Divinity and Delivery: What Isn’t Wrong with Divine Command Theory

Introduction

In this paper I shall defend divine command theory (DCT) from a canonical objection,

referred to as the Euthyphro dilemma. I shall conclude, not that DCT is true (I do not think it is)

but that the Euthyphro dilemma is incapable of demonstrating its falsity. In §1, I will provide a

stipulative account of DCT, and a stipulative account of the Euthyphro dilemma. In section §2, I

will provide an argument, in the form of an extended counterexample, that I think significantly

diminishes the extent to which the Euthyphro dilemma should give us pause in deciding whether

to endorse DCT. In §3, I will reiterate the argument of §2 in more precise terms that do not

resort to the counterexample. Finally, in §4, I will answer the question, “So what?”. The answer

to this question will be quite pertinent, because I am defending a theory that I think is false.

§1

DCT, as a label, has been applied to several multifarious accounts of ethical obligation

(or permissiveness, forbiddenness, goodness, etc.). So many distinct theories have been placed

under this heading that the phrase has come to mean the same thing as Theological Voluntarism,

the view that “what God wills is relevant to the moral status of some set of entities.”1 Various

ambiguities in this formulation allow the defender of theological voluntarism to adopt one of any

number of positions. Having committed to this bare principle, the arguer has yet to define God’s

will (is it what God commands? desires? intends?), relevance (coextension? supervenience?

causation?) and the pertinent set of entities (acts? states of affairs?). This also allows the

theological voluntarist some flexibility in the face of arguments against her position. If a causal

voluntarism seems problematic (perhaps because of metaphysical issues concerning the relation

1
Murphy, Mark. “Theological Voluntarism” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voluntarism-theological/
of causal powers to such a thing as a moral status) then she may shift to a supervenience

voluntarism, and etc.

In the face of such confusion, I want to be very clear: the position that I am defending

against the Euthyphro dilemma is not quite as flexible. I am defending an account that

minimally commits to the following proposition:

DCT: God’s commanding that we perform an act, Φ, is independently sufficient2 for it to

be the case that Φ is morally obligatory. Analogous propositions hold for permissibility
and forbiddenness.

The DCTist whose view I am defending against the Euthyphro dilemma may have some

flexibility with respect to the species of relevance; the formulation I have offered is agnostic

concerning the way in which the sufficiency relation is established. However, the formulation

straightforwardly holds that commands are the relevant manifestation of God’s will, and that acts

are the relevant set of entities. If we know that God commands we help our neighbor, this is

independently sufficient for it to be the case that we are obligated to help our neighbor.

To refer to the objection in question as the Euthyphro dilemma is also problematic. The

objection that I am addressing is consistently referred to in introductory textbooks as the

Euthyphro dilemma. Nonetheless, the objection differs rather markedly from the argument

Socrates actually poses to Euthyphro.3 If I commit this same exegetical mistake in so labeling

2
It has been suggested this should read “necessary and sufficient”. I suppose this is probably right, but it seems to
me that a minimal version of DCT would want to allow that there may be some moral obligations in arenas where
there are no divine commands. At the very least, the DCTist may be more friendly to this possibility than the
possibility that something may be permissible in spite of God’s having forbidden it. I don’t think that anything that
I offer below would be rendered problematic if I were to add this qualification to my formulation of DCT, so for
now, if only for my own comfort, I will attribute to the DCTist only the view that God’s commanding Φ is sufficient
for Φ’s being morally obligatory. Thank you to Andrew Cohen (in correspondence) for drawing my attention to this
matter.
3
The actual argument that Socrates poses to Euthyphro (with the necessary amendations to convert piety talk into
moral obligation talk) proceeds something like this: DCT demands that bringing about Φ is morally obligatory
because God loves instantiations of Φ (the alternative is rejected out of hand). However, Socrates points out,
something is pushed because someone pushes it. It is not the case that someone pushes something because it is
pushed. The assertion in question says that being morally obligatory is simply to be defined as being loved by God,
the objection in question, it is only so that I may speak the same language as those to whom I

respond. The Euthyphro dilemma as I will formulate it runs as follows.4

The DCTist asserts that divinely commanded actions are morally obligatory. So, we take

for granted that God has commanded Φ. A natural question: is Φ obligatory because God

commands it? Or does God command Φ because it is obligatory? We demand that the DCTist

must assent to the former. If God commands Φ because it is obligatory, it appears that the

DCTist does not commit to DCT except in a quite uninteresting sense. In the spirit of Divine

Command Theory, the theorist wants to say that God’s command somehow is the x-maker, the

essential feature of the rightness or wrongness of Φing. At pains of adopting a rather perverse

understanding of DCT, the theorist ought to say that Φ is obligatory because God commands it.

The objection proceeds: for any Φ such that God commands Φ, God either commands Φ for

some reason, or else God commands Φ for no reason. This is the crux of the alleged dilemma. If

God commands Φ for no reason (and if God’s so commanding is, properly speaking, the x-maker

just as something’s being pushed is unproblematically equivalent to its being the thing that someone pushes. If
something’s being morally obligatory and its being pushed are properly analogous, than the above reasoning
suggests that we must say that Φ is loved because someone loves it, while on the other hand, it cannot be the case
that something is pleasing to X because X loves it but rather that X loves it because it is pleasing. By a series of
modus tollens, this will yield a non-identity betweens Φ is pleasing to X and Φ is morally obligatory (in the case that
Φ is holy is identical to X loves Φ). This particular argument is rarely even remotely addressed by proponents or
critics of DCT, perhaps because it is so confusing. I myself admit to being able to make only partial sense out of it.
Nonetheless, this is not the argument that I am referring to under the heading of “The Euthyphro Dilemma”. For a
satisfying account of this arguments inadequacy, I recommend the reader to Joyce, Richard “Theistic Ethics and the
Euthyphro Dilemma” (Journal of Religious Ethics 30 (2002)) [TEED], pages 50-55. One can also find extensive
discussions of the argumentative structure of the historical Euthyphro Dilemma in Cohen, S. Marc, “Socrates on the
Definition of Piety: Eythphro 10A-11B” (Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito: Critical Essays, Ed. Rachana
Kamtekar, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) 35-49, and Brown, John “The Logic of the Euthyphro 10A-11B” (The
Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 54, 1964) 1-14.
4
Here’s the weird thing about the Euthyphro Dilemma. People who actually do work on theistic ethics have long
abandoned the minimal DCT that I have enumerated above, presumably because they think it is indefensible in the
face of the Euthyphro Dilemma’s contemporary manifestation. Consequently, in order to lend credence to my
own formulation of the contemporary Euthyphro Dilemma, I must refer my reader to introductory textbooks,
which set up DCT as something to be knocked down by this straightforward argument “from antiquity”. One can
find such accounts in, e.g. Shafer-Landau, Russ, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil (Oxford University Press,
2004) pp. 79-85 and Timmons, Mark, Moral Theory (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002) pp. 27-30. The
best attempt at a responsible formulation of what I am calling the Euthyphro Dilemma can be found in Joyce
(TEED, pp. 55-6). Joyce proceeds to reject the claim that the Euthyphro dilemma is a problem for DCT on problems
that are friendly toward, but quite distinct from, my own.
with respect to moral obligatoriness) then moral obligations lack rational constraint. If God

commands for some reason, R, then it seems that R, and not God’s command, is what makes Φ

obligatory. Essentially, this is to say that if the DCTist needs to acknowledge that God has

reasons for commanding as he does, but in doing so she falls back on saying that God commands

Φ because Φ is morally obligatory.5 To make this move is to leave behind the spirit of DCT, for

reasons enumerated above.

So, this is the Euthyphro dilemma in its contemporary form, as it is employed to defeat

DCT. If DCT is true, and God doesn’t have reasons, than morality is arbitrary and God is less

than fully rational, but morality isn’t arbitrary and God (if he exists, is perfectly rational), so

DCT is false. If DCT is true, and God does have reasons, then God’s command isn’t the x-

maker with respect to moral obligation, so DCT is false. Since these two conditions (God does

have reasons, God does not have reasons) are contradictory, and thus exhaustive, this renders

DCT false in all possible worlds.

I will be addressing the second horn of this dilemma. I am not granting the first horn; I

actually think that there are a number of ways to raise problems for it,6 but I shall not address

them here. Rather, I aim to show that these propositions are perfectly compatible:

(G) God’s commanding Φ is what makes Φ morally obligatory.

(H) God has reasons for commanding Φ.

I will demonstrate this compatibility by way of an extended thought experiment, which I shall

take up in the following section.

§2

5
When I can do so without sacrificing ease of prose, I resist using a pronoun to refer to God. When a pronoun is
unavoidable, I use the uncapitalized “he” rather than the traditional capitalized “He”, or some gender neutral
substitution. I have no good reason for having made this choice, but I am pleased that it has the potential to
incense liberal and conservative readers alike, if such categories are at all meaningfull.
6
Some such problems can be found in Joyce (TEEB).
 Xantippe works for Plato’s Pizza. Upon arriving at work on Wednesday afternoon, there

are four orders. One for Mr. Kripke, one for Mr. Rorty, one for Mr. Putnam, and one for Mr.

Nietzsche. Mr. Kripke ordered a mushroom pizza because Mr. Kripke likes the taste of

mushrooms. “Kripke likes the taste of mushrooms” is Kripke’s reason for ordering a mushroom

pizza. Mr. Rorty ordered a pepperoni pizza. Mr. Rorty has arranged a list of pizza toppings,

numbered them, and used a random number generator. The random number generator produced

the number 7, and pepperoni was the seventh topping on Mr. Rorty's list. We could say that Mr.

Rorty's reason for ordering a pepperoni pizza was “the random number generator produced the

number 7”, “pepperoni was the seventh topping on the list”, or the conjunction of the two.

Alternatively, and more to the point, we could say that Mr. Rorty had no pepperoni-specific

reasons to order a pepperoni pizza. At least, this would seem warranted insofar as, when looking

for Mr. Rorty's reasons, we are looking for some sort of rational justification for picking

pepperoni over anything else. Mr. Putnam orders a spinach pizza, because he knows that spinach

is very healthy. “Spinach is healthy” is Mr. Putnam's reason for ordering a spinach pizza.

Finally, Mr. Nietzsche orders a sausage pizza. Mr. Nietzsche is at a party with Mr. Kant, a self-

righteous vegetarian. Mr. Nietzsche despises Mr. Kant, so Mr. Nietzsche orders a sausage pizza

in order to prevent Mr. Kant from being able to enjoy the pizza. “Mr. Kant will not be able to eat

a pizza with sausage on it” is Mr. Nietzsche's reason for ordering a sausage pizza.

Now, suppose we were to replace any given topping with a variable. We could say the

following:

● Mr. Kripke orders a pizza with W because Mr. Kripke likes the taste of W.
● Mr. Rorty orders a pizza with X for no X-specific reason.
● Mr. Putnam orders a pizza with Y because Y is healthy.
● Mr. Nietzsche orders a pizza with Z because Mr. Kant will not be able to eat a
pizza with Z on it.
This is all to the good. Unfortunately, Xantippe is fairly bad at keeping things straight. She

instead delivers all of the pizzas to the wrong addresses. Xantippe delivers a Spinach pizza to

Mr. Kripke, a sausage pizza to Mr. Rorty, a mushroom pizza to Mr. Putnam, and a pepperoni

pizza to Mr. Nietzsche.

Recall that the person who wields the Euthyphro dilemma against DCT assumes that if

God has reasons, R, for commanding Φ, then Φ is obligatory because of R, not because God

commanded Φ, and DCT is false. If God's commanding Φ is taken (by the DCTist) to be

independently sufficient for Φ's being morally obligatory, and if Φ's being, for instance, utility

maximizing is independently sufficient for God's commanding Φ (because this is God's reason

for commanding Φ), then Φ's being utility maximizing appears to be independently sufficient for

Φ's being morally obligatory, and DCT is false. Now, if the fact that God has reason, R, for

commanding Φ, this reason presumably takes the form of “because Φ is L”. The argument in

question maintains that God’s commanding Φ because Φ is L makes it the case that Φ’s being L

is what makes Φ morally obligatory. Consequently, if ψ is also L, then ψ is also morally

obligatory.7 Ψ, of course, was not divinely commanded, but it nonetheless is L, and since being L

is the X-maker on this account, the fact that ψ was not divinely commanded doesn’t provide us

reasonable grounds for forging a principled distinction between the obligatoriness of ψ and the

obligatoriness of Φ. If the reason, R, which God has for commanding that Φ is a proposition

which would be true in case Φ were replaced by ψ, I will say that ψ satisfies God's reason for

commanding Φ. If it is a fact that God has reason, R, to command Φ, and if R is just as good of

a reason to command ψ, then the principle that R can replace God's command as the justification

for Φ's being morally obligatory would require that R renders ψ morally obligatory as well. A

7
If a reader could enlighten me as to whether it is appropriate to capitalize a greek letter that, while operating as a
variable, appears at the beginning of a sentence, I would be much obliged.
brief example may make this more clear. If my only reason for going out the back door is to

escape from the police, and if going out the side door is also sufficient for my potential escape to

obtain (and no mitigating factors interfere) then I have identical, equally sufficient reasons for

going out the side door as I have for going out the back door, and there is no principled way to

distinguish between the options in terms of their practical appropriateness. If someone were to

press me concerning why I picked one door, and not the other, all I could say to them is “no

reason, I suppose, but I had to go out some door! Get off my back!” The concern I am

enumerating threatens that allowing God to have reasons to command Φ could, in principle, yield

some other obligation, which may amount to disobeying God's command, without being able to

say how the latter obligation is any less pressing. The result appears to be that Φ's (or ψ's) moral

obligatoriness is logically independent of God's command, and DCT is false. I will now show

that Xantippe's unenviable situation demonstrates what is wrong with this reasoning.

It ought to be uncontroversially the case that, corresponding to each proposition

enumerated above, that “Xantippe delivered a spinach pizza to Mr. Kripke” and the like, there

corresponds a true proposition that “Xantippe erred in delivering a spinach pizza to Mr. Kripke”

and the like. Why is this corresponding proposition true? Presumably, because Mr. Kripke

didn't order a spinach pizza. Or, to make the analogy crystal clear, Mr. Kripke issued a

command that was not fulfilled by Xantippe's delivering him a Spinach Pizza. It is Kripke's

having commanded a particular thing that renders Xantippe's act incorrect, inappropriate, or

wrong. Kripke's command was performative; as of its utterance, Xantippe was obligated

(practically, if not morally) to deliver him a mushroom pizza. If the tactic employed by the

Euthyphro dilemma has the potential to render (G) and (H) contradictory, then it ought to be the

case that if Mr. Kripke had reasons for commanding as he did, then it was his reasons, and not
the mere fact of his having so commanded, that accounts for Xantippe's obligation to deliver him

a mushroom pizza. We know that Kripke's reason was that he likes mushrooms. Suppose that

Kripke hates Spinach. In this case, the reason Kripke had for ordering a pizza with W, that “Mr.

Kripke likes the taste of W” would render the truth value FALSE if W were substituted with

“spinach”. But, of course, for all we know, Mr. Kripke may love spinach, in which case Kripke's

reason for preferring W would be happily satisfied by his receiving a spinach pizza. The

reasoning employed by the Euthyphro dilemma yeilds the strange conclusion that the correctness

of Xantippe's having delivered a spinach pizza to Kripke is a function of whether or not Kripke

likes spinach, but this is implausible. Mushroom, and only mushroom, is the correct topping on

Kripke's pizza because, and only because, Kripke ordered a mushroom pizza. This is compatible

with Kripke's having had reasons to order a mushroom pizza!

If Y's being healthy was Putnam's reason for ordering of a pizza with Y (as it was), then

the fact that mushrooms are healthy would mean that Putnam's having received a mushroom

pizza would satisfy Putnam's reason for commanding that Φ, so Putnam's having received a

mushroom pizza would be correct. Because Kant can no more enjoy a pepperoni pizza than he

can a sausage pizza, Nietzsche's reason for ordering a sausage pizza was satisfied by his

receiving a pepperoni pizza. Finally, since there was no pepperoni-specific reason for Rorty's

having ordered a pepperoni pizza, his case seems to be the only case in which we can confidently

say that his ordering a pepperoni pizza was what made his reception of a sausage pizza incorrect.

But this is all quite perverse, and it seems to miss the point of a command. A command

is a performance; it makes something the case merely by virtue of having been uttered, and when

a command is issued in the proper situation, such that it is attended by a norm calling for its

satisfaction (namely, the commander is properly positioned in a heirarchy of authority), it does

so by rigidly designating the particular action commanded, not any given X such that X satisfies

the reason behind the commanders having commanded X. Xantippe's status as having made a

mistake in bringing the wrong pizza to each of the four commanders is brought about in the exact

same way, by virtue of the exact same facts: when Xantippe was ordered by S to A for reason R,

and if S is in the properly authoritative position, Xantippe errs when she doesn't do A, even if she

does A' which happens to also satisfy reason R. The fact that some of the commanders had good

reasons, some had bad reasons, and some didn't appear to have reasons at all is orthogonal to the

correctness of Xantippe's not acting such that A. It is the fact that Xantippe was commanded to

Φ, and not S's reasons for commanding Φ, which is the sole source of the correctness of

Xantippe's Φing, and of the incorrectness of Xantippe's not Φing, or ψing. The result is that,

even if S has reasons for commanding that Φ, it is unproblematic to say that Φ is correct solely

because S commanded that Φ.

§3

In this section, I reiterate the argument developed in §2, but without recourse to the

Plato's Pizza counterexample, more specifically drawing out the claims I am making, those I am

refuting, and their implications for DCT. Finally, I consider two objections to the argument I

have advanced here.

Our interlocuter has claimed that DCT cannot be true, because if DCT is true then Φ is

morally obligatory because God commands it (rather than the other way around), and God must

have reasons behind any command he issues (else morality is arbitrary, which we have charitably

stipulated to be an unacceptable consequence). These two propositions are incompatible,

because any reason God may have for commanding Φ deserves full credit for rendering Φ

morally obligatory, and the mere fact of God's having so commanded has no remaining role to
play. We have seen that this incompatibility claim is not warranted. A command is an utterance

that, if offered in the proper circumstances (namely, by someone with the proper authority to

issue commands), rigidly designates its content as that which is to be done. This logical

relationship between a command and the act or state of affairs commanded is logically

independent of any prior justification (or lack thereof). In endorsing the DCTist's belief that

God's commanding Φ brings about a state of affairs such that we are morally obligated to Φ, we

are endorsing God's being in a position of the relevant sort of authority (an endorsement that

would hardly be novel to the theist) and are free to remain completely agnostic concerning the

existence or validity of any given reasons. Consequently need not be the case that the reasons

themselves are the reasons that Φ is morally obligatory, since it could obtain that God's reasons

for commanding Φ could be good, bad or non-existent without changing the logical relationship

between the command and that which is commanded.

Therefore, when faced by the Euthyphro dilemma, the DCTist needn't fret. Pushed to the

point of having to concede that God has reasons for commanding as he does, the DCTist can

comfortably assert that he does. At the forthcoming suggestion that this compromises the

fundamental assumption of DCT, that it is God's command alone which makes it the case that

Φing is morally obligatory, the DCT needn't allow this inference. God has reasons to command

loving our neighbor just as Putnam had reasons to order spinach pizza, and (we assume) they are

satisfying reasons (just as Putnam's were). Nonetheless, just as Xantippe had done something

wrong in arriving at Putnam's door with a mushroom pizza (even though a mushroom pizza

satisfied Putnam's reason for ordering a spinach pizza), we have done something wrong in

disobeying God's commands, not because we have failed to satisfy God's reasons (we may well

have done something that did satisfy God's reasons, just as the mushroom pizza satisfied Kripke's
reasons) but because we have failed to obey God's command. Consequently, there is nothing

incoherent about maintaining that God has some reason for commanding Φ, but that it is God's

having so commanded, and not said reasons, that obliges us to Φ. The Euthyphro dilemma puts

no pressure on DCT.

Before moving on to my final thoughts concerning the motivation for the above

argument, I should mention and address two possible objectsions. First, I see no way for the

DCTist to avoid acknowledging that, even if God has reasons for commanding Φ, and even if

they are good reasons, they could have been bad, and they could have been non-existent, and yet

we would still be obliged to Φ. But this is probably a bullet that the DCTist would be happy to

bite. After all, so far as the theistic DCTist is concerned, the possible world in which God had

bad reasons to command as he did would be a far away world indeed, so she'll have no qualms

with admitting that an arbitrary or perverse moral system may have obtained in such a world.

Indeed, the thoroughgoing DCTist is likely to need to bite a series of such bullets, and this

particular one probably wouldn't be so troubling.

There is another objection, however, to which I should draw attention. I will call this the

“difference in kind” objection. I do not quite know the best way to answer it, but I will suggest

that answering it is not necessarily incumbent upon me. It has been suggested to me that divine

rationality is somehow a different beast entirely than finite, human rationality. Certainly, there is

a distinction to be made; unlike human rationality, divine rationality is perfect and absolute. But

the thrust of the objection comes from insisting that the distinction is so radical that no

interesting analogy can be drawn between a human subject’s (perhaps, a pizza-orderer’s)

commanding that Φ for reason R and God’s commanding that Φ for reason R. Facing this

objection, I admit to being dumbfounded. I have admittedly been assuming that there is no
distinction in kind between human rationality and divine rationality; I have simply allowed that,

whatever it is that we have that allows us to entertain counterfactuals, engage in deduction, etc.,

is something that God has a whole lot more of. Perhaps this is naïve of me, but upon

investigation I have not see anything among those who attempt to dismantle DCT on the basis of

the Euthyphro dilemma that even attempts to proffer a competing account of rationality, one that

would be adequate to characterizing rationality in a divine intellect. Put frankly, damned if I

have any idea how to make sense of divine rationality.

The “difference in kind” objection seems to be something like this. Because divine

rationality is perfect, it must always be the case that the object of divine command, the act that is

made morally obligatory by virtue of (?) said command, must be the sort of thing which is

obligatory by virtue of an absolutely perfect justificatory scheme. Any such scheme would

HAVE to be perfectly tracking a perfectly good intentional object, and doing so with perfect

consistency. This, allegedly, makes it a logical necessity that there must be some secular (?)

justification, in principle at least, according to which all moral obligations could be discerned.

My responses, then, are three. First, I don’t see the grounds for assuming that any

perfectly rational, consistent justificatory scheme must be located outside of the context of the

divine command itself. Admittedly, this is a premise that I have attributed to my interlocuter, but

I don’t see how the objection gets off the ground without it. Second, the Old Testament, for

instance, seems to present a number of commands that seem to obviously derive their normative

purchase from nowhere other than the fact that they have been commanded. Many of these

commands seem to deriving from the requirement that we do things in some way, even if there is

no straightforwardly rational grounds for our doing things in this way. If we are to allow for the

possibility of any commands of this form, then it no longer seems obvious that a perfectly
rational divine commander must command entirely within a justificatory scheme that acquires an

Archimedean validity from outside of the context of the command itself.8 My final response is

to throw my hands in the air, and admit that I don’t quite know what to say. If divine rationality

is to be characterized in such a way that it is so radically different in kind from human rationality

that none of the analogies I have offer are relevant, than it is probably indeed the case that my

defense of DCT is no good, but before I admit so much, I demand of my interlocuter a satisfying

account of what on earth they mean by divine rationality. Pending such an account, I think the

intuitive force of my analogies should, at the very least, give us pause in rejecting out of hand the

notion of a God that commands things for reasons much in the way that we command things for

reasons, but simply does so inerrantly.

§4

The express purpose of this paper was to show that DCT is immune to the Euthyphro

dilemma. What follows might be of only incidental interest. In this section, I aim to answer “So

what?”.

The defender of DCT will not be inclined to ask such a question. She will be happy to

have her theory guarded against an objection that has been widely regarded as incurably damning

to anyone hoping to defend DCT. But I am not, broadly speaking, a defender of DCT. I think it

is a rather awful theory. I think this for a straightforward reason: God may not exist. Resting

our ethical justification on his existence is dangerous, unless we're comfortable with the prospect

of our ethical justification being baseless, and I am not. Further, even if God does exist, our

access to his commands is notoriously shady, with a number of available sacred texts to choose

from and each of them open to vastly different interpretations and open to considerable disputes

concerning correct translation. Consequently, if we wish to be thoroughgoing DCTists, then we

8
I fear that this response is incoherent.
had either be remarkably convinced of our deeply held religious beliefs, so convinced that we

consider others beholden to them (and this would lack a degree of intellectual integrity and

modesty) or else we must remain content with massive indeterminacy in our ethical

justifications, resigned to an impotent quietism concerning objective moral truth. Again, these

may be satisfying to some, but they are dissatisfying to me. My point is simply this: the

problems with Divine Command Theory are practical, not logical. The Euthyphro dilemma (or

the anti-DCTist that employs it) purports to undermine DCT's logical foundations, but fails to do

so. DCT is, I think, logically coherent, absent further, more persuasive development of the

“difference in kind” objection. Nonetheless, DCT but lacks any of the practical virtues that

might rationally push us to endorse it over other logically coherent ethical systems.

So why defend it? Why not just let it rest? My answer to this is an uninformative

promissory note. I think theological voluntarism, in all its mildness and flexibility, deserves

more attention than it receives. I think there is a remarkable extent to which our moral discourse

and our moral practices rely upon a postulated authority-figure, and I do not take for granted that

this is a folly; similar insights, after all, are to be found in Kant and Nietzsche, at least one of

whom certainly did not regard morality as a sham. The Euthyphro dilemma, if it works, purports

to undermine any constitutive relationships between our apprehension (even if delusional) of

divine will, and the objective import of our moral beliefs, unless we are willing to discard the

practice of giving secular reasons for holding such beliefs. Consequently, if it worked, the

problem that the Euthyphro dilemma claims to pick up on would be venemous to any form of

theological voluntarism. But it doesn't work, so an exploration of the constitutive role of posited

divine will in our moral beliefs, which purport to have objective truth, can proceed unhindered

by the larger problems posed by the Euthyphro dilemma.

 Conclusion

My larger point has been a soberly logical thesis. There is nothing inconsistent about

holding that Φing is obligatory because God commands that we Φ and simultaneously holding

that God has reasons for commanding that we Φ. If this be granted, it must also be granted that

the Euthyphro dilemma has nothing damning to say about DCT, and nothing damning to say

about Theological voluntarism. DCT is a bad theory, but for practical reasons, not logical

reasons. Theological voluntarism might very well have some interesting things to tell us about

the real constituents of objectively true moral beliefs, but I have provided nothing like a

persuasive argument for such a claim. I have merely hoped to open the door to its logical

possibility; it is towards this end that I have sought to discharge the Euthyphro dilemma, and

establish that it is not worthy of our concern in evaluating a possible constitutive relationship

between divine will and objective moral truth.

Raleigh Miller
Georgia State University