Copyright © 1996, 2007, R.J. Kilcullen.
It has sometimes been suggested that the reason why we ought to obey the rules of morality is that they are commandments of God.
This suggestion has been criticised pretty effectively, for example by J.S. Mill:
If we believe this [that virtue is constituted by the will of God], we believe that God does not declare what is good, and command us to do it, but that God actually makes it good. Good is whatever God makes it. What we call evil, is only evil because he has arbitrarily prohibited it. ... This doctrine takes away all motives to yield obedience to God except those which induce a slave to obey his master. He must be obeyed because he is the stronger. He is not to be obeyed because he is good, for that implies a good which he could not have made bad by his mere will. If we had the misfortune to believe that the world is ruled by an evil principle, that there is no God, but only a devil, or that the devil has more power over us than God, we ought by this rule to obey the devil. ..
But do they [the Scriptures] not say perpetually, God is good, God is just, God is righteous, God is holy? And are we to understand by these affirmations nothing at all, but the identical and unmeaning proposition [that] God is himself, or a proposition which has so little to do with morality as this, [that] God is powerful? Has God in short no moral attributes? no attributes but those which the devil is conceived to possess in a smaller degree? and no title to our obedience but such as the devil would have, if there were a devil, and the universe were without God?...
If we are capable of recognising excellence in the commands of the Omnipotent, they must possess excellence independently of his command...
We have expended more words than were perhaps necessary upon so preposterous a doctrine. Our excuse must be, the infinitely mischievous tendency of a theory of moral duty according to which God is to be obeyed not because God is good, nor because it is good to obey him, but from some motive or principle which might have dictated equally implicit obedience to the powers of darkness. (J.S. Mill, "Blakey's History of Moral Science", in Essays on Ethics Religion and Society, ed. J.M. Robson, J.S. Mill, Collected Works vol. 10, U of Toronto Press 1969, pp. 27-29)
The theory Mill rejects is discussed in Plato's Euthyphro, in the form of the question: "whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods".
Another passage from Mill:
I know that infinite goodness must be goodness, and that what is not consistent with goodness, is not consistent with infinite goodness. If in ascribing goodness to God I do not mean what I mean by goodness; if I do not mean the goodness of which I have some knowledge, but an incomprehensible attribute of an incomprehensible substance, which for aught I know may be a totally different quality from that which I love and venerate—and even must, if Mr. Mansel is to be believed, be in some important particulars opposed to this—what do I mean by calling it goodness? and what reason have I for venerating it? If I know nothing about what the attribute is, I cannot tell that it is a proper object of veneration. To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good? To assert in words what we do not think in meaning, is as suitable a definition as can be given of a moral falsehood. Besides, suppose that certain unknown attributes are ascribed to the Deity in a religion the external evidences of which are so conclusive to my mind, as effectually to convince me that it comes from God. Unless I believe God to possess the same moral attributes which I find, in however inferior a degree, in a good man, what ground of assurance have I of God’s veracity? All trust in a Revelation presupposes a conviction that God’s attributes are the same, in all but degree, with the best human attributes.If, instead of the “glad tidings” that there exists a Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive, exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, not what are the principles of his government, except that “the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving” does not sanction them; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this being by the names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go. (J.S. Mill, Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.)
In the seventeenth century Hugo Grotius rejected the theory that morality rests on divine command in a much-quoted passage:
What we have said [about natural law, i.e. social morality] would still be in point even if we should grant, what we cannot without great wickedness, that there is no God, or that He bestows no regard upon human affairs.
On Grotius's thinking on this matter see Miller's article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The antecedents of this passage were traced in A-H. Chroust, "Hugo Grotius and the Scholastic Natural Law Tradition", New Scholasticism, vol. 17 (1943), pp. 101–133 (reprinted in Dunn, John, and Harris, Ian. (1997). (eds.) Grotius). See my article "Medieval Theories of Natural Law" for the origins of this line of thought in Gregory of Rimini and Gabriel Vasquez.
See also section "The Moral Autonomy Argument" in James Rachels, "God and Moral Autonomy".
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