Mailbag: Are Divine Commands Necessary for Moral Obligations?
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Dr. Baggett, do you have any responses to Erik Wielenberg’s 2022 paper in JESP called “Divine Commands Are Unnecessary for Moral Obligation”?
Nick
Hey Nick!
I had a chance to take a quick look at Wielenberg’s article. It’s much in the spirit of his view that moral obligations come about as a result of various moral reasons adding up (an approach of which I'm skeptical). The example he uses—going home from the bar since he’d promised his wife—does indeed seem to me like a real obligation, but it’s not at all clear to me that it’s divorced from divine commands. Even if it, though, I surely don’t see its best explanation divorced from a theistic account of morality more generally.
Divine command theory is of course just one among other efforts to root deontic stuff in God; it also comes in lots of forms, including a minimal form that doesn't have the implication he insists it does--a version that simply affirms that if God commands us to do X, then we're obligated to do X, which doesn't imply a divine command is a necessary condition for a duty.
At any rate, the central piece of the scenario depicted strikes me as about promise keeping. Why should be keep our promises, though? What explains that? Perhaps more generally, why is there a moral obligation to be truthful—at least in most cases at least?
Wielenberg is a moral realist, and I accord him accolades for that; in certain respects this makes him an ally. But this is also why much of what he says initially sounds so plausible when perhaps it shouldn't. Moral realists read it and think, “Yeah, that’s true!” But what makes it true that there are any objective moral obligations at all?
In his book he offers his own account, of course, but it’s also an account exceedingly subject to criticisms of various sorts—several are starting to make a cottage industry extolling its deficiencies. And the fact remains that error theorists, expressivists, constructivists, and plenty of sensibility theorists would all deny that there are any objective moral duties—most all of them from his secular camp. I think they're wrong, of course, but the point is he helps himself to a generous portion of realism in what almost seems like an effort to preach to the choir.
He wants to say that theists, by their own commitments, should admit that this duty to go home from the bar is a duty—and divorced from divine commands. I don’t track with that. If we’re going to start seeing things from a theistic perspective, I’m not in the least inclined to explain such a duty in a way that appeals only to the relationship between a man and his wife. Even when David sinned with Bathsheba, afterwards he cried out to God, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned.” Morally bad behavior is always first and foremost (even if not exclusively) against God himself. The man who loves God most loves his wife best.
A man need not realize that God’s at the center of things, and of course an atheist would deny it. But that hardly settles the metaphysics of the matter. If there is indeed a binding duty here, the question is what best explains it? This sort of abductive question is my preferred approach, which leaves open the room for other explanations that can explain things to some degree, but just not as well. This very phenomenon, it seems to me, is what Wielenberg wants to take advantage of to go his pluralist route. But if God does in fact explain the full range of moral phenomena best, then there is good philosophical reason to gravitate to such an explanation; Wielenberg’s characterization of such an approach as “monistic” almost seems to be a subtle argument by derision.
Wielenberg as something of a naturalist (admittedly something of a Platonist too, which generates a tension with his acceptance of causal closure and such) nevertheless affirms meaningful agency, or at least thinks the arguments against such freedom aren’t decisive. But I’m much more inclined to see his worldview as precluding substantive moral freedom, without which moral duties become notoriously hard to make sense of. So there’s also that.
So those are a few quick reflections off the cuff anyway. Thanks for asking! Pass along your own thoughts when you get a chance.
Blessings,
Dave
David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he's a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He's currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale's John Hare.
