A Stoic thesis

Combine these two rather Stoic theses:

1. No one can make the fully virtuous person worse off

2. Doing what is morally wrong always makes you worse off

and you get:

3. No one can make the fully virtuous person do what is morally wrong.

It is going to be crucial to this post that (3) includes cases of inculpably doing what is morally wrong. I myself think (1) is false, say for the that Aristotle cites, namely that severe pain makes even the virtous worse off. But nonetheless I want to defend (3).

It may be possible to first destroy a virtuous person’s virtue, and then get them to do what is morally wrong. Hitting someone on the head or brainwashing them can severely damage the psyche in a way that can remove the rational habits that constitute virtue. I do not count this a counterexample to (3), because in this case when the victim performs the wrong action, they have previously lost their virtue.

One might try to rule out the case of head injury and brainwashing by restricting (3) to culpable wrongs, but I don’t want to do that. I want to defend (3) in the case of inculpable wrongs, too.

A consequence of (3) is a fairly strong source incompatibilism about our action. Not only is it that neural manipulation cannot make you perform a free action, but it cannot make you perform an action. This fits well with dualism, but does not require it, because it might be that brain states that constitute acts of will have to have functional characteristics incompatible with outside control.

As a final clarification, I understand “making” as reliable, but not necessarily 100% reliable. Someone with significant free will cannot be 100% reliably made to do wrong, even if they are not virtuous. But at the same time, while a fully virtuous person cannot be reliably tempted away from right action, they might still have significant free will and be able to do wrong, so a temptation might unreliably get them to do wrong. Furthermore, I am thinking of “making” on something like a specific occasion. Thus, perhaps, if you tempt a virtuous person a million times, while restoring their brain to the pre-temptation state between temptations, by the law of large numbers you can expect them to fail at least once.

Let’s think about (3) some more.

Threats aren’t going to reliably get the fully virtuous person do the wrong thing. Sometimes, it is reasonable to bow to a threat. If someone holds a gun to your head and tells you to cover the side of your neighbor’s house with a giant smiley face graffiti, it’s reasonable to go along with it. But morality is reasonable, and where it is reasonable to bow to a threat, doing so is not only not culpable but simply not wrong. Indeed, it would typically be a failure of respect for human life to refuse to paint the graffiti when one’s life is threatened. In cases, however, where it is unreasonable to knuckle under, the fully virtuous person will reliably withstand the threat.

Physical control of another’s body or brain isn’t going to produce morally wrong action, because it doesn’t produce action at all. It is not wrong to kill someone by being pushed off a cliff on top of them, because it’s not an action to fall off a cliff. Similarly, if someone implants a remote control for one’s muscles, even if in the brain, then the resulting muscle spasms are not actions, and hence are not morally wrong actions.

Cases of omissions are interesting. It is easy to make someone fail to do what they promised, say by imprisoning them. If one thinks that such a failure counts as an inculpable wrongdoing, and if (3) is supposed to apply to omissions as well, then we have a counterexample. I do want (3) to apply to omissions. But I think that all that’s morally required by a promise is a reasonable amount of effort—where what counts as reasonable depends on the case. If you promise to come to a party but are in the hospital after a serious accident, it’s not morally required—indeed, it’s morally forbidden—that you rip the IV out of your arm and drag yourself on hands knees to the party. Indeed, (3) is a part of my reason for thinking that promises only require reasonable effort, so this is the first example where I have (3) giving us evidence for a substantive moral thesis. I think something similar is true in the case of commands, legislation and the like. You can’t ask for more than reasonable effort! Asking for more adds insult to injury. The parents whose children starve because the parents were unjustly imprisoned have not done wrong in failing to feed them.

Cases of ignorance are also interesting. If Alice is serving wine to her guests and Bob pours poison in the wine whe she isn’t looking, some might say that Alice has done wrong in poisoning her guests. Certainly, actual-result act utilitarianism implies this. But so much the worse for actual-result act utilitarianism. It is much better to say that Alice has done no wrong, as long as it was reasonable for her to have no suspicion of Bob. Cases of ignorance of through-and-through moral facts, on the other hand, are arguably incompatible with full virtue.

Where I think (3) becomes most interesting is in cases where we have a normative power over what is right or wrong for another to do. Using our normative powers, we can make someone who would otherwise have done wrong not be doing wrong. There is a story of a hasid whose house is being robbed, and when the thief is carrying his property away, the hasid yells: “I renounce my property rights.” In doing so, the hasid releases the thief from the duties of restitution, and makes it be the case that the thief is not sinning by continuing to carry the goods away.

Are there cases where we can use our normative powers to reliably make someone do wrong? Definitely. You can know that someone under your authority will very likely refuse to follow a certain command, and you can nonetheless issue the command. But this is obviously a case of someone who is lacking full virtue.

I think the best bet for using our normative powers to reliably make someone perfectly virtuous do wrong is when our exercise of normative powers creates a duty but does so in a way that the perfectly virtuous person does not know about. For instance, one might command the fully virtuous person in circumstances where they will likely not hear the command. Or one might pass legislation that they won’t know about. There are two ways to defend (3) in these cases. The first is to have a communication condition on commands and legislation—they are only morally binding when person subject to them either is informed about them or ought to be informed about them. The second is to say that all that’s morally required is that one make a reasonable effort to obey commands and laws in general, not that one make a reasonable effort to obey each specific command or law (since if one doesn’t know about a command or law, one doesn’t need to make a reasonable effort to obey it). I somewhat prefer the first option of a communication condition—the vicious lawbreaker does wrong in disobeying a specific law, and not just law in general (though according to James 2:10, they are also doing wrong in disobeying law in general).

In any case, I think (3) puts some significant constraints on the shape of moral obligation and the nature of action, but these constraints seem defensible. Though maybe I am failing to notice some better counterexample.

Divine speech acts

Suppose random quantum processes result in deep marks on a stone that spell out:

• Thou shalt not eat goat. – God

What would need to be true for it to be the case that God said (or wrote) that, thereby forbidding us to eat goat?

I assume that God always cooperates with creaturely causation, so divine causation is involved in the above production. However, such divine cooperation with the production of something that looks like an inscription or sounds like an utterance does not suffice to make it be the case that God said the thing. Imagine that a cult leader makes the above inscription. God is still cooperating with the cult leader’s causality, but we don’t want to attribute the inscription to God’s authorship.

One obvious answer is by analogy to our language. A part of what makes a performance a speech act of a particular sort is a certain kind of intention, e.g., that the performance be taken to be that sort of speech act. So maybe it just depends on God’s intentions. If God merely intends cooperation with quantum processes, there is no inscription, just random marks on stone that happen to look like an inscription. But if God intends the marks to be taken to be an inscription, they are an inscription.

This solution, however, is unhelpful given divine simplicity. The intention is a contingent feature of God, and on divine simplicity the contingency of contingent divine features is always grounded in some contingent arrangement of creatures. There cannot be two worlds that are exactly alike in their created aspects but where God has different intentions in the two worlds. So given divine simplicity, there has to be a characterization of what makes the marks a divine command in terms of what creation is like. (My view of divine intentions is, roughly, that God intends F in doing A iff intending F would be a good reason for God to do A. This presupposes divine omnirationality.)

Here is one possibility.

1. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act if and only if it was directly produced by God without secondary causes.

But this seems mistaken. Imagine that in the sight of a tribe, God created a stone and a stylus ex nihilo, and then miraculously moved the stylus in such a way as to inscribe the prohibition on eating goat. Then, surely, the members of the tribe upon seeing the stylus moving through the air and gouging clear text in the stone would be right to attribute the message to God. But the inscription was not directly produced by God: it was produced by means of a stylus.

Perhaps:

2. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act if and only if it was a deterministic result of something done by God without secondary causes.

This still seems a bit too restrictive. Imagine that while God used the stylus to inscribe the stone in our previous story, he nonetheless allowed for ordinary quantum randomness in the interaction between the hard stylus and the softer stone, which randomness ensured that there was a tiny probability that no inscription would result—that, say, stylus atoms would quantum tunnel through the stone atoms.

One might replace “deterministic” with “extremely probable”. But just how probable would it have to be?

Here is a different suggestion that seems to me more promising.

3. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act to humans if and only if a normal human who knew all the metaphysical and physical facts about the production of this act, as well as the human social context of the production, would reasonably take it to be a divine speech act.

This suggestion allows for the possibility that a normal human would be mistaken about whether something is a divine speech act—but the mistake would then be traced back to a mistake about the relevant metaphysical, physical and social facts.

The applicability of (3) is still difficult. Take the initial example where the apparent divine prohibition on eating goat appears from quantum randomness. Would a reasonable and normal human who knew it to have appeared from quantum randomness with ordinary divine cooperation of the sort found in all creaturely causation think it to be a divine speech act? I don’t know. I don’t know that I am a reasonable and normal human, and I don’t actually know what to think about this.

Do we have normative powers?

A normative power is supposed to be a power to directly change normative reality. We can, of course, indirectly change normative reality by affecting the antecedents of conditional norms: By unfairly insulting you, I get myself to have a duty to apologize, but that is simply due to a pre-existing duty to apologize for all unfair insults.

It would be attractive to deny our possession of normative powers. Typical examples of normative powers are promises, commands, permissions, and requests. But all of these can seemingly be reduced to conditional norms, such as:

• Do whatever you promise

• Do whatever you are validly commanded

• Refrain from ϕing unless permitted

• Treat what you are requested as a reason for doing it.

One might think that one can still count as having a normative power even if it is reducible to prior conditional norms. Here is a reason to deny this. I could promise to send you a dollar on any day on which your dog barks. Then your dog has the power to obligate me to send you a dollar, a power reducible to the norm arising from my promise. But dogs do not have normative powers. Hence an ability to change normative reality by affecting the antecedents of a prior conditional norm is not a normative power.

If this argument succeeds, if a power to affect normative reality is reducible to a non-normative power (such as the power to bark) and a prior norm, it is not a normative power. Are there any normative powers, then, powers not reducible in this way?

I am not sure. But here is a non-conclusive reason to think so. It seems we can invent new useful ways of affecting normative reality, within certain bounds. For instance, normally a request comes along with a permission—a request creates a reason for the other party to do the requested action and while removing any reasons of non-consent against the performance. But there are rare contexts where it is useful to create a reason without removing reasons of non-consent. An example is “If you are going to kill me, kill me quickly.” One can see this as creating a reason for the murderer to kill one quickly, without removing reasons of non-consent against killing (or even killing quickly). Or, for another example, normally a general’s command in an important matter generates a serious obligation. But there could be cases where the general doesn’t want a subordinate to feel very guilty for failing to fulfill the command, and it would be useful for the general to make a new commanding practice, a “slight command” which generates an obligation, but one that it is only slightly wrong to disobey.

There are approximable and non-approximable promises. When I promise to bake you seven cookies, and I am short on flour, normally I have reason to bake you four. But there are cases where there is no reason to bake you four—perhaps you are going to have seven guests, and you want to serve them the same sweet, so four are useless to you (maybe you hate cookies). Normally we leave such decisions to common sense and don’t make them explicit. However, we could also imagine making them explicit, and we could imagine promises with express approximability rules (perhaps when you can’t do cookies, cupcakes will be a second best; perhaps they won’t be). We can even imagine complex rules of preferability between different approximations to the promise: if it’s sunny, seven cupcakes is a better approximation than five cookies, while if it’s cloudy, five cookies is a better approximation. These rules might also specify the degree of moral failure that each approximation represents. It is, plausibly, within our normative authority over ourselves to issue promises with all sorts of approximability rules, and we can imagine a society inventing such.

Intuitively, normally, if one is capable of a greater change of normative reality, one is capable of a lesser one. Thus, if a general has the authority to create a serious obligation, they have the authority to create a slight one. And if you are capable of both creating a reason and providing a permission, you should be able to do one in isolation from the other. If you have the authority to command, you have the standing to create non-binding reasons by requesting.

We could imagine a society which starts with two normative powers, promising and commanding, and then invents the “weaker” powers of requesting and permitting, and an endless variety of normative subtlety.

It seems plausible to think that we are capable of inventing new, useful normative practices. These, of course, cannot be a normative power grab: there are limits. The epistemic rule of thumb for determining these limits is that the powers do not exceed ones that we clearly have.

It seems a little simpler to think that we can create new normative powers within predetermined limits than that all our norms are preset, and we simply instance their antecedents. But while this is a plausible argument for normative powers, it is not conclusive.

Divine desire ethical theories are false

On divine desire variants of divine command ethics, necessarily an action is right just in case it accords with God’s what God wants.

But it seems:

1. Necessarily, if God commands an action, the action is right.

2. Possibly, God commands an action but does not want one to do it.

Given (1) and (2), divine desire ethics is false.

I think everyone (and not just divine command theorists) should agree about (1): it is a part of the concept of God that he is authorative in such a way that whatever he commands is right.

What about (2)? Well, consider a felix culpa case where a great good would come from obedience to God and an even greater one would come from disobedience, and in the absence of a command one would have only a tiny good. Given such a situation, God could command the action. However, it seems that a perfectly good being’s desires are perfectly proportioned to the goods involved. Thus, in such a situation, God would desire that one disobey.

This is related to the important conceptual point about commands, requests and consentings that these actions can go against the characteristic desires that go with them. In the case of a human being, when there is a conflict between what a human wants and what the human commands, requests or consents to, typically it is right to go with what is said, but sometimes there is room for paternalistically going with the underlying desire (and sometimes we rightly go against both word and desire). But paternalism to God is never right.

Consent and inner acts

Some people think that a constituent (whole or partial) of consent is some sort of inner mental act of agreement with the thing one consents to. Here is an argument against this:

1. A request or command does not require an inner mental act of agreement.

2. Someone who requests or commands something necessarily consents to its performance.

3. So, consent does not require an inner mental act of agreement.

(One can also qualify the requests, commands and consents as valid in all the premises, and the argument remains sound, I think.)

That said, consent does require some inner component, as does request or command. Consent requires a relevant communicative act to be performed intentionally. Similarly, to request or command something is not just to utter some sounds (or make some gestures, etc.), but to do so intending to be taken as requesting or commanding.

Divine hiddenness and divine command ethics

Once upon a time, there was an isolated village in the mountains. It had a large electronic billboard. Every so often, unsigned demands appeared on the billboard. Most of these demands seemed reasonable, and the villagers find themselves with an ingrained feeling that they should do what the billboard says, and typically they do so, often deferring to the billboard even when the reasonableness of its demands is less clear. There were two main theories about the billboard. Some villagers said that thousands of miles away there was an authoritative and benevolent monarch who had cameras and microphones hidden around the village, and who issued commands via the billboard. Others said that there was no monarch, but centuries ago, as a science fair project, a clever teenager wrote a machine learning program that offered good advice for the village—a program that wasn’t sophisticated enough to count as really intelligent, but nonetheless its deliverances were quite helpful—and hooked it up to the billboard, and eventually the origins of the system were largely forgotten. The evidence is such that neither group of villagers is irrational in holding to their theory.

Suppose that the monarch theory was in fact the correct one.

Question: Did the monarch’s demands constitute valid commands for the villagers who accepted the software theory?

Response: No. Anonymous demands are not valid commands even when they are issued by a genuine authority. A valid command needs to make it evident whom it comes from. When the authority chooses not to make a subordinate be aware of the demand as an authoritative command, the demand is not an authoritative command.

Objection: Given the widely ingrained feeling that the billboard should be obeyed, even the villagers who accepted the software theory had a duty to obey the billboard. That was just part of the governing structure of the village: to obey the billboard.

Response: Perhaps. But even so, the duty to obey the billboard (at least over the villagers who accept the software theory) wasn’t grounded in the monarch’s authority, but in either the authority of the individual’s conscience or the law-giving force of village custom.

Question: Did the monarch’s demands constitute valid commands for the villagers who accepted the monarch theory?

Response: I am not sure. I think a case can be made in either direction.

A problem for non-command divine command theories

Some divine “command” theories do not ground obligations in commands as such, but in divine mental states, such as his willings, intentions or desires. It’s occurred to me that there is a down-side to such theories. Independently of accepting a divine command theory of any sort, I think the following is plausible (pace Murphy):

1. All humans have a duty to obey any commands from God.

But if obligations are grounded in divine mental states, there is the following possibility: God commands one to ϕ even though God does not will, intend or desire that one ϕ, and so I am not obligated to ϕ. The actuality of this possibility would not fit with (1). In fact, the case of the Sacrifice of Isaac appears precisely such: God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but did not will, intend or desire for Abraham to do so. God only willed, intended and desired for Abraham to prepare to sacrifice Isaac.

In my previous post, I was happy with the corollary of the divine intention account of duty that Abraham did not have a duty to sacrifice Isaac. But given the plausibility of (1), I should not have been happy with that.

The command version of divine command theory obviously verifies (1). So do natural law theories on which obedience to God is a part of our nature (either explicitly or as a consequence of some more general duty).

Divine speech acts and classical theism

Here is a question I have wondered about and have never heard or seen much discussion of:

1. What does it mean to say that God engaged in some speech act, such as commanding or asserting?

The more anthropomorphic one’s theism, the easier the question can be answered, because the closer the analogy between divine speech acts and ours. But the setting that interests me here is classical theism (both because it’s the truth theory of God and because it’s more challenging). In particular, let’s take on board divine immutability and simplicity.

Let’s think about the human case first. We’re going to have to pay close attention to such factors as intention and context. Thus, the same words in the same tone are an assertion in an ordinary conversation but not an assertion when spoken on a stage. The same handwritten sentence can be a command in one case and in another can be a handwriting exercise. Theorists will differ as to the balance between intention and context in the correct theory. But I think it is easy to argue that an important part of the distinction between assertion and play-acting or between command and handwriting exercise will be constituted by intentions. For instance, it is not simply being on a stage that makes one’s words not be assertions. The actor on stage can yell “Fire!” upon seeing the flames licking the back of the room, and that will be an assertion—even if that word happens to be exactly what the script calls for at this time. (It may be an assertion that is not taken up, though, much as an assertion might not be heard in a loud rooom.)

Very roughly speaking, to engage in a speech act of kind K, one has to form the intention to be taken by one’s audience as engaging in a speech act of kind K.

Now, there are natural rock formations that look like faces. Suppose that somewhere in the solar system there is a natural rock formation that spells out “God exists”, and one day an English speaking astronaut comes across it. Is it an assertion by God?

It is certainly something made by God. For God made everything other than himself. But did God make it with the intention that it be taken as an assertion? Or is it just a formation of rocks intended for some other purpose than to be taken as an assertion? (Presumably, it’s not a handwriting exercise, since God doesn’t need to practice being already perfect.)

On more anthropomorphic theisms, there is no special problem here about the God case. God can form the intention to make an assertion just as a human being can or, just as a human being, he can fail to form that intention. But if divine simplicity is correct, then there are no contingent intrinsic divine properties. There is just God. Any contingency is on the side of creation. In particular, there cannot be two worlds that are exactly alike except with respect to divine intentions intrinsic to God. Divine intentions must supervene on creation and on necessary truths about God. But what contingent facts about creation and necessary truths about God can make it be that the rock formation is or is not a divine assertion?

One might try to make use of divine reasons. I have argued that divine simplicity entails divine omnirationality: whenever God does something, he does it for all the good reasons there are for doing it, rather than choosing which of the good reasons to act on. Now, suppose that in fact the astronaut’s faith in God is strengthened by the rock formation. That’s a good thing. Goods provide reasons. So, God has a good reason to make the rock formation in order to strengthen the astronaut’s faith. But the astronaut’s faith is presumably strengthened by her taking the formation as a divine assertion. So, God has a reason to have the astronaut take the formation as a divine assertion. And, thus, by omnirationality, God is acting on that reason, and the rock formation is an assertion.

But take a variant case. Our astronaut lands on a planet with a rock formation that says “Kneel!” But, now, kneeling is both good and bad for the astronaut. Perhaps it is spiritually good but physically bad, because our astronaut has bad knees. The astronaut takes it as a command. That’s a good and a bad thing: she kneels, hurts her knees, and the mission is in jeopardy. But she spent a few minutes in prayer, and that was good for her. And, in fact, in a complex world there will generally be pluses and minuses of anything. Even in the case of the “God exists!” rock formation, there is some benefit to believing without such overt signs, perhaps a greater maturity of faith.

We could try to make the intention condition work something like this: God counts as intending that something assertion-like or command-like (structured symbolically in the right way) be taken as an assertion or command provided it’s good in some way that it be taken as such. But that seems overbroad. Or we could say it’s an assertion or command provided it’s good on balance that it be taken as such. But when we are dealing with incommensurable values, there may be no “on balance”. These objections aren’t fatal: but they point to a need to do serious philosophical work here.

Here is a possible different solution. We don’t need to advert to speaker intentions in every case to figure out whether something is a speech act of the right sort. When yelled from the stage, we may need to know whether “Fire!” is intended as a warning or as part of the script. But when yelled from the seats, there is no reasonable doubt. There are contexts where no reasonable person in the relevant audience would fail to take something as a certain kind of speech act. You come across the Summa Theologica in a heath. Of course, it’s a speech act, of whatever sort a theological discourse is (a series of arguments and assertions). Every reasonable person who knew the language (that’s perhaps the relevant audience component) would take it as such.

Perhaps we can now say this:

2. In contexts where every reasonable person in the relevant audience who knew the relevant context sufficiently well would take something to be a divine speech act of a certain kind, it is a primary case of a divine speech act of that kind.

For primary divine speech acts, we need some kind of reasonable luminosity: they need to be the sort of thing that one couldn’t reasonably doubt to be divine speech acts if one knew the relevant circumstances. Perhaps God builds into our nature an ability to recognize divine speech acts.

And then we have derivative cases of divine speech acts, which are when the initial audience is enlarged by means of the members of the initial audience becoming heralds of the message, and the process continues. When the herald is being faithful to the message, what the herald says counts as a speech act of the original speaker. So, the heralds pass on the word of God. And since the heralds are human, their intentions are relevant and raise no deep ontological concerns.

This story would lead to a rather restrictive view of divine speech acts. The rock formations, in a vast universe, could be reasonably doubted. So they aren’t primary divine speech acts. The primary divine speech acts may, rather, be more like cases of prophecy, where God makes it reasonably impossible for the prophet to doubt what kind of a speech act it is.

I am not very happy with any of the stories above. This is just a vague and inchoate start. I don’t really want to finish off this task. It would make a really interesting philosophical theology dissertation, though.

Divine command theory and atheism

Suppose that the captain impersonates an admiral and yells: “Turn hard to starboard!” The sailors ought to turn hard to starboard and the captain had the authority to command them this. But nonetheless the captain has failed to issue a valid order. For in order to issue a valid order, the captain needs to make herself heard as the captain. The sailors’ obligation to turn to starboard is not a command-obligation but rather is an obligation of conscience to do what one believes, correctly or not, to be the commands of legitimate authority. A sailor who refused to turn would be acting badly, but would not be disobeying an order: she wouldn’t be disobeying the captain’s order, since the captain did not order anything qua captain, or the admiral’s order, since the admiral didn’t order anything.

The same thing would be true, though perhaps less clearly, if the admiral impersonated the captain and told the crew to turn to starboard. The admiral had the authority to issue the order (or so I assume), but to do that she would have to have made herself heard as the admiral.

Similarly, if the captain is a telepath and induces in the helmsman a strong moral belief that he should turn the ship to starboard, no order has been issued to the helmsman. If the helmsman refuses to turn, he is disobeying conscience but he is not disobeying the captain.

Now, consider the command version of the divine command theory: God’s commands (rather than will) define moral obligation. Now we have a prima facie problem with atheists. The atheist believes in an obligation to refrain from stealing, but is not aware of it as a divine command. Therefore, it seems that no command has been validly issued to the atheist: the case seems relevantly like that of the telepath captain. Thus it follows that on the command version of the divine command theory, the atheist has no obligations.

This was a bit too quick, however. For a promulgation condition on commands that requires actual cognitive uptake is too strong. If the captain is yelling orders as captain but the helmsman has deliberately plugged her ears so as not to hear the orders, the helmsman’s failure to hear does not impugn the validity of the orders.

But suppose instead that the helmsman is hard of hearing due to a recent explosion, and the captain whispers the order while knowing the helmsman won’t hear it. In this case, the order is invalid. It seems, roughly, that if the captain could easily make the command heard as her command but does not do so, and the failure to hear it as her command is not something the other party is antecedently at fault for, then the command is invalid.

Now, it seems that there are atheists who are not at fault for their atheism, and whose failure to hear divine commands as divine commands is not something they are at fault for. But God could easily (everything is easy to an omnipotent being) make them hear them as such. So, on the command version of divine command theory, these atheists have never been validly commanded, and hence have no obligations—which is clearly false.

Maybe I will get some pushback on the claim that there are atheists who are not at fault for atheism. Let’s consider, then, the case of Alice, a life-long atheist who is at fault for her atheism and who was never aware of any divine command as a divine command. Then, at some point t₁ of time, Alice did the first thing that made her be at fault for her atheism and/or her failure to be aware of divine commands as divine commands. Perhaps an argument for theism was being offered to her by Bob, but she refused to listen to Bob out of racism.

Now to be at fault, you have to culpably do something wrong. And, according to divine command theory, the wrong is always a violation of a (valid) divine command. So, at t₁, Alice’s action was the violation of a valid divine command. But at t₁, Alice wasn’t aware of the command as one from God, since we’ve assumed that Alice was never aware of any divine command as a divine command. And Alice’s failure to be aware of the command as one from God was not due to any antecedent fault of hers, since we have assumed that t₁ is the time of Alice’s first action that made her be at fault with respect to this failure.

Thus, it seems that the divine command theorist who takes the command part of the theory seriously has to say that those who are now atheists are atheists because they disobeyed a command from God which they were aware of as a command from God. This is deeply implausible. It is way more implausible than the already not very plausible response to the hiddenness argument that says that all atheists are morally guilty for their atheism.

But perhaps we want to distinguish epistemic from moral fault, and say that a command can still be valid if it fails to be heard due to an epistemic fault that the commander could have easily overcome, even when that epistemic fault does not correspond to a moral one. I do not think this is plausible. Being unable to parse complex sentences might be an epistemic fault. But if I issue a complex command to someone I know to be incapable of parsing such complex sentences, when I could easily have used a simpler sentence with the same content, I do not validly command.

Command ethics

I think one of the most powerful objections to divine command theory is MacIntyre’s question as to which divine attributes make it be the case that the obligatory is what God commands. It’s not God’s creating us: for imagine a naturalistic universe where a crazy scientist creates people—surely the crazy scientist’s commands do not constitute obligations. It’s not God’s being omnipotent—that just seems irrelevant. Omniscience also doesn’t seem to help. Etc.

Here’s a theory that just occurred to me which avoids this problem:

• the obligatory is what is validly commanded by someone.

This is a command theory instead of a divine command theory. The difficulty with this theory is giving an account of a valid command that does not proceed by saying that a valid command is one that it is obligatory to obey. Perhaps, though, one could suppose that there is a fundamental property of non-derivative authority (actually, a relational property: non-derivative authority over x with respect to R) that some persons have. For instance, God has this property in a very broad and non-derivative way, but God might not be the only one (maybe parents have it with respect to children, and governments with respect to people). This theory solves the MacIntyre problem with divine command theory. And while there is a cost to having a primitive account of non-derivative authority, there is some reason to think that even if we grounded obligations in something other than commands, we might still have to take non-derivative authority to be primitive.

Of course, without God the command theory is just implausible: clearly there are ordinary obligations we have that do not come from the commands of other ordinary persons.

I certainly don’t endorse the theory. But it’s worth thinking about, and in particular it’s worth thinking whether it’s not superior to divine command theory.

A hypothesis about authority and duties of care

Parents have the authority to command their children and parents have a special duty to care for children. Officers have special duties of care for those under their command. The state likewise has special duties of care for those under its jurisdiction. Special duties of care do not imply authority: adult siblings have special duties of care to one another but do not have jurisdiction over one another. But we can hypothesize that authority implies special duties of care.

Why would that be so? One possibility is that authority always arises out of special duties of care: in some cases, in order to properly care for y one must have authority over y. That fits neatly with the parent-child case, but doesn't fit with the military case, where the authority seems explanatory of the duties of care, or at least not posterior to it. But in the military case we might say this: in paradigmatic cases (putting to one side the case of mercenaries), the officer's authority derives from the state's authority. And the state's authority may well arise out of special duties of care for its citizens, whom the state can thus induct, voluntarily or not, into the military.

This more general pattern can fit cases which don't fit the simple version of the authority-care hypothesis. For instance, perhaps, a judge has commanding authority over a convicted prisoner but does not have special duties of care for the prisoner. But the judge's authority derives from the state's authority, which is explained by the state's special duties towards its citizens. So the more refined hypothesis is something like this: The authority to command is connected with special duties of care, but the special duties of care need not be had by the one who has the authority to command--the authority to command may have been deputized from another who had both the authority and the special duties.

But what about this case: Sometimes a state will imprison those who are not under its care but who have harmed its citizens. One example is prisoners of war. Another is the case of seizing a criminal from another country, as in the case of Manuel Noriega. I could wimpily say that the hypothesis is just a general rule with exceptions. But perhaps what I should instead say is that the case of prisoners of war and criminals seized from abroad is not a case of authority to command and hence no exception to the hypothesis. While an imprisoned citizen does violate duties of obedience to the state in escaping, the prisoner of war or criminal seized from abroad do not violate any such duties of obedience in escaping. There may be a limited commanding authority, however, derived from duties of care. Thus, an officer in charge of a prisoner of war camp might have commanding authority in respect of keeping order at food lines. And in even other cases there may be moral reasons to obey not because of authority but in order to maintain order, which is good in itself.

So let's suppose the hypothesis is correct. We now come to two of the most interesting cases: God and self. If the hypothesis is true, then God's absolute commanding authority over us derives from God's duty to love us. That's surprising, but may be right. The case of self is even more interesting. While we may not, strictly speaking, have commanding authority over ourselves (though "promises to self" might be an example), the authority we have over ourselves goes beyond most cases of commanding authority. Does that authority, too, derive from duties to care for ourselves? I like that idea, but many will not like the idea of duties to care for ourselves.

Assertions and other illocutionary acts

I used to think one could get by without assertions in a society, using only promises. Here's the trick I had in mind. Instead of asserting "The sky is blue", one first promises to utter a truth, and then one utters (without asserting!) "The sky is blue." This has sufficiently similar normative effects to actually asserting "The sky is blue" that a practice like this could work. This observation could then lead to further speculation that promises are more fundamental than assertions.

But that speculation would, I now think, be quite mistaken. The reason is that we do two things with a promise. First, we create a moral reason for ourselves. Second, we communicate the creation of that moral reason to our interlocutors. Both parts are central to the practice of promises: the first is important for rationally constraining the speaker's activity and the second is important for making it rational for the listener to depend on the speaker. But communicating that we created a moral reason is very much like asserting a proposition--viz., the proposition that we created a moral reason of such and such a type. Consequently, promises depend on something that, while not quite assertion, is sufficiently akin to assertion that we should not take promises as more fundamental than assertions.

A similar phenomenon is present in commands, requests and permissions. With commands, requests and permissions we attempt to create or remove reasons in the listener, but we additionally--and crucially--communicate the creation or removal to the listener. Assertions, promises, permissions, commands and requests seem to be the pragmatically central speech acts. And they all involve communicating a proposition. Assertion involves little if anything beyond this communication. In the case of the other four, the proposition is normative, and the speech act when successful also makes that proposition be true. For instance, to promise to do A involves communicating that one has just created a moral reason for oneself to do A, while at the same time making this communicated proposition be true.

So something assertion-like is involved in all these pragmatically important speech acts, but they are not reducible to assertion. However if we were able to create and destroy the relevant reasons directly at will, we wouldn't need promises, commands, requests or permissions. We could just create or destroy the reasons, and then simply assert that we had done so. But our ability to create and destroy reasons is limited. I can create a reason for you by requesting that you do something, but I can't create a reason for you by simply willing the reason into existence. (Compare: I can make a cake by baking, but not by simply willing the cake into existence.) However I can create and destroy reasons through speech acts that simultaneously communicate that creation and destruction, and that's how promises, commands, requests and permissions work.

Weak promises

Commanding is meant to create an obligating reason for another, while requesting is meant to create a non-obligating one. Promising is meant to create an obligating reason for self. There is a natural spot in illocutionary space, then, for a speech act meant to create a non-obligating reason for self, a speech act type that stands to promising as requesting does to commanding.

We would expect that when I have a normative power, I also have the corresponding weaker powers. If a legislature can bind under pain of ten years' imprisonment, they can bind under pain of a week's imprisonment. If I can create an obligating reason for myself, I can create a non-obligating reason for myself. That's another reason to think that we would have the "weak promise" speech act that creates non-obligating reasons.

I am not sure we have good phrases to express weak promises. We can approximate the force of a weak promise by weaselly promissory wordage like "I'll try to do this" or "I'll take your needs into account".

A practical liar paradox in two words

I saw a woman with a tattoo that said only: CAVEAT LECTOR.

Illocutionary force and propositions

Suppose I say to Bill: "Make all of your papers be between two and four pages." Bill hands in an eight page paper for his first assignment. I rebuke him and he apologizes. He then hands in another eight page paper for his second. When I rebuke him, he says: "You told me to bring it about that all my papers be between two and four pages. With my first paper I ensured that the proposition that all my papers are between two and four pages is false. Sorry! By the time of my second paper, it was too late to undo this: no matter what length of paper I wrote, that proposition would still be false. So I might as well write the length that I like."

Bill's mistake was thinking that the content of my command was the proposition that all his papers be between two and four pages. I didn't command that proposition. Rather, I commanded distributively of each of his papers that it be between two and four pages.

This means that we should not analyze my speech act as having a propositional content plus an illocutionary force. The content of the speech act wasn't a proposition, but something else. Perhaps the content of the speech act was an ordered pair of properties, the property P of being one of Bill's papers, and the property L of being between two and four pages in length. And the illocutionary force was of something one might call distributive command. Successful distributive command in respect of a pair of properties P and L creates for each instance x of P a reason to make x have L.

There are, I think, assertion-like speech acts that also have such a non-propositional content. For instance, assertoric endorsement. A paradigm case: I endorse what you are about to assert. The content of assertoric endorsement is a property which is supposed to be had by one or more propositions—say, the property of being soon asserted by you—and when successful, the assertoric endorsement makes you stand behind each of these propositions as if you asserted it. This kind of assertoric endorsement is distributive.

I wish I knew what kinds of entities can be contents of speech acts. The above suggests that some speech acts have propositions as contents, some have pairs of properties, some have single properties. There must be many other options.

Commands and requests

One way to help out a sceptic about something is by arguing that what she is sceptical about is way more widespread than she thinks. Of course, that's a risky strategy, since instead of her scepticism disappearing, she might just widen its scope. Here's one example of this risky strategy.

Authority sceptics are sceptical that another person's commands can generate obligations for us, except in certain unproblematic ways (a command from someone trustworthy might provide epistemic reason to think that the commanded action is independently obligatory; when one has reason to believe that others will follow the command, there might be reasons to coordinate one's activity with theirs; etc.). There is something seemingly magical about generating obligations for another just by commanding.

But isn't it equally magical that we can generate non-obligating reasons for another just by requesting, or obligating reasons for self just by promising? Yet it seems quite absurd to be a request or promise sceptic.

A dilemma for divine command theory

Either God does or does not have moral obligations.

If he has moral obligations, divine command theory seems to be false. Divine command theory comes in two versions: command theory and will theory. On command theory, an action is obligatory if and only if God commands it to one. But no one can impose obligations on himself by commands (one can impose obligations on oneself by promises, of course). On will theory, an action is obligatory if and only if God wills (in a relevant sense) one to do it. But what one wills oneself to do does not impose an obligation. That's all I'll say about this horn, though more can probably be said.

If God has no moral obligations, however, then in particular he has no moral obligation to keep his promises and reveal only truths to us. But the Western monotheistic religions are founded on an utter reliance on God's promises and revelation. Without God having moral obligations, why think that God's promises and revelation are trustworthy? (It would obviously be circular to think so on the basis of God's promises and revelations.) So if God has no moral obligations, Western monotheistic religions are in trouble. But most divine command theorists accept one of the Western monotheistic religions.

Perhaps, though, it is impossible for God to break promises or lie, even though he is under no obligation to keep promises or refrain from lying. But if it is not wrong for him to do these things, why can't he do it? If it's just a brute limitation in what he can do, then that seems to conflict with his omnipotence. Maybe, though, God's inability to promise or lie follows from some other essential attribute of God.

Perhaps his goodness? But goodness in a context where duty is not at issue, i.e., deontologically unconstrained goodness, does not seem sufficient to rule out breaking promises or lying.

Maybe in the case of an omnipotent being, though, it does. Goodness is opposed to inducing false beliefs in others, since false beliefs are intrinsically bad. So in our case, deontologically unconstrained goodness might lead one to break a promise, because one made the promise in ignorance of some aspect of the consequences of keeping it, and to lie because there is no other way of achieving some good. But an omnipotent and omniscient being is not going to suffer from such limitations. Sometimes the only humanly possible way to save someone's feelings from being hurt is by lying to him, and deontologically unconstrained goodness may lead one to do that. But God can directly will to have someone's feelings not be hurt.

But this line of thought is a dangerous one to the theist. For it is pretty much the same line of thought that leads the atheist to conclude that God, if he existed, would prevent various horrendous evils. In response to the atheist, the theist has to insist that there may very well be goods—perhaps but not necessarily beyond our ken—that are served by not preventing the horrendous evils. But if we are impressed by this line of thought, we will likewise be unimpressed by the thought that whatever end might be accomplished by lying or breaking of promises can be accomplished by an omniptoent and omniscient being without these. In particular, a sceptical theist cannot give the response I gave in the preceding paragraph.

There is a different line of thought, though, that might work better, inspired by Steve Evans' version of divine command theory. In addition to the distinction between permissible and impermissible actions, there is a distinction between virtuous and vicious actions, and it is only the permissible/impermissible distinction that is grounded by divine command theory. God, one can say, is essentially virtuous. But lying and breaking promises is vicious. Hence God can't do these actions, not because they are wrong, but because they are vicious. I think this is the best response to the dilemma, but I am not convinced.

One reason I am not convinced is this line of thought. Suppose that what makes lying and promise-breaking vicious is that these things are wrong. This is actually plausible. Consider this line of thought. A lot of people think that in extreme circumstances it is permissible to lie or break a promise (we might, though, argue that an omnipotent being doesn't end up in such extreme circumstances—this may be a subtly different line of argument from one that I argued against above, I think). They aren't going to say that lying or breaking promises is always vicious—only that it is vicious when it is wrong, and then because it is wrong. A minority of people, including me, think lying is always wrong (I don't know the promise literature, so I won't talk about promises here). They presumably think lying is always vicious. But surely it is always vicious precisely because it is always wrong. If so, then it is quite plausible that lying and promise-breaking are vicious because, and to the extent that, they are wrong. But the divine command theorist who says that they're vicious but not wrong for God cannot take this line.

Another plausible view is that lying and promise-breaking are wrong, when they are wrong, because they are vicious. But again a divine command theorist cannot take this line of thought, because that would allow one to ground wrongness facts in non-deontological virtue fact, and would make divine command theory unnecessary.

What the divine command theorist needs to hold here is that there is no explanatory relationship between the wrongness of lying and promise breaking and the viciousness of these. And that doesn't seem very plausible, though I do not have a knock-down argument against that.

Role obligations and divine commands

This post pulls out one strand from my argument here and makes it into an independent argument, under the inspiration of Chris Tweedt.

Valid commands are always to be understood in the context of a role, and give rise to a role-obligation in respect of the recipient's role. Thus, a military command gives rise to a military duty, a legal command gives rise to a legal duty, and so on. Divine commands also give rise to a role duty. Let's call this a creaturely duty. A military duty is the duty of the soldier qua soldier. A legal duty is the duty of a subject qua subject (one might prefer "citizen", but that's not right; I am not a citizen of the United States, but I am bound by its laws when living in the United States). A creaturely duty is the duty of a creature (or, better, rational creature) qua creature.

Now, here is a puzzle. Divine command theorists (of the sort that interest me here) tell us to understand moral duty in terms of divine commands. But what divine commands give rise to are creaturely duty. So why not, instead, define moral duty as creaturely duty—as the duty proper to our role as creatures of God—rather than as the content of divine commands? While all divine commands give rise to creaturely duties, it is not particularly plausible that divine commands necessarily exhaust creaturely duties. Imagine a world where God issues no commands, but Jones thinks that God (or: a loving God, if one prefers the Adams version) has commanded him to abstain from beef. Surely Jones has some kind of a duty to abstain from beef, and plausibly it is a creaturely duty. But there is little reason to think that among the creaturely duties only those that arise from divine commands are moral duties. It seems that what gives normative oomph to divine commands is that they generate creaturely duties. But if there could be other kinds of creaturely duties, these would then have the same normative oomph. And even if there could not be any creaturely duties other than duties of obedience to divine commands, it still seems that what does the explanatory normative work is not the command, but the creaturely duty that it gives rise to.

I think analyzing morality in terms of creaturely duty is superior to analyzing morality in terms of divine commands.

For instance, consider the worry that there are some actions that are so bad that they would be wrong even if they were not prohibited by God. There is at least some room for the response that these actions are, nonetheless, violations of a creaturely duty—maybe it is a part of the creaturely role that one not be nasty to those who are equally creatures.

Or consider the idea that God is morally required to keep his promises. While we don't literally want to say that God has a creaturely duty to keep his promises, that's just a matter of words. Let R be the creature-creator role. Then we can say that God has an R-duty to keep his promises (for us, R-duty is creaturely duty; for God, R-duty is creator duty).

I do not endorse the idea of analyzing morality in terms of creaturely duty, because I think all role duties are moral duties (though this controversial claim could be overcome).

Self-referential properties

The following is even rougher than is usual for posts.  It's notes to self mainly.

Consider this anti-self-referentiality (ASR) thesis about properties:

• There is no property P and relation R (complex or not) such that a component (say, a conjunct or disjunct) of P is the property of being R-related to P.

Suppose ASR is true.  Then we may well get the following consequences:  

1. Property-identity forms of divine command theory are in trouble.  On these theories, being obligatory is identical with being commanded by God.  But being commanded by x is a complex property one component of which is being intended by x have obligatoriness.  And that's a way of being related to obligatoriness.  And hence property-identity forms of divine command theory likely violate ASR.
2. For the same reason, property-identity forms of legal positivism and moral prescriptivism are in trouble.  For in both cases, we identify a species of obligation with a species of being commanded, and it is plausible that the property of being commanded in the relevant way will include a relation to obligation.
3. The property of being asserted (requested, commanded, etc.) by x is not identical with any complex property that includes a conjunct like being intended to be taken as asserted (requested, commanded, etc.) by x.  Thus various accounts of illocutionary force fail.
4. No property P is identical with being taken to have P, being properly taken to have P, being felt to have P, etc.  All sorts of projectionist views are in trouble.

A fair amount of work would be needed to substantiate the inference from ASR to the above claims. 

I suspect quite a bit of other stuff is ruled out by ASR.  For instance, no property P can have a component of being R-related to Q while Q has a component of being S-related to P.  

I don't know if ASR is true.  I suspect it is.

A simple argument against divine command theories

A standard line of objection against divine command theories is centered on the counterfactual:

1. Even if God commanded it, torturing the innocent would be wrong.

But here it is extremely plausible that the antecedent is necessarily false—that God cannot command torture of the innocent. There is still a line of argument against divine command theories that continues past this roadblock, but I think it fizzles out.

But if we replace "God commanded it" with "God didn't forbid it", we actually get a much stronger argument. Actually, let's avoid counterfactuals, since we don't understand them well enough. We can give this argument:

2. (Premise) Necessarily, torturing the innocent is wrong.
3. (Premise) Possibly, God does not forbid torturing the innocent.
4. (Premise) If divine command theory is true, then it is the case that: necessarily, something is wrong if and only if it is forbidden by God.
5. Therefore, divine command theory is not true.

The argument is valid. Premise (2) is pretty plausible. It is justified by the same kinds of intuitions as (1) was. Premise (4) is uncontroversial, though it highlights the fact that the argument is specifically being aimed at divine command theories. Pure divine will theories are unaffected by the argument.

Interestingly, I think that if the argument works, it continues to work even if one replaces "God" with "a loving God", as in Robert M. Adams divine command theory.

The big question now is with regard to (3). A quick move to defend (3) is this. Possibly, God creates a world with no agents other than himself. In such a world, God wouldn't have any reason to issue any commands. So, possibly, there is a world with no agents other than God where no such commands have been issued. (Maybe you might object that God can issue a command to himself. But why would he need to? After all, the same loving character that might lead him to issue such a command would lead him to refrain from torturing the innocent.)

Now, this particular argument might make one worry that the assent to (2) was too quick. Perhaps instead the divine command theorist should have said:

6. Necessarily, for every created agent x, it is wrong for x to torture the innocent.

However, I don't think the quantification in (2) should be restricted to created agents.

But suppose we do grant such a restriction. I think my argument can be rescued. Add:

7. (Premise) Possibly, there is a created agent x who is not forbidden to torture the innocent.
8. (Premise) If divine command theory is true, necessarily: for every created agent x and action-type A, A is wrong for x if and only if A is forbidden to x.
9. So divine command theory is false. (By 6-8)

How can I defend (8)? For an initial line of defense, imagine that God created persons whose character is such that it would be unthinkable" for them to torture the innocent. Then God might reasonably refrain from forbidden them to torture the innocent not to give them the idea.

When I tried an argument like this on our graduate students, they came up with a very nice line of defense. God might command more fundamental things, such as to love God and neighbor. Torturing the innocent is incompatible with these fundamental commands. And it might be necessary that God command these more fundamental things because being subject to such commands might be constitutive of being an agent (or at least a created agent, I guess).

We can run this line of thought in two ways. First, we might say that what is incompatible with a command counts as forbidden. Second, we might modify (8) by saying that if divine command theory is correct, then it is necessary that something is wrong for a created agent if and only if it is incompatible with some divine command. For convenience, I will consider the first line—it won't matter, I think.

But what one is commanded by God is an extrinsic characteristic of a created agent, while being an agent is an intrinsic characteristic. So it seems problematic for divine commands to partly constitute our being agents. Imagine a being just like you, with the same nature, beliefs and other intrinsic features, but whom God did not command to love God and neighbor. Such a being still believes that she should love God and neighbor to the same extent as you believe it, and has the propensity to deliberate in light of love of God and neighbor as much as you do. Wouldn't she be an agent just as much as you?

Still, one might wonder what kind of reasons God might have not to command someone to love God and neighbor. But I think answers are possible. First of all, if it were possible to have persons who love God and neighbor with any obligation to do so, there plausibly would be a value in there being such persons—and it is hard for a divine command theorist to deny the possibility of such persons. Second, it could be that by giving an agent the command to love, God might be putting in the agent's head the idea that it is possible not to love. And there could be a value to creating agents who do not have any such idea. Third, if it were possible to do so, there would be a value to creating agents who cannot sin—and creating agents who are under no commands would be a way to do that if divine command theory is right. In fact, given divine command theory, God might create a mix of agents: some who are under commands, as we are, and some who aren't.

I don't know how strong this line of thought is. And like I said, it does nothing against theories that involve solely divine will considerations and have no command (or promulgation of will) component to obligation.