actual biblical setting of the Canaanite genocide. We must ask whether it is at all likely that in the circumstances described god had sufficient reason for commanding genocide. We cannot appeal to some vague possibility of sufficient reason.

Furthermore, many reasons for the genocide are actually offered in the bible. So we must ask whether these reasons are sufficient warrant for the command of genocide.

What if God Commanded Something Terrible? (Part 4): We Must Obey

This post is part of my series on Wes Morriston's discussions of theistic morality. For an index, see here.

I am currently taking a look at a paper by Morriston entitled "What if God Commanded Something Terrible?". The paper looks at theistic responses to the problems inherent in a divine command theory (DCT) of morality.

Part One set out why it is a problem for DCT-proponents that God could command us to do something terrible. Part Two examined a classic theistic response to this problem: claim that God is essentially good and so could never command something terrible. This response was found to be deficient.

Part Three looked at Robert Adams's attempt to proffer a modified DCT. This modification would allow for DCTs to be the best theories of objective morality, while at the same time allowing us to disobey certain commands. This response was found to be confused.

In this part, we consider the third and final response to the problem with the DCT. This third response "bites the bullet", so to speak. It claims that the DCT is sound and that we would have to obey God's command no matter how repugnant it seemed. Let's see if this response fairs any better than its predecessors.



Torturing Children: Yes or No?
Morriston focuses his discussion on the writings of James D. Rissler*. Rissler argues we should not be so quick to rely on our moral intuitions about certain matters such as child torture. If we can conceive of a God who is omnipotent and omniscience, then it seems possible that He could have moral reasons for issuing abhorrent commands that are beyond our ken. In effect, Rissler is appealing to God's "wholly other" nature, a topic discussed in Part One.

Rissler argues that you may have an obligation to torture a child if two conditions are met:

1. You are psychologically certain that God has issued this command. This means you have explored all alternative explanations and have found you cannot doubt the veracity and source of the command.
2. Although you are unable to conceive of a reason for this command, you can at least conceive of the possibility that God has some good reason for it.

It may be that this sets the bar very high since it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which both conditions are met (surely a belief in one's own insanity is more rational than a belief in the command?). But Rissler thinks God, if he exists, could easily satisfy these conditions.

He does, however, envisage one scenario in which it would be impossible to satisfy the second condition. This would be when the command completely undermines all my pre-existing moral convictions. Imagine your moral convictions form a densely intertwined web. If the command is such that is destroys the entire web, it cannot be obeyed; if it possible to jump to some other part of the web while considering the command, it can be obeyed.

It is difficult to say whether or not the specific example of child torture shows that Rissler's exception is easily met or easily dismissed. Morriston thinks that Rissler's commitment to divine transcendence and epistemic humility would make it easy to accept child torture as a possible good.

In short, on Rissler's theory, it is possible for us to have a moral obligation to torture children.

Third Parties

An interesting aspect of Rissler's theory is its implications for third parties, i.e. those not privy to the divine command. Suppose you are psychologically certain that God commanded you to torture your child. Suppose I stumble upon you in the act of torturing your child. What should I do?

Rissler suggests that I should do everything in my power to stop you. I should not be convinced by your testimony claiming divine permission (or obligation) for what you are doing. Rissler's point seems to be that the individual receiving the command is answerable to god, not to their moral community. And that the moral community is entitled to be sceptical because they would not have psychological certitude concerning the divine command.

But here we get into an interesting debate about the rationality of belief. Rissler thinks that the person in receipt of the command is just as rational in following it, as the moral community are in rejecting it. Morriston thinks this is wrong. He argues that the community's beliefs would override the individual's psychological certainty about the command.

To see this point, Morriston asks us to imagine a detailed example involving a man named "Abe". Abe receives a command from God to torture his child. He has his doubts. He talks it over with his pastor and members of his local church. They are all committed believers and cannot bring themselves to accept that God would issue such a command. Still, Abe cannot shake his belief that God really did issue this command and that God may, given his transcendence, have reasons for doing so.

Morriston argues that the community's scepticism would defeat Abe's belief. The reasoning is as follows:

• Abe is only justified in obeying the command if (a) he psychologically certain that it came from God and (b) God's transcendence makes it conceivable for there to be reason for his issuing the command.
• Abe's church community share his belief in God, including his belief in God's transcendence. They cannot bring themselves to accept that the command came from God.
• Thus, Abe has reason to doubt that (b) has been met, his only reason for obeying the command is (a).

This leads into a longer discussion of why Abe's psychological certainty would convict him of irrationality. In short, as Rissler describes it, Abe has no reasons, no evidence, no argument to back-up his belief. He only has the raw psychological feeling of certainty. This would seem to be the very definition of an irrational belief.

Morriston goes further. In such a case, there would not even be a genuine command. A command can only be successful if it is reasonable to follow it. In the scenario outlined above this reasonability condition is not met.

The funny thing is, Rissler's discussion is designed to deal with the difficult biblical passages where God appears to issue abhorrent commands. But as Morriston points out, these scenarios are very different from the ones discussed by Rissler.

In the Bible, Yahweh backs-up his commands with reasons. For instance, the Canaanite genocide is justified by claiming that the Canaanites were guilty of certain practices, e.g having sex during a woman's menstrual period, homosexuality and bestiality.

In these Bible passages, there is nothing transcendent or "wholly other" about God. His reasons are transparent and all too comprehensible by us lowly humans. Morriston pursues this line of argument at greater length in another paper I will be covering.

*I could not find a personal webpage for Rissler. You can find mention of his papers via a google search. 

What if God Commanded Something Terrible? (Part 3): A Modified DCT

This post is part of my series on Wes Morriston's discussions of theistic morality. For an index, see here.

I am currently working my way through an article by Morriston entitled "What if God Commanded Something Terrible?" -- the question says it all!

Part One explained why this question is a problem for the defender of a divine command theory (DCT) of morality. Part Two dealt with the first theistic response to the problem, which was to claim that God is essentially good and so could never command something terrible. That response was found to be lacking.

This part covers a second theistic response that is developed in the work of Robert M. Adams. Adams defends a modified version of the DCT, one suggesting that we may not always have an obligation to follow God's command.

Upon reading this section of the article for the first time, I was baffled. Either (i) it was late and I was too tired or stupid to concentrate on it; or (ii) Morriston's discussion lacked its usual perspicuity; or (iii) Adams's theory is odd; or (iv) all of the above.

Undeterred, I left it alone for a while and reread it later on. It made more sense the second time, but I was still slightly perplexed at the subtle distinctions being made. This post may well reflect my confusion (and lack of subtlety).


Morality does depend on the Commands of a Good God
Morriston states that Adams himself believes God to be a necessarily existent and essentially good being. Furthermore, Adams thinks a DCT offers the best hope for an objective morality. Thus, he defines morally wrong conduct in terms of contrariety to the commands of a good God. For Adams, God's goodness is fairly stringently defined in terms of a set of properties. Only when God has these properties do his commands issue in moral obligations. This is his modification of DCT

Adams is then willing to consider possible worlds in which God does issue terrible commands (this would be a bad God), and even worlds in which there is no God. He uses the example of a command to sacrifice a child as a reference point.

Adams suggests that if you were to receive such a command, you would have to ask two questions (a) is it still wrong to sacrifice your child? and (b) are you obliged to sacrifice our child? Adams thinks that his modified DCT allows us to answer the second question in the negative. This is because such a command could only come from a bad God.

There is a problem here. Adams thinks morality is dependent on the commands of a good God. If God turns around and issues a command for child sacrifice, then he can no longer be considered good. So, if we got such a command, the objective basis for morality would collapse. This implies that in this possible world, child sacrifice is acceptable, along with everything else.

Morriston points out another troubling implication that arises from Adams's DCT. Since morality is dependent on God's commands, wherever God is silent there is no morality. So if there has been no pronouncement on the propriety of child sacrifice, it is permissible.

There is something slippery about Adams's discussion: he seems to make God dependent on morality at one point (i.e. when saying God must have certain properties), and then he flips and says morality is dependent on God at another point (i.e. when discussing the implications of the command for child sacrifice).

To put this another way, Adams is trying to repossess an already-eaten cake. He is trying to save our intuitions about certain things being wrong, while preserving the dependency of morality on God. It does not seem possible to do this.

Morriston's discusses some other aspects of Adams's theory, but once the points just discussed are made it seems slightly unnecessary. Indeed, Adams's theory does not seem to differ greatly from those considered in Part Two.

Maybe I am being unfair about all of this. Correct me if I am.