those instincts. At the same time, when our principles or theories tell us to perform actions that are in conflict with our deepest feelings and intuitions, that is a reason to re-examine those principles and perhaps revise them or even reject them outright. Such a procedure apparently never occurred to Bin Laden, who either felt no sympathy for his victims, or was unflinchingly convinced of the righteousness of his cause.
The idea that moral rules be tested against our intuitions is analogous to the scientific method by which scientific theories are tested against experiments and direct observations. Sometimes a really fine and widely repeated experiment convinces everyone that a scientific theory cannot be right, and sometimes experimental results or observations are dismissed as faulty because they come into conflict with an otherwise well confirmed and excellent theory. There is no hard-and-fast way to decide how to go. How would all this play out in the case of ethics?
Here is a simple example to illustrate the procedure, before we move on to taking a look at the more prominent moral theories. Consider the so-called Golden Rule1, a moral rule dating from antiquity that appears in various forms in a variety of different ancient authors and traditions. It states: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What intuitions could be used as evidence against this rule? Put another way, what’s counterintuitive about it, if anything? Well, the Golden Rule implicitly assumes that everyone has the same preferences. That assumption seems a bit questionable. Suppose that you like backrubs. In fact, you’d like a backrub from pretty much anyone. The Golden Rule advises you to treat other people the way you would like to be treated. Since you’d like other people to give you unsolicited backrubs, you should, according to the Golden Rule, give everyone else a backrub, even if they didn’t ask for one. But some people don’t like backrubs, or don’t care for strangers touching them. Intuitively, it would be wrong to give backrubs to those people without their consent, or against their will. Since this intuition conflicts with the Golden Rule’s implication to administer unsolicited backrubs, we should conclude that maybe the Golden Rule is really iron pyrite after all.
You might respond that we should revise the Golden Rule to avoid the unwanted implication, or we should replace it with a more precise moral rule. Perhaps, Do unto others as they would have be done unto them, or some such. Of course, that formulation means we would have to give others whatever they ask of us, which is surely more than we should have to provide. That’s just how moral philosophy proceeds– we modify our moral views in light of compelling arguments and counterexamples, or sometimes go back to the drawing board altogether to come up with better theories.
1.2 Divine Command Theory (Is Morality Just What God Tells Me to Do?)
Morality could be like the law in this sense: an authority is needed to tell us what our moral duties are, and to enforce the rules. Without a lawgiver, a ruler to lay down the moral law, we are adrift with no deeper connection to right and wrong than our own transient preferences. Traditionally, God has been considered to be this moral authority. You might think that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. The need for God as a source of morality is often cited as a motivation–maybe the motivation–to be religious; that the ethical life is possible only within a religious context. It is endorsed, as we saw above, by Osama bin Laden, and promoted by no end of Christian ministers, pundits and politicians. It is well worth thinking through.
Divine command theory is not new, nor is it connected with any particular religion. Orthodox Jews subscribe to the 613 mitzvot2, the complete list of Yahweh’s commandments in the Torah, including not to gather grapes that have fallen to the ground, not to eat meat with milk, and not to wear garments of wool and linen mixed together. Christians recall the Ten Commandments3 that Yahweh gave to Moses or the instructions of Jesus to love God and also to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Muslims emphasize the value of having a good character, which is built by following the five pillars of Islam4: believing that there is no God but Allah, offering daily prayers, performing charity, engaging in fasting, and going on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Such actions and beliefs are all moral obligations as laid down by the deities of those respective religions.
The proposal that morality is essentially connected to religion has two chief components:
1 God loves (endorses, recommends, advocates) all good actions and hates (forbids, abjures, prohibits) all evil actions.
2 We can figure out which is which; that is, we can know what God loves and what he hates.
Let’s consider these in turn. Grant for the sake of argument that there is a morally perfect God, that is, there is a God who loves everything good and hates everything evil (for more on the attributes of God, see Chapter 3). For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn’t matter whether goodness/badness is primarily a quality of persons, actions, characters, or what have you. The notion of a perfectly good God is that his attitudes are in perfect sync with morality.
Plato discussed the idea that morality and religion are inseparable 2500 years ago in his dialogue Euthyphro5. In the dialogue, the characters of Socrates and Euthyphro try to figure out the nature of piety, that is, right action. After some back and forth, Euthyphro proposes that right action is what all the gods love, and evil actions are what all the gods hate. In this way he explicitly ties morality to the choices and preferences of the gods.
Plato was no atheist–by all accounts he, like his mentor Socrates, respected and accepted the official Greek gods6. Nevertheless, Plato thought that even if the gods are perfectly good, that fact is not enough to explain morality. Plato scrutinizes Euthyphro’s connection between morality and what the gods love by raising this very subtle and interesting question, here phrased for modern monotheists:
Are things good because God loves them, or does he love them because they are good?
Even though God loves everything good and hates everything bad, the Euthyphro question presents two very different options about God’s love.
Option A. Things are good because God loves them. This means that it is God’s love that makes things good, and his dislike that makes things bad. Prior to, or considered independently of, God’s judgment, things don’t have moral qualities at all. If it weren’t for God, nothing would be right or wrong, good or bad. Moral properties are the result of God’s decisions, like candy sprinkles he casts over the vanilla ice cream of the material world.
Option B. God loves good things because they are good. On this option, things are good (or bad) antecedently to, and independently of, God. In other words, things already have their moral properties, and God, who is an infallible judge of such matters, always loves the good things and hates the bad things. Morality is an independent objective standard apart from God. God always responds appropriately to this standard (loving all the good stuff and hating the bad), but morality is separate from, and unaffected by, his judgments.
So which is it? Option A, where God creates the moral qualities of things, or Option B, where God is the perfect ethical thermometer, whose opinions accurately reflect the moral temperature of whatever he judges? Following Plato, here are some interrelated reasons to prefer Option B.
First, think about something you love. You love your mom? The Philadelphia Eagles? Taylor Swift? Bacon cheeseburgers? Your pet dog? French roast coffee? All good choices. Now, reflect on why you love them. You can give reasons, right? You love your mom, but not everyone’s mom, because she raised you, cares for you, is kind to you, etc. Other moms didn’t do that. You love Taylor Swift because of her charisma, upbeat lyrics, and catchy pop hooks. You love French roast coffee over milder roasts because you really like the pungent, smoky, bitter brew it produces. You get the idea. In other words, your
