Question

Briefly explain Divine Command Thoery. Describe at least one objection to this theory.

Answer 1

• It's the belief that in any given ethical situation to decide what is the right or wrong thing to do, you need to look at a list of commands from God.  Depending on your religion, it might be the Ten Commandments, the hadith, or the Torah. But if someone has a list of rules that they believe comes from God (or the gods) and they use those rules to decide what is right or wrong then they are following DIVINE COMMAND THEORY.
• Divine command theory is the belief that the commands of god establish both the grounding or metaphysics of ethics and the epistemology of ethics.
• That is, whatever reflects the nature of god is good and whatever does not reflect the nature of god is bad (epistemology). What makes something objectively good or bad is the nature of god (metaphysics).
• It doesn’t offer a coherent definition of morality. If a moral or good act is defined as behavior that is in accord with the command of a divine power, then any act could conceivably be considered moral, including the wholesale slaughter of innocent children or wanton rape.
• If one presumes that a divine power would not command such a thing because said power would not command anything so horrible, then one has admitted that some other standard of morality exists and thus divine command theory doesn’t help us get closer to what is moral.
• An objection based on the fact that God's commands must be made known or promulgated. This objection claims that if God makes known his requirements through something like conscience or other forms of general revelation, the source of the commands will not be clear enough.
• Another objection is from autonomy, which argues that morality requires an agent to freely choose which principles they live by. This challenges the view of divine command theory that God's will determines what is good because humans are no longer autonomous, but followers of an imposed moral law, making autonomy incompatible with divine command theory.