Abstract
Divine command theories (DCTs) come in several different forms but at their core all of these theories claim that certain moral statuses (most typically the status of being obligatory) exist in virtue of the fact that God has commanded them to exist. Several authors argue that this core version of the DCT is vulnerable to an epistemological objection. According to this objection, DCT is deficient because certain groups of moral agents lack epistemic access to God’s commands. But there is confusion as to the precise nature and significance of this objection, and critiques of its key premises. In this article, I try to clear up this confusion and address these critiques. I do so in three ways. First, I offer a simplified general version of the objection. Second, I address the leading criticisms of the premises of this objection, focusing in particular on the role of moral risk/uncertainty in our understanding of God’s commands. And third, I outline four possible interpretations of the argument, each with a differing degree of significance for the proponent of the DCT.
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Notes
Deontic logic is multivalent. According to some theories, there are more than the four deontic statuses mentioned in the text, hence the ‘and so on’.
Though whether we should trust those intuitions is a separate question. See Joyce 2002 for an analysis and critique of the Euthyphro dilemma.
Note: this quote was originally sourced through Morriston 2009
This particular list of moral platitudes is taken, with some modifications, from Beyleveld 1991.
For a defence of the claim that ‘ought implies can’ also implies knowledge, see Howard-Snyder 1997. In that paper, Howard-Snyder specifically critiques objective consequentialism, arguing that people cannot follow the core imperative of objective consequentialism because they do not always know which action produces the best consequences. This view has been criticised on the grounds that Howard-Snyder confuses know-how with know-that in her argument (Andríc 2016). But even defenders of this criticism concede that know-which (i.e. knowledge of which actions are required by a given moral principle) is essential to the ‘ought implies can’ maxim (Andríc 2017). I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me on this point.
Not least because DCT is itself a species of non-natural moral realism, albeit slightly different from the version described in the text.
Several authors make this point about the diverse forms of divine communication. Peoples (2011) summarises the contributions to the debate. See also Evans (2013), pp. 37–45 on the different ways in which God’s commands may be promulgated. As one of the anonymous reviewers to this paper pointed out, missing from the list provided in the text are Kant’s suggested methods for using reason to arrive at moral knowledge in the Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals (2012/1785 at 4: 401–402 and 4:421–424) and Critique of Practical Reason (2015/1788 at 5:25). The Kantian method would seem to deliver moral obligations as dictates/commands of reason. But it is noteworthy in this regard that Kant did not think that the moral law had an author. He thought God had a role to play in morality, but that it was a regulative/practical role, not a constitutive/grounding role. He argued that we needed to postulate God in order to make it practical to attain the highest good (2015/1788 at 5: 113–132), but that the content of the moral law itself was grounded solely in reason. This Kantian view of God’s role in the moral order is different from the one being targeted by the epistemological objection. On this interpretation of Kant’s argument, see Byrne (2011).
The problems with this move are discussed briefly in the final section.
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to engage with this aspect of Evans’s argument. Minor textual note: Evans refers to the epistemological objection as the ‘promulgation objection’. The terminological difference is unimportant here.
There is of course one crucial difference between the cases, but this merely strengthens the epistemological objection to DCT. Organic food will continue to be organic food even if it is mislabeled. But on DCT, a moral obligation will not continue to be a moral obligation unless it is successfully communicated and, according to what is being argued here, it is not successfully communicated until knowledge of its source is provided.
One of the reviewers to this paper suggested that when considering the alleged status of a moral obligation under DCT “[t]he RNB can still examine the commands and properties of the alleged God of DCT, and can even specifically consider the claim that God has employed conscience or natural law to communicate his moral will, as well as verbal commands.” This suggests a scenario in which the RNB is at least open to God as a possible source. Is being open to this possibility enough to generate knowledge of an obligation? That is the question pursued in the text.
This phrasing seems crucial. It suggests that, within the thought experiment, there is a live epistemic possibility that the commands come from some particular source.
Linguistic philosophers distinguish between semantics, which has to do with the general conventional meanings, and pragmatics, which has to do with the token-specific properties of an utterance.
Obviously these figures are misleadingly precise. No one could accurately estimate the truth of their moral beliefs like this. In reality, we would have to estimate subjective probability ranges. The precise figures are used for illustrative purposes only.
Of course, some people will argue that moral beliefs are factual since moral propositions are capable of being true or false. I do not dispute this and although I think the distinction between the moral and the non-moral is fuzzy, I think the distinction is clear enough for this discussion to make sense.
It is certainly no different than the kind of uncertainty regarding whether a foetus is a person or a non-human animal an entity with the right not to be killed for our consumption. Uncertainty with respect to those kinds of beliefs is accepted as an example of moral uncertainty in the existing literature (Moller 2011). That said, I readily acknowledge that some critics of moral uncertainty think there are subtle distinctions between moral and non-moral facts that may make a crucial difference in this debate (e.g. Harman 2015 and Weatherson 2014). Since I ultimately appeal to the views of these critics in our response to Evans, I do not believe that my view is in tension with theirs.
The thought experiment also layers prudential risk on top of legal/moral risk, with the risk asymmetries working in the same way. This makes it doubly compelling.
This interpretation of the argument subsumes the preceding pragmatic enrichment interpretation because what is now being alleged is that uncertainty with respect to the pragmatic context is sufficient for successful communication of the command.
To be clear, I do not accept here that DCT is otherwise internally coherent in its account of moral ontology. There are other objections one can make. I merely grant this possibility arguendo.
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Danaher, J. In Defence of the Epistemological Objection to Divine Command Theory. SOPHIA 58, 381–400 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0622-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0622-9