In this three-part series I will look at some different ways of adjudicating conflicts between apparent divine commands and moral beliefs. I started with Immanuel Kant, now I will look at Robert Adams’ position.

In “God, Morality and Abhorrent Commands: Part I Kant” I mentioned Phillip Quinn’s observation that theists can face a particular dilemma,

“[I]t seems possible that a theist should have both good reasons for believing that God has commanded him to perform a certain action and good reasons for believing that it would be morally wrong for him to perform that action. Thus a theist can be confronted with moral dilemmas of a peculiar sort.”

Immanuel Kant argued that when faced with such a dilemma the theist should reject the belief that God has commanded the action and accept the moral belief. This was due to his belief that moral beliefs are more certain that theological beliefs. I contested this claim. More recently Robert Adams has defended Kant’s conclusion. Consider the structure of the kind of dilemma Quinn cites,

[1] Whatever God commands is morally permissible;

[2] God commands X;

[3] It is wrong to do X.

These three claims contradict each other; like Kant, Adams suggests that the rational person should reject [2]. However, his reasons are somewhat different. Adams persuasively reasons that [1] is true only if God is understood as perfectly good, in the sense of being loving, just and so on. If God were evil or morally indifferent then it would be possible for him to command wrongdoing and so [1] would be false.  This means that a person who accepts [1] must presuppose that God is good.

Adams argues that God cannot be meaningfully said to be good if what he commands drastically departs  from what we consider to be right and wrong. Human beings have some grasp of what constitutes goodness and some grasp of what constitutes right and wrong and it is part of our concept of what is good that a good being does not command wrong doing. Moreover, to call a being good is to attribute to it a character trait that is incompatible with certain other actions, attitudes and so on. Raymond Bradley made the point succinctly in his debate with William Lane Craig “Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?“

“If we were to describe someone such as Hitler as perfectly good despite all his evil doings, we’d be playing word games which are intellectually dishonest as they are morally pernicious. … it would be to deprive the word “holy” of its ordinary meaning and make it a synonym for “evil.”

This supports Adams’ conclusion that one cannot rationally accept [1] as one implicitly assumes that God does not issue commands at variance with our conception of morality. In Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics he concludes,

“Our existing moral beliefs are bound in practise, and I think, ought in principle, to be a constraint on our beliefs about what God commands. We simply will not and should not, accept a theological ethics that ascribes to God a set of commands that is too much at variance with the ethical outlook we bring to our ethical thinking.” [Emphasis original]

As with Kant there is a lot of truth to this; however, Adams’ position has certain limits.  As critics of Adams have pointed out his conclusion is limited. In the paragraph above Adams concludes that “our existing moral beliefs” must be a constraint on our beliefs about what God commands. His justification for this is that we “should not, accept a theological ethics that ascribes to God a set of commands that is too much at variance with the ethical outlook we bring to our ethical thinking.” The phrase “too much” suggests that one can accept ascription of a set of commands that is somewhat at odds with the outlook we bring to our ethical thinking.

Two points Adams makes elsewhere in Finite and Infinite Goods suggest that this limitation on his conclusion is necessary. First, while we do have some grasp of what is good and some grasp of what is right and wrong it is evident that our moral judgements are fallible. Adams calls this the “transcendence” of the good. He states,

“All of God’s commands and judgments are right; God is the ethical standard. But our beliefs (even the most cherished) about them must be distinguished from God’s commands and judgments themselves. To fail to make that distinction is idolatry.”

Adams is surely correct here. While God does not command wrongdoing. It is quite likely that a perfectly good omniscient being would command something contrary to what we think is wrong.  Our moral intuitions are fallible, hence it is possible that some of God’s commands would clash with our own moral judgements. In fact to suggest that God would never command something which we consider to be wrong expresses an incredible hubris. It is to dogmatically assume that we are such good judges of morality that God could never disagree with us. It is to put our own moral judgements beyond question. The existence of some commands that strike us as strange or immoral does not count for much.

Second, our concept of goodness and our judgement about particular cases can be and sometimes is subject to revision. We change our opinions about the goodness and rightness of certain things without “playing word games which are intellectually dishonest” or depriving “the word ‘holy’ of its ordinary meaning and make it a synonym for ‘evil.’”  If this were not the case, one could never honestly or rationally change ones mind on an ethical issue. Nor could people coherently disagree with or persuade one another about moral issues. Adams’ notes this when he writes that he accepts “the possibility of a conversion in which one’s whole ethical outlook is revolutionized, and reorganized around a new center” but “we can hardly hold open the possibility of anything too closely approaching a revolution in which, so to speak, good and evil would trade places”.

These points, however, quite evidently limit Adams’ conclusion. What his argument, in fact, shows is not that “our existing moral beliefs must serve as a constraint on our beliefs about what God commands” but rather that certain types of our existing beliefs do this, those so central to our concept of goodness that accepting them would be “approaching a revolution in which, so to speak, good and evil would trade places.” In “A Psychological Constraint on Obedience to God’s Commands: The Reasonableness of Obeying the Abhorrently Evil” James Rissler notes,

“In such an instance, obedience requires that one give up everything one previously believed about morality… one has been commanded to relinquish everything one understands about the nature of goodness, one will have no concept of the good with which to identify Gods command, there will be complete breakdown of between everything one currently affirms about goodness and everything one is asked to believe about goodness.”

Rissler gives two examples; the first is where God issues a command to reverse one’s conception of right and wrong or issues a set of commands, each one of which negates every moral imperative one currently accepts. Second, he suggests that a moral belief might be “sufficiently integral to one’s conception of morality” that abandoning it would force such a radical revision as to destroy one’s concept of goodness all together. Imagine a command to kill everyone around you purely for entertainment or a command that said harming, hurting and inflicting suffering on people for no reason at all is permissible. Consider a command to hate God and despise all other human beings. One cannot accept a system of divine commands where every duty we believe in is declared false nor can we accept a system which suggests that the vast majority of our moral beliefs are mistaken. This would come too close to the problematic revolution Adams talks of.

To sum up, in Part I and II, I have looked at the Kantian approach to the kind of dilemma Quinn sketches. Neither Kant or Adams, I think, establish the claim that in “our existing moral beliefs must serve as a constraint on our beliefs about what God commands.” They did, however, lend support for a weaker thesis. Kant’s argument, for example, does suggest that those moral claims about which we are certain, should serve as such a constraint and I mentioned several beliefs which I consider to be fairly certain as examples.

Adams’ argument on the other hand suggests that we cannot coherently “accept a theological ethics that ascribes to God a set of commands that is too much at variance with the ethical outlook we bring to our ethical thinking.” He argues that we cannot coherently or defensibly accept a theological ethics which, in effect, makes good and evil trade places and which so radically transforms our concept of goodness so that good becomes a synonym for what we call evil or calls our concept of goodness so radically into question that it breaks down. Certain beliefs such as it is prima facie wrong to inflict pain and suffering on others or it is prima facie wrong to treat others with contempt” or it is prima facie wrong to lie, steal and kill are so central to our account of goodness that we cannot coherently accept that a perfectly good being has issued commands that negate them.

In my next post I will look at Philip Quinn’s alternative.

RELATED POST:
God, Morality and Abhorrent Commands: Part I Kant
God, Morality and Abhorrent Commands: Part III Philip Quinn

Tags:   Divine Command Theory · God and Morality · James Rissler · Kant · Philip Quinn · Raymond Bradley · Religious History · Robert Adams · Selection7 Comments