Abstract
Stephen Maitzen argues that divine command metaethics must be mistaken because it is committed to the implausible assumption that the sentence ‘God is (morally) good’ is a tautology. In this article, I show that a charitable interpretation of R. M. Adams’ version of divine command metaethics is not committed to accept this assumption. I conclude that Maitzen’s objection merely manages to refute a strawman version of divine command metaethics.
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Notes
Maitzen points out convincingly that previous versions of the objection from God’s goodness (in particular, J. L. Mackie’s, James Rachels’, and John Chandler’s version) ‘do[…] not bother to spell out [their] reasoning as thoroughly as one might have hoped’ (Maitzen, 2004, 18).
I believe that this premise suffers from two problems. First, even if it is difficult to imagine tautologies that have religious significance in virtue of their semantic properties, Maitzen forgets that they can have religious significance in virtue of their pragmatic properties. For instance, one can assert the tautology ‘God is God’ in a conversation with a pantheist to conversationally implicate that we should understand God in a traditional way (instead of equating God with the entire cosmos). In this context, this tautology would have religious significance. (For a more vivid but fictional example of a context in which the tautology ‘God is God’ has religious significance, consider the song of the same name by the music group Laibach.) Second, Maitzen’s argument for premise (2) seems to be based on the general assumption that the religious significance of a sentence depends on the amount of information that it contains. However, it is easy to refute this principle by counterexample. For instance, there are many mantras that have religious significance in several Buddhist, Hinduist, and Jainist traditions but that do not contain any information (e.g. the famous mantra ‘Om’). I suspect that Maitzen’s argument for premise (2) is guilty of what Belnap (1990) calls the ‘declarative fallacy’: He seems to forget that there are countless speech acts apart from declaratives; and many of these non-declarative speech acts do have religious significance. Nevertheless, this objection against premise (2) is no serious threat for Maitzen’s argument because the relevant instantiation of (2) remains tenable: The tautology ‘God wills what God wills’ indeed has no noteworthy religious significance.
I would like to highlight two aspects of this definition. First, DCM-Goodness-Meaning is formulated in terms of God’s will and not God’s commands. Thus, the label ‘divine will metaethics’ would strictly speaking be more accurate than the label ‘divine command metaethics’. Second, DCM-Goodness-Meaning is based on the assumption that the will of an agent determines his or her (moral) goodness. For example, Kant (2002) is a famous proponent of this assumption. Nevertheless, this assumption is not uncontroversial (Wood 2003).
Technically, Adams (1987) defines DCM in terms of wrongness, while Maitzen prefers goodness. However, this difference seems to be of minor importance for the purposes of this article.
This aspect of Adams’ version of DCM is not unprecedented: Already Luther (citing Romans 2:15) argues that the natural law ‘is written in the depth of the heart and cannot be erased’ (Luther 1971, 110). Thus, not unlike Adams, Luther believes that every human has implicit knowledge of fundamental moral principles but only those who accept DCM can acquire a deeper understanding of them.
For the sake of coherency, I ignored the fact that Adams (strictly speaking) offers an account of the moral wrongness of acts and not the moral goodness of agents. Maitzen ignores this difference as well.
Correia and Skiles (2019) suggest this formulation to describe cases of full generic essence.
For a critical discussion of this ‘restriction’ manoeuvre, see Murphy (2012).
The aforementioned authors do not offer a deontological version of DCM that is formulated in terms of the meaning of sentences and, therefore, are not committed to DCM-Rightness-Meaning. Rather, as an anonymous reviewer points out, they offer a version of DCM that is formulated in terms of Kripke-style a posteriori metaphysical necessity.
On the one hand, one can construct a simple argument from perfect being theology for this assumption. On the other hand, Maitzen (2004, 28n) mentions some evidence from Scripture (e.g. Deuteronomy 32:4 and Hosea 14:9) to show that (at least) Christians and Jews are well advised to accept this assumption.
Maybe, a sophisticated modal account of essence can accommodate this Fine-inspired counterexample (e.g. Wildman 2013; Zalta 2006). To enter this debate would exceed the limits of this article. At any rate, even if this objection turns out to be untenable, I offer a second objection in the next subsection.
If van Fraassen’s pragmatic account of explanation is right, then (virtually) every sentence has more than one adequate explanation. van Frassen argues that ‘[a]n explanation is an answer to a why-question’ (van Fraassen 1980, 134) and, accordingly, that the question what counts as an adequate explanation is highly dependent on contextual factors. Thus, if he is right, then it becomes difficult to imagine a sentence that has literally only one adequate explanation. (Perhaps, there are very special conversational contexts in which one can literally ask only one sensible why-question about a sentence. These sentences would literally have only one adequate explanation, according to van Fraassen. In any case, as I argue in the next paragraph, the sentence ‘x is (morally) good’ is certainly not such an exceptional case.).
Similarly, Adams claims that mere conceptual analysis provides us with a list of properties that are necessary and jointly sufficient for something to count as (morally) obligatory (Adams 1999, 233–238). Technically, the latter discussion is more relevant in the present context because Adams rejects DCM with respect to (moral) goodness but endorses DCM with respect to (moral) obligatoriness.
For example, we can explain the truth-value of the sentence ‘x is (morally) good’ in terms of the specific contents of God’s relevant commands or in terms of His motivating reasons for giving the relevant commands.
For helpful feedback, I would like to thank Jonathan Fabella, the audience of the Studierendenvortragsreihe Philosophie 2019 at Humboldt University of Berlin, as well as three anonymous reviewers.
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Kremers, P. Maitzen’s Objection from God’s Goodness. SOPHIA 61, 581–598 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00861-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00861-5