Christian Ethics by Wilkens Steve;

Author:Wilkens, Steve; [Wilkens, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2017-05-02T20:44:02+00:00

Summary

To sum up, it may be helpful to look back briefly over what this chapter has tried to accomplish. We started with an account of divine command theory, the theory that divine command is what makes things morally obligatory, explaining the two terms moral obligation and divine command and then explaining the nature of the relation between them. Moral obligation was given a Kantian account, but this was not essential to the theory. There could be (indeed there have been) divine command consequentialist accounts and divine command virtue accounts of obligation. Divine command was explained in terms of a distinction between five types of divine prescription: precepts, prohibitions, permissions, counsels, and directly effective commands. Precepts and prohibitions create obligations. They are issued with authority, and some kind of sanction is envisioned for noncompliance, ranging from blame to punishment. The account of authority (borrowing from Joseph Raz) was that one person is practically authoritative over another in a certain domain only if the first person’s dictates bring about to some extent the reasons for action that the other has in that domain. God’s commands have proper objective authority because obedience to God is good in itself. Finally, the relation between the two terms is that divine command does not cause or constitute moral obligation, but God’s commands are explicit performatives, like the phrase “I promise,” which brings about an obligation just by its utterance in appropriate circumstances.

The chapter then considered and responded to four objections to divine command theory: the objections from vicious regress, from arbitrariness, from heteronomy, and from pluralism.50 The reply to the objection from vicious regress was that justifying moral obligation by God’s command does not terminate in something that itself requires justification, because, if God exists, it is necessarily true that God is to be obeyed. The reply to the objection from arbitrariness was that God selects from the probably infinite number of good things that might lead us to our proper end those things to require, and only those things are obligatory. The reply to the objection from heteronomy was that autonomy does not mean creating the law but making it a law for oneself; the moral law already exists, but appropriating it (and so responding to divine command) requires a mature use of human freedom, and this response was given a phenomenology in terms of five features: clarity and distinctness, external origin, familiarity, authority, and providential care. Finally, the reply to the objection from pluralism was that democratic society, so far from banishing religiously based contributions to public discussion, actually needs this contribution, and such discussion between believers and nonbelievers is not impeded but is in fact helped by the divine command theorist’s account, which offers a basis for obligations felt by believers and nonbelievers alike.

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