One might, of course, understand these divine commands as merely God's endorsement of a moral code … endobj Learn more about Institutional subscriptions. We could take the benevolent person in question to lack heroism. endstream But I disagree. %PDF-1.3 I would, for instance, give a consequentialist account of the moral comparative: of two acts the one with the better consequences is morally better. Followers of the theory accept that all moral judgment is derived from an understanding of God’s character or his direct commandments. Here I note three points: The first is that, as an alternative, we could identifybeing right withbeing permitted by God. Both Exodus 20:1–17 and Deuteronomy 5:6–21, which recount the revelation of the Decalogue, portray God as instructing the Chosen People about what they are to do and not to do by commanding them. In other words, “what is in accordance with God’s command is moral and what is contrary to that command is immoral” (Farnell, 2005). It if were, then this would collapse to a thesis about what is necessarily the case. For a discussion of Kant's concept of an imperfect duty see Marion Baron, ‘Kantian Ethics and Supererogation’,The Journal of Philosophy, 84 (1987), 237–262. Delaney (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1979) p. 117 See also Adams' “A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness” and “Divine Command Metaethics as NecessaryA Posteriori” reprinted inDivine Commands of Morality, ed. 2. Different benevolent people will manifest their human weakness in different ways. © 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Forrest, P. An argument for the Divine Command Theory of Right Action. Sophia And Her/His choice may be due to other motives, such as aesthetic ones, or a sense of humour. Perhaps the most important such challenge arises in the Platonic dialogue which we read for class today. For a discussion of this issue see, Philippa Foot, ‘Moral Realism and Moral Dilemma’,The Journal of Philosophy, 80 (1983), 379–98. Secondly, we usually reserve the judgement that an act is right for the situation in which all but some narrowly constrained class of acts is wrong. This is recognised as a difficulty for Utilitarianism. The third is that I myself would takebeing right to be a property of properties of acts rather than a property. That is, the theory that to have value is to be approved of by God, to have disvalue is to be disapproved of by Her/Him. Can we compare, to take a well-known example, a lesser good for many with a greater good for a few? /F1.0 9 0 R >> >> and you may need to create a new Wiley Online Library account. The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02789850, Over 10 million scientific documents at your fingertips, Not logged in This is not quite Divine Utilitarianism. That is, it is either true that the act is wrong or it is true that the act is not wrong. For example, the theory that the Divine Command Theory holds except for the wrongness of inflicting pain for the fun of it, for which Utilitarianism holds. xuO� >> 11 0 obj Article God is, I take it, figuratively Sheand He, and literallyneither Shenor He. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share the view that the Hebrew Bible has authority in matters of religion. << /ProcSet [ /PDF /Text ] /ColorSpace << /Cs1 7 0 R /Cs2 8 0 R >> /Font << These do not collapse to indicative conditionals. For to say an act is right seems to presuppose some other acts are wrong. If we assume that human beings are morally autonomous, the argument goes, then no human being can be obligated to perform any action simply because God (or any other agent) has commanded it. x�ROHQ��6��A�x�w When I refer to God as ‘She/He’ I do not mean ‘She or He’. But it seems natural enough to suppose that the authority of the Decalogue depends in some manner on the fact it is divinely commanded or the fact that the commands express God's will.
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