Divine Command
Feb. 4, 2022 | SARA BIZARRO
La Passion de Jean D'Arc, 1928
Divine Command Theory is a theory according to which something is good if God commands it (and bad if God forbids it). This theory asserts that morality comes directly from God, and often it is also paired with the claim that if there is no God, there is no morality. Divine Command Theory has the advantage of being simple and the authority of God gives it a foundation that for many believers seems unshakable. However, does Divine Command Theory really guide us on what to do in such an unshakeable way? Does it provide the type of foundation that all can follow? There are several problems with this view:
From affirming that God exists, nothing necessarily follows about what to do.
There are many holy books and many religions, so how do we decide which religion to follow and which book?
Even within the same books, there are inconsistencies where if you follow one suggestion you will be breaking another, so which suggestions do we follow?
Religious books are typically filled with metaphors that require interpretation, so which interpretations are right? This requires our judgment again, and is not as final and clearcut as it may seem.
What if someone is not religious at all, does this leave the person out of the moral realm?
All these are problems with Divine Command Theory that will appear in the several films in this section. This does not mean that Divine inspiration does not have any positive role in a person's life, it may have for some [as in Chariots of Fire, 1981] and it may be more complicated for others [La Passion de Jean D'Arc, 1928, Silence, 2016, and The Devil All the Time, 2020].
The most important question to answer is: Do we need Religion to justify morality, or can we justify morality separately without appeal to Religion (but not necessarily excluding it completely as well)? This was the question presented by Socrates to Euthyphro in a dialogue written by Plato in 399 BC. The question asked is this:
Is something good because God approves OR Does God approve of it because it is good?
Socrates proceeds to analyze each side of this dilemma independently.
Is something good because God approves?
If this is so, God can change his mind, and what is good today, can be bad tomorrow.
Saying that "God is good" simply means "God approves of what he approves."
If someone who is religious claims that God cannot change his mind, then God is not omnipotent, if they claim he can make murder be good today and bad tomorrow, this is definitely a problem, especially since who is to say God did not change his mind about murder a second ago? Typically religions also want to say that God is good and it would be very uncomfortable to be forced to say simply that he is what he is, if he is not good (nor bad, he is what he commands), then why is what he commands good or bad?
The other side of the dilemma also has two consequences for religion:
Does God approve of it because it is good?
If God approves of things because of them being good in themselves, then God is not omnipotent, since he can't change what is good and bad.
If things are good themselves, then why do we need religion to study or discover what is good? There is no special connection, so we can just address what is good or bad directly.
Notice that this side of the dilemma does not render religion irrelevant in the search for what is good, it just leaves it competing with other theories, it removes its special access to it. With this horn of the dilemma, we can have several religions with something to say about what is good, without needing exclusivity, which is good for religious tolerance as well.
Summing up the argument, Divine Authority Theory is appealing initially because it gives a firm foundation for right and wrong. However, even if we are religious, we may still have difficulty determining what exactly a religion recommends. This may be because we do not have direct access to God, and the books are metaphorical and need interpretation to be useful when we make our choices. Furthermore, this excludes people who are not religious from morality, which seems absurd. We know that there are people who are not religious who are good, and people who are religious and are genuinely trying to follow God's commands and are bad (check the section about The Devil All the Time, 2020). So the assurance religion is supposed to give us, doesn't seem as firm as all that.
The Euthyphro problem is an argument defending that morality seems to be logically prior to religion, even if somehow it was true that there was one God and he made all the decisions about right and wrong, we would still need to figure out what they were, and the best way is to look directly at right and wrong, rather than fall in the potentially maddening path of trying to figure out what a deity would or would not want us to do. In fact, if the deity was a good deity, it would provide us a way to think about right and wrong directly, and give us the tools to figure this out by ourselves, rather than trust in confusing and puzzling revelations and metaphors.
REFERENCES
Plato, Euthyphro
Cahn, Stephen, "God and Morality", Exploring Ethics.
Geisler, Norman, Christian Ethics, Options and Issues.
FILMS
La Passion de Jean D'Arc, 1928
FURTHER RESOURCES
ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIAS
Divine Command Theory, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
COURSES
Intro to Philosophy - Divine Command Theory
OTHER
Divine Authority, Benjamin Balint - Review of Rémi Brague. The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. University of Chicago Press. 354 pages.